a thread as to have withstood the strain of temptation, and never so pure as to have escaped its tarnish, and she voluntarily chose just this kind of fabric, because from it, for literary purposes, the highest results issued, the most wonderful tapestries could be woven. Thus Maggie Tulliver and Stephen Guest are drawn for us, and Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, Casaubon and Dorethea Brooke, Lydgate and Rosamond Vincy, Daniel Deronda and Grandcourt, and Gwendolen Harleth, and all the earthly terrors of Janet Dempster's fate.

And so it is with Thomas Hardy and William Black and Miss Wilkins and Mrs. Ward.

But we hear the incredulous protest arising on all sides, that in making the literary excellence of these works to consist in the subject matter of Misery, we have substituted for people, scenes, conversations, episodes, a purely moral expression, a quite indefinite generalization of feeling—such as misery or suffering -that instead of emphasizing that Romola for instance, is a reconstruction of Florence in the fifteenth century, or Barnaby Rudge a picture of life at the time of the Lord Gordon riots, we dwell upon the emotional expression, the prevalent or predominant impression of suffering men and women, portrayed in these books.

This however is not quite true, since the misery or the sin varies in its individual aspects in each case. It becomes incorporated in each person, and gathers a special character from the contrasted scenes or times at which it is represented. We mean in insisting upon Sin, Misery, and Ignorance, as controlling factors in the creation of permanent human literature that these words express genera, of which each literary example is a specialized case or manifestation, a particular, even an individualized case. It would be as impossible to put Misery or Sin or Ignorance on the page of the novelist, or the historian or the dramatist without some concrete illustration, as to give an adequate or comprehensible idea of a chemical reaction without a definite instance. Chemical reactions are the whole substance of chemistry, but of course their interest resides in the results gained, in the special associations of contacts which the chemist forms. Our terms are of necessity general, and the especial illustrations drawn from literature simply exemplify a general proposition. In each case the literary charm and interest inheres in the treatment and style-which we have elsewhere alluded to—and the especial subject matter of place and individual and time, but that literary interest is after all only the specialized embodiment of the pri

mary stuff of feeling, and the existence, so admirable and stimulating to our thoughts, of this or that character, in a book, is a particular realization of the undifferentiated magma (to borrow a term from vulcanology) of Sin, or Misery or Ignorance.

But the pre-organized condition of those three terms in human life makes it possible for the creative mind of the writer to assume and incorporate them in his or her exact and discrete creations. This is plain enough. Nor need it molest us, for the value of this thesis, that it can be shown that much and even a creditable proportion of literature involves a different kind of material. We may have been hurried here and there in this hastily composed essay to claim too much for our promulgation, but it is in nowise impaired thereby, for we do now again assert that a great, a paramount amount of the noble and permanent literature, in the highest sense, has come to be by reason of the imminence everywhere on all sides and in myriad forms of Ignorance, Sin, and Misery.

Walton's "Complete Angler," and White's "Natural History of Selborne," together with such a book as Henry James' "A Little Tour in France" are certainly literature, and they do not pervasively or even at any point essentially dwell on these things.

Let it be so. It is none the less true that Browning's Mr. Sludge the Spiritualist, or Carlyle's French Revolution, or Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, or Poe's Tales do, and the more regnant manifestations of the literary genius always will. In which matter, as we in our conclusion point out, as the world progressively grows better, and a more even material happiness devolves through all the elements of the state, as we escape the European incubus, it is to be expected that Literature, in its most imaginative forms, will also progressively dwindle and disappear, and it is

no matter.

CHAPTER VII.

IGNORANCE AS THE SUBSTANCE OF POETRY

The title of this chapter repells attention. It is a monstrous and an unquestionably invidious statement. That those lovely word weaving and inspired structures of verbal music have anything to do with Ignorance, when too they so often are full of learning and thought, seems an especially rude assault upon the patience of the reader. We have said something about it elsewhere and it is now our unpleasant task to be more explicit, even at the risk of failure. Let us be as deliberate and cautious as the responsibilities of this disagreeable operation demand.

And in the outset as a useful tonic to our attention and the liberalization of our point of view, we must learn to forget that Ignorance, in a cosmic sense, is so ignoble or humiliating a condition; that it, as applied to the verity of things, is almost surely the enforced position of the most informed. We might have used a different word in the connections we are about to encounter, but we retain the word because, for the universality of our contention, it thus includes the kind of necessary darkness enshrouding even the highest speculation and inspired utterance, and the