in which it is clad—nay, the very words in which it is conveyed—are really inseparable. Body and soul, form and substance, thought and expression, sacred and profane, fun and earnest—these and many others are familiar antitheses, indispensable in certain connections, but conventional and scholastic with no deep foundation in reality. Did a painter ever exalt the soul at the expense of the body, or a poet ever say that thought is everything and expression nothing, or a saint ever find the necessary business of life profane, or a great humourist ever assure you that he was only joking? A poet proceeds not by argument, but by vision. He does not clothe a soul with flesh, but informs a body with life. A body that has thus had a soul breathed into it is sometimes called a metaphor. Before that, it was probably a mere fact. Or it may have been a falsehood. It will live on if it find a soul. Witness our old friends the phoenix and upas-tree.
Hist. If you prove anything, which I am far from asserting, you prove that History and Literature can never join hands.
Poet. History can never be written in metaphor. It is so densely populated with facts, moreover, that it would be the height of unreason to suppose that they all have, or ever can have, souls. But whether they have souls or not, they can at least be attired in wedding garments. They are too often a ragged regiment, dissipated and lame, impressing only by their multitude and their idle clamour.
Hist. Truly we are little likely to agree. The improvements I have made in the History of Israel are pointed in precisely the opposite direction. I have been anxious that the bare facts should not be falsified by the impress of style, and that no emotional excitement should blur the impartiality of my readers.
Poet. A philosophical history, I suppose. But would you ever have set about it if there had been no Jewish religion? Historymay
