always the man is conscious of the hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure of it.  It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity.  The unscrupulous man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor of respectability.  His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury.  The novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately “rewarding the good and punishing the bad.”  But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the majority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice.  And we ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to do it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgment of life as it goes on.  Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs.  The great artist undervalued his genius.  He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo reported what they saw.  With his touch of genius he assigned to everything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity.  I find in him the highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and sympathy, which has got the name of “art for art’s sake.”  Literary fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for men.  “Art for art’s sake” is a good and defensible phrase, if our definition of art includes the ideal, and not otherwise.

I do not know how it has come about that in so large a proportion of recent fiction it is held to be artistic to look almost altogether upon the shady and the seamy side of life, giving to this view the name of “realism”; to select the disagreeable, the vicious, the unwholesome; to give us for our companions, in our hours of leisure and relaxation, only the silly and the weak-minded woman, the fast and slangy girl, the intrigante and the “shady”—­to borrow the language of the society she seeks—­the hero of irresolution, the prig, the vulgar, and the vicious; to serve us only with the foibles of the fashionable, the low tone of the gay, the gilded riffraff of our social state; to drag us forever along the dizzy, half-fractured precipice of the seventh commandment; to bring us into relations only with the sordid and the common; to force us to sup with unwholesome company on misery and sensuousness, in tales so utterly unpleasant that