literary
merit to anything which is broadly popular. They think of literary merit
as something upon which they alone are competent to decide, as something
to be tried by the touchstones they keep in their studies, under lock
and key. The scholarly contemporaries of Shakspere saw that he did not
conform to the classic traditions they revered, and they could not
guess he was establishing a classic tradition of his own. They were so
full of the past that they could not see the present right before their
eyes. They mist in Shakspere's work what they had been trained to
consider as the chief essential of dramatic art; and they were not acute
enough to inquire whether there were not good reasons why he was so
attractive to the vulgar mob whom they despised.

To most critics of the drama "literary merit" is something external,
something added to the play, something adjusted to the structure. They
blame modern playwrights for not putting it in. They take an attitude
toward the drama of their own day like that of the New England farmer,
when he was asked who had been the architect of his house. "Oh, I built
that house myself," was the answer; "but there's a man coming down from
Boston next week to put the architecture on." To this New England
farmer, architecture was not in the planning and the proportion and the
structure; to him it seemed to mean only some sort of jig-saw fretwork
added as an afterthought. To most of those who amuse themselves by
writing about the drama, "literary merit" is chiefly a matter of pretty
speeches, of phrase-making, of simile and metaphor--in short, of
rhetoric.

It seems absurd that at this late day it should be needful to repeat
once more that literature is not a matter of rhetoric; that it is not
external and detachable, but internal and essential. It has to do with
motive and character, with form and philosophy; it is a criticism of
life itself, or else it is mere vanity and vexation. If literature is no
more than a stringing of flowers of speech, then is 'Lucile' a greater
book than 'Robinson Crusoe,' or then is the 'Forest Lovers' a finer book
than 'Huckleberry Finn'; then is Pater a better writer than Benjamin
Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Books are not made by style alone. Even
lyric poetry is estimated by its fervor and by its sincerity rather than
by the dulcet phrases in which the lyrist has voiced his emotion of the
moment. If verbal felicity alone is all that the poet needs, if he is t