tagonist of the Sophist—yet he was susceptible to the æsthetic influences of his Athenian environment; the whole texture of his discourse betraying his sense of form and color, being instinct with harmony and rhythm, sufficiently austere to exclude all meaningless decoration, yet availing of every dramatic value. He too, with true Hellenic freedom and daring, made the voyage of discovery; penetrating the unexplored regions of the mind, bringing shadowy and intangible things within the range of speculation, and giving them the names they have ever since been known by. His spectral analysis dwelt with its dim and formless object until, as we see in the progress of any one of his Dialogues, what seemed undistinguishable takes shape and color and motion—also its place in the divine harmony—forever thereafter a matter of familiar recognizance. The formal processes of logic will not serve for such disclosures; these only strip and sterilize truth, which in the creative vision is lifted from abjectness and oblivion into life and motion, its sphere and orbit luminously apparent.
In the generation after Shakespeare, Jeremy Taylor furnished the exceptional instance of a preacher whose sermons will be read as long as there are English-speaking readers, not because of their piety, but because they have the magical charm of imaginative investment.
Among Addison's prose writings, in themselves always elegant for their grace and ease as well as for their formal excellence and for a flexible use of the language which discloses its resources as a medium for the expression of the most varied and delicate shades of thought, his sketches of Sir Roger de Coverley and Will Honeycomb especially delight us, having a dramatic impersonation and thus the expression of an individual mood and temperament not the writer's own, but dramatically projected into an independent personality which the reader may regard under its own special masque. The amplitude of expression and the expansion of thought leading thereto, which the writer allows himself in an open and undefined field, are brought under limitations in the definite and consistent portrayal of a character; and these limitations not only are pleasing to the reader as implying a subtler art, but yield him a higher satisfaction because they are limitations of life as well as of this art—of an individual will having its own prejudices and passions, so that life displaces logic, and we see it as it is, not as we think it ought to be.
From this adventure of Addison it is but a step to the modern novel which so soon afterward came into being, and of which it was the tentative prelude. A new field was opened for creative art in prose, free from certain formal obligations essential to the higher poetic art,—free also from certain exactions affecting the stage play—notably highly pitched tension and exaggeration. The new art had leisure for the full play of imagination and the widest possible scope for interpretation—always availing of the dramatic masque, which is life's own prism refracting its truths, showing them in all their colors.
The fiction of our own time, of the highest order, has made use of this new art to more purpose than that of any preceding period in the disclosure of psychical truth. For exemplification we shall not refer to well-known masters like Hardy and Meredith and James, but content ourselves with a single instance from a less widely read novelist, Joseph Conrad. Here is a writer who has spent a large portion of his life at sea, and the sea is naturally the background of his stories; not only that—it blows saltly and whispers and moans and rages through their whole frame-work, a haunting, inevitable Presence: that sea which has been in all history the touchstone of the human spirit,—which the Greek loved and which the Hebrew shunned, hedging inland, and would have none of in the New Earth of his apocalyptic vision. Man in this Presence—that is Conrad's theme, never before unfolded, analyzed, and dramatized by any such master.
This alone is a great distinction, if in the theme it were only the sea that is interpreted in its own flowing and mystical terms, in peace and storm; but it is man also, he chiefly indeed, that is interpreted—the flux and mystery of the human heart, in its weakness and strength. This twofold mastery it is which makes Lord Jim the greatest novel of its kind in all literature, equal in
