all-pervading naturalism, a curiosity about everything whatever as it
really is, involving a certain humility of attitude, cognate to what
must, after all, be the less ambitious form of literature. And prose
thus asserting itself as the special and privileged artistic faculty
of the present day, will be, however critics may try to narrow its
scope, as varied in its excellence as humanity itself reflecting on
the facts of its latest experience--an instrument of many stops,
meditative, observant, descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive,
fervid. Its beauties will be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will
exert, in due measure, all the varied charms of poetry, down to the
rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12] or Michelet, or Newman, at their
best, gives its musical value to every syllable.*

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .
proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the
scholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must
think it, under a system of education which still to so large an
extent limits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he
supposes always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes)
warily, considerately, though without consideration for him, over the
ground which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably.
For the material in which he works is no more a creation of his own
than the sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and
contending tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a
language has its own abundant and often recondite laws, in the
habitual and summary recognition of which scholarship consists. A
writer, full of a matter he is before all things anxious to express,
may think of those laws, the limitations of vocabulary, structure,
and the like, as a restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find
in them an opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties