e inexplicable inspiration.
By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective
indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reaches
us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant
sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but
approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we
misunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimes
avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the
force I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul.
Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without
finding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle
[26] words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them
doubles its force. Religious history presents many remarkable
instances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious
literary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway
from one to another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those
lips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the
writings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have
instances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious
feeling in operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind
acts with similar power in certain writers of quite other than
theological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar
sense of theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature,
this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence.
At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";
such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but
of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with, peculiar
form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on
which account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, in
style. And this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what is
congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity--unity of atmosphere
here, as there of design--soul securing colour (or perfume, might [27]
we say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the
former vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is
practically infinite. There are some to whom nothing has any real
interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and
it is they who best apprecia