they count for nothing.  But in fact they come naturally of truth, and grace it without solicitation; they are added unto it.  In the whole range of fiction I know of no true picture of life—­that is, of human nature—­which 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 and their power; and to draw from these no one need go far—­no one need really go out of himself.