nge and abhorrent to the bourgeois mind. It was to take much time and a long growth in self-confidence before any spokesman for the new group dared commit to print such a wholesale condemnation of "aristocratic literature" as that Tolstoy (himself an aristocrat!) expressed in What is Art? But his apparent paradoxes had long been commonplaces of the middle-class Protestant mind, which had in the interim been carrying on an underground warfare against high culture, with the bestselling novel as a chief weapon (Fiedler 42-3).
A novel can be explained; so can a poem, a building, or a painting. A novel is intended to engage the reader; so are other forms of art. But a poem, particularly the lyric poem that supplanted the epic or narrative as a major art form once the novel had appeared, or an expression by any of the plastic arts, far more than a novel, is intended to wash over rather than explain
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