when you describe two persons whom you know, whose characters are
interesting, and who become involved in all manner of entanglements, and
then stop your narration; and when I ask, say you have not the least idea
whether they got out of their difficulties, or what became of them. In
real life we do not call that a story where everything is left
unconcluded and in the air. In point of fact, romances are daily
beginning and daily ending, well or otherwise, under our observation.

Should they always end well in the novel? I am very far from saying that.
Tragedy and the pathos of failure have their places in literature as well
as in life. I only say that, artistically, a good ending is as proper as
a bad ending. Yet the main object of the novel is to entertain, and the
best entertainment is that which lifts the imagination and quickens the
spirit; to lighten the burdens of life by taking us for a time out of our
humdrum and perhaps sordid conditions, so that we can see familiar life
somewhat idealized, and probably see it all the more truly from an
artistic point of view. For the majority of the race, in its hard lines,
fiction is an inestimable boon. Incidentally the novel may teach,
encourage, refine, elevate. Even for these purposes, that novel is the
best which shows us the best possibilities of our lives--the novel which
gives hope and cheer instead of discouragement and gloom. Familiarity
with vice and sordidness in fiction is a low entertainment, and of
doubtful moral value, and their introduction is unbearable if it is not
done with the idealizing touch of the artist.

Do not misunderstand me to mean that common and low life are not fit
subjects of fiction, or that vice is not to be lashed by the satirist, or
that the evils of a social state are never to be exposed in the novel.
For this, also, is an office of the novel, as it is of the drama, to hold
the mirror up to nature, and to human nature as it exhibits itself. But