appearance, will not make you "understand" it any better,
in the sense that a work of art is "understood" as opposed, say,
to a piece of machinery. One may begin to wonder whether
what is in some places studied as literature is indeed literature
or something else; for what the student of literature should
aim at is to eat the bread, not analyse the chemical nature of the
soil from which the wheat sprang. What the literary addict
should do is to taste the bread, analyse how it is made, whether
or not it is properly cooked, and how much it nourishes him.
Anything else is another study, perhaps a paradise for the
specialist, but not half so rewarding for the whole man.

Nevertheless, a study of this kind has enormous value, if
properly used: it may remove certain barriers which prevent
us from getting into intimate contact with the work of literature.
Of course it has its value as a sociological study, but with such,
as students of literature, we are not primarily concerned. Yet
if we can discount the mental and moral trappings of an age,
separate them from what is essential so that they need not dis-
tract us from our proper study of the work of art as such, a great
deal has been gained. A generation or so ago such a statement
would have been regarded as "mere æstheticism", as perhaps
a good many now may regard it, with a good deal of stress on
the "mere": but it is time to reconsider the position in view
of the danger of the study of literature becoming a sub-depart-
ment of sociology. This is not the place in which to argue the
question--to anyone abreast of recent studies in psychology,
education, or scientific philosophy it will need no arguing--but
rather to see in what way a book such as Beljame's can be of use
to us as students of literature itself.

How the writers earned their livelihood, that is, who paid
them, must evidently have some effect upon what they wrote,
and how they wrote it; as Dryden, forestalling Dr. Johnson,
put it:

They who have best succeeded on the stage,
Have still conformed their genius to their age;

and what this book enables us to do is to see how far certain
attitudes, methods, materials used, developments of attack, are
common form, and have only an accidental connection with the
essentials of that unique thing, a work of art. All art is an
exploration of reality: and anything which helps us to discard
the adventitious paraphernalia of that reality brings us closer

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