t is lamentable enough to
have to exclaim--as we must over so much of human history--

"Ah! what avails the sceptred race
And what the form divine?..."

But it must be quite intolerable when a story leaves us demanding,
"What avail native innocence, truthfulness, chastity, when all these
can be changed into guile and uncleanliness at the mere suggestion of
a dirty mesmerist?"

The answer to this, I suppose, will be, "But hypnotism is a scientific
fact. People can be hypnotized, and are hypnotized. Are you one of
those who would exclude the novelist from this and that field of human
experience?" And then I am quite prepared to hear the old tag, "_Homo
sum_," etc., once more misapplied.

Limitation of Hypnotic Fiction.

Let us distinguish. Hypnotism is a proved fact: people are hypnotized.
Hypnotism is not a delimited fact: nobody yet knows precisely its
conditions or its effects; or, if the discovery has been made, it has
certainly not yet found its way to the novelists. For them it is as
yet chiefly a field of fancy. They invent vagaries for it as they
invent ghosts. And as for the "_humananum nihil a me alienum_"
defence, my strongest objection to hypnotic fiction is its inhumanity.
An experience is not human in the proper artistic sense (with which
alone we are concerned) merely because it has befallen a man or a
woman. There was an Irishman, the other day, who through mere
inadvertence cut off his own head with a scythe. But the story is
rather inhuman than not. Still less right have we to call everything
human which can be supposed by the most liberal stretch of the
imagination to have happened to a man or a woman. A story is only
human in so far as it is governed by the laws which are recognized as
determining human action. Now according as we regard human action, its
two great determinants will be free will or necessity. But hypnotism
entirely does away with free will: and for necessity, fatal or
circumstantial, it substitutes the lawless and irresponsible
imperative of a casual individual man, who (in fiction) usually
happens to be a scoundrel.

A story may be human even though it discard one or more of the
recognized conditions of human life. Thus in the confessedly
supernatural story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the conflict between
the two Jekylls is human enough and morally significant, because it
answers to a conflict which is waged day by day--though as a rule less
tremendously--in th