But we can take no really effective action upon this matter until we understand precisely what the novel is and means; and it is, therefore, with the additional pleasure of stimulating you to systematize and extend your views upon a living issue which demands your opinion, that I now invite you to enter with me, without further preliminary, upon a series of studies in which it is proposed, first, to inquire what is that special relation of the novel to the modern man, by virtue of which it has become a paramount literary form; and, secondly, to illustrate this abstract inquiry, when completed, by some concrete readings in the greatest of modern English novelists. In the course of this inquiry I shall be called on to bring before you some of the very largest conceptions of which the mind is capable; and inasmuch as several of the minor demonstrations will begin somewhat remotely from the Novel, it will save me many details which would be otherwise necessary, if I indicate in a dozen words the four special lines of development along one or other of which I shall be always travelling. My first line will concern itself with the enormous growth in the personality of man which our time reveals when compared, for instance, with the time of Æschylus. I shall insist with the utmost reverence that between every human being and every other human being exists a radical, unaccountable, inevitable difference from birth; this sacred Difference between man and man, by virtue of which I am I, and you are you; this marvellous separation which we express by the terms "personal identity," "self-hood," "me,"--it is the unfolding of this, I shall insist, which since the time of Æschylus (say) has wrought all those stupendous changes in the relation of man to God, to physical nature, and to his fellow, which have culminated in the modern cultus. I can best bring upon you the length and breadth of this idea of modern personality as I conceive it, by stating it in terms which have recently been made prominent and familiar by the discussion as to the evolution of genius; a phase of which appears in a very agreeable paper by Mr. John Fiske in a recent _Atlantic Monthly_ on "Sociology and Hero Worship." Says Mr. Fiske, in a certain part of this article, "Every species of animals or plants consists of a great number of individuals which are nearly, but not exactly alike. Each individual varies slightly in one characteristic or another from a certain type which expresses the average among all the individuals of the species.... Now the moth with his proboscis twice as long as the average ... is what we call a spontaneous variation; and the Darwin or the Helmholtz is what we call a 'genius'; and the analogy between the two kinds of variation is obvious enough." He proceeds in another place: "We cannot tell why a given moth has a proboscis exactly an inch and a quarter in length, any more than we can tell why Shakspeare was a great dramatist,"