g? A novel is not a proposition in Euclid. I give due
notice beforehand to reviewers in general, that if any principle at all
is "proved" by any of my Hill-top Novels, it will be simply this: "Act
as I think right, for the highest good of human kind, and you will
infallibly and inevitably come to a bad end for it."

Not to prove anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, I
take it, the true function of fiction. One wishes to make one's readers
THINK about problems they have never considered, FEEL with sentiments
they have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet has his duty
defined for him in those divine words of Shelley's:

"Singing songs unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not."

That, too, is the reason that impels me to embody such views as these
in romantic fiction, not in deliberate treatises. "Why sow your ideas
broadcast," many honest critics say, "in novels where mere boys and
girls can read them? Why not formulate them in serious and argumentative
books, where wise men alone will come across them?" The answer is,
because wise men are wise already: it is the boys and girls of a
community who stand most in need of suggestion and instruction. Women,
in particular, are the chief readers of fiction; and it is women whom
one mainly desires to arouse to interest in profound problems by the
aid of this vehicle. Especially should one arouse them to such living
interest while they are still young and plastic, before they have
crystallised and hardened into the conventional marionettes of polite
society. Make them think while they are young: make them feel while they
are sensitive: it is then alone that they will think and feel, if ever.
I will venture, indeed, to enforce my views on this subject by a little
apologue which I have somewhere read, or heard,--or invented.

A Revolutionist desired to issue an Election Address to the Working Men
of Bermondsey. The Rector of the Parish saw it at the printer's, and
came to him, much perturbed. "Why write it in English?" he asked. "It
will only inflame the minds of the lower orders. Why not allow me to
translate it into Ciceronian Latin? It would then be comprehensible to
all University men; your logic would be duly and deliberately weighed:
and the tanners and tinkers, who are so very impressionable, would not
be poisoned by it." "My friend," said the Revolutionist, "it is the
tanners and tinkers _