d splendor, and dies in the odor of
respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and
defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The
novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience
as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon
his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good
and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal
the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do
this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the
majority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice. And
we ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to do
it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgment
of life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in
his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he
saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artist
undervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo
reported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned to
everything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to
righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the
highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep
currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and
sympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake." Literary
fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men. "Art
for art's sake" is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of art
includes the ideal, and not otherwise.

I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion of
recent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon
the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of
"realism"; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; to
give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only
the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the
intrigante and the "shady"--to borrow the language of the society she
seeks--the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious;
to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the
gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along
the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh c