nners and morals. To convince ourselves of this, we do not need
to recall the effect of Werther, of Childe Harold, and of Don Juan, and
the imitation of their sentimentality, misanthropy, and adventure, down
to the copying of the rakishness of the loosely-knotted necktie and the
broad turn-over collar. In our own generation the heroes and heroines of
fiction begin to appear in real life, in dress and manner, while they are
still warm from the press. The popular heroine appears on the street in a
hundred imitations as soon as the popular mind apprehends her traits in
the story. We did not know the type of woman in the poems of the
aesthetic school and on the canvas of Rossetti--the red-haired, wide-eyed
child of passion and emotion, in lank clothes, enmeshed in spider-webs
--but so quickly was she multiplied in real life that she seemed to have
stepped from the book and the frame, ready-made, into the street and the
drawing-room. And there is nothing wonderful about this. It is a truism
to say that the genuine creations in fiction take their places in general
apprehension with historical characters, and sometimes they live more
vividly on the printed page and on canvas than the others in their pale,
contradictory, and incomplete lives. The characters of history we seldom
agree about, and are always reconstructing on new information; but the
characters of fiction are subject to no such vicissitudes.

The importance of this matter is hardly yet perceived. Indeed, it is
unreasonable that it should be, when parents, as a rule, have so slight a
feeling of responsibility for the sort of children they bring into the
world. In the coming scientific age this may be changed, and society may
visit upon a grandmother the sins of her grandchildren, recognizing her
responsibility to the very end of the line. But it is not strange that in
the apathy on this subject the novelists should be careless and
inconsiderate as to the characters they produce, either as ideals or
examples. They know that the bad example is more likely to be copied than
to be shunned, and that the low ideal, being easy to, follow, is more
likely to be imitated than the high ideal. But the novelists have too
little sense of responsibility in this respect, probably from an
inadequate conception of their power. Perhaps the most harmful sinners
are not those who send into the world of fiction the positively wicked
and immoral, but those who make current the dull, the co