Equally baseless is the assumption that it is inartistic and untrue to nature to bring a novel to a definite consummation, and especially to end it happily.  Life, we are told, is full of incompletion, of broken destinies, of failures, of romances that begin but do not end, of ambitions and purposes frustrated, of love crossed, of unhappy issues, or a resultless play of influences.  Well, but life is full, also, of endings, of the results in concrete action of character, of completed dramas.  And we expect and give, in the stories we hear and tell in ordinary intercourse, some point, some outcome, an end of some sort.  If you interest me in the preparations of two persons who are starting on a journey, and expend all your ingenuity in describing their outfit and their characters, and do not tell me where they went or what befell them afterwards, I do not call that a story.  Nor am I any better satisfied when you describe two persons whom you know, whose characters are interesting, and who become involved in all manner of entanglements, and then stop your narration; and when I ask, say you have not the least idea whether they got out of their difficulties, or what became of them.  In real life we do not call that a story where everything is left unconcluded and in the air.  In point of fact, romances are daily beginning and daily ending, well or otherwise, under our observation.

Should they always end well in the novel?  I am very far from saying that.  Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in literature as well as in life.  I only say that, artistically, a good ending is as proper as a bad ending.  Yet the main object of the novel is to entertain, and the best entertainment is that which lifts the imagination and quickens the spirit; to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of our humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar life somewhat idealized, and probably see it all the more truly from an artistic point of view.  For the majority of the race, in its hard lines, fiction is an inestimable boon.  Incidentally the novel may teach, encourage, refine, elevate.  Even for these purposes, that novel is the best which shows us the best possibilities of our lives—­the novel which gives hope and cheer instead of discouragement and gloom.  Familiarity with vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and of doubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is not done with the idealizing touch of the artist.

Do not misunderstand me to mean that common and low life are not fit subjects of fiction, or that vice is not to be lashed by the satirist, or that the evils of a social state are never to be exposed in the novel.  For this, also, is an office of the novel, as it is of the drama, to hold the mirror up to nature, and to human nature as it exhibits itself.  But when the mirror shows nothing but vice and social disorder, leaving out the saving qualities that keep society