aroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that
there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of
Henry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the
wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It is
wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see
it in society. It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often
succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the
pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the
hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure
of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such
a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice
by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous
man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor of
respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and
defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The
novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience
as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon
his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good
and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal
the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do
this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the
majority of his readers to efface the lines between virtue and vice. And
we ask this not for the sake of the moral lesson, but because not to do
it is, to our deep consciousness, inartistic and untrue to our judgment
of life as it goes on. Thackeray used to say that all his talent was in
his eyes; meaning that he was only an observer and reporter of what he
saw, and not a Providence to rectify human affairs. The great artist
undervalued his genius. He reported what he saw as Raphael and Murillo
reported what they saw. With his touch of genius he assigned to
everything its true value, moving us to tenderness, to pity, to scorn, to
righteous indignation, to sympathy with humanity. I find in him the
highest art, and not that indifference to the great facts and deep
currents and destinies of human life, that want of enthusiasm and
sympathy, which has got the name of "art for art's sake." Literary
fiction is a barren product if it wants sympathy and love for