IN LITERATURE
comment is that they were both right, for one explained how the horn grew, and the other explained what it meant—just as, when the dinner-bell rings, we know how the sound is produced, and we know what it means. It would be stupid, however—though I believe some philosophers have been guilty—to confuse the interpretation with the cause, to say it is the significance of the dinner-bell that is ringing it. The quarrel with the miraculous in literature, therefore, is only with the miraculous when used as magic—as a wilful substitute for that continuity of cause and effect which outside of literature we believe in.
II
Of this kind of magic it is easy to find illustrations in medieval literature. Certain well-known French lays of the
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