ies in the realm of the mind--the mind
attending closely to Nature, but he is too much the naturalist and the
land-surveyor to lose himself in the raptures of nature love. He is a
stranger to the ethereal touch with which Fiona Macleod opens the magic
door of that which is felt but not seen in earth and sky. He misses the
mystic hour when ghosts of the green life are about. That hour has been
seized by Algernon Blackwood, who makes us feel the fascination, the
vague dread of the elemental powers. There is a dream-wood in which the
souls of all things intermingle, and once imprisoned there, the
nature-lover may not escape until he has paid toll to the pixies.

There is, after all, nothing incompatible in the life of self-enrichment
and the life of self-expenditure. They are interdependent, and rule the
ancient order of gnosis and praxis. Whether we go to nature or religion
or science for replenishment, we must be filled. And the ironic power
which presides over our feasts compels the most inveterate egoist
amongst us to share his treasures. Mind is for ever craving to give to
mind. If we want nothing better than to boast of our superiority, the
boasting imparts a lesson to others and is therefore a gift. But the
reforming spirit spares few who think. It is generally believed that the
purely literary mind scorns the idea of reforming: that art is above
moral purpose. I have yet to discover the purely literary mind. Homer
and Shakespeare, Goethe and Dante are clearly not of it. Shakespeare, so
say the wiseacres, is the strictly impartial dramatist. He depicts the
good and the bad, the great and the small, with complete detachment.
Naturally, the art is the detachment and the lesson is in the perfect
representation. The literary man may indignantly repudiate the idea of
"preaching." "To go preach to the first passer by," wrote Montaigne, "to
become tutor to the ignorance of the first I meet, is a thing I abhor."
He may have abhorred the idea, but through his essays he made himself
tutor to innocence and the model of subjective moralizing.

However widely we roam the Republic of Letters, we meet no citizen
without a badge of consecrated service. Pretenders, perhaps, usurpers of
the titles of others, men to whom literature is nothing but merchandise.
These may be totally free from the impulse. Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann,
Hugo are reformers of the first order, whose words are charged with
revolt. The transcendentalism of Emerso