the whole race speaks through them to the whole man who puts himself in a receptive mood towards them.  This totality of influences, conditions, and history which goes to the making of books of this order receives dramatic unity, artistic sequence, and integral order and coherence from the personality of the writer.  He gathers into himself the spiritual results of the experience of his people or his age, and through his genius for expression the vast general background of his personal life, which, as in the case of Homer, for instance, has entirely faded from view, rises once more in clear vision before us.  “In any museum,” says Mr. La Farge, “we can see certain great differences in things; which are so evident, so much on the surface, as almost to be our first impressions.  They are the marks of the places where the works of art were born.  Climate; intensity of heat and light; the nature of the earth; whether there was much or little water in proportion to land; plants, animals, surrounding beings, have helped to make these differences, as well as manners, laws, religions, and national ideals.  If you recall the more general physical impression of a gallery of Flemish paintings and of a gallery of Italian masters, you will have carried off in yourself two distinct impressions received during their lives by the men of these two races.  The fact that they used their eyes more or less is only a small factor in this enormous aggregation of influences received by them and transmitted to us.”

From this point of view the inexhaustible significance of a great work of art becomes clear, both as regards its definite revelation of racial and individual truth, and as regards its educational or culture quality and value.  Ideas are presented not in isolation and detachment, but in their totality of origin and relationship; they are not abstractions, general propositions, philosophical generalisations; they are living truths—­truths, that is, which have become clear by long experience, and to which men stand, or have stood, in personal relations.  They are ideas, in other words, which stand together, not in the order of formal logic, but of the “logic of free life.”  They are not torn out of their normal relations; they bring all their relationships with them.  We are offered a plant in the soil, not a flower cut from its stem.  Every man is rooted to the soil, touches through his senses the physical, and through his mind and heart the spiritual, order of his time; all these influences are focussed in him, and according to his capacity he gathers them into his experience, formulates and expresses them.  The greater and more productive the man, the wider his contact with and absorption of the life of his time.  For the artist stands nearest, not farthest from his contemporaries.  He is not, however, a mere medium in their hands, not a mere secretary or recorder of their ideas and feelings.  He is separated from them in the clearness of his vision of the significance of their activities, the