dice through all their disguises. The emptiness of
conventional respectabilities and pieties and the futility of the
spasmodic attempts at heroism are obvious enough.

It was an eclipse of my faith in human nature. The eclipse was never
total because the shadow of the book could not quite hide the thought of
various men and women whom I had actually known.

After a while I began to recover my spirits. Why should I be so
depressed? This is a big world, and there is room in it for many
embodiments of good and evil. There are all sorts of people, and the
existence of the bad is no argument against the existence of quite
another sort.

Let us take realism in literature for what it is and no more. It is, at
best, only a description of an infinitesimal bit of reality. The more
minutely accurate it is, the more limited it must be in its field. You
must not expect to get a comprehensive view through a high-powered
microscope. The author is severely limited, not only by his choice of a
subject, but by his temperament and by his opportunities for
observation. He is doing us a favor when he focuses our attention upon
one special object and makes us see it clearly.

It is when the realistic writer turns philosopher and begins to
generalize that we must be on our guard against him. He is likely to use
his characters as symbols, and the symbolism becomes oppressive. There
are some businesses which ought not to be united. They hinder healthful
competition and produce a hateful monopoly. Thus in some states the
railroads that carried coal also went into the business of coal-mining.
This has been prohibited by law. It is held that the railroad, being a
common carrier, must not be put into a position in which it will be
tempted to discriminate in favor of its own products. For a similar
reason it may be argued that it is dangerous to allow the dramatist or
novelist to furnish us with a "philosophy of life." The chances are
that, instead of impartially fulfilling the duties of a common carrier,
he will foist upon us his own goods, and force us to draw conclusions
from the samples of human nature he has in stock. I should not be
willing to accept a philosophy of life even from so accomplished a
person as Mr. Bernard Shaw. It is not because I doubt his cleverness in
presenting what he sees, but because I have a suspicion that there are
some very important things which he does not see, or which do not
interest him.

It is really much m