minors, and semifatuous persons constitute the vast majority of "our own flesh and blood." "Twenty-five millions, chiefly fools!" Perhaps, Yet we may be quite sure that in the most foolish, the heart does not exist that has never throbbed with a deep emotion, nor the intellect that has never harboured a true thought, nor the imagination that has never nursed a dream of beauty. In the dullest, the least cultivated, as in the most richly endowed and highly disciplined of our race, we may discern what the historian of Materialism confesses to be," the same necessity, the same transcendental root of our nature, which leads us to fashion a world of the ideal, whither we may escape from the limitations of the senses, to find there the home of our spirit."

"The man of letters has a cure of souls," a great French writer has well said. This is particularly true of those who work in that department of romantic fiction, the influence of which in this age is so great and is ever increasing. It is their vocation to refine, to elevate, to moralise. And here comes in the essential difference between their function and that of the physicist. To physical science nothing is filthy or impure. The student in its domain takes all the facts and catalogues them in the order of their importance, reducing them to formulas. He deals with matter. Ethics is a sphere into which he does not enter. Far other is it with the writer of fiction. In the first place he is not concerned with all the facts. His

work is essentially poetical, and the primary duty. of the poet is choice, which is governed by those eternal laws, those necessary conventions, ruling throughout the domain of art. The great ethical principles of reserve, shame, reverence, which have their endless applications in civilised life, prescribe limits to imagination as to action. There are moods of thought which do not yield in heinousness to the worst deeds moods of madness, suicidal and polluting. To leave them in the dark is to help towards suppressing them. And this is a sacred duty. "We are bound to reticence," says George Eliot, "most of all by that reverence for the highest efforts of our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence." The main theme of the novelist, the dramatist, is ever the passion of love-the most common, the most imperious of human sentiments. But love is not to him what it is to the physiologist-a mere animal impulse which man has in common with moths and mollusca. His task is to extract from human life, even in its commonest aspects, its most vulgar realities, what it contains of secret beauty; to lift it to the level of art, not to degrade art to its level. And so he is concerned with this most potent and universal instinct, as transformed, in greater or less degree, by the imaginative faculty; whether, dealing with it in its illicit manifes

tations, he exhibits it as the blight and bane of life, or depicts it in its pure and worthy expression "the bulwark of patience, the tutor of honour, the perfectness of praise." His ethos comes out in the treatment of his subject rather than in his personages, his plot, or his dénouement. It is easy to conceive of a work of fiction in which all the characters should be evil, but which should be severely ethical in its tone. An hour passed in Dante's Inferno does but intensify our longing to enter his Paradiso.

Unquestionably this general canon may be laid down, that in a work of art the depicting of deformity and evil is admissible only as it brings into stronger relief beauty and virtue; that the sensuous impression should not overpower the spiritual. Certainly the drama or the novel of modern life must be true to life; it may not put darkness for light, nor light for darkness; it must represent the darkness and the light as they are. A work of imagination should not obtrude the moral sentiment. To employ it for the establishment of a thesis is fatally to pervert it from its true function. Flaubert was well warranted when he wrote, "Une œuvre d'art qui cherche à prouver quelque chose est nulle par cela seul." Let the literary artist body forth things as they are in this confused drama of existence, subject only to the reservations which the essential laws of art impose. Those "bad good books," as they have well been called, which depict things as

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they are not, stand condemned by the first principle of literary ethics, for they are wanting in the primary condition of morality, which is truth. Balzac has profoundly observed, "Great works of imagination subsist by their passionate side. But passion is excess, is evil. The writer has nobly accomplished his task when, not putting aside this essential element of all literary work, he accompanies it with a great lesson. The really immoral book," he justly adds, "is that which saps the bases of property, religion, justice -in other words, which ignores or denies the spiritual nature of men, whereon these essential foundations of civilisation rest. And he elsewhere sums the matter up in the proposition that to moralise his epoch is the end which every literary artist should propose to himself. How far this great master contributed to moralise his epoch, how far he is open to the impeachment that his virtue is after all but an obscene virtue, are questions which must not detain us now. What I would insist on is the great principle which he so well states, that the true value of any work of art is its ethical value, and that the measure of its ethical value is its correspondence with the truth of things. But the true is the ideal; the phenomenal is not the real, but its perpetual antithesis. A generation taught by Kant should not need to be reminded how pregnant is that old aphorism of Hellenic wisdom that the senses are very indifferent

witnesses of truth; that what meets them is merely an expression, adapted to our imperfect apprehensive powers, of eternal verities, which eye hath not seen nor ear heard, for they are beyond the reach of our limited perceptive organs. Those verities are the true domain of the artist in fiction as of all artists. He is essentially a psychologist; and it is precisely in the degree that the physiognomy, gestures, words, actions of his characters interpret truly the innumerable sentiments which make up the life of the soul that he is veracious; for the soul is the great human reality; man's moral being is the dominant fact about him. Balzac's piercing eyes discerned this truth clearly enough; and he has formulated it with admirable succinctness in the introduction to the Comédie Humaine: "Un roman a pour loi de tendre vers le beau idéal." Yes; this is the great law of romantic fiction. ultimate test in judging of it ever is, whether there is any high thought, any true ideal, which serves as the centre of the fable and informs the composition. If, and in so far as, there is, it may be pronounced artistic, ethical, true. In the filthy æstheticism of which M. Zola's writings are the most popular manifestation there is not a vestige of the beau idéal. There is nothing but blank and crude materialism, the trivial, the foul, the base of animal life. A movement of prurient curiosity, a spasm of lust, a thrill of physical horror-these are the highest emotions which such art excites. That

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