right-minded man cannot be really beautiful, and that the sentiments which it offends cannot be put out of court simply because they are called moral. They have as good a right to be considered as any others. There is a temptation of the opposite kind: the temptation to what I may briefly call sentimentalism. The virtue of idealism is as necessary as the virtue of realism; and every great writer shows his greatness by combining the two. The contradictory of the real is not properly the ideal, but the unreal--which is a very different thing. For idealism means properly, as I take it, that quality in virtue of which a poem or a fiction does not represent merely the scientific or photographic reproduction of matters of fact, but incarnates an idea and expresses a sentiment. A great work imparts to us the impression made upon a mind of unusual power, reflectiveness, and emotional sensibility by some aspect of the world in which we all live, but which he can see more vividly than others. To be really impressive, therefore, it must correspond to facts and be the genuine product of experience. The erroneous idealism is that which perverts the truth in order to gain apparent emphasis; which deals in the impossible, the absurd, and the exaggerated; and supposes a world which cannot even be better than the actual, because it cannot exist; which, therefore, has the defect of being arbitrary and inconceivable. So political Utopias are interesting in proportion as they suggest a legitimate construction, based upon actual facts and observed laws of human nature. As soon as we see that they presuppose a world of monstrosities, of impossible combinations of incompatible qualities, they become mere playthings. And the same is true of every work of imagination; as soon as it ceases to have a foundation in truth--to be other than realistic--it loses its real hold upon our sympathies. You solve no problem when you call in a god to cut the knot. This is the tendency of the sentimentalist, who refuses to be bound by the actual conditions. His creations are ephemeral because only plausible, even to the imagination, so long as the illusions to which they are congenial survive. And he probably falls into the further error that the emotion which he utters becomes as factitious as the laws which he invents. The man who weeps because he is melted at the sight of misery, touches us; but when he weeps because he finds it pleasant, or because he wishes to make a public exhibition of his tenderness of heart, we find him out by degrees and call him a humbug and a sentimentalist. Sham feelings and moral facts are the staple of the sentimentalist and the cause of his inevitable decay.