checking the "despotism of situations." The essay
concludes characteristically with the refusal to believe that democracy
is necessarily unpoetic. As "we hold fast to the faith that the
'cultivation of the masses,' which has for the present superseded the
development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher
type of individual manhood than any which the old world has known," so,
though in the novel "the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it
held in the epic and the tragedy," "we may well believe that this
temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the
poet shall idealise life without making abstraction of any of its
elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the
inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the housetops to the common
intelligence of mankind."

Readers of the essay who are also novel-readers will be inclined to say
that the writer was not much in sympathy with his subject; and he
himself, on getting the prize, remarks that "it is curious that I should
have been successful in an essay on novels, about which I know and care
little, and should have failed in both my efforts in theology, for which
I care considerably." At the same time it is probably true, as he once
said, that he had read more novels than his friends gave him credit for,
and it is certainly true that what his reading lacked in extent it made
up in intensity. As might be supposed, his taste in fiction was for
forcible delineation and robust humor. The flavor of strong, healthy
individuality was what attracted him; for rarities, niceties, and
abnormalities of mental organisation he cared nothing. He liked things
which he could take hold of with his mind, not things which merely gave
him sensations, pleasant or painful. Both in his deepest and his
lightest moods he was absolutely simple and "above board," and this
simplicity made him keenly alive to the proximity of the sublime to the
ridiculous or the exquisite to the grotesque. Though he had little of
the animal in him, and was never troubled by his appetites, he was quite
free from prudery. If obscenity moved him at all, it was to frank
laughter or to grim contempt; he never dwelt upon it, either in the way
of enjoyment or loathing. "For rules of ascetic discipline," says a
friend, "he had no need. The view of life suggested by so much of the
best French literature, that thinking men are generally in a practical
dil