The art quality in a book is as difficult to analyse as the feeling for it; not because it is intangible or indefinite, but because it is so subtly diffused.  It is difficult to analyse because it is the breath of life in the book, and life always evades us, no matter how keen and exhaustive our search may be.  Most of us are so entirely out of touch with the spirit of art in this busy new world that we are not quite convinced of its reality.  We know that it is decorative, and that a certain pleasure flows from it; but we are sceptical of its significance in the life of the race, of its deep necessity in the development of that life, and of its supreme educational value.  And our scepticism, it must be frankly said, like most scepticism, grows out of our ignorance.  True art has nothing in common with the popular conception of its nature and uses.  Instead of being decorative, it is organic; when men arrive at a certain stage of ripeness and power they express themselves through its forms as naturally as the tree puts forth its flowers.  Nothing which lies within the range of human achievement is more real or inevitable.  This expression is neither mechanical nor artificial; it is made under certain inflexible laws, but they are the laws of the human spirit, not the rules of a craft; they are rooted in that deeper psychology which deals with man as an organic whole and not as a bundle of separate faculties.

It was once pointed out to Tennyson that he had scrupulously conformed, in a certain poem, to a number of rules of versification and to certain principles in the use of different sound values.  “Yes,” answered the poet in substance, “I carefully observed all those rules and was entirely unconscious of them!” There was no contradiction between the Laureate’s practice of his craft and the technical rules which govern it.  The poet’s instinct kept him in harmony with those essential and vital principles of language of which the formal rules are simply didactic statements.

Art, it need hardly be said, is never artifice; intelligence and calculation enter into the work of the artist, but in the last analysis it is the free and noble expression of his own personality.  It expresses what is deepest and most significant in him, and expresses it in a final rather than a provisional form.  The secret of the reality and power of art lies in the fact that it is the culmination and summing up of a process of observation, experience, and feeling; it is the deposit of whatever is richest and most enduring in the life of a man or a race.  It is a finality both of experience and of thought; it contains the ultimate and the widest conception of man’s nature and life, or of the meaning and reality of Nature, which an age or a race reaches.  It is the supreme flowering of the genius of a race or an age.  It has, therefore, the highest educational value.  For the very highest products of man’s life in this world are his ideas and ideals; they