The positive element in the enduring works is always something more than the beautiful; it is the true, the vital, the real, as well. The beautiful is there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world is held together, life is nourished and made strong, and power begotten, by the neutral or negatively beautiful. Works are everywhere produced that are artistically serious, but morally trifling and insincere; faultless in form, but tame and barren in spirit. We could not say this of the works of Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he had a higher purpose than to produce mere literary effects; but we can say it of most of the productions of the younger British essayists and poets. In some of them there is a mere lust of verbal forms and rhythmic lilt. In reading their poems, I soon find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be trying to breathe in a vacuum,--an effect which one does not experience at all in reading Tennyson, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pater, the lust of mere style so pervades his work. Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet the best qualities of style--freshness, naturalness, simplicity--are not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far towards atoning for all his sins against art, against sanity and proportion, are his terrible moral earnestness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think of his work, we are not likely to call it “mere literature.” That masterly ubiquitous sporting and toying with the elements of life which we find in Shakespeare we shall probably never again see in letters. The stress and burden of later times do not favor it. The great soul is now too earnest, too self-conscious; life is too serious. Only light men now essay it. With so much criticism, so much knowledge, so much science, another Shakespeare is impossible. Renan says: “In order to establish those literary authorities called classic, something especially healthy and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value here than pastry.” There can be little doubt that our best literary workers are intent upon producing something analogous to pastry, or even confectionery,--something fine, complex, highly seasoned, that tickles the taste. It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and sustaining qualities of natural products,--grain, fruits, nuts, air, water. XII ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON In one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as a wife feels toward her husband; we like to find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us to have others do the same. He was a friend of our youth. Though we may in a measure have outgrown him, and now find his paradoxes, his daring affirmations, his trick of overstatement and understatement less novel and stimulating than we once did, yet we cherish him in our heart of hearts.