moment did our fiction lose this
privilege? In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lips
of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital
interests of life?

Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom,
or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them by
saying that the Young Girl has never done anything of the kind. The
manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that
is all. Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or
abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so
habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors' wives, as they once
did. Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they
have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but
they have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that. They
require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his
seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they
require a sort of scientific decorum. He can no longer expect to be
received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher
function, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expect
him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they hold
him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence. If he
will accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he may
then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of
such experiences, such relations of men and women as George Eliot treats
in 'Adam Bede,' in 'Daniel Deronda,' in 'Romola,' in almost all her
books; such as Hawthorne treats in 'The Scarlet Letter;' such as Dickens
treats in 'David Copperfield;' such as Thackeray treats in 'Pendennis,'
and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters
of English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly. It is
quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left
untouched these most important realities of life. They have only not
made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in
regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the
space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England and
America. They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well
that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid