man life that are eminently worth the telling, to
embody them in imagined facts with a mastery both of structure and of
style, and, behind and beyond the work itself, to be all the time a
person worthy of being listened to: this is, for the fiction-writer,
the ultimate ideal. Seldom, very seldom, have these three contrarious
conditions revealed themselves in a single author; seldom, therefore,
have works of fiction been created that are absolutely great. It would
be difficult for the critic to select off-hand a single novel which
may be accepted in all ways as a standard of the highest excellence.
But if the term _fiction_ be regarded in its broadest significance, it
may be considered to include the one greatest work of art ever
fashioned by the mind of man. The "Divine Comedy" is supreme in
subject-matter. The facts of its cosmogony have been disproved by
modern science, the religion of which it is the monument has fallen
into disbelief, the nation and the epoch that it summarizes have been
trampled under the progress of the centuries; but in central and
inherent truth, in its exposition of the struggle of the beleaguered
human soul to win its way to light and life, it remains perennial and
new. It is supreme in art. With unfaltering and undejected effort the
master-builder upreared in symmetry its century of cantos; with
faultless eloquence he translated into song all moods the human heart
has ever known. And it is supreme in personality; because in every
line of it we feel ourselves in contact with the vastest individual
mind that ever yet inhabited the body of a man. We know (to quote the
Poet's most appreciative translator)--

"from what agonies of heart and brain,
What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,
Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This medieval miracle of song."

His labor kept him lean for twenty years; and many a time he learned
how salt his food who fares upon another's bread,--how steep his path
who treadeth up and down another's stairs. But Dante saw and
conquered,--realizing what he had to do, knowing how to do it, being
worthy of his work. Therefore, singly among authors, he deserves the
epithet his countrymen apply to him,--divine.

"The Divine Comedy" is the supreme epic of the world. The supreme
novel remains to be written. It is doub