ver authors have
appeared who have diverted their contemporaries with ingenious
invention, brilliant incident, unexpected novelty of character, or
alluring eloquence of style, but who have been discarded and
forgotten by succeeding generations merely because they failed to tell
the truth. Probably in the whole range of English fiction there is
no more skilful weaver of enthralling plots, no more clever master of
invention or manipulator of suspense, than Wilkie Collins; but Collins
is already discarded and well-nigh forgotten, because the reading
world has found that he exhibited no truths of genuine importance,
but rather sacrificed the eternal realities of life for mere momentary
plausibilities. Probably, also, there is no artist in French prose
more seductive in his eloquence than Rene de Chateaubriand; but
his fiction is 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.

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 exhibi