n it and eats away its finest portions. If Goethe and
Shakspere are realists in literary method, as some of their interpreters
would claim, yet to them the spiritual is supreme, the soul is monarch.
So it is with Homer, with Dante, with Scott, with Cervantes, with Victor
Hugo, with every supremely artistic and creative mind. Great minds
instinctively believe in the creative power of the mind, in its capacity
for self-direction. An unbiassed mind gifted with genius sees over
and through all obstacles, leaps to magnificent results, will not be
restrained by the momentary conditions of the present. Education or social
environment, however adverse, will not long hinder the poet from his work.
He writes for the future, if the present will not accept him, confident
that what his soul has to utter can be truly uttered only as his own
individuality impels, and that if he is faithful to his genius the world
will listen in due time. This power of personality lies at the basis of all
genuine literature, teaching faith in the soul, faith in a providential
ordering of the world, and overturning all agnostic theories about realism
and environment.

This instinctive faith in mind is the basis of all genuine idealism. The
idealist is not the creator of an imaginary world, peopling it with shapes
that never existed; but he is one who believes in ideas, and in mind as
their creator and the vehicle of their expression. Contemporary with George
Eliot was a group of men who believed in the mind as something other than
the temporary product of an evolutionary process. With them she may be
contrasted, her work may be measured by theirs. Carlyle, Tennyson, Browning
and Buskin shared with her the radical ideas of the time. Not one of them
has been fettered by narrow theories or cramped by old social doctrines.
The broad, inquiring, scientific spirit of the time has been shared by them
all. Buskin is a realist, Carlyle believed in the enduring realm of facts,
and they have all accepted the spirit of naturalism which has ruled the
century. The scientific, philosophic and social theories of the time have
been their inspiration. Certain ideas about law, progress and social
regeneration have affected them through and through. Yet as regards the one
great characteristic of idealism, all have widely departed from George
Eliot, for all regard mind as supreme, all believe in a spiritual realm
environing man. This fact appears throughout their work. To the