Then that novelist began to reflect, and he remembered how sick the invariable motive of the French novel made him.  He perceived finally that, convention for convention, ours was not only more tolerable, but on the whole was truer to life, not only to its complexion, but also to its texture.  No one will pretend that there is not vicious love beneath the surface of our society; if he did, the fetid explosions of the divorce trials would refute him; but if he pretended that it was in any just sense characteristic of our society, he could be still more easily refuted.  Yet it exists, and it is unquestionably the material of tragedy, the stuff from which intense effects are wrought.  The question, after owning this fact, is whether these intense effects are not rather cheap effects.  I incline to think they are, and I will try to say why I think so, if I may do so without offence.  The material itself, the mere mention of it, has an instant fascination; it arrests, it detains, till the last word is said, and while there is anything to be hinted.  This is what makes a love intrigue of some sort all but essential to the popularity of any fiction.  Without such an intrigue the intellectual equipment of the author must be of the highest, and then he will succeed only with the highest class of readers.  But any author who will deal with a guilty love intrigue holds all readers in his hand, the highest with the lowest, as long as he hints the slightest hope of the smallest potential naughtiness.  He need not at all be a great author; he may be a very shabby wretch, if he has but the courage or the trick of that sort of thing.  The critics will call him “virile” and “passionate”; decent people will be ashamed to have been limed by him; but the low average will only ask another chance of flocking into his net.  If he happens to be an able writer, his really fine and costly work will be unheeded, and the lure to the appetite will be chiefly remembered.  There may be other qualities which make reputations for other men, but in his case they will count for nothing.  He pays this penalty for his success in that kind; and every one pays some such penalty who deals with some such material.

But I do not mean to imply that his case covers the whole ground.  So far as it goes, though, it ought to stop the mouths of those who complain that fiction is enslaved to propriety among us.  It appears that of a certain kind of impropriety it is free to give us all it will, and more.  But this is not what serious men and women writing fiction mean when they rebel against the limitations of their art in our civilization.  They have no desire to deal with nakedness, as painters and sculptors freely do in the worship of beauty; or with certain facts of life, as the stage does, in the service of sensation.  But they ask why, when the conventions of the plastic and histrionic arts liberate their followers to the portrayal of almost any phase of the physical or of the emotional nature, an American novelist may not