their persistence.  To discover what these qualities are that have insured permanence and promise indefinite continuance is to have a means of judging with an approach to scientific accuracy our contemporary literature.  There is no thing of beauty that does not conform to a law of order and beauty—­poem, story, costume, picture, statue, all fall into an ascertainable law of art.  Nothing of man’s making is perfect, but any creation approximates perfection in the measure that it conforms to inevitable law.

To ascertain this law, and apply it, in art or in literature, to the changing conditions of our progressive life, is the business of the artist.  It is the business of the critic to mark how the performance conforms to or departs from the law evolved and transmitted in the long-experience of the race.  True criticism, then, is not a matter of caprice or of individual liking or disliking, nor of conformity to a prevailing and generally temporary popular judgment.  Individual judgment may be very interesting and have its value, depending upon the capacity of the judge.  It was my good fortune once to fall in with a person who had been moved, by I know not what inspiration, to project himself out of his safe local conditions into France, Greece, Italy, Cairo, and Jerusalem.  He assured me that he had seen nothing anywhere in the wide world of nature and art to compare with the beauty of Nebraska.

What are the qualities common to all the masterpieces of literature, or, let us say, to those that have endured in spite of imperfections and local provincialisms?

First of all I should name simplicity, which includes lucidity of expression, the clear thought in fitting, luminous words.  And this is true when the thought is profound and the subject is as complex as life itself.  This quality is strikingly exhibited for us in Jowett’s translation of Plato—­which is as modern in feeling and phrase as anything done in Boston—­in the naif and direct Herodotus, and, above all, in the King James vernacular translation of the Bible, which is the great text-book of all modern literature.

The second quality is knowledge of human nature.  We can put up with the improbable in invention, because the improbable is always happening in life, but we cannot tolerate the so-called psychological juggling with the human mind, the perversion of the laws of the mind, the forcing of character to fit the eccentricities of plot.  Whatever excursions the writer makes in fancy, we require fundamental consistency with human nature.  And this is the reason why psychological studies of the abnormal, or biographies of criminal lunatics, are only interesting to pathologists and never become classics in literature.