32 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
1st. Represents only that side of vice which makes it attractive. 
The world has found that vice brings disaster or meets it. Vice is 
an evidence of decay ; growth alone is truly attractive. 
2nd. Which excites and feeds passions that we should control, 
the passions that cause trouble in the world. 
3rd. Which weakens our reverence. 
4th. Which makes us feel anything other than an appreciation 
and sympathy for our fellowmen. 
5th. Which by its false ideals unfits us for the practical duties 
of daily life. 
6th. Which makes the end of life consist in something petty 
that takes away any aim worth nobly striving for. In this class I 
would put that large proportion of modern novels which virtually 
make the end of life a marriage which society will sanction, and the 
only aim, particularly for the heroine, to be pretty, so as to win 
attention from the other sex. 
This list of principles might be largely extended. _I think that 
each one should, at least mentally, draw out for himself such a list 
that he may be able to distinguish between the true and the specious, 
or the false, to the end that he may get from great novels that com- 
pensation for the narrowness of personal lot, that help toward a 
proper understanding and sympathy with his fellowmen, that 
guidance in self-knowledge, that warning against the very first step 
downward, and that call to something higher, which constitute the 
grandest possibilities of fiction. 
My remarks have been all of a general nature. I know of no 
writer who fulfils all the possibilities of fiction, but, in my judgment, 
George Eliot, comes nearer to it than any other in the most impor- 
tant respects, though her representations are in a good many points 
only partial. I will not attempt to show this by a reference to any 
other works, I merely mention it to give my ideas a certain definite- 
ness by pointing to a limited embodiment of them. To me her 
works seem most worthy of careful study, and most rich in returns, 
because she never allowed a striving after effect to interfere with her 
expression of her conceptions of the true workings of the principles of 
life, and her rare mental endowments pre-eminently fitted her for the 
study of these principles. There are many other authors I might 
mention, but she seems so peculiarly suitable as an illustration of my 
principles, at least of some of the more important ones, that I will 
