After all, it is a matter of business; and the insurgent novelist should consider the situation with coolness and common-sense.  The editor did not create the situation; but it exists, and he could not even attempt to change it without many sorts of disaster.  He respects it, therefore, with the good faith of an honest man.  Even when he is himself a novelist, with ardor for his art and impatience of the limitations put upon it, he interposes his veto, as Thackeray did in the case of Trollope when a contributor approaches forbidden ground.

It does not avail to say that the daily papers teem with facts far fouler and deadlier than any which fiction could imagine.  That is true, but it is true also that the sex which reads the most novels reads the fewest newspapers; and, besides, the reporter does not command the novelist’s skill to fix impressions in a young girl’s mind or to suggest conjecture.  The magazine is a little despotic, a little arbitrary; but unquestionably its favor is essential to success, and its conditions are not such narrow ones.  You cannot deal with Tolstoy’s and Flaubert’s subjects in the absolute artistic freedom of Tolstoy and Flaubert; since De Foe, that is unknown among us; but if you deal with them in the manner of George Eliot, of Thackeray, of Dickens, of society, you may deal with them even in the magazines.  There is no other restriction upon you.  All the horrors and miseries and tortures are open to you; your pages may drop blood; sometimes it may happen that the editor will even exact such strong material from you.  But probably he will require nothing but the observance of the convention in question; and if you do not yourself prefer bloodshed he will leave you free to use all sweet and peaceable means of interesting his readers.

It is no narrow field he throws open to you, with that little sign to keep off the grass up at one point only.  Its vastness is still almost unexplored, and whole regions in it are unknown to the fictionist.  Dig anywhere, and do but dig deep enough, and you strike riches; or, if you are of the mind to range, the gentler climes, the softer temperatures, the serener skies, are all free to you, and are so little visited that the chance of novelty is greater among them.

XXV.

While the Americans have greatly excelled in the short story generally, they have almost created a species of it in the Thanksgiving story.  We have transplanted the Christmas story from England, while the Thanksgiving story is native to our air; but both are of Anglo-Saxon growth.  Their difference is from a difference of environment; and the Christmas story when naturalized among us becomes almost identical in motive, incident, and treatment with the Thanksgiving story.  If I were to generalize a distinction between them, I should say that the one dealt more with marvels and the other more with morals; and yet the critic should