national or racial experience; for a
man's spiritual dimensions, as revealed
through any form of art, are deter-
mined by his power of discerning
essential qualities and experiences in
the greatest number of people. The
four writers who hold the highest
places in literature justify their claims
by their universality; that is to say,
by the range of their knowledge of
life as that knowledge lies revealed in
the experience of the race.

It is the fortune of a very small
group of men in any age to possess
the power of divining, by the gift of
genius, the world which lies, nebulous
and shadowy, in the lives of men
about them, or in the lives of men
of other times; in the nature of
things, the clairvoyant vision of poets
like Tennyson, Browning, and Hugo,
of novelists like Thackeray, Balzac,

[[170]]

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v?