down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be
made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and
consequences.

I justify them in this view not only because I hate what is cheap and
meretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who
require "passion" as something in itself admirable and desirable in a
novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and
character. Most of these critics who demand "passion" would seem to have
no conception of any passion but one. Yet there are several other
passions: the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of
pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy,
the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship; and all these have a
greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, and
infinitely greater than the passion of guilty love. Wittingly or
unwittingly, English fiction and American fiction have recognized this
truth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degree
than most other fiction.

XXIV.

Who can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparably
truer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to the
celebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, and
could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all the
interests, all the facts? Every novelist who has thought about his art
knows that it would, and I think that upon reflection he must doubt
whether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat
freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion. But, as I have shown,
the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized.
This is proved again by the fact that serious criticism recognizes as
master-works (I will not push the question of supremacy) the two great
novels which above all others have, moved the world by their study of
guilty love. If by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, any
American should now arise to treat it on the level of 'Anna Karenina' and
'Madame Bovary,' he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame and
gratitude as great as those books have won for their authors.

But what editor of what American magazine would print such a story?

Certainly I do not think any one would; and here our novelist must again
submit to conditions. If he wishes to publish such a story (supposing
him to have once writ