expression, the finer accommodation of speech to that vision within.

--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In
literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding
of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts
itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above
its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of
course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely
serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which
is in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or
incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul,
of a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and
power.

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this
transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as
modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.
It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its
representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being
only one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may
be thought, being the special art of the modern world. That
imaginative prose should be the special and opportune art of the
modern world results from two important facts about the latter:
first, the chaotic variety and complexity of its interests, making
the intellectual issue, the really master currents of the present
time incalculable--a condition of mind little susceptible of the
restraint proper to verse form, so that the most characteristic verse
of the nineteenth century has been lawless verse; and secondly, an