e providence of God. At
such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in
order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied
independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of
the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic
genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the
monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned
expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for
instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some
elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and
place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and
finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain
the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which
makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the
eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow
him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts
broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law.
The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level,
what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough
to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us forget
ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the
novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the
world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it
strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of
the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real
service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may,
through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already
found a principle of life to give it a freer application than their
limited circumstances would otherwise allow; the "fictitious experience"
may "give expansion to the personal," while the personal gives reality
to the fictitious, and thus may be mitigated that "sacrifice of the
individual to society" which the modern division of labor tends to bring
about. And secondly, by appealing to such various classes and
capacities, and exhibiting the identity of human nature under such
various circumstances, novels supply a vehicle through which the force
of public opinion may work, fusing differences, breaking down
prejudices, and