easily allege that this merciful effect of his art arose from the
reader's weak human sympathies, and hold himself irresponsible. But
he would be conscious of a more miserable weakness in thus divorcing
himself from his fellow-men who in the domain of art must ever walk
hand in hand with him. So he prefers to say that, of all the various
forms in which Cant presents itself to suffering humanity, he knows of
none so outrageous, so illogical, so undemonstrable, so marvelously
absurd, as the Cant of "Too Much Mercy." When it shall be proven to
him that communities are degraded and brought to guilt and crime,
suffering or destitution, from a predominance of this quality; when he
shall see pardoned ticket-of-leave men elbowing men of austere lives
out of situation and position, and the repentant Magdalen supplanting
the blameless virgin in society,--then he will lay aside his pen and
extend his hand to the new Draconian discipline in fiction. But until
then he will, without claiming to be a religious man or a moralist,
but simply as an artist, reverently and humbly conform to the rules
laid down by a Great Poet who created the parable of the "Prodigal
Son" and the "Good Samaritan," whose works have lasted eighteen
hundred years, and will remain when the present writer and his
generation are forgotten. And he is conscious of uttering no original
doctrine in this, but of only voicing the beliefs of a few of his
literary brethren happily living, and one gloriously dead, who never
made proclamation of this "from the housetops."


* * * * *


THE LUCK OF ROARING CAMP, AND