16 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
expression of some universe that God knows. Indeed are we not most 
god-like when we have reached that point in the fullness of our de- 
velopment where our thoughts are complete enough to take on a 
material form and stand alone. 
If anything further be needed in support of my position that 
the explanation of artistic production is to be found, not in a wish to 
please or-instruct, but in a fact of our natural constitutions, I will 
only ask whether the passionate devotedness to their life-work, their 
absorption and joy in their work as work, of those men and women 
whom the world has called great artists, does not demand an ex- 
planation in something other than their desire to tickle the 
eesthetic sensibilities of mankind. It is very true that the desire to 
give pleasure, as well as many other desires, may enter as elements 
in the production of many works of art, but they in themselves can 
never account for any of these. 
If the opinion of art here outlined be correct, the novelist will 
be one whose conception of human life finds expression in the 
portrayal by words of acting and mutually inter-acting men and 
women. Words are the material ofthis artist ; that with which he wishes 
to express his conception of human life. From his knowledge of 
the principles or the customary processes of human nature he con- 
structs in imagination individual men and women, and then presents 
them to us as naturally as can be done through the medium of 
words. Andhe does this because in the inscrutable counsels before 
the world was made it was decreed that it should be natural for man 
to try to express every completed conception in some material form. 
This is what a novel is, and this why we write one. 
We have thus far looked at the novel from the author’s stand- 
point, let us now look at it from the reader’s, and ask: znd, Why 
do we read one? I shall not give an exhaustive list of reasons, for 
I suspect that such a list would be almost co-extensive with the lists 
of temperaments and moods, but I will give the principal reasons 
that have occurred to me. We read a novel : 
Ist. For pleasure. The reading of many novels is an unal- 
loyed pleasure and there are many times when we pick out this kind 
of novel and read it for the mere feeling which it excites. We never 
attempt to analyze the story or search for any significance—we merely 
enjoy it. 
