never been a truthful reproduction of
the artist's era. Indeed, in the higher walks of fiction art has never
reproduced anything, but has always dealt with the facts and laws of
life as so much crude material which must be transmuted into
comeliness. When Shakespeare pronounced his celebrated dictum about
art's holding the mirror up to nature, he was no doubt alluding to the
circumstance that a mirror reverses everything which it reflects.

Nourishment for much wildish speculation, in fact, can be got by
considering what the world's literature would be, had its authors
restricted themselves, as do we Americans so sedulously--and
unavoidably--to writing of contemporaneous happenings. In
fiction-making no author of the first class since Homer's infancy has
ever in his happier efforts concerned himself at all with the great
"problems" of his particular day; and among geniuses of the second rank
you will find such ephemeralities adroitly utilized only when they are
distorted into enduring parodies of their actual selves by the broad
humor of a Dickens or the colossal fantasy of a Balzac. In such cases
as the latter two writers, however, we have an otherwise competent
artist handicapped by a personality so marked that, whatever he may
nominally write about, the result is, above all else, an exposure of
the writer's idiosyncrasies. Then, too, the laws of any locale wherein
Mr. Pickwick achieves a competence in business, or of a society wherein
Vautrin becomes chief of police, are upon the face of it extra-mundane.
It suffices that, as a general rule, in fiction-making the true artist
finds an ample, if restricted, field wherein the proper functions of
the preacher, or the ventriloquist, or the photographer, or of the
public prosecutor, are exercised with equal lack of grace.

Besides, in dealing with contemporary life a novelist is goaded into
too many pusillanimous concessions to plausibility. He no longer moves
with the gait of omnipotence. It was very different in the palmy days
when Dumas was free to play at ducks and drakes with history, and
Victor Hugo to reconstruct the whole system of English government, and
Scott to compel the sun to set in the east, whenever such minor changes
caused to flow more smoothly the progress of the tale these giants had
in hand. These freedoms are not tolerated in American noveldom, and
only a few futile "high-brows" sigh in vain for Thackeray's "happy
harmless Fableland, where th