An aspiring soul might feel disposed to "take and drown itself in a pail" (as one of Dickens's characters says) if it had to live the life which the inhabitants of Highbury are represented as living; to read about that life--to read about it over and over again--has been and is always likely to be one of the chosen delights of some of the best wits of our race.

This is one of the paradoxes of art: and perhaps it is the most wonderful of them, exceeding even the old "pity and terror" problem.

And the discovery of it, as a possible source of artistic success, is one of the greatest triumphs and one of the most inexhaustible discoveries of that art itself.

For by another paradox--this time not of art but of nature--the extraordinary is exhaustible and the ordinary is not.

Tragedy and the more "incidented" comedy, it is well known, run into types and reproduce situations almost inevitably.