All pure literature is the revelation of a man. In a work of true literary art the subject matter has been so interpenetrated and vitalized by the spirit or personality of the writer, has become so thoroughly identified with it, that the two are one and inseparable, and the style _is_ the man. Works in which this blending and identification, through emotion or imagination, of the author with his subject has not taken place, or has taken place imperfectly, do not belong to pure literature. They may serve a useful purpose; but all _useful_ purposes, in the strict sense, are foreign to those of art, which means foreign to the spirit that would live in the whole, that would live in the years and not in the days, in time and not in the hour. The true literary artist gives you of the substance of his mind; not merely his thought or his philosophy, but something more intimate and personal than that. It is not a tangible object passed from his hand to yours; it is much more like a transfusion of blood from his veins to yours. Montaigne gives us Montaigne,--the most delightfully garrulous man in literature. “These are fancies of my own,” he says, “by which I do not pretend to discover things, but to lay open myself.” “Cut these sentences,” says Emerson, “and they bleed.” Matthew Arnold denied that Emerson was a great writer; but we cannot account for the charm and influence of his works, it seems to me, on any other theory than that he has at least this mark of the great writer: he gives his reader of his own substance, he saturates his page with the high and rare quality of his own spirit. Everything he published has a distinct literary value, as distinguished from its moral or religious value. The same may be said of Arnold himself: else we should not care much for him. It is a particular and interesting type of man that speaks and breathes in every sentence; his style is vital in his matter, and is no more separable from it than the style of silver or of gold is separable from those metals. In such a writer as Lecky on the other hand, or as Mill or Spencer, one does not get this same subtle individual flavor; the work is more external, more the product of certain special faculties, as the reason, the memory, the understanding; and the personality of the author is not so intimately involved. But in the writer with the creative touch, whether he be poet, novelist, historian, critic, essayist, the chief factor in the product is always his own personality.