something of the cold thrill of dawn, cling to his work and

give it a particular address to what is best in us. I do not
know that you learn a lesson; you need not - Mill did not -

agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet the spell is cast.
Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new

error - the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit
communicated is a perpetual possession. These best teachers

climb beyond teaching to the plane of art; it is themselves,
and what is best in themselves, that they communicate.

I should never forgive myself if I forgot THE EGOIST. It is
art, if you like, but it belongs purely to didactic art, and

from all the novels I have read (and I have read thousands)
stands in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the modern

David; here is a book to send the blood into men's faces.
Satire, the angry picture of human faults, is not great art;

we can all be angry with our neighbour; what we want is to be
shown, not his defects, of which we are too conscious, but

his merits, to which we are too blind. And THE EGOIST is a
satire; so much must be allowed; but it is a satire of a

singular quality, which tells you nothing of that obvious
mote, which is engaged from first to last with that invisible

beam. It is yourself that is hunted down; these are your own
faults that are dragged into the day and numbered, with

lingering relish, with cruel cunning and precision. A young
friend of Mr. Meredith's (as I have the story) came to him in

an agony. 'This is too bad of you,' he cried. 'Willoughby
is me!' 'No, my dear fellow,' said the author; 'he is all of

us.'
I have read THE EGOIST five or six times myself, and I mean

to read it again; for I am like the young friend of the
anecdote - I think Willoughby an unmanly but a very

serviceable exposure of myself.
I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that I have forgotten

much that was most influential, as I see already I have
forgotten Thoreau, and Hazlitt, whose paper 'On the Spirit of

Obligations' was a turning-point in my life, and Penn, whose
little book of aphorisms had a brief but strong effect on me,

and Mitford's TALES OF OLD JAPAN, wherein I learned for the
first time the proper attitude of any rational man to his

country's laws - a secret found, and kept, in the Asiatic
islands. That I should commemorate all is more than I can

hope or the Editor could ask. It will be more to the point,
after having said so much upon improving books, to say a word

or two about the improvable reader. The gift of reading, as
I have called it, is not very common, nor very generally

understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast
intellectual endowment - a free grace, I find I must call it

- by which a man rises to understand that he is not
punctually right, nor those from whom he differs absolutely

wrong. He may hold dogmas; he may hold them passionately;
and he may know that others hold them but coldly, or hold

them differently, or hold them not at all. Well, if he has
the gift of reading, these others will be full of meat for

him. They will see the other side of propositions and the
other side of virtues. He need not change his dogma for

that, but he may change his reading of that dogma, and he
must supplement and correct his deductions from it. A human

truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as much of life
as it displays. It is men who hold another truth, or, as it

seems to us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend our
restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our drowsy

consciences. Something that seems quite new, or that seems
insolently false or very dangerous, is the test of a reader.

If he tries to see what it means, what truth excuses it, he
has the gift, and let him read. If he is merely hurt, or

offended, or exclaims upon his author's folly, he had better
take to the daily papers; he will never be a reader.

And here, with the aptest illustrative force, after I have
laid down my part-truth, I must step in with its opposite.

For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content.
Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few

that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest
lessons are the most palatable, and make themselves welcome

to the mind. A writer learns this early, and it is his chief
support; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; and he is

sure at heart that most of what he says is demonstrably
false, and much of a mingled strain, and some hurtful, and

very little good for service; but he is sure besides that
when his words fall into the hands of any genuine reader,

they will be weighed and winnowed, and only that which suits
will be assimilated; and when they fall into the hands of one

who cannot intelligently read, they come there quite silent
and inarticulate, falling upon deaf ears, and his secret is

kept as if he had not written.
CHAPTER IV - A NOTE ON REALISM (16)

STYLE is the invariable mark of any master; and for the
student who does not aspire so high as to be numbered with

the giants, it is still the one quality in which he may
improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative force,

the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour of
birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the

just and dexterous use of what qualities we have, the
proportion of one part to another and to the whole, the

elision of the useless, the accentuation of the important,
and the preservation of a uniform character from end to end -

these, which taken together constitutetechnical perfection,
are to some degree within the reach of industry and

intellectual courage. What to put in and what to leave out;
whether some particular fact be organically necessary or

purelyornamental; whether, if it be purelyornamental, it
may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally,

whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and
notably, or in some conventionaldisguise: are questions of

plastic style continually rearising. And the sphinx that
patrols the highways of executive art has no more

unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great

change of the past century has been effected by the admission
of detail. It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at

length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his more or less
wholly unromantic followers, bound like a duty on the

novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
ample contemplation of the conditions of man's life; but it

has recently (at least in France) fallen into a merely
technical and decorative stage, which it is, perhaps, still

too harsh to call survival. With a movement of alarm, the
wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from these

extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked,
narrative articulation; after the succinct, the dignified,

and the poetic; and as a means to this, after a general
lightening of this baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld

the starveling story - once, in the hands of Voltaire, as
abstract as a parable - begin to be pampered upon facts.

The introduction of these details developed a particular
ability of hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has

led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A
man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on

technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and attract
the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to

call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what
more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of

the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to
degenerate into mere FEUX-DE-JOIE of literary tricking. The