han
you are. No sordid details of verity here, if you please; no wretched
being humbly and weakly struggling to do right and to be true, suffering
for his follies and his sins, tasting joy only through the mortification
of self, and in the help of others; nothing of all this, but a great,
whirling splendor of peril and achievement, a wild scene of heroic
adventure and of emotional ground and lofty tumbling, with a stage
"picture" at the fall of the curtain, and all the good characters in a
row, their left hands pressed upon their hearts, and kissing their right
hands to the audience, in the old way that has always charmed and always
will charm, Heaven bless it!

In a world which loves the spectacular drama and the practically
bloodless sports of the modern amphitheatre the author of this sort of
fiction has his place, and we must not seek to destroy him because he
fancies it the first place. In fact, it is a condition of his doing well
the kind of work he does that he should think it important, that he
should believe in himself; and I would not take away this faith of his,
even if I could. As I say, he has his place. The world often likes to
forget itself, and he brings on his heroes, his goblins, his feats, his
hair-breadth escapes, his imminent deadly breaches, and the poor,
foolish, childish old world renews the excitements of its nonage.
Perhaps this is a work of beneficence; and perhaps our brave conjurer in
his cabalistic robe is a philanthropist in disguise.

Within the last four or five years there has been throughout the whole
English-speaking world what Mr. Grant Allen happily calls the
"recrudescence" of taste in fiction. The effect is less noticeable in
America than in England, where effete Philistinism, conscious of the
dry-rot of its conventionality, is casting about for cure in anything
that is wild and strange and unlike itself. But the recrudescence has been
evident enough here, too; and a writer in one of our periodicals has put
into convenient shape some common errors concerning popularity as a test
of merit in a book. He seems to think, for instance, that the love of
the marvellous and impossible in fiction, which is shown not only by
"the unthinking multitude clamoring about the book counters" for fiction
of that sort, but by the "literary elect" also, is proof of some
principle in human nature which ought to be respected as well as
tolerated. He seems to believe that the ebullition of this passion