to a single department.  It is so in everything—­all arts, all trades; and the novelist is not superior to the universal rule against universality.  He contributes his share to a thorough knowledge of groups of the human race under conditions which are full of inspiring novelty and interest.  He works more fearlessly, frankly, and faithfully than the novelist ever worked before; his work, or much of it, may be destined never to be reprinted from the monthly magazines; but if he turns to his book-shelf and regards the array of the British or other classics, he knows that they, too, are for the most part dead; he knows that the planet itself is destined to freeze up and drop into the sun at last, with all its surviving literature upon it.  The question is merely one of time.  He consoles himself, therefore, if he is wise, and works on; and we may all take some comfort from the thought that most things cannot be helped.  Especially a movement in literature like that which the world is now witnessing cannot be helped; and we could no more turn back and be of the literary fashions of any age before this than we could turn back and be of its social, economical, or political conditions.

If I were authorized to address any word directly to our novelists I should say, Do not trouble yourselves about standards or ideals; but try to be faithful and natural:  remember that there is no greatness, no beauty, which does not come from truth to your own knowledge of things; and keep on working, even if your work is not long remembered.

At least three-fifths of the literature called classic, in all languages, no more lives than the poems and stories that perish monthly in our magazines.  It is all printed and reprinted, generation after generation, century after century; but it is not alive; it is as dead as the people who wrote it and read it, and to whom it meant something, perhaps; with whom it was a fashion, a caprice, a passing taste.  A superstitious piety preserves it, and pretends that it has aesthetic qualities which can delight or edify; but nobody really enjoys it, except as a reflection of the past moods and humors of the race, or a revelation of the author’s character; otherwise it is trash, and often very filthy trash, which the present trash generally is not.

XXIII.

One of the great newspapers the other day invited the prominent American authors to speak their minds upon a point in the theory and practice of fiction which had already vexed some of them.  It was the question of how much or how little the American novel ought to deal with certain facts of life which are not usually talked of before young people, and especially young ladies.  Of course the question was not decided, and I forget just how far the balance inclined in favor of a larger freedom in the matter.  But it certainly inclined that way; one or two writers of the sex which is somehow supposed to have purity