ntains sometimes rise from the sea and
sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a
struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished,
should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not
be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they
can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary
writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets
and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the
inner life.

The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none
more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion
for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian
complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and
appreciation for the old order in England--the contentment and humours
of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for
religion--she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time
into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of
humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of
duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our
knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types
than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests
in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had
widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.

Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same
broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous.
The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a
commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of
late for comfort and inspiration: 'The world is not a vale of tears, but
a vale of soul-making.' Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of
children. But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it
be of humanity in growth. Soul-making--the practice and the theory--has
become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought
and endeavour. We need the greater mind to see the links in the
overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history.
We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social
life. Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul
needed, with a world-consciousness, some kno