Asia's loftiest and oldest? Indeed, so marked is the success of the
latter-day poets in this respect, that any ordinary reader may well be
puzzled, and ask, if the shaggy antique masters are poets, what are the
refined and euphonious producers of our own day?

If we were to inquire what this something else is which is prerequisite
to any deep and lasting success in literature, we should undoubtedly
find that it is the man behind the book. It is the fashion of the day
to attribute all splendid results to genius and culture. But genius and
culture are not enough. "All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has
not the science of honesty and goodness," says Montaigne. The quality
of simple manhood, and the universal human traits which form the bond
of union between man and man,--which form the basis of society, of the
family, of government, of friendship,--are quite overlooked; and the credit
is given to some special facility, or to brilliant and lucky hit. Does
any one doubt that the great poets and artists are made up mainly of the
most common universal human and heroic characteristics?--that in them,
though working to other ends, is all that construct the soldier, the
sailor, the farmer, the discoverer, the bringer-to-pass in any field,
and that their work is good and enduring in proportion as it is
saturated and fertilized by the qualities of these? Good human stock is
the main dependence. No great poet ever appeared except from a race of
good fighters, good eaters, good sleepers, good breeders. Literature
dies with the decay of the _un-_literary element. It is not in the
spirit of something far away in the clouds or under the moon, something
ethereal, visionary, and anti-mundane, that Angelo, Dante, and
Shakespeare work, but in the spirit of common Nature and of the
homeliest facts; through these, and not away from them, the path of the
creator lies.

It is no doubt this tendency, always more or less marked in highly
refined and cultivated times, to forget or overlook the primary
basic qualities, and to parade and make much of verbal and technical
acquirements, that led Huxley to speak with such bitter scorn of the
"sensual caterwauling of the literary classes," for this is not the
only country in which books are produced that are a mere skin of elegant
words blown up by copious literary gas.

In imaginative works, especially, much depends upon the quality of
mere weight. A stern, material inertia is indispensable.