1884.] on the Art of Fiction. 83 



love, sacrifice, and devotion for virtues, with selfishness, cunning, and 

 treachery for vices. Out of these, with their endless combinations 

 and changes, that novelist must be poor indeed who cannot make a 

 story. 



Lastly, I said at the outset that I would ask you to accord to 

 novelists the recognition of their place as artists. But after what has 

 been said, I feel that to urge this further would be only a repetition 

 of what has gone before. Therefore, though not all who write novels 

 can reach the first, or even the second, rank, wherever you 

 find good and faithful work, with truth, sympathy, and clearness of 

 purpose, I pray you to give the author of that work the praise as 

 to an Artist — an Artist like the rest — the praise that you so readily 

 accord to the earnest student of any other Art. As for the great 

 Masters of the Art — Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Victor 

 Hugo — I, for one, feel irritated when the critics begin to appraise, 

 compare, and to estimate them : there is nothing, I think, that we can 

 give them but admiration that is unspeakable, and gratitude that is 

 silent. This silence proves more eloquently than any words how 

 great, how beautiful an Art is that of Fiction. 



[W. B.] 



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