on to more open plains of peace. The
chorus of the ballad looks past the drowning maiden and the miller's
gibbet, and sees the lanes full of lovers.

This use of the chorus to humanize and dilute a dark story is strongly
opposed to the modern view of art. Modern art has to be what is
called "intense." It is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly
speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.
Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long
stories (as the man said of philosophy) cheerfulness would creep in.
Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful. And doubtless
they bore some resemblance to some lives lived under our successful
scientific civilization; lives which tend in any case to be painful, and
in many cases to be brief. But when the artistic people passed beyond
the poignant anecdote and began to write long books full of poignancy,
then the reading public began to rebel and to demand the recall of
romance. The long books about the black poverty of cities became quite
insupportable. The Berkshire tragedy had a chorus; but the London
tragedy has no chorus. Therefore people welcomed the return of
adventurous novels about alien places and times, the trenchant and
swordlike stories of Stevenson. But I am not narrowly on the side of the
romantics. I think that glimpses of the gloom of our civilization ought
to be recorded. I think that the bewilderments of the solitary and
sceptical soul ought to be preserved, if it be only for the pity (yes,
and the admiration) of a happier time. But I wish that there were some
way in which the chorus could enter. I wish that at the end of each
chapter of stiff agony or insane terror the choir of humanity could come
in with a crash of music and tell both the reader and the author that
this is not the whole of human experience. Let them go on recording hard
scenes or hideous questions, but let there be a jolly refrain.

Thus we might read: "As Honoria laid down the volume of Ibsen and went
wearily to her window, she realized that life must be to her not only
harsher, but colder than it was to the comfortable and the weak. With
her tooral ooral, etc.;" or, again: "The young curate smiled grimly as
he listened to his great-grandmother's last words. He knew only too
well that since Phogg's discovery of the hereditary hairiness of goats
religion stood on a very different basis from that which it had occupied
in his chil