ncrustation may common-sense and human interest deliver us.

It is a matter of endless debate whether a novel should have an ethical
purpose, or whether it should merely be an attempt to present
beautifully any portion of truth clearly perceived, faithfully
observed, delicately grouped, and artistically isolated. In the latter
case, say the realists, whatever the subject, the incident, the details
may be, the novel will possess exactly the same purpose that underlies
things, no more and no less; and the purpose may be trusted to look
after itself.

The other theory is that the novelist should have a definite motive;
that he should have a case which he is trying to prove, a warning he
wishes to enforce, an end which he desires to realise. The fact that
Dickens and Charles Reade had philanthropic motives of social reform,
and wished to improve the condition of schools, workhouses, lunatic
asylums, and gaols, is held to justify from the moral point of view
such novels as _Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, Hard Cash_, and _It is
Never too Late to Mend_. And from the moral point of view these books
are entirely justified, because they did undoubtedly interest a large
number of people in such subjects who would not have been interested by
sermons or blue-books. These books quickened the emotions of ordinary
people on the subject; and public sentiment is of course the pulse of
legislation.

Whether the philanthropic motive injured the books from the artistic
point of view is another question. It undoubtedly injured them exactly
in proportion as the philanthropic motive led the writers to distort or
to exaggerate the truth. It is perfectly justifiable, artistically, to
lay the scene of a novel in a workhouse or a gaol, but if the
humanitarian impulse leads to any embroidery of or divergence from the
truth, the novel is artistically injured, because the selection and
grouping of facts should be guided by artistic and not by philanthropic
motives.

Now the one emotion which plays a prominent part in most romances is
the passion of love, and it is interesting to observe that even this
motive is capable of being treated from the philanthropic as well as
from the artistic point of view. In a book which is now perhaps unduly
neglected, from the fact that it has a markedly early Victorian
flavour, Charles Kingsley's _Yeast_, there is a distinct attempt made
to fuse the two motives. The love of Lancelot for Argemone is depicted
bot