In General Grant's confession of novel-reading there is a sort of
inference that he had wasted his time, or else the guilty conscience of
the novelist in me imagines such an inference. But however this may be,
there is certainly no question concerning the intention of a
correspondent who once wrote to me after reading some rather bragging
claims I had made for fiction as a mental and moral means. "I have very
grave doubts," he said, "as to the whole list of magnificent things that
you seem to think novels have done for the race, and can witness in
myself many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my
mental make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is
injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worse
than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life
that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter-
of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no
sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the
impossibly accumulated sufferings of some gaudy hero or heroine."

I am not sure that I had the controversy with this correspondent that he
seemed to suppose; but novels are now so fully accepted by every one
pretending to cultivated taste and they really form the whole
intellectual life of such immense numbers of people, without question of
their influence, good or bad, upon the mind that it is refreshing to have
them frankly denounced, and to be invited to revise one's ideas and
feelings in regard to them. A little honesty, or a great deal of
honesty, in this quest will do the novel, as we hope yet to have it, and
as we have already begun to have it, no harm; and for my own part I will
confess that I believe fiction in the past to have been largely
injurious, as I believe the stage-play to be still almost wholly
injurious, through its falsehood, its folly, its wantonness, and its
aimlessness. It may be safely assumed that most of the novel-reading