a picture of human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher than the want of knowledge.  And this contribution, which I desire to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are aware of it or not.  It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as light as the fall of a leaf or a bird’s song on the shore; it may be the thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman:  but it has this one quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for facts, for knowledge, for wealth.

In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized, in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back by equally emphasized contempt.  The apostles of light regard the rest of mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions of life easier.  It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is comparatively unimportant.  Everybody who is not a drone has his sufficient world.  To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law, it is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling, in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others.  And to each of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.  To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the world is that which eats, and pays—­with more or less regularity; to the scholar the world is in books and ideas.  One realizes how possessed he is with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism, and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and seemed to him so large.  When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts, relates to the greatest and best of human things, Socrates says:  I dare