a poem like "Faust" the man is greater than
the poem. Behind the poet stands the man of profound reflection, the man
of the world, the philosopher, the passionate or disillusioned lover. He
is all of these before he is a literary artist. His writing is only the
vehicle by which he communicates what he is in all these capacities to
others, and so leaves a practical impression on the thoughts and
emotions of the world.

And what is true of verse is more obviously true of prose. Of all prose
works which have captured attention by their mere merits as literature,
no better example can be given than the great masterpiece of Gibbon. But
though Gibbon may be read by many for the sake of his mere literary
charm, his place in the world as a great writer depends but in a
secondary way on this charm in itself. He lives because this charm was
used by him to convey the results of research so penetrating and
comprehensive, and guided by a mind so sagacious and powerful, that for
the most part these results have stood the test of criticism, however
keen and hostile; and in accomplishing this feat Gibbon has rendered a
service which is still indispensable to the historical students and
historical thinkers of to-day, whereas otherwise his merely literary
merits would have been merits displayed in vain or relegated to a
literary museum which few men cared to enter.

This conception of pure literature as written language which is mainly
appreciated for its own sake, and is for that reason in a relative
sense trivial, no doubt widens out again when we come to consider the
fact that emotion of some kind is, in the last resort, the one thing
which gives value to life. But the fact remains that all the desirable
emotions are determined by things which are not in themselves emotions,
such as knowledge, intellectual beliefs, and the laws, economic and
otherwise, which alone render a civilized society possible; and even the
greatest of merely literary charms make great literature only in so far
as they endow mankind with fundamental things like these.

Throughout these memoirs there has been constant allusion to the
relation borne by literary expression to life in the case of the author
himself. I have said already that for mere literature as such, and for
its practitioners, I have from my youth onward had a certain feeling of
contempt, and I now may explain once more what, at least in my own case,
such a feeling really means. It means, not th