Diarists of amusing passages are under an obligation to paint us a realistic revival of the time, or we miss the relish.  The odour of the roast, and more, a slice of it is required, unless the humorous thing be preternaturally spirited to walk the earth as one immortal among a number less numerous than the mythic Gods.  ‘He gives good dinners,’ a candid old critic said, when asked how it was that he could praise a certain poet.  In an island of chills and fogs, coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum, the comic and other perceptions are dependent on the stirring of the gastric juices.  And such a revival by any of us would be impolitic, were it a possible attempt, before our systems shall have been fortified by philosophy.  Then may it be allowed to the Diarist simply to relate, and we can copy from him.

Then, ah! then, moreover, will the novelist’s Art, now neither blushless infant nor executive man, have attained its majority.  We can then be veraciously historical, honestly transcriptive.  Rose-pink and dirty drab will alike have passed away.  Philosophy is the foe of both, and their silly cancelling contest, perpetually renewed in a shuffle of extremes, as it always is where a phantasm falseness reigns, will no longer baffle the contemplation of natural flesh, smother no longer the soul issuing out of our incessant strife.  Philosophy bids us to see that we are not so pretty as rose-pink, not so repulsive as dirty drab; and that instead of everlastingly shifting those barren aspects, the sight of ourselves is wholesome, bearable, fructifying, finally a delight.  Do but perceive that we are coming to philosophy, the stride toward it will be a giant’s —­a century a day.  And imagine the celestial refreshment of having a pure decency in the place of sham; real flesh; a soul born active, wind-beaten, but ascending.  Honourable will fiction then appear; honourable, a fount of life, an aid to life, quick with our blood.  Why, when you behold it you love it—­and you will not encourage it?—­or only when presented by dead hands?  Worse than that alternative dirty drab, your recurring rose-pink is rebuked by hideous revelations of the filthy foul; for nature will force her way, and if you try to stifle her by drowning, she comes up, not the fairest part of her uppermost!  Peruse your Realists—­really your castigators for not having yet embraced Philosophy.  As she grows in the flesh when discreetly tended, nature is unimpeachable, flower-eke, yet not too decoratively a flower; you must have her with the stem, the thorns, the roots, and the fat bedding of roses.  In this fashion she grew, says historical fiction; thus does she flourish now, would say the modern transcript, reading the inner as well as exhibiting the outer.