In the same pleasing, surprising way, all artistic work must be a kind of revelation.  Thus architecture is probably the oldest of the arts; yet we still have many builders but few architects, that is, men whose work in wood or stone suggests some hidden truth and beauty to the human senses.  So in literature, which is the art that expresses life in words that appeal to our own sense of the beautiful, we have many writers but few artists.  In the broadest sense, perhaps, literature means simply the written records of the race, including all its history and sciences, as well as its poems and novels; in the narrower sense literature is the artistic record of life, and most of our writing is excluded from it, just as the mass of our buildings, mere shelters from storm and from cold, are excluded from architecture.  A history or a work of science may be and sometimes is literature, but only as we forget the subject-matter and the presentation of facts in the simple beauty of its expression.

The second quality of literature is its suggestiveness, its appeal to our emotions and imagination rather than to our intellect.  It is not so much what it says as what it awakens in us that constitutes its charm.  When Milton makes Satan say, “Myself am Hell,” he does not state any fact, but rather opens up in these three tremendous words a whole world of speculation and imagination.  When Faustus in the presence of Helen asks, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” he does not state a fact or expect an answer.  He opens a door through which our imagination enters a new world, a world of music, love, beauty, heroism,—­the whole splendid world of Greek literature.  Such magic is in words.  When Shakespeare describes the young Biron as speaking

        In such apt and gracious words
    That aged ears play truant at his tales,

he has unconsciously given not only an excellent description of himself, but the measure of all literature, which makes us play truant with the present world and run away to live awhile in the pleasant realm of fancy.  The province of all art is not to instruct but to delight; and only as literature delights us, causing each reader to build in his own soul that “lordly pleasure house” of which Tennyson dreamed in his “Palace of Art,” is it worthy of its name.

The third characteristic of literature, arising directly from the other two, is its permanence.  The world does not live by bread alone.  Notwithstanding its hurry and bustle and apparent absorption in material things, it does not willingly let any beautiful thing perish.  This is even more true of its songs than of its painting and sculpture; though permanence is a quality we should hardly expect in the present deluge of books and magazines pouring day and night from our presses in the name of literature.  But this problem of too many books is not modern, as we suppose.  It has been a problem ever since Caxton brought the