ted as the
element in which these characters have their being. Even in the sphere
of the will, who shall say that man does not knowingly choose evil as
his portion? So, too, as the method of idealism in the world of the good
tends to erect man above himself, the same generalizing method in the
world of the evil tends to degrade human nature below itself; the
extremes of the process are the divine and the devilish; both transcend
life, but are developed out of it. The difference between these two
poles of ideality is that the order of one is an order of life, that of
the other an order of death. Between these two is the special province
of the human will. What literature, what all art, presents is not the
ultimate of good or the ultimate of evil separately; it is, taking into
account the whole range, the mixed world becoming what it ought to be in
its evolution from what it is, and the laws of that progress. Hence
tragedy on the one hand and comedy, or more broadly humour, on the other
hand, have their great place in literature; for they are forms of the
intermediate world of conflict. I speak of the spiritual world of man's
will. We may conceive of the world optimistically as a place in which
all shall issue in good and nothing be lost; or as a place in which, by
alliance with or revolt from the forces of life, the will in its
voluntary and individual action may save or lose the soul at its choice.
We may think of God as conserving all, or as permitting hell, which is
death. We do not know. But as shown to us in imagination, idealism,
which is the race's dream of truth, hovers between these two worlds
known to us in tendency if not in conclusion,--the world of salvation on
the one hand, in proportion as the order of life is made vital in us,
the world of damnation on the other hand, in proportion as the order of
death prevails in our will; but the main effort of idealism is to show
us the war between the two, with an emphasis on the becoming of the
reality of beauty, joy, reason, and virtue in us. Not that prosperity
follows righteousness, not that poverty attends wickedness, in worldly
measure, but that life is the gift of a right will is her message; how
we, striving for eternal life, may best meet the chances and the bitter
fates of mortal existence, is her brooding care; ideal characters, or
those ideal in some trait or phase, in the midst of a hostile
environment, are her fixed study. So far is idealism from ignoring