write a story on the lines of ’Anna Karenina’ or ‘Madame Bovary.’  They wish to touch one of the most serious and sorrowful problems of life in the spirit of Tolstoy and Flaubert, and they ask why they may not.  At one time, they remind us, the Anglo-Saxon novelist did deal with such problems—­De Foe in his spirit, Richardson in his, Goldsmith in his.  At what moment did our fiction lose this privilege?  In what fatal hour did the Young Girl arise and seal the lips of Fiction, with a touch of her finger, to some of the most vital interests of life?

Whether I wished to oppose them in their aspiration for greater freedom, or whether I wished to encourage them, I should begin to answer them by saying that the Young Girl has never done anything of the kind.  The manners of the novel have been improving with those of its readers; that is all.  Gentlemen no longer swear or fall drunk under the table, or abduct young ladies and shut them up in lonely country-houses, or so habitually set about the ruin of their neighbors’ wives, as they once did.  Generally, people now call a spade an agricultural implement; they have not grown decent without having also grown a little squeamish, but they have grown comparatively decent; there is no doubt about that.  They require of a novelist whom they respect unquestionable proof of his seriousness, if he proposes to deal with certain phases of life; they require a sort of scientific decorum.  He can no longer expect to be received on the ground of entertainment only; he assumes a higher function, something like that of a physician or a priest, and they expect him to be bound by laws as sacred as those of such professions; they hold him solemnly pledged not to betray them or abuse their confidence.  If he will accept the conditions, they give him their confidence, and he may then treat to his greater honor, and not at all to his disadvantage, of such experiences, such relations of men and women as George Eliot treats in ‘Adam Bede,’ in ‘Daniel Deronda,’ in ‘Romola,’ in almost all her books; such as Hawthorne treats in ‘The Scarlet Letter;’ such as Dickens treats in ‘David Copperfield;’ such as Thackeray treats in ‘Pendennis,’ and glances at in every one of his fictions; such as most of the masters of English fiction have at same time treated more or less openly.  It is quite false or quite mistaken to suppose that our novels have left untouched these most important realities of life.  They have only not made them their stock in trade; they have kept a true perspective in regard to them; they have relegated them in their pictures of life to the space and place they occupy in life itself, as we know it in England and America.  They have kept a correct proportion, knowing perfectly well that unless the novel is to be a map, with everything scrupulously laid down in it, a faithful record of life in far the greater extent could be made to the exclusion of guilty love and all its circumstances and consequences.