faulty conditions of the present, in either case changed somewhat
from the actual [9] world. In science, on the other hand, in history
so far as it conforms to scientific rule, we have a literary domain
where the imagination may be thought to be always an intruder. And
as, in all science, the functions of literature reduce themselves
eventually to the transcribing of fact, so all the excellences of
literary form in regard to science are reducible to various kinds of
pains-taking; this good quality being involved in all "skilled work"
whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament, as in sewing. Yet
here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history especially, and in
all those complex subjects which do but lie on the borders of
science, will still take the place of fact, in various degrees. Your
historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful intention, amid the
multitude of facts presented to him must needs select, and in
selecting assert something of his own humour, something that comes
not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon moulds
his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus,
Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the
past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to
what degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in
proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes
to be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of
his sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and
good art (as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of
his presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer
functions of literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is
the essence of such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there
can be no merit, no craft at all, without that. And further, all
beauty is in the long run only fineness of truth, or what we call