enth century will not
allow that their powers are less virile, their emotions less eager,
than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, lacking the very terms of
art, they had not been able to arrive at fit expression; the soul had
found no body wherewith to clothe itself into beauty. As they avowed in
all simplicity, they needed schoolmasters; the discipline of Aristotle
and Horace and Virgil; a body of critical doctrine, to teach them how
to express the France and England or Italy of their day, and thus give
permanence to their fleeting vision of the world. Naive as may have
been the Renaissance expression of this need of formal training, blind
as it frequently was to the beauty which we recognize in the
undisciplined vernacular literatures of mediaeval Europe, those groping
scholars were essentially right. No one can paint or compose by nature.
One must slowly master an art of expression.

Now through long periods of time, and over many vast stretches of
territory, as our own American writing abundantly witnesses, the whole
formal side of expression may be neglected. "Literature," in its
narrower sense, may not exist. In that restricted and higher meaning of
the term, literature has always been uncommon enough, even in Athens or
Florence. It demands not merely personal distinction or power, not
merely some uncommon height or depth or breadth of capacity and
insight, but a purely artistic training, which in the very nature of
the case is rare. Millions of Russians, perhaps, have felt about the
general problems of life much as Turgenieff felt, but they lacked the
sheer literary art with which the _Notes of a Sportsman_ was written.
Thousands of frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's hard
and varied and admirable training in the mastery of speech, but in his
hands alone was the weapon wrought to such perfection of temper and
weight and edge that he spoke and wrote literature without knowing it.

Such considerations belong, I am aware, to the accepted
commonplaces,--perhaps to what William James used to call "the
unprofitable delineation of the obvious." Everybody recognizes that
literary gifts imply an exceptionally rich development of general human
capacities, together with a professional aptitude and training of which
but few men are capable. There is but one lumberman in camp who can
play the fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus the great book,
we are forever saying, is truly representative of myria