Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in
the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion,
produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little
share--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process.

Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the
various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry,
and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a
quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual
process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part
in it.

The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest
the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may
feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry
or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so
losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their
true life.

It was this problem which made _Robert Elsmere_ take three years to
write, instead of one. Mr. Gladstone complained, in his famous review of
it, that a majestic system which had taken centuries to elaborate, and
gathered into itself the wisest brains of the ages, had gone down in a
few weeks or months before the onslaught of the Squire's arguments; and
that if the Squire's arguments were few, the orthodox arguments were
fewer! The answer to the first part of the charge is that the
well-taught schoolboy of to-day is necessarily wiser in a hundred
respects than Sophocles or Plato, since he represents not himself, but
the brainwork of a hundred generations since those great men lived. And
as to the second, if Mr. Gladstone had seen the first redactions of the