“The thought that makes the work of art,” says Mr. John La Farge in a discussion of the art of painting of singular insight and intelligence, “the thought which in its highest expression we call genius, is not reflection or reflective thought.  The thought which analyses has the same deficiencies as our eyes.  It can fix only one point at a time.  It is necessary for it to examine each element of consideration, and unite it to others, to make a whole.  But the logic of free life, which is the logic of art, is like that logic of one using the eye, in which we make most wonderful combinations of momentary adaptation, by co-ordinating innumerable memories, by rejecting those that are useless or antagonistic; and all without being aware of it, so that those especially who most use the eye, as, for instance, the painter or the hunter, are unaware of more than one single, instantaneous action.”  This is a very happy formulation of a fundamental principle in art; indeed, it brings before us the essential quality of art, its illustration of thought in the order not of a formal logic, but of the logic of free life.  It is at this point that it is differentiated from philosophy; it is from this point that its immense spiritual significance becomes clear.  In the great books fundamental ideas are set forth not in a systematic way, nor as the results of methodical teaching, but as they rise over the vast territory of actual living, and are clarified by the long-continued and many-sided experience of the race.  Every book of the first order in literature of the creative kind is a final generalisation from a vast experience.  It is, to use Mr. La Farge’s phrase, the co-ordination of innumerable memories,—­memories shared by an innumerable company of persons, and becoming, at length and after long clarification, a kind of race memory; and this memory is so inclusive and tenacious that it holds intact the long and varied play of soil, sky, scenery, climate, faith, myth, suffering, action, historic process, through which the race has passed and by which it has been largely formed.

The ideas which underlie the great books bring with them, therefore, when we really receive them into our minds, the entire background of the life out of which they took their rise.  We are not only permitted to refresh ourselves at the inexhaustible spring, but, as we drink, the entire sweep of landscape, to the remotest mountains in whose heart its sources are hidden, encompasses us like a vast living world.  It is, in other words, the totality of things which great art gives us,—­not things in isolation and detachment.  Mr. La Farge will pardon further quotation; he admirably states this great truth when he says that “in a work of art, executed through the body, and appealing to the mind through the senses, the entire make-up of its creator addresses the entire constitution of the man for whom it is meant.”  One may go further, and say of the greatest books that