Having seen this culmination, I realize why many people either recoil
before it, and take the first train home, or speak of it as a "remarkable
formation." For, though mankind at large craves finality, it does not
crave the sort that bends the knee to Mystery. In Nature, in Religion, in
Art, in Life, the common cry is: "Tell me precisely where I am, what
doing, and where going! Let me be free of this fearful untidiness of not
knowing all about it!" The favoured religions are always those whose
message is most finite. The fashionable professions--they that end us in
assured positions. The most popular works of fiction, such as leave
nothing to our imagination. And to this craving after prose, who would
not be lenient, that has at all known life, with its usual predominance
of our lower and less courageous selves, our constant hankering after the
cosey closed door and line of least resistance? We are continually
begging to be allowed to know for certain; though, if our prayer were
granted, and Mystery no longer hovered, made blue the hills, and turned
day into night, we should, as surely, wail at once to be delivered of
that ghastliness of knowing things for certain!

Now, in Art, I would never quarrel with a certain living writer who
demands of it the kind of finality implied in what he calls a "moral
discovery"--using, no doubt, the words in their widest sense. I would
maintain, however, that such finality is not confined to positively
discovering the true conclusion of premises laid down; but that it may
also distil gradually, negatively from the whole work, in a moral
discovery, as it were, of Author. In other words, that, permeation by an
essential point of view, by emanation of author, may so unify and
vitalize a work, as to give it all the finality that need be required of
Art. For the finality that is requisite to Art, be it positive or
negative, is not the finality of dogma, nor the finality of fact, it is