Then shall the novel have no purpose? Shall it not try to do good? Shall this unrivalled, this inapproachable form, beside which epic and drama dwindle to puny dwarfishness, and are so little that they can both be lost in its vast room, shall this do nothing to better men and uplift them? Shall it only amuse them? No, and a thousand times, no! But it shall be a mission to their higher selves only so far as it shall charm their minds and win their hearts. It shall do no good directly. It shall not be the bread, but the grain of wheat which must sprout and grow in the reader's soul, and be harvested in his experience, and in the mills of the gods ground slowly perhaps many years before it shall duly nourish him. I do not mean that there can never be any immediate good from novels. I do not see how any one can read The Scarlet Letter, or Middlemarch, or Romola, without being instantly seized with the dread of falsehood. This is in the way to the love of truth. It is the first step, the indispensable first step towards that love, but it is by no means arrival at it. The novel can teach, and for shame's sake, it must teach, but only by painting life truly. This is what it must above all things strive to do. If it succeeds, every good effect shall come from it: delight, use, wisdom. If it does not succeed in this, no good can come of it. Let no reader, and let no intending novelist suppose that this fidelity to life can be carried too far. After all, and when the artist has given his whole might to the realization of his ideal, he will have only an effect of life. I think the effect is like that in those cycloramas where up to a certain point there is real ground and real gra**, and then carried indivisibly on to the canvas the best that the painter can do to imitate real ground and real gra**. We start in our novels with something we have known of life, that is, with life itself; and then we go on and imitate what we have known of life. If we are very skilful and very patient we can hide the joint. But the joint is always there, and on one side of it are real ground and real gra**, and on the other are the painted images of ground and gra**. I do not believe that there was ever any one who longed more strenuously or endeavored more constantly to make the painted ground and gra** exactly like the real, than I have done in my cycloramas. But I have to own that I have never yet succeeded to my own satisfaction. Some touch of color, some tone of texture is always wanting; the light is different; it is all in another region. At the same time I have the immense, the sufficient consolation, of knowing that I have not denied such truth as was in me by imitating unreal ground and gra**, or even copying the effect of some other's effort to represent real ground and real gra**.
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Fiction is the chief intellectual stimulus of our time, whether we like the fact or not, and taking it in the broad sense if not the deep sense, it is the chief intellectual influence. I should say moral influence, too; but it is often a moral stimulus without being a moral influence; it reaches the mind, and stops short of the conduct. As to the prime fact involved, I think we have but to recall the books of any last year of modern times, and we cannot question it. It is ninety-nine chances out of a hundred that the book which at any given moment is making the world talk, and making the world think is a novel. Within the last generation, I can remember only one book making the impression that a dozen of novels have each made, and against Renan's Life of Jesus, I will set Les Miserables, Romola and Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, L'Assommoir and Nana, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Anna Karénina and the Kreuzer Sonata, Robert Elsmere, Trilby, Ben Hur, not all, or at all, of the same artistic value, but all somehow, of a mighty human interest. We must leave Uncle Tom's Cabin out of the count because it was of an earlier period; if we counted it, the proof of my a**ertion would be overwhelming.
The novel is easily first among books that people read willingly, and it is rightfully first. It has known how to keep the charm of the story, and to add to it the attraction of almost every interest. It still beguiles, as in the hands of the Byzantine romancers, not to go unnumbered centuries back to the Greek novel of Homer, the Odyssey; and it has learnt how to warn, to question, to teach in every concern of life. Scarcely any predicament, moral or psychological has escaped its study, and it has so refined and perfected its methods that antiseptic surgery itself has hardly made a more beneficent advance. It began with the merest fable, excluding from the reader's interest all but the fortunes of princes and the other dignified personages, for whose entertainment it existed until now it includes all sorts and conditions of men, who turn to it for instruction, inspiration, consolation. It has broadened and deepened down and out till it compa**es the whole of human nature; and no cause important to the race has been unfriended of it. Sometimes I have been vexed at its vicious pandering to pa**ion, but I cannot think, after all, of any great modern novel which has not been distinctly moral in effect. I am not sorry to have had it go into the dark places of the soul, the filthy and squalid places of society, high and low, and shed there its great light. Let us know with its help what we are, and where we are. Let all the hidden things be brought into the sun, and let every day be the day of judgment. If the sermon cannot any longer serve this end, let the novel do it.