Term it “Veritism” and “Impressionism” if you prefer—juggle the names and put your Union troops in gray, but this does not change the question. The battle between the two schools of literature is a football game. The extreme goal on one side is tea table chatter, on the other an obscure symbolism. “The difference is this:” said Dion Boucicault, “when Romanticism goes to seed it is ‘rot;’ when Realism reaches a like condition it is only ‘drivel.’” In literary production why should we hear so much about the dignity of this school and the propriety of that. Men who fail to appreciate the individual excellence of a certain literary output, declare it to be without sense and therefore base. In letters they assume that a style is wholly good or it is wholly bad. They make no allowances for temperament; they would have all men speak in one voice. Yet liberty need not result in disorder, nor can originality serve as a pretext for boozy inaccuracy. In a literary production the bolder the conception the more irreproachable should be the execution. There is a tendency for thought to get fixed in set forms, and this form is always that which has been used by some great man. For any one to express thought and feeling in a different way is blasphemy to the eunuchs who guard the tents of Tradition. Writers of different schools exist because their style fits the mind of a certain style of reader. The sprightly, animated picturesqueness, the play of wit and flights of imagination are only a full expression of what many faintly feel. Thus their mood is mirrored and their thought expressed: hence they are pleased. In fact the only reason why we like a writer is because he expresses our thought in a way we like. And the reason we dislike a writer is because he deals in that which is not ours. We of course might grow to like him, but the process is slow, for according to Herbert Spencer we must hear a thing six hundred times before we understand. If we comprehend a proposition at once, it is only because it was ours already. If the portrayal of a situation in fiction fascinates us, it is because we (in fancy or fact) have gone before and spied out the land. There must be more than one school of literature, because there is more than one mood of mind: just as in religion there must be many sects. We worship God not only in sincerity and truth, but according to the temperament our mothers gave us. The emotional “school of religion” finds its votaries in Methodism: Methodism fits a certain mind. The stately dignity of the Ritualist is a necessity to a certain cast of intellect. And until we get a church that is broad enough, and deep enough, and high enough to allow for temperament in men, “church union” will exist only as an abstract idea.