This analogy of the process of alchemy which Richard Middleton has himself suggested is one of the finest and the fittest for our purpose; but there are many others.  The “magic wand” analogy comes to much the same thing; there is the like notion of something ugly and insignificant changed to something beautiful and significant.  Something ugly; shall we not say rather something formless transmuted into form!  After all, the Latin Dictionary declares solemnly that “beauty” is one of the meanings of “forma” And here we are away from alchemy and the magic wand ideas, and pass to the thought of the first place that I have quoted:  “the streets were more than a mere assemblage of houses,” The puzzle is solved; the jig-saw—­I think they call it—­has been successfully fitted together, There in a box lay all the jagged, irregular pieces, each in itself crazy and meaningless and irritating by its very lack of meaning:  now we see each part adapted to the other and the whole is one picture and one purpose.

But the first thing necessary to this achievement is the recognition of the fact that there is a puzzle.  There are many people who go through life persuaded that there isn’t a puzzle at all; that it was only the infancy and rude childhood of the world which dreamed a vain dream of a picture to be made out of the jagged bits of wood, There never has been a picture, these persons say, and there never will be a picture, all we have to do is to take the bits out of the box, look at them, and put them back again.  Or, returning to Richard Middleton’s excellent example:  there is no such thing as London, there are only houses.  No man has seen London at any time; the very word (meaning “the fort on the lake”) is nonsensical; no human eye has ever beheld aught else but a number of houses; it is clear that this “London” is as mythical and monstrous and irrational a concept as many others of the same class.  Well, people who talk like that are doubtless sent into the world for some useful but mysterious process; but they can’t write real books.  Richard Middleton knew that there was a puzzle; in other words, that the universe is a great mystery; and this consciousness of his is the source of the charm of “The Ghost Ship.”

I have compared this orthodox view of life and the universe and the fine art that results from this view to the solving of a puzzle; but the analogy is not an absolutely perfect one.  For if you buy a jig-saw in a box in the Haymarket, you take it home with you and begin to put the pieces together, and sooner or later the toil is over and the difficulties are overcome:  the picture is clear before you.  Yes, the toil is over, but so is the fun; it is but poor sport to do the trick all over again.  And here is the vast inferiority of the things they sell in the shops to the universe:  our great puzzle is never perfectly solved.  We come across marvellous hints, we join line to line and our hearts beat with the rapture of