And this matter becomes very important when we consider the position which works of fiction have attained in the present century.  In the days of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Heywood, Fielding, or Smollett, coarseness of thought and language was so general that it naturally had a prominent place in novels.  All persons who objected to licentious scenes and gross expressions in the reading of themselves or their children excluded works of fiction.  As Miss Edgeworth said, most novels were filled with vice or folly, and as Miss Burney complained, no body of literary men were so numerous, or so little respectable as novelists.  But, in the hands of such writers as Sir Walter Scott, as Miss Ferrier, as Miss Austen, as Dickens, as Thackeray, as Charles Kingsley, as Mr. Anthony Trollope, the novel has achieved for itself a position of respectability and dignity which seems to remain unimpaired, notwithstanding the efforts of many authors to destroy it.  Works of fiction are to be found in every home, in the hands of parents, in the hands of young boys and girls.  The word novel has been given so high a signification by the great names which are associated with it, that parental censorship has almost ceased.  It is impossible that a form of literature to which so many and so great minds have been devoted, and which takes so prominent a place in the favor of the reading public, should not be without a powerful influence.  Let us look more closely at the works of fiction of the nineteenth century, and then endeavor to determine how far their influence has been for good, and how far for evil.

II.

It is the especial province of the novel of life and manners to be as far as possible a truthful reflection of nature.  And the more it approaches to this condition, the more realistic it is said to be.  But the word realism is a vague term, and is constantly employed to express different ideas.  As far as it applies to the novel, it usually signifies an author’s fidelity to nature.  But even with this definition, the term realism has no very definite meaning unless all persons agree as to what constitutes nature.  There is a great difference in men according as they are looked at with the eye of a Raphael or of a Rembrandt.  There has been a strong tendency among novelists of the present century who have written since Scott, to devote themselves more to the common characters and incidents of every-day life; to describe the world as it appears to the ordinary observer, who rarely associates with either heroes or villains, and has little experience of either the sublime or the marvellous.  Such was the expressed object of Thackeray, and such is the general character of the works of George Eliot and of Mr. Anthony Trollope.  This tendency has been carried to an extreme by some English novelists, and above all by the Frenchman, Emile Zola, who have not only thrown aside entirely the romantic element in their fictions, but have shown their ideas of realism to consist in the base and the ignoble, and have confined their studies to the vices and degradation of the human species.