functions of
literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the essence of
such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit,
no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long
run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.

--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In
literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding
of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts
itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above
its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of
course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely
serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is
in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or
incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of
a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this
transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as
modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.
It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its
representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only
one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be
thought, being the special art of the modern world. That imaginative
prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world
results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic
variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue,
the really master currents of the present time incalculable--a
condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse
form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century
has been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, a
curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a
certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the
less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as
the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will
be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its
excellen