I justify them in this view not only because I hate what is cheap and meretricious, and hold in peculiar loathing the cant of the critics who require “passion” as something in itself admirable and desirable in a novel, but because I prize fidelity in the historian of feeling and character.  Most of these critics who demand “passion” would seem to have no conception of any passion but one.  Yet there are several other passions:  the passion of grief, the passion of avarice, the passion of pity, the passion of ambition, the passion of hate, the passion of envy, the passion of devotion, the passion of friendship; and all these have a greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love, and infinitely greater than the passion of guilty love.  Wittingly or unwittingly, English fiction and American fiction have recognized this truth, not fully, not in the measure it merits, but in greater degree than most other fiction.

XXIV.

Who can deny that fiction would be incomparably stronger, incomparably truer, if once it could tear off the habit which enslaves it to the celebration chiefly of a single passion, in one phase or another, and could frankly dedicate itself to the service of all the passions, all the interests, all the facts?  Every novelist who has thought about his art knows that it would, and I think that upon reflection he must doubt whether his sphere would be greatly enlarged if he were allowed to treat freely the darker aspects of the favorite passion.  But, as I have shown, the privilege, the right to do this, is already perfectly recognized.  This is proved again by the fact that serious criticism recognizes as master-works (I will not push the question of supremacy) the two great novels which above all others have, moved the world by their study of guilty love.  If by any chance, if by some prodigious miracle, any American should now arise to treat it on the level of ‘Anna Karenina’ and ‘Madame Bovary,’ he would be absolutely sure of success, and of fame and gratitude as great as those books have won for their authors.

But what editor of what American magazine would print such a story?

Certainly I do not think any one would; and here our novelist must again submit to conditions.  If he wishes to publish such a story (supposing him to have once written it), he must publish it as a book.  A book is something by itself, responsible for its character, which becomes quickly known, and it does not necessarily penetrate to every member of the household.  The father or the mother may say to the child, “I would rather you wouldn’t read that book”; if the child cannot be trusted, the book may be locked up.  But with the magazine and its serial the affair is different.  Between the editor of a reputable English or American magazine and the families which receive it there is a tacit agreement that he will print nothing which a father may not read to his daughter, or safely leave her to read herself.