Literature, so long as it be idealistic, is the anodyne of the spirit, the mother of faith, the nurse of hope! Literature records and criticises, but does not make history: as we grow older we have to recognise, slowly and sadly, the fact that the world is profoundly incomplete. The more that we can keep our eyes from a vain attempt to plumb the abyss, the more useful, practical, hopeful we become. And literature, like society, athletics, politics, is one of the devices we resort to, to hide from ourselves the horror of the gap. But the only true consolation is our faith in the incompleteness of the world as we see it, and in the ultimate completeness of the Divine plan. Realistic literature can never help us to this faith: it can only plunge us deeper in the mire--deeper in fact than we need be plunged, because realism deludes us into accepting as typical what is only abnormal. The Realist is a man who stands beside a drag-net that is being slowly hauled ashore. He picks up and handles, not without a sickly creep of horror, the viscous fleshy things, clammy polypi, bulging, translucent cucumber-objects smelling of the peevish brine. They are struggling, heaving, dying; on them, on these creatures of the silent, moving sea, settles the nauseating faintness of the unsubstantial air. Such pleasure as they give him is horrible, physiological, almost obscene. But the Idealist, to use an exquisite simile of Mr. Henry James' in "The Middle Years," is the man who visits "the great glazed tank of art." There in the vivarium, through the glimmering panes, under the loops and lines of light, and among the bursting bubbles, on the dim sand, in dusky corners, on jutting shelves of the rock, the strange sea-monsters, all humps and horns, lie at their ease. Strange they are and horrible; but it is a cleanly, a spectacular horror. They are quiet, they are at home. They twiddle their mandibles, they rise and walk, with clumsy groping motions. But there is no vile invasion: they are safe behind the crystal wall. It is thus that I have tried to show my own gallery of persons. I have not burrowed into their secrets, or tried to nose out scandals. Beyond their studies I have not followed them. There has been none of that "ripping up, like pigs," which Lord Tennyson so forcibly deprecated. I have tried to respect the reticences of these persons, their concealments, their caprices. They are not sliced into sections and bottled, but sketched with what would fain be a careful and affectionate hand. We can never see too much of desirable people. Though my heroes did not all deal with life in a sharp, business-like way, making the most of its pleasures, and shirking its pains, yet they lived and wrote with dignity.