medy; and any work that is so serves
the turn of instruction." This is well thought and well put, although
many of us might demand that novels should be more than "reasonably
true." But even if Stevenson was here a little lax in the requirements
he imposed on others, he was stricter with himself when he wrote
"Markheim" and the "Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."

Another story-teller, also cut off before he had displayed the best
that was in him, set up the same standards for his fellow-craftsmen in
fiction. In his striking discussion of the responsibility of the
novelist, Frank Norris asserted that the readers of fiction have "a
right to the Truth as they have a right to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. It is _not_ right that they be exploited and
deceived with false views of life, false characters, false sentiment,
false morality, false history, false philosophy, false emotions,
false heroism, false notions of self-sacrifice, false views of
religion, of duty, of conduct, and of manners."

III

Even if there may have been a certain advantage to the novel, as M.
Le Breton maintains, because it was long left alone unfettered by any
critical code, to expand as best it could, to find its own way
unaided and to work out its own salvation, the time has now come when
it may profit by a criticism which shall force it to consider its
responsibilities and to appraise its technical resources, if it is to
claim artistic equality with the drama and the epic. It has won
its way to the front; and there are few who now question its right to
the position it has attained. There is no denying that in English
literature, in the age of Victoria, the novel established itself
as the literary form most alluring to all men of letters and that it
succeeded to the place held by the essay in the days of Anne and by
the play in the days of Elizabeth.

And like the play and the essay in those earlier times, the novel now
attracts writers who have no great natural gift for the form. Just as
Peele and Greene wrote plays because play-writing was popular and
advantageous, in spite of their inadequate dramaturgic equipment, and
just as Johnson wrote essays because essay-writing was popular and
advantageous in spite of his deficiency in the ease and lightness
which the essay demands, so Brougham and Motley and Froude adventured
themselves in fiction. We may even doubt whether George Eliot was a
born story-teller and whethe