method of treatment, conveying it to his public more or less successfully
in the measure of his skill.

We have been speaking of the representative arts of painting and
sculpture, but the same is true of art in any form. In music, not a
representative art, in spite of the somewhat grotesque claims of so-called
program music, the method of the composer is everything, or at least his
subject is so vague and immaterial that no one would think of exalting it
as an end in itself. There is, however, an art in which the subject stands
forth so prominently that even those who love the art itself are
continually in danger of forgetting the subject's secondary character. I
mean the art of literature. Among the works of written speech the
boundaries of art are much more ill-defined than they are elsewhere. There
is, to be sure, as much difference between Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark"
and Todhunter's "Trigonometry" as there is between the Venus de Milo and a
battleship; and I conceive that the difference is also of precisely the
same kind, being that by which, as we have seen above, we may always
discriminate between a work of art and one of utility. But where art-value
and utility are closely combined, as they are most frequently in
literature, it is, I believe, more difficult to divide them mentally and
to dwell on their separate characteristics, than where the work is a
concrete object. This is why we hear so many disputes about whether a
given work does or does not belong to the realm of "pure literature," and
it is also the reason why, as I have said, some, even among those who love
literature, are not always ready to recognize its nature as an art, or
mistakenly believe that in so far as its art-value is concerned, the
subject portrayed is of primary importance--is an aim in itself instead of
being a mere vehicle for the conveyance of an impression.

Take, if you please, works which were intended by their authors as works