ommandment; to bring
us into relations only with the sordid and the common; to force us to sup
with unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterly
unpleasant that we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; and
then--the latest and finest touch of modern art--to leave the whole
weltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue.
And this is called a picture of real life! Heavens! Is it true that in
England, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loathe
is produced; is it true that in our New England society there is nothing
but frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble ambition
and ignoble living? Is there no charm in social life--no self-sacrifice,
devotion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them?
Are there no noble women, sensible, beautiful, winning, with the grace
that all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that make
all the world hope? Is there no manliness left? Are there no homes where
the tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimental
affinity? Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paint
only the feeble and the repulsive in our social state? The feeble, the
sordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor does
anybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders are
reproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art; but is it not time
that it should be considered good art to show something of the clean and
bright side?

This is pre-eminently the age of the novel. The development of variety of
fiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious. The prejudice
against novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken all
fields for its province; everybody reads novels. Three-quarters of the
books taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up half
the library of the Sunday-schools. If a writer has anything to say, or
thinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of the
public by the medium of a story. So we have novels for children; novels
religious, scientific, historical, archaeological, psychological,
pathological, total-abstinence; novels of travel, of adventure and
exploration; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books called
novels of society. Not only is everything turned into a story, real or so
called, but there must be a story in everything. The stump-speaker