amusing the undertaker may be. I confess that I should like to see again
the lovely heroine, the sweet woman, capable of a great passion and a
great sacrifice; and I do not object if the novelist tries her to the
verge of endurance, in agonies of mind and in perils, subjecting her to
wasting sicknesses even, if he only brings her out at the end in a
blissful compensation of her troubles, and endued with a new and sweeter
charm. No doubt it is better for us all, and better art, that in the
novel of society the destiny should be decided by character. What an
artistic and righteous consummation it is when we meet the shrewd and
wicked old Baroness Bernstein at Continental gaming-tables, and feel that
there was no other logical end for the worldly and fascinating Beatrix of
Henry Esmond! It is one of the great privileges of fiction to right the
wrongs of life, to do justice to the deserving and the vicious. It is
wholesome for us to contemplate the justice, even if we do not often see
it in society. It is true that hypocrisy and vulgar self-seeking often
succeed in life, occupying high places, and make their exit in the
pageantry of honored obsequies. Yet always the man is conscious of the
hollowness of his triumph, and the world takes a pretty accurate measure
of it. It is the privilege of the novelist, without introducing into such
a career what is called disaster, to satisfy our innate love of justice
by letting us see the true nature of such prosperity. The unscrupulous
man amasses wealth, lives in luxury and splendor, and dies in the odor of
respectability. His poor and honest neighbor, whom he has wronged and
defrauded, lives in misery, and dies in disappointment and penury. The
novelist cannot reverse the facts without such a shock to our experience
as shall destroy for us the artistic value of his fiction, and bring upon
his work the deserved reproach of indiscriminately "rewarding the good
and punishing the bad." But we have a right to ask that he shall reveal
the real heart and character of this passing show of life; for not to do
this, to content himself merely with exterior appearances, is for the