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.

A third quality common to all masterpieces is what we call charm, a
matter more or less of style, and which may be defined as the agreeable
personality of the writer. This is indispensable. It is this personality
which gives the final value to every work of art as well as of
literature. It is not enough to copy nature or to copy, even accurately,
the incidents of life. Only by digestion and transmutation through
personality does any work attain the dignity of art. The great works of
architecture, even, which are somewhat determined by mathematical rule,
owe their charm to the personal genius of their creators. For this reason
our imitations of Greek architecture are commonly failures. To speak
technically, the masterpiece of literature is characterized by the same
knowledge of proportion and perspective as the masterpiece in art.

If there is a standard of literary excellence, as there is a law of
beauty--and it seems to me that to doubt this in the intellectual world
is to doubt the prevalence of order that exists in the natural--it is
certainly possible to ascertain whether a new production conforms, and
how far it conforms, to the universally accepted canons of art. To work
by this rule in literary criticism is to substitute some