plete suppression of the latter would stultify the dramatic poet, and reduce the possibilities of his creative act to eventless and vapid dialogue.

In concluding this chapter we are to consider the Sin Substance of Literature in Poetry and it may not long delay us as it does not so weightily enter the tissue of Poetry, as does Ignorance and Misery, and far less than in Drama does it effect those intellectual results which bestow to Drama and dramatic poetry such distinction and splendor.

Drama is action, and poetry outside of drama, is contemplation, description, reflection, and pervasively, the re-presentation of Nature in words, wherein of course we get Nature as the reaction of the outward physical world and the nature and temperament of the poet. But Poetry especially consumes its creator in his submission to the emotions, and they are the emotions of a noble cast, love, patriotism, heroic rage; it deals in the lyrics of devotion, self-denial, epithilamiums, limpid apostrophes to the past, the great, the sorrows of life, passionate regrets, the involution of himself in the processes of Nature, as the sunsets, the moonlight, the trees, and birds, the seasons, moral postulation, the verbal painting of scenes, of character, of pictorial narrative, and those evoca

tive appeals which stimulate seriousness, sadness, and a certain beneficial intellectual elevation.

It is true that Poetry in these offices finds its human standpoint involved and expressively tinted, to its own advantage, with sin and misery and ignorance, but it is the latter two that more effectively and pervasively minister to its needs, and offer it the provocatives of a subtle melancholy, a gentle and sometimes a fierce fever of scepticism, the puzzled questionings which like the chasmal darkenings and purple shadows of a closing day impart to Poetry a vague glory and attraction. Of this we shall I think be convinced in another chapter.

And just here at any rate it is appropriate to call attention that the three great epics of the world have had their immediate cause in adventuresome and ethnic Sin, in the formal and traditional story of the enormous event that put this singular ingredient in our natures. They are the Iliad, the Inferno of the Divine Comedy of Dante, and Milton's Paradise Lost. These masterpieces of Literature fundamentally, however we construe the meanings of their subjects, have to do with a sinning world, the metaphorical or metaphysical tragedy of Sin, and the religious symbolization of its advent.

CHAPTER VI.

THE SIN-SUBSTANCE AND THE MISERY-SUBSTANCE OF LITERATURE IN FICTION

Dr. Johnson called Madame D'Arblay, the creator of Evelina and Cecilia, a “character-monger," by which he meant to describe a method of fiction writing, which is an evolutionary stage in the development of the really ideal novel, that stage which succeeds the merely narrative, episodical, and catastrophic style of Smollett and Fielding, or in its less humorous and more sophistical form the story of Ainsworth and Sylvanus Cobb.

To take a trait of character, invest it with some sort of appropriate human guise, ventriloquize it with a speaking apparatus whose outpourings shall yield a corroborative endorsement of the aforesaid trait, and mingle it upon a stage of relevant action with other characters, as cleverly designed and as skillfully executed, is a recipe of commendable dignity. It has in a way been the formula by which Evelina and Cecilia and some of the less advanced and less mentally profound novels of Dickens have been elaborated. Needless to say with humour and expression, descriptive power, and an edequate dialogue it furnishes our bookshelves with distinguished occupants.

Macaulay has thus summarized its results in the novels of Madame D'Arblay: "about every one of her men and women has some one propensity developed to a morbid degree. In Cecilia, for example, Mr. Delille never opens his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or Mr. Briggs, without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or Mr. Simpkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favor with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady Margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prattle. If ever Madame D'Arblay aimed at more, we do not think that she succeeded well."

Now it is unnecessary, in view of the wide implications given in the previous chapter to the notion or aspect of Sin-it is unnecessary particularly to demonstrate that in the preceding inventory of the attributes of Madame D'Arblay's characters, we are

reviewing aspects of Sin, light, venial, entertaining, pleasantly, for literary purposes, exasperating aspects, but all incomprehensible and inferentially excluded from Heaven, or the societies of perfect men.

It is significant, as a further supporting consideration in this thesis, that novel writing assumes high prerogatives, endues itself with the art of dramatic and poetic portraiture as its exponents follow the psychological intricacies of Sin, bend their informing scrutiny upon the subtleties and vulgarities of Sin, its littlenesses and its magnitude, as they throw into picturesque groups the contrasted vices, and virtues of men and women, and crowd their pages with the forms of living sinful beings, filling up the relations between them with illuminating conversations, in which, from sentence to sentence, the reader discerns the progress of temptation, the reticence of virtue, the shades of criminal intention, or is startled into new interest by the menaces and expletives of brutality and lust.

In nearly all novels the matter of absorbing interest is the way in which a man and a woman fall in love, and over small or great obstructions finally consummate a union. It does not always fall out so pleasantly, and the novel becomes tragic and sad,