the cunning device of those who, uncertain of their talent, would seek to add lustre to it by the authority of a school.  Such, for instance, are the high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism.  But Stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of his freedom.  Stendhal’s mind was of the first order.  His spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation.  For the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas.  And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous.  He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty.

It must not be supposed that I claim for the artist in fiction the freedom of moral Nihilism.  I would require from him many acts of faith of which the first would be the cherishing of an undying hope; and hope, it will not be contested, implies all the piety of effort and renunciation.  It is the God-sent form of trust in the magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth.  We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility.  What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance.  It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers.  That frame of mind is not the proper one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction.  It gives an author—­goodness only knows why—­an elated sense of his own superiority.  And there is nothing more dangerous than such an elation to that absolute loyalty towards his feelings and sensations an author should keep hold of in his most exalted moments of creation.

To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good.  It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of its being made so.  If the flight of imaginative thought may be allowed to rise superior to many moralities current amongst mankind, a novelist who would think himself of a superior essence to other men would miss the first condition of his calling.  To have the gift of words is no such great matter.  A man furnished with a long-range weapon does not become a hunter or a warrior by the mere possession of a fire-arm; many other qualities of character and temperament are necessary to make him either one or the other.  Of him from whose armoury of phrases one in a hundred thousand may perhaps hit the far-distant and elusive mark of art I would ask that in his dealings with mankind he should be capable of giving a tender recognition to their obscure virtues.  I would not have him impatient with their small failings and scornful of their errors.  I would not have him expect too much gratitude from that humanity whose fate, as illustrated in individuals, it is open to him to depict as ridiculous