It is sad to have to declare that the bulk of contemporary writers lie outside all these classifications. They are artists neither in prose nor verse, and though they may have "soul," they cannot make it visible. For "soul" may be expressed equally through painting and sculpture and music and acting, audits dimly discerned presence can scarcely convert slipshod writing into literature. No one would accept as art a picture in which a gleam of imagination struggled against the draughtsmanship of the schoolboy to whom arms are toasting-forks, or applaud an actor who might be brimming over with sensibility but could command neither his voice nor his face. No one has any business to come before the public who has not studied the medium through which he proposes to exhibit his "soul": unfortunately this is the age and England is the country of the amateur, and in every department we are deluged with the crude. The fault lies less with the amateur than with the public before which he presents himself, and which, incompetent to distinguish art from amateurishness, is as likely to bless the one as the other. Of all forms of art literature suffers most; for the pity is, and pity'tis't is true, everybody learns to talk and write at an early age. This makes the transition to literature so fatally easy. _Facilis descensus Averni!_ To paint, one must at least know how to mix colours and handle a brush; to compose, one must be familiar with the meaning of strayed spiders' legs on curious parallel bars, and there are strange disconcerting rumours of "orchestration." But to produce literature you have simply to dip pen in ink or open your mouth and see what God will give you. Hence particularly the flood of novels, hence the low position of the novel; although, as Theodore Watts has pointed out, it is practically the modern Epic. I have met distinguished students of Greek texts who have never conceived of the novel as a work of art, or as anything beyond the amusement of an idle hour--something for the women and the children. One such told me he would not read "The Mill on the Floss" because it ended unhappily. I must conclude he has only read Aeschylus for his examinations. Acting stands next to literature in its seductiveness. The actor's instrument is his body, and everybody has a body. If, in addition to a "body," the creature conceives himself to possess a "soul," the odds are there will be laughter for the "gods." I tremble for the time when the popular educationist shall have had his way and every child be seised of the rudiments of drawing. We shall see sights then. At present, despite the horrors of the galleries and the widespread ignorance of art, painting cannot compete with literature as a misunderstood art. For the public--which is the only critic that counts in the long run--does not demand grammar, much less style; and the novel of the season may bristle with passages that could be set for correction at examinations in English.