It is no new discovery that the novel, like the drama, is a powerful instrument of moral suggestion.  This has been understood in England ever since there has been such a thing as a novel in England.  This has been recognised equally by novelists, novel-readers, and the people who wouldn’t read novels under any condition whatever.  Richardson wrote deliberately for edification, and “Tom Jones” is a powerful and effective appeal for a charitable, and even indulgent, attitude towards loose-living men.  But excepting Fielding and one or two other of those partial exceptions that always occur in the case of critical generalisations, there is a definable difference between the novel of the past and what I may call the modern novel.  It is a difference that is reflected upon the novel from a difference in the general way of thinking.  It lies in the fact that formerly there was a feeling of certitude about moral values and standards of conduct that is altogether absent to-day.  It wasn’t so much that men were agreed upon these things—­about these things there have always been enormous divergences of opinion—­as that men were emphatic, cocksure, and unteachable about whatever they did happen to believe to a degree that no longer obtains.  This is the Balfourian age, and even religion seeks to establish itself on doubt.  There were, perhaps, just as many differences in the past as there are now, but the outlines were harder—­they were, indeed, so hard as to be almost, to our sense, savage.  You might be a Roman Catholic, and in that case you did not want to hear about Protestants, Turks, Infidels, except in tones of horror and hatred.  You knew exactly what was good and what was evil.  Your priest informed you upon these points, and all you needed in any novel you read was a confirmation, implicit or explicit, of these vivid, rather than charming, prejudices.  If you were a Protestant you were equally clear and unshakable.  Your sect, whichever sect you belonged to, knew the whole of truth and included all the nice people.  It had nothing to learn in the world, and it wanted to learn nothing outside its sectarian convictions.  The unbelievers you know, were just as bad, and said their creeds with an equal fury—­merely interpolating nots.  People of every sort—­Catholic, Protestant, Infidel, or what not—­were equally clear that good was good and bad was bad, that the world was made up of good characters whom you had to love, help and admire, and of bad characters to whom one might, in the interests of goodness, even lie, and whom one had to foil, defeat and triumph over shamelessly at every opportunity.  That was the quality of the times.  The novel reflected this quality of assurance, and its utmost charity was to unmask an apparent villain and show that he or she was really profoundly and correctly good, or to unmask an apparent saint and show the hypocrite.  There was no such penetrating and pervading element of doubt and curiosity—­and charity, about the rightfulness and beauty of conduct, such as one meets on every hand to-day.