Now very often, I daresay, the artist is guided by this sympathy for the rogue without suspecting its existence. Thus even in the most genteel and circumspect of arts,--which I take to be the composition of a novel in the English language,--it is droll to find from the beginning the most respectable of scribes, if not always of pharisees, depicting one or another rascally law-breaker with fervors of fond admiration whereof the writer seems wholly unconscious. For the English novel began with the rogueries of Lovelace and Tom Jones. Then followed the chronicles of Rob Roy and Jack Sheppard and Paul Clifford, most exemplary and magnanimous of highwaymen. Seth Pecksniff presently fell down the steps of his cottage in Wiltshire: and tall Redmund Barry fled up to Dublin, just two years later, after his duel with Captain Quin. By and by, in Lymport, the great Mel assumed his over-tight lieutenant's uniform, and was laid out in his coffin, by way of beginning the tale which his personality infuses all through: and the gay young Master of Ballantrae (after tossing a guinea with his brother) travelled northward from Durrisdeer, singing as he rode toward Culloden, with a fine new white cockade in his hat.... For all these are rogues, in each of whom his creator obviously joyed, no matter under what protective coloration of moral purpose and of self-deceit. § 29 That art is a criticism of life, appears a favorite apothegm among those who know least about either. Yet the statement is true enough, in the sense that prison-breaking is a criticism of the penitentiary. Art is, in its last terms, an evasion of the distasteful. The artist simply does not like the earth he inhabits: for the laws of nature his admiration has always been remarkably temperate; and with the laws of society he has never had any patience whatever. So the literary artist leaves the earth which he inhabits, daily and with no more to-do than daily is made over the same feat by professional aeronauts. And the literary artist diverts himself by constructing other worlds, whose orderings are different, and to his mind more approvable. All creative writers have thus, whether consciously or no, embarked in an undertaking compared with which the axiomatic attempt to weave ropes of sand or to construct silk purses from even less adapt material is a quite sane and unassuming enterprise. For the literary artist here is at play with the second of his adversaries, with piety; and has offered to instruct the aggregate wisdom of his fellows and even of Omnipotence how to create a more satisfactory world.