o contain in them the
secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar
excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact
is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive
writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time
to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must
consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem no
longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's
spirit, to think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longer
of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world,
prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present,
in either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world. In science,
on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule,
we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be
always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of
literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so
all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible
to various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in
all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament,
as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history
especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the
borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various
degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful
intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs
select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something
that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon
moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus,
Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the
past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to
what degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in
proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to
be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his
sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art
(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his
presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer