very power which he sought to
escape. Here is the world itself brought back to him. Here is a perfect
copy of that which in actual experience he sees but partially. The
mirror is but too truly held up to nature. The getting and spending, the
marrying and giving in marriage, the dominion of fortune which makes
life a riddle, the prudential motives and worship of happiness which
hide its divinity, these meet him here as they meet him in life,
untransmuted, unidealised. Yet the charm of art overcomes him. The
perfectness of the representation, the skill with which the incidents
are combined to result in a crowning happiness behind which no sorrow
seems to lie, make him find a pleasure in the copy which he cannot find
in actual life, when in personal and painful collision with it. But
meanwhile he gains no real strength, he readies no new height of
contemplation. He comes back to the world, as a man with a diseased
digestion, after living for a time on spiced meats, comes back to
ordinary food. He has not braced the assimilative power of his thought
by a flight into the ideal world, or learnt even for a time to turn
"matter to spirit by sublimation strange." He has remained on the earth,
and though his fancy has for the hour given the earth a charm, he is no
better able than he was before to raise his eyes from its dead level, or
remove the limits of its horizon.

14. Thus, then, the old quarrel of the philosopher with the imitative
arts seems to be revived in respect of the novel. But though
novel-writers might be banished from a new republic,[14] it would not be
as artists, but for the inferiority of their art. An artist indeed the
novelist is; he combines events and persons with reference to ends; he
concentrates into a dialogue of a few sentences an amount of feeling and
character which it would take real men some hours to express; he imparts
a rapidity to the stream of incident quite unlike the sluggishness of
our daily experience. In this sense he does not copy what we see, but
shows us what we can not see for ourselves. Our complaint against him is
that the aspect of things which he shows us is merely the outward and
natural, as opposed to the inner or ideal. His answer would probably be
either that the ideal, in any sense in which it can be opposed to the
natural, must be false and delusive; or that it is merely an accident of
novel-writing, as hitherto practised, and not anything essential to this
species of com