is not also a masterpiece of literature, full of
divine and natural beauty. It may have no touch or tint of this special
civilization or of that; it had better have this local color well
ascertained; but the truth is deeper and finer than aspects, and if the
book is true to what men and women know of one another's souls it will be
true enough, and it will be great and beautiful. It is the conception of
literature as something apart from life, superfinely aloof, which makes
it really unimportant to the great mass of mankind, without a message or
a meaning for them; and it is the notion that a novel may be false in its
portrayal of causes and effects that makes literary art contemptible even
to those whom it amuses, that forbids them to regard the novelist as a
serious or right-minded person. If they do not in some moment of
indignation cry out against all novels, as my correspondent does, they
remain besotted in the fume of the delusions purveyed to them, with no
higher feeling for the author than such maudlin affection as the
frequenter of an opium-joint perhaps knows for the attendant who fills
his pipe with the drug.

Or, as in the case of another correspondent who writes that in his youth
he "read a great many novels, but always regarded it as an amusement,
like horse racing and card-playing," for which he had no time when he
entered upon the serious business of life, it renders them merely
contemptuous. His view of the matter may be commended to the brotherhood
and sisterhood of novelists as full of wholesome if bitter suggestion;
and I urge them not to dismiss it with high literary scorn as that of
some Boeotian dull to the beauty of art. Refuse it as we may, it is
still the feeling of the vast majority of people for whom life is
earnest, and who find only a distorted and misleading likeness of it in
our books. We may fold ourselves in our scholars' gowns, and close the
doors of our studies, and affect to despise this rude voice; but we
cannot shut it out. It comes to us from wherever men are at work, from
wherever they are truly living, and accuses us of unfaithfulness, of
triviality, of mere stage-play; and none of us can escape conviction
except he prove himself worthy of his time--a time in which the great
masters have brought literature back to life, and filled its ebbing veins
with the red tides of reality. We cannot all equal them; we need not
copy them; but we can all go to the sources of their inspiration a