It is interesting to see how the leading ideas in his [Green's] mind governed the treatment of an apparently alien material in his last piece of academic work, the essay on novels, which gained the Chancellor's prize in 1862. The essay has also the additional interest of being almost the only record of his views on art and its relation to life. The fundamental conception upon which it is based is one with which we have already met. The world in its truth is a unity, governed by a single law, animated by an undivided life, a whole in every part. But to human apprehension it is fragmentary and mechanical, a chaos of elements of which each is external to the other and all are external to our minds, and in which chance tempered by familiarity seems to be the only law. To exceptional men, or at exceptional crises in life, in the moments of intense insight or emotion which philosophy calls knowledge and religion faith, the weight of custom falls away, the truth breaks through the veil, and the most trivial object or accident comes to reflect in itself the whole system of nature or the whole providence of God. At such moments man realises that in order to live he must die, that in order to be free he must obey, and that only by surrendering his fancied independence can he enter into the divine unity. To this liberation of the self from its own bondage art contributes its share. The poetic genius, like the speculative and the religious, penetrates the monotonous disorder of everyday life, and lays bare "the impassioned expression" which is there for those who can read it. The dramatist, for instance, with whom the novelist is here compared, shows us some elemental force of humanity, stripped of the accidents of time and place, working itself out in free conflict with other forces, and finally breaking itself against the eternal fact that no man can gain the world without first losing himself. It is this catastrophe which makes the real tragedy of life; it is this which the tragic poet has the eye to see and the words to portray; and in proportion as we can follow him in imagination, we come away from the spectacle with our own hearts broken and purged, but strengthened to face the fact and obey the law. The novelist does with inferior means, and for minds at a lower level, what the dramatist may do for a mind at its highest. He idealises enough to make us feel pleasure or pain, not enough to make us forget ourselves. He excites curiosity or suspense, not awe or hope. If the novel ends well, it flatters our complacency with the feeling that the world as it is is not such a bad place after all; if it ends badly, it strengthens the indolent conviction that aimless misery is the law of the universe. There are however two ways in which novels may be of real service and value. If they cannot teach men how to live, they may, through the wide range of their subjects, enable those who have already