Here the poet works so subtly that the mind is not aware of the
illumination of this light which comes without the violence of the
preacher, until after the fact; and, indeed, the effect is wrought more
through the sympathies than the reason. In such a case literature,
though it conveys moral with other kinds of truth, is not open to the
charge of didacticism, which is valid only when teaching is explicit and
abstract. The educative power of literature, however, is not diminished
because in its art it dispenses with the didactic method, which by its
very definiteness is inelastic and narrow; in fact, the more imaginative
a character is, the more fruitful it may be even in moral truth; it may
teach, as has been said, what the poet never dreamed his work contained.

If, then, to sum up the argument thus far, the subject-matter of
literature is life in the forms of personality and experience, and the
particular facts with respect to these are generalized by means of type
and plot in concrete form, and so are set forth as phases of an ordered
world for the intelligence, to the end that man may know himself in the
same way as he knows nature in its living system--if this be so, what
standing have those who would restrict literature to the actual in life?
who would replace ideal types of manhood by the men of the time, and
the ordered drama of the stage by the medley of life? They deny art,
which is the instrument of the creative reason, to literature; for as
soon as art, which is the process of creating a rational world, begins,
the necessity for selection arises, and with it the whole question of
values, facts being no longer equal among themselves on the score of
actuality, nor in fitness for the work in hand. The trivial, the
accidental, the unmeaning, are rejected, and there will be no stopping
short of the end; for art, being the handmaid of truth, can employ no
other than the method of all reason, wherefore idealism is to it what
abstraction is to logic and induction to natural science,--the breath of