eat poem, boasts of the
devastation of the highest power a human being can attain. The commonest
man that lives, whatever his powers may be, if they are powers that act
together, can look down on a man whose powers cannot, as a mutilated
being. While it cannot be denied that a being who has been thus
especially mutilated is often possessed of a certain literary ability,
he belongs to the acrobats of literature rather than to literature
itself. The contortionist who separates himself from his hands and feet
for the delectation of audiences, the circus performer who makes a
battering-ram of his head and who glories in being shot out of a cannon
into space and amazement, goes through his motions with essentially the
same pride in his strength, and sustains the same relation to the
strength of the real man of the world.

Whatever a course of literary criticism may be, or its value may be, to
the pupils who take it, it consists, more often than not, on the part of
pupil and teacher both, in the dislocating of one faculty from all the
others, and the bearing it down hard on a work of art, as if what it was
made of, or how it was made, could only be seen by scratching it.

It is to be expected now and then, in the hurry of the outside world,
that a newspaper critic will be found writing a cerebellum criticism of
a work of the imagination; but the student of literature, in the
comparative quiet and leisure of the college atmosphere, who works in
the same separated spirit, who estimates a work by dislocating his
faculties on it, is infinitely more blameworthy; and the college teacher
who teaches a work of genius by causing it to file before one of his
faculties at a time, when all of them would not be enough,--who does
this in the presence of young persons and trains them to do it
themselves,--is a public menace. The attempt to master a masterpiece, as
it were, by reading it first with the sense of sight, and then with the
sense of smell, and with all the senses in turn, keeping them carefully
guarded from their habit of sensing things together, is not only a
self-destructive but a hopeless attempt. A great mind, even if it would
attempt to master anything in this way, would find it hopeless, and the
attempt to learn a great work of art--a great whole--by applying the
small parts of a small mind to it, one after the other, is more hopeless
still. It can be put down as a general principle that a human being who
is so little aliv