other graceful things
that amuse the passing hour, and help us to live agreeably in a world
where men actually sin, suffer, and die. But it belongs to the
decorative arts, and though it has a high place among them, it cannot be
ranked with the works of the imagination--the works that represent and
body forth human experience. Its ingenuity, can always afford a refined
pleasure, and it can often, at some risk to itself, convey a valuable
truth.

Perhaps the whole region of historical romance might be reopened with
advantage to readers and writers who cannot bear to be brought face to
face with human nature, but require the haze of distance or a far
perspective, in which all the disagreeable details shall be lost. There
is no good reason why these harmless people should not be amused, or
their little preferences indulged.

But here, again, I have my modest doubts, some recent instances are so
fatuous, as far as the portrayal of character goes, though I find them
admirably contrived in some respects. When I have owned the excellence
of the staging in every respect, and the conscience with which the
carpenter (as the theatrical folks say) has done his work, I am at the
end of my praises. The people affect me like persons of our generation
made up for the parts; well trained, well costumed, but actors, and
almost amateurs. They have the quality that makes the histrionics of
amateurs endurable; they are ladies and gentlemen; the worst, the
wickedest of them, is a lady or gentleman behind the scene.

Yet, no doubt it is well that there should be a reversion to the earlier
types of thinking and feeling, to earlier ways of looking at human
nature, and I will not altogether refuse the pleasure offered me by the
poetic romancer or the historical romancer because I find my pleasure
chiefly in Tolstoy and Valdes and Thomas Hardy and Tourguenief, and
Balzac at his best.

XXI.

It used to be one of the disadvantages of the practice of romance in
America, which Hawthorne more or less whimsically lamented, that there
were so few shadows and inequalities in our broad level of prosperity;
and it is one of the reflections suggested by Dostoievsky's novel, 'The
Crime and the Punishment,' that whoever struck a note so profoundly
tragic in American fiction would do a false and mistaken thing--as false
and as mistaken in its way as dealing in American fiction with certain
nudities which the Latin peoples seem to find edifying. Wha