s no longer
read, because the world has found that his sentimentalism was to this
extent a sham--it was false to the nature of normal human beings.
"Alice in Wonderland" will survive the works of both these able
authors, because of the many and momentous human truths that look upon
us through its drift of dreams.

=Morality and Immorality in Fiction.=--The whole question of the
morality or immorality of a work of fiction is a question merely of
its truth or falsity. To appreciate this point, we must first be
careful to distinguish immorality from coarseness. The morality of a
fiction-writer is not dependent on the decency of his expression. In
fact, the history of literature shows that authors frankly coarse,
like Rabelais or Swift for instance, have rarely or never been
immoral; and that the most immoral books have been written in the most
delicate language. Swift and Rabelais are moral, because they tell the
truth with sanity and vigor; we may object to certain passages in
their writings on esthetic, but not on ethical, grounds. They may
offend our taste; but they are not likely to lead astray our
judgment--far less likely than D'Annunzio, for instance, who, although
he never offends the most delicate esthetic taste, sicklies o'er with
the pale cast of his poetry a sad unsanity of outlook upon the
ultimate deep truths of human life. In the second place, we must
bravely realize that the morality of a work of fiction has little or
no dependence on the subject that it treats. It is utterly unjust to
the novelist to decide, as many unreasonable readers do, that such a
book as Daudet's "Sapho" must be of necessity immoral because it
exhibits immoral characters in a series of immoral acts. There is no
such thing as an immoral subject for a novel: in the treatment of the
subject, and only in the treatment, lies the basis for ethical
judgment of the work. The one thing needful in order that a novel may
be moral is that the author shall maintain throughout his work a sane
and healthy insight into the soundness or unsoundness of the relations
between his characters. He must know when they are right and know when
they are wrong, and must make clear to us the reasons for his
judgment. He cannot be immoral unless he is untrue. To make us pity
his characters when they are vile, or love them when they are noxious,
to invent excuses for them in situations where they cannot be excused,
to leave us satisfied when their baseness has be