are developed out of it.  The difference between these two poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of the other an order of death.  Between these two is the special province of the human will.  What literature, what all art, presents is not the ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress.  Hence tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the intermediate world of conflict.  I speak of the spiritual world of man’s will.  We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.  We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is death.  We do not know.  But as shown to us in imagination, idealism, which is the race’s dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,—­the world of salvation on the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us, the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us.  Not that prosperity follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile environment, are her fixed study.  So far is idealism from ignoring the actual state of man that it most affirms its pity and evil by setting them in contrast with what ought to be, by showing virtue militant not only against external enemies but those inward weaknesses of our mortality with its passion and ignorance, which are our most undermining and intimate foes.  Here is no false world, but just that world which is our theatre of action, that confused struggle, represented in its intelligible elements in art, that world of evil, implicit in us and the universe, which must be overcome; and this is revealed to us in the ways most profitable for our instruction, who are bound to seek to realize the good through all the strokes of nature and the folly and sin of men.  Ideal literature in its broad compass, between its opposed poles of good and evil, is just this:  a world of order emerging from disorder, of beauty and wisdom, of virtue and joy, emerging from the chaos of things that are, in selected and typical examples.