from experience; not a creation of the imagination, but a touched-up copy from the memory. We cannot say this of “The Bells” or “The Raven,” or of the work of Milton or Keats or Tennyson. Whittier sings what he feels; it all has a root in his own experience. The great poet feigns the emotion and makes it real to us. We complain of much current verse that it has no feeling. The trouble is not that the poets feign, but that the feigning is feeble; it begets no emotion in us. It simulates, but does not stimulate. It is not Wordsworth’s art that makes him great; it is his profound poetic emotion when in the presence of simple, common things. Tennyson’s art, or Swinburne’s art, is much finer, but the poetic emotion back of it is less profound and elemental. Emerson’s art is crude, but the stress of his poetic emotion is great; the song is burdened with profound meanings to our moral and spiritual nature. Poe has no such burden; there is not one crumb of the bread of life in him, but there is plenty of the elixir of the imagination. This passion for art, so characteristic of the Old World, is seen in its full force in such a writer as Flaubert. Flaubert was a devotee of the doctrine of art for art’s sake. He cared nothing for mere authors, but only for “writers;” the work must be the conscious and deliberate product of the author’s literary and inventive powers, and in no way involve his character, temperament, or personality. The more it was written, the more it savored of deliberate plan and purpose,--in other words, the less it was the product of fate, race, or of anything local, individual, inevitable,--the more it pleased him. Art, and not nature, was his aspiration. And this view has more currency in Europe than in this country. In some extreme cases it becomes what one may fairly call the art disease. Baudelaire, for instance, as quoted by Tolstoi, expressed a preference for a painted woman’s face over one showing its natural color, “and for metal trees and a theatrical imitation of water, rather than real trees and real water.” Thus does an overweening passion for art degenerate into a love for the artificial for its own sake. In the cultivation of letters there seems always to be a danger that we shall come to value things, not for their own sake, but for the literary effects that may be wrought out of them. The great artist, I take it, is primarily in love with life and things, and not with art. On these terms alone is his work fresh and stimulating and filled with good arterial blood. VI Teaching literature is like teaching religion. You can give only the dry bones of the matter in either case. But the dry bones of theology are not religion, and the dry bones of rhetoric are not literature. The flesh-and-blood reality is alone of value, and this cannot be taught, it must be felt and experienced.