the
century. The value and range of the new method are well illustrated in its
use by two such thinkers and poets.

The analytic method as applied by George Eliot regards man as a social
being, studies him as a member of society. All that he is, and all
the influences working upon him, are understood only as affected by
his connection with the life of the race. This fact gives the most
distinguishing characteristic to her literary methods. Her imitators may
not, and nearly all of them do not, follow her into positivism; but they
all study man as a social being. They deal with him as affected by
heredity, education, and social characteristics. Even here it is not her
theories, but her artistic methods, which are imitated. The novel is no
longer regarded as a story to be told dramatically and with moving effect,
but as a study of character, as an analysis of situations and motives. The
advocates of the new method say that "in one manner or another the stories
were all told long ago; and now we want merely to know what the novelist
thinks about persons and situations." [Footnote: W.D. Howells in the
Century for November, 1882.] This interpretation of the mission of the
novelist well describes George Eliot's work, for she never hesitated to
tell her reader what she thought about the situations and the persons of
whom she wrote.

The new method, as developed in sympathy with agnosticism, fails in
literature just as science fails to be a complete interpretation of the
universe. The process which answers in the material world does not answer
in the spiritual. The instruments which tell the secrets of matter, close
the avenues to the revelations of mind. The methods of experiment and
demonstration which have brought the universe to man's knowledge, have not
been sufficient to make the soul known to itself. Any literary methods
imitating physical science must share in its limitations without its power
over the materials with which it has to deal. Literature has hitherto been
made helpful and delightful and acceptable because of its ideal elements.
Belief in a spiritual world, belief in the imperative law of righteousness
as a divine command, runs through all effective literature. However
realistic the poets have been when they have reached their highest and
best, they have believed that the soul, and what belongs to it, is the only
_reality_. Divorced of this Element, literature is at once lowered in tone,
a dry-rot seizes upo