ge for improvement as well as entertainment. They also saw real
life depicted. The absence of empty lines and stilted phrases so
common in conventional drama was refreshing and interesting to those
who believe that the drama has a mission other than merely to amuse.
"Margaret Fleming" is nothing if not artistic from the standpoint of
the realist. Its fidelity to life as we find it--to existing
conditions and types of society,--is wonderful. Its dramatic strength
is none the less marked. But aside from and above all this, for me it
has a far greater merit--utility. I have no sympathy with the
flippant, effeminate, and senile cry, "Art for art's sake"; that is
the echo of a decaying civilization, the voice of Greece and Rome in
their decline. It is the shibboleth of a people drunken with pleasure;
of a popular conscience anaesthetized; the cry of sensualism and
selfishness popular with shallow minds and bloodless hearts; the
incarnation of that fatal effeminacy that springs from a union of
wealth and superficial intellectuality; the voice of a human automaton
without a soul. Victor Hugo has made no utterances more grandly true
than when he pleads for the beautiful being made the servant of
progress as voiced in the following sentiment:

"Be of some service. Do not be fastidious when so much
depends upon being efficient and good. Art for art's sake
may be very fine, but art for _progress_ is finer still.
Ah! you must think? Then think of making man better.
Courage! Let us consecrate ourselves. Let us devote
ourselves to the good, to the true, to the just; it is well
for us to do so. Some pure lovers of art, moved by a
solicitude which is not without its dignity, discard the
formula, 'Art for Progress,' the Beautiful Useful, fearing
lest the useful should deform the beautiful. They tremble to
see the drudge's hand attached to the muse's arm. According
to them, the ideal may become perverted by too much contact
with _reality_. They are solicitous for the sublime, if it
descends as far as to humanity. They are in error. The
useful, far from circumscribing the sublime, enlarges it.
But critics protest: To undertake the cure of social evils;
to amend the codes; to impeach law in the court of right to
utter those hideous words, 'penitentiary,' 'convict-keeper,'
'galley-slave,' 'girl of the town'; to inspect the police
registers;