we are ready to welcome any disaster as a relief; and then—­the latest and finest touch of modern art—­to leave the whole weltering mass in a chaos, without conclusion and without possible issue.  And this is called a picture of real life!  Heavens!  Is it true that in England, where a great proportion of the fiction we describe and loathe is produced; is it true that in our New England society there is nothing but frivolity, sordidness, decay of purity and faith, ignoble ambition and ignoble living?  Is there no charm in social life—­no self-sacrifice, devotion, courage to stem materialistic conditions, and live above them?  Are there no noble women, sensible, beautiful, winning, with the grace that all the world loves, albeit with the feminine weaknesses that make all the world hope?  Is there no manliness left?  Are there no homes where the tempter does not live with the tempted in a mush of sentimental affinity?  Or is it, in fact, more artistic to ignore all these, and paint only the feeble and the repulsive in our social state?  The feeble, the sordid, and the repulsive in our social state nobody denies, nor does anybody deny the exceeding cleverness with which our social disorders are reproduced in fiction by a few masters of their art; but is it not time that it should be considered good art to show something of the clean and bright side?

This is pre-eminently the age of the novel.  The development of variety of fiction since the days of Scott and Cooper is prodigious.  The prejudice against novel-reading is quite broken down, since fiction has taken all fields for its province; everybody reads novels.  Three-quarters of the books taken from the circulating library are stories; they make up half the library of the Sunday-schools.  If a writer has anything to say, or thinks he has, he knows that he can most certainly reach the ear of the public by the medium of a story.  So we have novels for children; novels religious, scientific, historical, archaeological, psychological, pathological, total-abstinence; novels of travel, of adventure and exploration; novels domestic, and the perpetual spawn of books called novels of society.  Not only is everything turned into a story, real or so called, but there must be a story in everything.  The stump-speaker holds his audience by well-worn stories; the preacher wakes up his congregation by a graphic narrative; and the Sunday-school teacher leads his children into all goodness by the entertaining path of romance; we even had a President who governed the country nearly by anecdotes.  The result of this universal demand for fiction is necessarily an enormous supply, and as everybody writes, without reference to gifts, the product is mainly trash, and trash of a deleterious sort; for bad art in literature is bad morals.  I am not sure but the so-called domestic, the diluted, the “goody,” namby-pamby, unrobust stories, which are so largely read by school-girls, young ladies, and women, do more harm than the “knowing,”