hout destroying its
veracity. But morality is also what he cannot leave out if he has
striven only to handle his subject sincerely. Hegel is right when he
tells us that art has its moral,--but the moral depends on him
who draws it. The didactic drama and the novel-with-a-purpose are
necessarily unartistic and unavoidably unsatisfactory.

This is what the greater artists have always felt; this is what they
have often expressed unhesitatingly. Corneille, for one, although he
was a man of his time, a creature of the seventeenth century, had the
courage to assert that "the utility of a play is seen in the simple
depicting of vices and virtues, which never fails to be effective if
it is well done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot
be confounded or mistaken; virtue always gets itself loved, however
unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant."
Dryden, again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor of
Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are
far in advance of theirs. "Delight," he said, "is the chief if not the
only end of poesy," and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms;
"instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry
only instructs as it delights." And once more, when we pass from the
seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century
when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the
wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning
acceptance everywhere. "If there is a moral in the subject it will
appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective
and artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as
Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he
will."

A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there
is an obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed on
Sophocles as one who "saw life steadily and saw it whole." Even the
humblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach,
not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events
for the sake of so-called "poetic justice," but to report life as
he knows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent it
honestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, even
if he does not tell the whole truth--which is given to no man to
know. This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers of
fiction have