BEFORE GENIUS 1438 
strong, loving man, but only a refined taste, a fer- 
tile invention, or a special talent of some kind or 
another. 
Think of the lather of the modern novel, and 
the fashion-plate men and women that figure in ii! 
What noble person has Dickens sketched, or has 
any novelist since Scott? The utter poverty of 
almost every current novelist, in any grand universal 
human traits in his own character, is shown in no- 
thing more clearly than in the kind of interest the 
reader takes in his books. We are led along solely 
by the ingenuity of the plot, and a silly desire to 
see how the affair came out. What must be the 
effect, long continued, of this class of jugglers work- 
ing upon the sympathies and the imagination of a 
nation of gestating women ? 
How the best modern novel collapses before the 
homely but immense human significance of Homer’s 
celestial swineherd entertaining divine Ulysses, or 
even the solitary watchman in Aischylus’ “ Aga- 
memnon,” crouched, like a night-dog, on the roofs 
of the Atreide, waiting for the signal fires that 
should announce the fall of sacred Ilion! 
But one need not look long, even in contempo- 
rary British literature, to find a man. In the au- 
thor of “Characteristics ” and “‘Sartor Resartus ” we 
surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We 
are made aware that here is something more than a 
littérateur, something more than genius. Here is 
veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong 
primary idiosyncrasies. Here the man enters into 
