 to give us those interminable mile-post piles
of matter (extending well-nigh to the very Pole) in essence, in chosen samples,
digestibly. I conceive him to indicate that the realistic method of a
conscientious transcription of all the visible, and a repetition of all the
audible, is mainly accountable for our present branfulness, and for that
prolongation of the vasty and the noisy, out of which, as from an undrained fen,
steams the malady of sameness, our modern malady. We have the malady, whatever
may be the cure or the cause. We drove in a body to Science the other day for an
antidote; which was as if tired pedestrians should mount the engine-box of
headlong trains; and Science introduced us to our o'er-hoary ancestry - them in
the Oriental posture: whereupon we set up a primæval chattering to rival the
Amazon forest nigh nightfall, cured, we fancied. And before daybreak our disease
was hanging on to us again, with the extension of a tail. We had it fore and
aft. We were the same, and animals into the bargain. That is all we got from
Science.
    Art is the specific. We have little to learn of apes, and they may be left.
The chief consideration for us is, what particular practice of Art in letters is
the best for the perusal of the Book of our common wisdom; so that with clearer
minds and livelier manners we may escape, as it were, into daylight and song
from a land of fog-horns. Shall we read it by the watchmaker's eye in luminous
rings eruptive of the infinitesimal, or pointed with examples and types under
the broad Alpine survey of the spirit born of our united social intelligence,
which is the Comic Spirit? Wise men say the latter. They tell us that there is a
constant tendency in the Book to accumulate excess of substance, and such
repleteness, obscuring the glass it holds to mankind, renders us inexact in the
recognition of our individual countenances: a perilous thing for civilization.
And these wise men are strong in their opinion that we should encourage the
Comic Spirit, who is, after all, our own offspring, to relieve the Book. Comedy,
they say, is the true diversion, as it is likewise the key of the great Book,
the music of the Book. They tell us how it condenses whole sections of the Book
in a sentence, volumes in a character; so that a fair part of a book
outstripping thousands of leagues when unrolled, may be compassed in one comic
sitting.
    For verily
