ts 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 been
unbetrayed, to make us wonder if after all the exception is
not greater than the rule,--in a single word, to lie about his
characters:--this is, for the fiction-writer the one unpardonable sin.

But it is not an easy thing to tell the truth of human life, and
nothing but the truth. The best of fiction-writers fall to falsehood
now and then; and it is only by honest labor and sincere strife for
the ideal that they contrive in the main to fulfil the purpose of
their art. But the writer of fiction must be not only honest and
sincere; he must be wise as well. Wisdom is the faculty of seeing
through and all around an object of contemplation, and understanding
totally and at once its relations to all other objects. This faculty
cannot be acquired; it has to be developed: and it is developed by
experience only. Experience ordinarily requires time; and though,
for special reasons which will be noted later on, most of the great
short-story writers have been young, we are not surprised to notice
that most of the great novelists have been men mature in years. They
have ripened slowly to a realization of those truths which later they
have labored to impart. Richardson, the father of the modern English
novel, was fifty-one years old when "Pamela" was published; Scott was
forty-three when "Waverley" appeared; Hawthorne was forty-six when he
wrote "The Scarlet Letter"; Thackeray and George Eliot were well on
their way to the forties when they completed "Vanity Fair" and "Adam
Bede"; and these are the first novels of each writer.

The young author who aspires to write novels must not only labor to
acquire the technic of his art: it is even more impo