Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/48

42 the explorer creates his Niagara; but he does not know in advance that it will be Niagara—at least, he cannot know what Niagara.

But after all, in practical life many purposes are combined in a single act without conscious contradiction. In at least one art, architecture, we recognize that utilitarian and aesthetic purposes may be and indeed must be combined harmoniously. May not something similar be true of literature? Certainly we often call that literature, and I think rightly, which has for its main purpose the communication of something, because with the communication is joined the sense of creating beauty. If the aesthetic end is secondary in this case, it seems at least probable that the secondary end would be utterly defeated if we tried to separate it from the primary one of communication. On the other hand, our adventurer in words who begins with mere creative impulse—as some writers apparently do—does not discover Niagara.

University of Illinois