BEFORE GENIUS 143 



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 it! 

 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 aifair 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 1 



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 jEschylus' "Aga- 

 memnon," crouched, like a night-dog, on the roofs 

 of the Atreidas, 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 Eesartus " we 

 surely encounter one of the true heroic cast. We 

 are made aware that here is something more than a 

 litterateur, something more than genius. Here is 

 veracity, homely directness and sincerity, and strong 

 primary idiosyncracies. Here the man enters into 



