they have come into their own. The old problem of bringing books to bear on the common life of men is no nearer solution. It is only complicated by the growing modern sentiment that makes respect for books conventional.

It is not true of all books that they "do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect that bred them." The modern writers who use that stately phrase without discrimination could never have originated it. The splendid fervor of a religious human purpose-splendid, though mistaken-glorified for Milton the books in which he saw that purpose reflected, and blinded him to the multitude of dull and evil books which existed in his day as well as in our own. And Milton, as a poet, spoke not literally, but with a poet's license. In the light of the subsequent history of even so enduring a book as "Paradise Lost" there is something pathetic in its author's vehement reiteration that "books are not dead things." For the doctrinal intention which was to Milton the life of his book is dead indeed to most modern readers, and all that remain is the beauty and the formal majesty which were to him-no pantheist-only the perfection of inanimate clay. Those who love beauty more than virtue may hold that this was, indeed, "the purest efficacy and extraction of the living intellect" of John Milton. But for the ordinary book no such claim can be made without traducing ordinary human nature.

That the purest efficacy of any living intellect may be preserved in a book is a large assumption. "Living" is a word of transcendent significance, in spite of all the leveling pretentions of science. If it means anything in connection with intellect it means the vital communicating spirit that moves and thinks, in sharp distinction from the objective communicable matter that is thought and suggested. It may happen that a book preserves a fuller and finer measure of intellectual efficacy than has been set in motion by all the action of its writer's history. It

does often happen that the influence of a book is almost miraculous; and the fascination in the study of books probably lies in this fact, that here in greater purity and distinctness than in any other enduring sensible medium may be traced the record of a power beyond sense. Yet if one is loyal to life as well as to books, one can hardly escape the conviction that the "purest efficacy of a living intellect" is something much too fine, too personal, too immediately operative for good and evil to be preserved unweakened to an ink and paper immortality, or to permit of concentration in any vial less sensitive and potent than a conscious human soul.

The relative importance of men and books is preserved in praise such as this of Milton's, by the exaltation of both sincerity and passion refine true eloquence from mawkishness as by a miracle of instinct. But there is no miracle in the modern indiscriminate praise of books. Milton could praise books highly because he believed in a high religious mission in human life and literature: the modern indiscriminate praise, on the contrary, approves most often such books as leave one doubtful whether life and literature have any mission at all. Milton could become vehement in praising books, because he believed intensely in a difference between good and evil, and thought he saw in books a means of propagating the truth that was good: the modern indiscriminate praise likes to play that good and evil are conventions, and values books in proportion as they represent, not a compelling truth, but a purient and pragmatical nothingness. In absolute contradiction to Milton this modern praise too often feeds respect for books on distrust of human purpose. It makes books spring from an unimaginable, self-sufficing origin, to be the flower of a process finer than human living, as if books-except one great book that lies beyond the range of this discussion-were not made, some by writers and some by readers, but all by men.

The idea of writing for the sake of writing, or of reading for the sake of reading, probably never entered the minds of the master spirits of literature. Says Fulke Greville of Sir Philip Sidney: "His aim was not writing, even while he wrote; nor his knowledge moulded for tables or schools, but both his wit and understanding bent upon his heart, to make himself and others, not in words or opinion, but in life and action, good and great." We laugh at the moral pretentions of some of our older novelists, but such pretentions, though extravagant, were an instructive recognition of the necessity of justifying one's book. It is only in modern times that we have begun, as a distinguished English writer, Frederic Harrison, puts it, "to pride ourselves on our power of absorbing print, as our grandfathers did on their gift of absorbing port." It is only since so large a part of mankind has grown sedentary and bilious that we forget the native dignity of life and personality, and descend to overlay our consciousness with any lettered page that comes to hand. We speak the lines of Shakespeare's pedant without perceiving the irony of the writer: "Sir, he hath never been fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; he hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts."

Very great intellects have often a touch of madness, and so do books that are great enough for serious attention. It is well for both that they be made to feel at times the restraining touch of a commonplace human understanding. The highest compliment a man can pay his books is to hold them to a human accountability, and to recognize that they may be as troublesome to his peace of mind as are his intimate friends. The utmost appreciation that can be afforded to genius as genius is finely expressed in a line of the poet Gray:

"Beneath the Good how far-but far above the Great." Gray speaks for his own province, of poetry, but the same valuation holds throughout literature. Even history, building professedly on facts and not on imagination, requires its reader to be ever alert, ever ready to match his own firm soul against some challenge of author or material. There is a very noble concession and warning in one of the last public utterances of a great Catholic historian. In his "Lecture on the study of History," Lord Acton tells his students: "The weight of opinion is against me when I exhort you never to debase the moral currency, or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxims that govern your own lives." These final maxims persist, while the apparently solid facts of history have a trick of changing. The generally accepted dictum that history must be rewritten for each new generation suggests the cynical reply of Faust to Wagner:

"My friend, the ages that are past

Are as a book with seven seals made fast,

And what we call the spirit of the age

Is but the spirit of the gentlemen

Who glass their own thoughts in the pliant page,
And image back themselves."

And, indeed, one may say without exaggeration that books are largely a field of conflict between writer and reader as to which shall "image back himself." Lord Acton was in many respects the most learned man and the greatest historian of the last generation, and his devotion to the facts of history was the trait of his character which the world knew best. Yet he continues, in the lecture already quoted: "Modern history touches us so nearly, is so deep a question of life and death, that we are bound to find our way through it, and to owe our insight to ourselves." Such a declaration from a sober historian gives value to a paradox which was merely fan

tastic, when propounded by an irresponsible mystic. "It is not history that teaches conscience to be honest," says Amiel's Journal; "it is conscience that educates history. Fact is corrupting-it is we who correct it by the persistence of our ideal. The soul moralizes the past in order not to be demoralized by it." Of course, fact is not corrupting-quite the reverse. But facts seen through the clouded lens of a human personality may easily assume the shape and colors of evil, and all book facts are seen through a double lens. For good or evil, then, the soul of the reader must bring with it the light that shall largely determine the effect.

It is really a dull reader who is ever so entirely satisfied with his book as to hear it praised without impatience. "For this, I conceive, Phaedrus is the evil of writing, and herein it closely resembles painting. The creatures of the latter art stand before you as if they were alive, but if you ask them a question they look solemn and say not a word. And so it is with written discourses. You could fancy they speak as though they were possessed of sense, but if you wish to understand what they say, and if you question them about it, you find them repeating but one and the self-same story." The greater the book, the greater the sense of incompleteness on finishing it: it must be so, because our deeper longings do not stir to a small suggestion. It is only ignorance that can believe in a library of perfect books: one easily learns the names of the great books-one must learn something of the kind at school-but one does not easily find time for real acquaintance. Hence comes much of the praise that is scandal in disguise.

Every persistent reader knows something of this experience: a mood in which the good book and the bad book are equally a burden to the soul. The mere reader encounters such an experience despondently, the great creative