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 to be judged only by the compelling melody of the words he has chosen to set in array, then is Poe the foremost of lyrists.  Even the essay, the most narrowly literary of all prose-forms, is valued for its wisdom rather than for its phrasing.  The essays of Stevenson, for example, will survive not because of their style alone, polished as that is and unexpectedly happy in its phrasing, but because the man who wrote them, artist as he was in words, had something to say—­something which was his own, the result of his own observation of life from his own angle of vision.  Style is the great antiseptic, no doubt; but style cannot bestow life on the still-born.