28 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 
acter delineated in this novel be better than we are, we shall 
know what life is to him and how we must act to be like him; we 
will find out what in the conviction of great men and women are the 
thoughts and actions that are worthier than ours. The greatest 
care, however, should be exercised by those novelists who attempt to 
represent the perfect man, that they should make their representa- 
tives strictly true to the nature of man. A novelist can lead us no 
farther than he has gone himself, either in actual experience, or in 
careful calculations upon human nature. No novel can be wholly 
beneficial whose characters are not possible to actual men and 
women in like circumstances. | And, besides, if we are capable of 
indefinite development, as we all believe we are, then only God 
could describe a perfect man. The only ideal representable by 
man is an ideal of attitude towards the problems of life, an ideal of 
disposition, not of attainment. The only ideal characters are 
sincerely striving men and women ; but it would not be difficult to 
represent men and women who have reached a greater degree of 
attainment than we have. I think it is very evident, then, that the 
novel I have defined must be the most beneficial. 
We have seen that the novel is read not only for instruction, 
but also for pleasure, for excitement, and relaxation, and any novel 
that meets these needs may be a legitimate kind of novel and may 
have a right to be. I am not advocating one kind of novel to the 
exclusion of all others. Iam attempting to establish that this kind 
is greater than all others. It cannot be urged as an argument against it 
that it is not fitted to please, as proved by the fact that a majority are 
not pleased by it. We do not consider that it is an argument 
against a Raphael, or a Michael Angelo, that a great many people 
prefer a chromo. ‘There is such a thing as the development 
of taste in novel-reading. Weare not born with a ready-made appre- 
ciation of what is highest in fiction any more than of what is 
highest in anything else. We may come in time to enjoy only that 
novel which is worthy of study just as we may come to enjoy 
Beethoven or Wagner. The novel I have defined may, then, not 
only be most beneficial but give most real pleasure, and to those 
who have once learned to appreciate it all others may appear com_ 
paratively trivial. 
I know that very many people will take a decided stand against 
so serious a view of the novel as I have presented. Such a novel 
