traits in the story.  We did not know the type of woman in the poems of the aesthetic school and on the canvas of Rossetti—­the red-haired, wide-eyed child of passion and emotion, in lank clothes, enmeshed in spider-webs —­but so quickly was she multiplied in real life that she seemed to have stepped from the book and the frame, ready-made, into the street and the drawing-room.  And there is nothing wonderful about this.  It is a truism to say that the genuine creations in fiction take their places in general apprehension with historical characters, and sometimes they live more vividly on the printed page and on canvas than the others in their pale, contradictory, and incomplete lives.  The characters of history we seldom agree about, and are always reconstructing on new information; but the characters of fiction are subject to no such vicissitudes.

The importance of this matter is hardly yet perceived.  Indeed, it is unreasonable that it should be, when parents, as a rule, have so slight a feeling of responsibility for the sort of children they bring into the world.  In the coming scientific age this may be changed, and society may visit upon a grandmother the sins of her grandchildren, recognizing her responsibility to the very end of the line.  But it is not strange that in the apathy on this subject the novelists should be careless and inconsiderate as to the characters they produce, either as ideals or examples.  They know that the bad example is more likely to be copied than to be shunned, and that the low ideal, being easy to, follow, is more likely to be imitated than the high ideal.  But the novelists have too little sense of responsibility in this respect, probably from an inadequate conception of their power.  Perhaps the most harmful sinners are not those who send into the world of fiction the positively wicked and immoral, but those who make current the dull, the commonplace, and the socially vulgar.  For most readers the wicked character is repellant; but the commonplace raises less protest, and is soon deemed harmless, while it is most demoralizing.  An underbred book—­that is, a book in which the underbred characters are the natural outcome of the author’s own, mind and apprehension of life—­is worse than any possible epidemic; for while the epidemic may kill a number of useless or vulgar people, the book will make a great number.  The keen observer must have noticed the increasing number of commonplace, undiscriminating people of low intellectual taste in the United States.  These are to a degree the result of the feeble, underbred literature (so called) that is most hawked about, and most accessible, by cost and exposure, to the greater number of people.  It is easy to distinguish the young ladies—­many of them beautifully dressed, and handsome on first acquaintance—­who have been bred on this kind of book.  They are betrayed by their speech, their taste, their manners.  Yet there is a marked public insensibility about this.