it was untrammelled--and
with Blake at least entirely innocuous to society, except to one
drunken soldier who richly deserved what he got. But with Coleridge,
throughout his career, one sees it struggling like a fly glued in
treacle, pausing often to cleanse its wings. The fly, you adjudge,
walked into the treacle. But Coleridge always thought that it was the
treacle which had walked over him.

THE CRYSTAL VASE

I have often wished that I could write a novel in which, as mostly
in life, thank goodness, nothing happens. Jane Austen, it has been
objected, forestalled me there, and it is true that she very nearly
did--but not quite. It was a point for her art to make that the
novel should have form. Form involved plot, plot a logic of events;
events--well, that means that there were collisions. They may have
been mild shocks, but persons did knock their heads together, and
there were stars to be seen by somebody. In life, in a majority of
cases, there are no stars, yet life does not on that account cease to
be interesting; and even if stars should happen to be struck out, it
is not the collision, nor the stars either, which interest us most.
No, it is our state of soul, our mental process under the stress which
we care about, and as mental process is always going on, and the state
of the soul is never the same for two moments together, there is ample
material for a novel of extreme interest, which need never finish,
which might indeed be as perennial as a daily newspaper or the _Annual
Register_. Why is it, do you suppose, that anybody, if he can, will
read anybody else's letter? It is because every man-Jack of us lives
in a cage, cut off from every other man-Jack; because we are incapable
of knowing what is going on in the mind of our nearest and dearest,
and because we burn for the assurance we may get by evidence of
homogeneity procurable from any human source. Man is a creature of
social instinct condemned by his nature to be solitary. Creatures in
all outward respects similar to himself are awhirl about him. They
cannot help him, nor he them; he cannot even be sure, for all he may
assume it, that they share his hope and calling.

Ensphered in flesh we live and die,
And see a myriad souls adrift,
Our likes, and send our voiceless cry
Shuddering across the void: "The truth!
Succour! The truth!" None can reply.

That is the state of our case. We can cope with mere events, comedy,
tr