elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while
spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the
absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the
complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.

The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in
its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory
circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in
finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs
some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not
consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of
surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which
the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as
we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so
rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say 'how classical'. The
whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but
the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us
the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature
the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest,
that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to
men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that
form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it
represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which
is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it
inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely
that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the
main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke
to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such
circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be
bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the
appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.

The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;
impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic
and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of
objective charac