done and if the traits are so recognizable that they cannot
be confounded or mistaken; virtue always gets itself loved, however
unfortunate, and vice gets itself hated, even though triumphant."
Dryden, again, a contemporary of d'Aubignac and a predecessor of
Johnson, had a clearer vision than either of them; and his views are
far in advance of theirs. "Delight," he said, "is the chief if not the
only end of poesy," and by poesy he meant fiction in all its forms;
"instruction can be admitted but in the second place, for poetry only
instructs as it delights." And once more, when we pass from the
seventeenth century of Corneille and Dryden to the nineteenth century
when the novel has asserted its rivalry with the drama, we find the
wise Goethe declaring to Eckermann the doctrine which is now winning
acceptance everywhere. "If there is a moral in the subject it will
appear, and the poet has nothing to consider but the effective and
artistic treatment of his subject; if he has as high a soul as
Sophocles, his influence will always be moral, let him do what he
will."

A high soul is not given to all writers of fiction, and yet there is
an obligation on them all to aspire to the praise bestowed on
Sophocles as one who "saw life steadily and saw it whole." Even the
humblest of story-tellers ought to feel himself bound, not to preach,
not to point a moral ostentatiously, not to warp the march of events
for the sake of so-called "poetic justice," but to report life as he
knows it, making it neither better nor worse, to represent it
honestly, to tell the truth about it and nothing but the truth, even
if he does not tell the whole truth--which is given to no man to know.
This is an obligation that not a few of the foremost writers of
fiction have failed to respect. Dickens, for example, is delighted to
reform a character in the twinkling of an eye, transforming a bad man
into a good man over night, and contradicting all that we know about
the permanence of character.

Other novelists have asked us to admire violent and unexpected acts of
startling self-sacrifice, when a character is made to take on himself
the responsibility for the delinquency of some other character. They
have invited our approbation for a moral suicide, which is quite as
blameworthy as any physical suicide. With his keen insight into ethics
and with his robust common sense, Huxley stated the principle which
these novelists have failed to grasp. A man, he tells