That depraved and sensual theory of story-telling was, however, more Aristophanic than Homeric, despite the single unfortunate precedent in the _Odyssey_. The tradition of Greek and Latin comedy was carried on by the medieval troubadours and by the story-tellers who catered to the decadent nobility of Italy and France. They retorted on their clerical censors and stimulated jaded appetites, substituting in shameless intrigues priests and nuns for the pagan gods. It was and is the glory of Scott that he broke away from these evil traditions which made the novel a hateful thing to our forefathers. Scott deserted the continental school of novelists and their English imitators, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, the last of all Byron. Scott gave up the satirical purposes which handed on in fiction the vulgar devices of low comedy. He went to history, to chivalry, to healthy men and women and created romances, not pathological studies. English, Irish and American fiction for a whole century yielded to the healthy and bracing impulse of Scott, but the younger novelists in vogue today in England, Ireland and America have gone back to the continental type, individual, pathological biographical problems, forsaking Scott’s revival through balladry of the best Homeric manner, where men “drank delight of battle with their peers far on the ringing plains of Troy.” The individualist must emancipate himself by the contemplation of nature. Pathological specimens, freakish oddities, all the surface impressions of the local colorists are not nature any more than a face contorted with a toothache is a man’s likeness. Such exceptional exhibitions cannot form the enduring basis of art. Personal experience must be widened by length of time, by merging into the stream of wisdom, flowing freighted from the past, or must, in exceptional cases, be won quickly by that intense and probing comprehension of genius, which seems almost Divine intuition. Excessive individualism, like the latest fashion, will be quaint and incongruous on the morrow. Homer lives eternal because through strange names and strange language and strange costumes we see our own sun and fields and ocean and sky and put our fingers on a pulse which registers the beat of a heart throbbing as ours. III ART AND HUMAN NATURE 1. THE UNIVERSAL ELEMENT