n, we
are in an irredeemably bad way. There is little beauty, joy, or
light-heartedness in living; the spontaneity and charm of life are
analyzed out of existence; sweet girls, made to love and be loved, are
extinct; melancholy Jaques never meets a Rosalind in the forest of Arden,
and if he sees her in the drawing-room he poisons his pleasure with the
thought that she is scheming and artificial; there are no happy marriages
--indeed, marriage itself is almost too inartistic to be permitted by our
novelists, unless it can be supplemented by a divorce, and art is
supposed to deny any happy consummation of true love. In short, modern
society is going to the dogs, notwithstanding money is only three and a
half per cent. It is a gloomy business life, at the best. Two learned but
despondent university professors met, not long ago, at an afternoon
"coffee," and drew sympathetically together in a corner. "What a world
this would be," said one, "without coffee!" "Yes," replied the other,
stirring the fragrant cup in a dejected aspect "yes; but what a hell of a
world it is with coffee!"

The analytic method in fiction is interesting, when used by a master of
dissection, but it has this fatal defect in a novel--it destroys
illusion. We want to think that the characters in a story are real
persons. We cannot do this if we see the author set them up as if they
were marionettes, and take them to pieces every few pages, and show their
interior structure, and the machinery by which they are moved. Not only
is the illusion gone, but the movement of the story, if there is a story,
is retarded, till the reader loses all enjoyment in impatience and
weariness. You find yourself saying, perhaps, What a very clever fellow
the author is! What an ingenious creation this character is! How brightly
the author makes his people talk! This is high praise, but by no means
the highest, and when we reflect we see how immeasurably inferior, in
fiction, the analytic method is to the dramatic. In the dramatic method
the characters appear, and show what they are by what they do and say;
the reader studies their motives, and a part of his enjoyment is in
analyzing them, and his vanity is flattered by the trust reposed in his
perspicacity. We realize how unnecessary minute analysis of character and
long descriptions are in reading a drama by Shakespeare, in which the
characters are so vividly presented to us in action and speech, without
the least interferen