o make it unattractive.

But we come back to the general proposition that the indispensable
condition of the novel is that it shall entertain. And for this purpose
the world is not ashamed to own that it wants, and always will want, a
story--a story that has an ending; and if not a good ending, then one
that in noble tragedy lifts up our nature into a high plane of sacrifice
and pathos. In proof of this we have only to refer to the masterpieces of
fiction which the world cherishes and loves to recur to.

I confess that I am harassed with the incomplete romances, that leave me,
when the book is closed, as one might be on a waste plain at midnight,
abandoned by his conductor, and without a lantern. I am tired of
accompanying people for hours through disaster and perplexity and
misunderstanding, only to see them lost in a thick mist at last. I am
weary of going to funerals, which are not my funerals, however chatty and
amusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see again
the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and a
great sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the
verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to
wasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in a
blissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweeter
charm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the
novel of society the destiny should be decided by character. What an
artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and
wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that
there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of
Henry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the
wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It is
wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see
it in society. It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often
succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the
pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the
hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure
of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such
a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice
by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous
man amasses wealth, lives in luxury an