it is Scott’s distinction also that he elevated into artistic creations both nobility and commonalty.  In short, the essential of fiction is not diversity of social life, but artistic treatment of whatever is depicted.  The novel may deal wholly with an aristocracy, or wholly with another class, but it must idealize the nature it touches into art.  The fault of the bourgeoisie novels, of which Heine complains, is not that they treated of one class only, and excluded a higher social range, but that they treated it without art and without ideality.  In nature there is nothing vulgar to the poet, and in human life there is nothing uninteresting to the artist; but nature and human life, for the purposes of fiction, need a creative genius.  The importation into the novel of the vulgar, sordid, and ignoble in life is always unbearable, unless genius first fuses the raw material in its alembic.

When, therefore, we say that one of the worst characteristics of modern fiction is its so-called truth to nature, we mean that it disregards the higher laws of art, and attempts to give us unidealized pictures of life.  The failure is not that vulgar themes are treated, but that the treatment is vulgar; not that common life is treated, but that the treatment is common; not that care is taken with details, but that no selection is made, and everything is photographed regardless of its artistic value.  I am sure that no one ever felt any repugnance on being introduced by Cervantes to the muleteers, contrabandistas, servants and serving-maids, and idle vagabonds of Spain, any more than to an acquaintance with the beggar-boys and street gamins on the canvases of Murillo.  And I believe that the philosophic reason of the disgust of Heine and of every critic with the English bourgeoisie novels, describing the petty, humdrum life of the middle classes, was simply the want of art in the writers; the failure on their part to see that a literal transcript of nature is poor stuff in literature.  We do not need to go back to Richardson’s time for illustrations of that truth.  Every week the English press—­which is even a greater sinner in this respect than the American—­turns out a score of novels which are mediocre, not from their subjects, but from their utter lack of the artistic quality.  It matters not whether they treat of middle-class life, of low, slum life, or of drawing-room life and lords and ladies; they are equally flat and dreary.  Perhaps the most inane thing ever put forth in the name of literature is the so-called domestic novel, an indigestible, culinary sort of product, that might be named the doughnut of fiction.  The usual apology for it is that it depicts family life with fidelity.  Its characters are supposed to act and talk as people act and talk at home and in society.  I trust this is a libel, but, for the sake of the argument, suppose they do.  Was ever produced so insipid a result?  They are called moral; in the higher sense they are immoral, for they tend to lower the moral tone and