Political economy, for example, shows me how to buy two drinks
for the same price I used to pay for one; while art inspires me to
transmute a pewter mug into a Cellini goblet. My physical nature, perhaps,
prefers two drinks to one; but, if my taste be educated, and I be not too
thirsty, I would rather drink once from the Cellini goblet than twice from
the mug. Political economy gravitates towards the material level; art
seeks incarnation only in order to stimulate anew the same spiritual
faculties that generated it. Art is the production, by means of
appearances, of the illusion of a loftier reality; and imagination is the
faculty which holds that loftier reality up for imitation.
The disposition of these preliminaries brings us once more in sight of the
goal of our pilgrimage. The novel, despite its name, is no new thing, but
an old friend in a modern dress. Ever since the time of Cadmus,--ever
since language began to express thought as well as emotion,--men have
betrayed the impulse to utter in forms of literary art,--in poetry and
story,--their conceptions of the world around them. According to many
philologists, poetry was the original form of human speech.
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