re we incapable of ardent idealism?
Then we cannot be just to Shelley. Is a capacity for profound reverence
and adoration not ours? Then we must not claim to say the last word on
Dante. The uncongenial subject prevents us from feeling with the writer,
and we therefore fancy a defect of literary power or charm in him, while
the defect is all the time in ourselves. We will, for the moment,
suppose ourselves to be the ideal critics. And let us first see what the
supreme literary gift is _not_.

* * * * *

We may admit that, in all literature which the world will not willingly
let die, there must be expressed something worth expressing. The matter
must be, in some way, of interest. But it appears to signify little
_how_ it interests. It may be enlightening, elevating, or inspiriting:
it may be profoundly touching: it may be of a fine or gracious sentiment
or fancy: it may be startling: it may be simply entertaining. Some
people, perhaps, remembering certain French and other fiction, would say
that it may even be deliberately wicked. That I do not believe. On the
contrary, it is much to the credit of a world which is declared to be so
rotten with original sin, that deliberately wicked writing finds so
little lasting favour with it. It does gladly let such writing die,
however well written. Interest fails, and admiration of the literary
skill is speedily swallowed up in disgust. Moreover it is seldom that
the true possessor of the supreme literary gift turns it to base ends.

Consummate literature, we have admitted, must be interesting. It would
be truer to say that the possessor of the supreme literary gift will
_make_ his matter interest us, however light or serious, however literal
or imaginative, it may be. But, when once of interest, the matter may be
anything you will.

The supreme literary gift, for example, does not imply profundity or
originality of thought. Homer and Chaucer are not deep thinkers, nor is
Herodotus or Virgil, Burns, Keats, or Tennyson. There need be nothing
philosophically epoch-making about a literary creation which is destined
to be immortal. Nor yet does the supreme literary gift necessarily imply
extraordinary depth of emotion. Of the writers just named Burns and
Keats perhaps have this capacity, but the rest--including
Tennyson--reveal little of it. We do not find burning passion to be a
distinct feature in Plato, in Milton, in Goethe, or in Matthew Arnold,
whi