als are managed. For this reason persons
who practice journalism--daily journalism in particular--will probably
be persons more or less similar in their habits, and clubs for admission
to which the main qualification consists in the fact of authorship may
provide them with special conveniences which they one and all desire.
But for persons whose literary pursuits are carried on in isolation, and
who aim at expressing by authorship no thoughts or no sentiments but
their own, it seems to me that a club for authors or writers as such
represents a conception as wrong as would that of a club for speakers as
such or for politicians as such. What bond of union would there be
between a Tory and a ferocious Democrat if they neither of them put pen
to paper--if they were not authors at all? They would keep, so far as
was possible, to different sides of the street. Why, then, should they
wish to meet in a club coffee room and lunch at adjacent tables, simply
because each, besides holding opinions absolutely odious to the other,
should, instead of keeping them to himself, endeavor to disseminate them
by writing among as many of his fellow creatures as was possible?

It may be said that two such men might very well wish to do so because,
though what each expressed was odious to the other in itself, each was a
consummate master of literary art in expressing it, and each admired,
and was aware of, the presence of this technical mastery in the other.
Now, so far as it goes, this, in numerous cases, may be true. Indeed,
such an admission is the very point from which the present argument
started. Pure literature, as such, is, no doubt, susceptible of
consummate beauties, in their natural admiration of which men who are
otherwise the bitterest adversaries may agree. What does this admission
cover? It applies, in my own opinion, to minor literature only, though
masterpieces of minor literature may be in their own way supreme, as
Keats has shown us in such poems as "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," but, as
applied to literature in its higher and greater forms, the admission
fails to be true, because it fails to be adequate. A poem by Keats may
be admirable so far as it goes, but really great literature, such as
Goethe's "Faust," for example, would possess but a minor value unless
there were at the back of it something that is more than literature. In
the case of a poem like "Endymion" the poem is greater than the man who
writes it. In the case of