the reader's view examples of evil as well as examples of good; it must
deal with depravity as well as with virtue. And, therefore, all that
can be expected from the novelist is that he should endeavor to
represent life as it is, with its due apportionment of beauty and of
ugliness. And so much is demanded not only by the moralist, but by the
critic. Many writers who have described the life of criminals, who have
endeavored to make infamous careers attractive, and have pandered to
the lower tastes of the reading public, would urge in their own
defence: that they have nothing to do with morality; that their object
is to produce a work of art; that no question of the good or evil
effect of their writing should be allowed to trammel their imagination.
But the critic would rightly reply, that truth at least must be
respected in a work of art; that the imagination must not be allowed
the liberty of misrepresentation; and that the novelist in whose pages
vice predominates, or is given an alluring aspect, is no more artistic
than the writer of Sunday-school books. In judging the influence
exerted by the great body of writers of fiction whose names have been
mentioned in this chapter, I shall therefore proceed on the
understanding that that novelist who writes almost exclusively of good
people is not necessarily the one whose influence has been the best,
nor that he who has drawn many weak or evil-doing characters has
necessarily taught the worst lessons. The standard by which we must
judge an author, as well from an artistic as from a moral point of
view, must be founded on the recognition that both good and evil
prevail in the world, and that whoever undertakes to give a picture of
life must paint both the evil and the good in their true colors.

In commenting on the fiction of the eighteenth century, its prevailing
coarseness was reprehended. But this characteristic was objected to on
the score of taste, but not at all on that of truth or morality. The