Newman's _Loss and Gain_, Kingsley's _Alton Locke_--for the novel of
religious or social propaganda. And it seemed to me that the novel was
capable of holding and shaping real experience of any kind, as it
affects the lives of men and women. It is the most elastic, the most
adaptable of forms. No one has a right to set limits to its range. There
is only one final test. Does it interest?--does it appeal? Personally, I
should add another. Does it make in the long run for _beauty_? Beauty
taken in the largest and most generous sense, and especially as
including discord, the harsh and jangled notes which enrich the
rest--but still Beauty--as Tolstoy was a master of it?

But at any rate, no one will deny that _interest_ is the crucial matter.

There are five and twenty ways
Of constructing tribal lays--
And every single one of them is right!

always supposing that the way chosen quickens the breath and stirs the
heart of those who listen. But when the subject chosen has two aspects,
the one intellectual and logical, the other poetic and emotional, the
difficulty of holding the balance between them, so that neither
overpowers the other, and interest is maintained, is admittedly great.

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for
religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and
to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual
life begins again. And with him I wished to contrast a type no less fine
of the traditional and guided mind, and to imagine the clash of two such
tendencies of thought as it might affect all practical life, and
especially the life of two people who loved each other.