nd
their power; and to draw from these no one need go far--no one need
really go out of himself.

Fifty years ago, Carlyle, in whom the truth was always alive, but in whom
it was then unperverted by suffering, by celebrity, and by despair, wrote
in his study of Diderot: "Were it not reasonable to prophesy that this
exceeding great multitude of novel-writers and such like must, in a new
generation, gradually do one of two things: either retire into the
nurseries, and work for children, minors, and semi-fatuous persons of
both sexes, or else, what were far better, sweep their novel-fabric into
the dust-cart, and betake themselves with such faculty as they have to
understand and record what is true, of which surely there is, and will
forever be, a whole infinitude unknown to us of infinite importance to
us? Poetry, it will more and more come to be understood, is nothing but
higher knowledge; and the only genuine Romance (for grown persons),
Reality."

If, after half a century, fiction still mainly works for "children,
minors, and semi-fatuous persons of both sexes," it is nevertheless one
of the hopefulest signs of the world's progress that it has begun to work
for "grown persons," and if not exactly in the way that Carlyle might
have solely intended in urging its writers to compile memoirs instead of
building the "novel-fabric," still it has, in the highest and widest
sense, already made Reality its Romance. I cannot judge it, I do not
even care for it, except as it has done this; and I can hardly conceive
of a literary self-respect in these days compatible with the old trade of
make-believe, with the production of the kind of fiction which is too
much honored by classification with card-playing and horse-racing. But
let fiction cease to lie about life; let it portray men and women as they
are, actuated by the motives and the passions in the measure we all know;
let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires;
let it show the different interests in their true proportions; let it
forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and
prejudice, but frankly own these for what they are, in whatever figures
and occasions they appear; let it not put on fine literary airs; let it
speak the dialect, the language, that most Americans know--the language
of unaffected people everywhere--and there can be no doubt of an
unlimited future, not only of delightfulness but of usefulness, for it.