Much the same thing might be said of the drawing of a moral, except that it is not easy to speak with patience of those often well-meaning but gravely mistaken pedagogues who seem bound to impress upon their scholars that literature is didactic. In so far as a book is deliberately didactic, it is not literature. It may be artistic in spite of its enforcing a deliberate lesson, but never because of this. My own instinct would be, and I am consistent enough to make it pretty generally my practice, to conceal from a class as well as I can any deliberate drawing of morals into which a writer of genius may have fallen. It is like the fault of a friend, and is to be screened from the public as far as honesty will permit. Certainly it should never be paraded before the young, who will not reason about the matter, but are too wholesome by nature and too near to primitive human conditions not to distrust an offering of intellectual jelly which obviously contains a moral pill. Morals are as a rule drawn by teachers who feel that they must teach something, and something tangible. They themselves lack the conception of any office of art higher than moralizing, and they deal with literature accordingly. They are unable to appreciate the fact that the most effective influence which can be brought to bear upon the human mind is never the direct teaching of the preacher or the moralizer, but the indirect instruction of events and emotions. Personally I have sufficient modesty, moreover, to make me hesitate to assume that I can judge better than a master artist how far it is well to go in drawing a moral. If the man of genius has chosen not to point to a deliberate lesson, I am far from feeling inclined to take the ground that I know better, and that the sermon should be there. When Shakespeare, or Coleridge, or Browning feels that a vivid transcript of life should be left to work out its own effect, far from me be the presumption to consider the poet wrong, or to try to piece out his magnificent work with trite moralizing. The tendency to abuse children with morals is as vicious as it is widespread. It is perhaps not unconnected with the idea that instruction and improvement must alike come through means not in themselves enjoyable. It is the principle upon which an old New England country wife rates the efficacy of a drug by its bitterness. We all find it hard to realize that as far as literature, at least, is concerned, the good it does is to be measured rather by the pleasure it gives. If the children entirely and intelligently delight in it, we need bother about no morals, we need—as far as the question of its value in the training of the child's mind goes—have no concern about examinations. Art is the ministry of joy, and literature is art or it is the most futile and foolish thing ever introduced into the training of the young. VI PRELIMINARY WORK