People at large favor appeals to their psychical natures; they enjoy stories, songs, scenery, art which reproduces and idealizes all that side of life. Scratch a Christianized Turk, it is said, and you will find a Mohammedan; scratch a practical man, and you will find a big boy responsive to the things of the spirit, though maybe ashamed to own it. Hence the men and women for whom sound, pure-hearted literature is written are, as a rule, quite ready to meet it half way. They must not be slow to encourage what is given them of sweet and inspirational; nor must they be tricked into the fallacious modern. notion that emotion is puerile and waste time, that intellectual wrestling is the most glorious outcome of latter-day development. So far is this last from being true that all genuine culture (as contradistinguished from knowledge) is a thing of the emotional and imaginative parts of

human consciousness. Some other modern nations the Germans, for example are nearer the right in their frank avowment of the worth of sentiment and the prominence in daily life they give to music

above all other arts offspring of the

link in a chain, or as a comparatively unimportant parent of a greater offspring. And then, second, there is its value as literature per se, aside from all question of evolutional place and importance in a line of causation. Too often these tests are confused, and much cloudy or wild criticism results. For example: the immense amount of research and critical judgment which have been expended upon the ballad forms of their older native literatures, by English and German scholars respectively, is right and proper when the historic position of the ballad is in view, but would be almost absurd if the investigation were for literary excellence alone; and, in consequence, one notices a fetish worship of these rough, amorphous attempts at song and narration, among people who ignore the merits of modern work in the same genre infinitely superior in all particulars which go to make poetry.

The story of the modern attitude toward the Elizabethan drama is again an illustration. For a while it was neglected as rude and contemptible; even the appreciation of a Dryden or a Pope being touched with the condescension of one viewing the

product from a superior height. But with the present century we get a truer aperçu, and the play-making of Shakespeare and his fellows is hailed as the Golden Age of our native drama. In the superlatives of praise now deemed proper for the latterday critic in treating of this product lurks a peril for those who read as they run, and perhaps for the critic-class itself. Those who take their opinions at second-hand will conclude that because the greatest poetry of our tongue was written by the matchless Shakespeare, by Marlowe of the mighty line, sweet-toned Ford, mournful Webster, and the rest of the seventeenth-century immortals, because their dramatic output is constantly and critically referred to as standing by itself, the chief glory of our native literature, therefore the best playmaking in our literary history was done between the days of Elizabeth and the second James. And this conclusion would be an egregious mistake. As literature, that virile and flamboyant product is doubtless above all else before and since; but as drama regarded as a form distinct from other forms, and having a technique of its own, the later work of Sheridan and Gold

smith, say, or far more that of Ibsen, is superior by an infinity of stage-craft and technical art. Yet so loosely has the unbounded laudation of the Elizabethans been construed that even this statement, precise as to fact and mild in manner, may seem to some whimsical or iconoclastic. Great as imaginative literature, great indeed as drama when compared with the precedent miracles and mysteries, horse-farce and stilted classicalities, out of which it evolved, the plays of Shakespeare and his mates are not good in the sense and to the degree that those of Sardou, Ibsen, Pinero, and Sudermann are good. In the evolution of the play as an organic form in literature, these later men stand on a vantage-ground and are of the sort to make use of it. We have here, in short, the confusion arising from the subtle power exercised by a mighty, but relatively inartistic art-product, to which is imputed a vicarious virtue by reason of youth and unsophistication; because it is more "spontaneous," less consciously articulated. Had Shakespeare, it is said, weighed and pruned and filed his figures, we should have had fewer pleonasms and euphuisms

perchance, but less authentic raptures as well. The fallacy of the folk-cult is here, though in modified form. Shakespeare, the Elizabethans at large, were great literary creators and at times great artists; and their most pronounced triumphs will be found to be at one inevitably with their truest art—a significant fact. a significant fact. It is unphilosophic to deify the untutored side of their power as if therein lay the secret of all its potency and charm.

That there is a popular quality, a wild, natural music, in much of the early effort in the literary evolution of a race cannot be gainsaid. At the same time, this simple truth may be-nay, is- elevated into a doctrine, with the result of blinding us to relative excellencies, and putting a more developed and finer art under a cloud. Literature, one must be ever repeating, is an art primarily and chiefly; it is extremely doubtful if the songs and ballads of the most unsophisticate age which history records were the output of pure inspiration, with no thought of manner or form. Merely because we fall in with a cruder product does not at all prove spontaneity it indicates only that the art