terrible passions, suffers its most appalling punishments, and passes
on, through anguish and sacrifice, to its new day of thought and
achievement.




Chapter XX.

The Culture Element in Fiction.


One of the chief elements in fiction which make for culture is,
primarily, its disclosure of the elementary types of character and
experience. A single illustration of this quality will suggest its
presence in all novels of the first rank and its universal interest
and importance. The aspirations, dreams, devotions, and sacrifices of
men are as real as their response to self-interest or their tendency
to the conventional and the commonplace; and they are, in the long
run, a great deal more influential. They have wider play; they are
more compelling; and they are of the very highest significance,
because they spring out of that which is deepest and most distinctive
in human nature. A host of men never give these higher impulses, these
spiritual aptitudes and possibilities, full play; but they are in all
men, and all men recognise them and crave an expression of them.
Nothing is truer, on the lowest and most practical plane, than the old
declaration that men do not live by bread alone; they sometimes exist
on bread, because nothing better is to be had at the moment; but they
live only in the full and free play of all their activities, in the
complete expression not only of what is most pressing in interest and