when I feel the pressure of his vast, natural, un-
affected dullness. Then I am able to enter con-
fidently into his life and inhabit there, to think
his shallow and feeble thoughts, to be moved by
his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly illumined by
his stinted inspirations, to share his foolish preju-
dices, to practice his obtuse selfishness."

He came later to regret what he pronounced the
misconception that construed these remarks as
prohibitory dicta and gave his descriptions of the
true realist a more positive cast:

"In life he finds nothing insignificant; all tells
for destiny and character; nothing that God has
made is contemptible. He cannot look upon hu-
man life and declare this or that thing unworthy
of notice, any more than the scientist can declare
a fact of the material world beneath the dignity
of his inquiry." ¹⁹

As a critical apostle of the commonplace he may
have misdirected a multitude of second-rate and
imitative writers, but on the original minds he was
a compulsion to fresh beauties and an exactitude
our literature had never known. They have not
devoted themselves, any more than novelists ever
have devoted themselves, exclusively to chroni-
cling the noon-day spaces of life, nor have they
habitually sought existence upon the normal plane
of the average man and woman, so incomparably
incarnated in the persons of Basil and Isabel
March; but whether seeking high or low, they
have learned to approach their matter with a
reverence for the verities such as moved neither
Sir Walter nor the apostle to Les Misérables.

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