Now the disadvantage of being at once a novelist and a teacher is that you have no neutral ground from which to observe your characters, no friendly appreciation of things or people as you find them. What the artist accepts with delicate sympathy, though with no pretense at justification, the moralist must either justify or condemn. The first course is common enough, and produces a class of literature essentially vicious because of its very limitations,--six deadly sins held up to public execration, and the seventh presented to us tenderly as an ill-understood and sadly calumniated virtue. The second course--that of implied condemnation--is equally open to a Sunday-school story or to the least decorous of French novels; both have for their avowed object the pillorying of vice, and both put forward this claim as a reasonable excuse for existence. But art has no pillory, no stocks, no whipping-post, no exclusive methods for fixing our attention upon sin. Art gives us Lady Macbeth and Iago, and gives them to us without reproaches, without extenuation, and without any attempt to reform. It is less painful to watch the irresistible development of their respective crimes than to hear Thackeray lashing with keen scorn some poor sinner stumbling through the mazes of worldly wickedness, or to see George Eliot pursuing one of her own creations with inextinguishable severity and contempt. There is something paralyzing in the cold anger with which Rosamond Vincy is branded and shamed; there is something appalling in the conscientious vindictiveness with which Tito is hunted down, step by step, to his final retribution. That delightful essayist, Mr. Karl Hillebrand, whose artistic nature is about as much at home among modern theories as a strayed Faun in a button factory, has given us a half-humorous, half-despairing picture of some old acquaintances under the new dispensation: of Manon Lescaut threatened with Charlotte Bronte's birch-rod; of Squire Western opening his startled eyes as Zola proceeds to detail for his benefit the latest and most highly realistic study of delirium tremens; of Falstaff, whom that losel Shakespeare treated so indulgently, listening abashed to George Eliot's scathing denunciations. "For really, Sir John," he hears her say, "you have no excuse whatever. If you were a poor devil who had never had any but bad examples before your eyes!--but you have had all the advantages which destiny can give to man on his way through life. Are you not born of a good family? Have you not had at Oxford the best education England is able to give to her children? Have you not had the highest connections? And, nevertheless, how low you have fallen! Do you know why? I have warned my Tito over and over again against it: because you have always done that only which was agreeable to you, and have shunned everything that was unpleasant." This sounds like sad trifling to our sober and orthodox ears, but it is not more audacious, on the whole, than the pathetic lamentations of Mr. Oscar Wilde over the career of Charles Reade: the most disheartening, he protests, in all literature; "wasted in a foolish attempt to be modern, and to draw attention to the state of our convict prisons, and the management of private lunatic asylums. Charles Dickens was depressing enough, in all conscience, when he tried to arouse our sympathy for the victims of the poor-law administration; but Charles Reade, an artist, a scholar, a man with a true sense of beauty, raging and roaring over the abuses of modern life like a common pamphleteer or a sensational journalist, is really a sight for the angels to weep over." It is just possible that whatever personal interest the angelic hosts take in our earthly lot may be directed to philanthropy rather than to literature; but, for the idle and inglorious mortal, the protest holds a world of truth and meaning. Reade, as a reformer, is melancholy company; and Dickens is inexpressibly dismal when he drags the Chancery business into "Bleak House," and the pauper dinner-table into "Oliver Twist," and that dreary caricature, the Circumlocution Office, into "Little Dorrit." If these things really accomplished the good that is claimed for them, it was dearly bought by the weariness of so many millions of readers. "A fiction contrived to support an opinion is a vicious composition," said Jeffrey, who was as apt in his general criticisms as he was awkward in their particular applications, and who lived before the era of serious and educational novels. To-day we have the unhesitating assertion of Mr. Howells that one of Tolstoi's highest claims to our consideration is his steadfast teaching "that all war, private and public, is a sin." Mr. Ruskin, it may be remembered, holds somewhat different views: "There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is based on war." Yet as every man is entitled to his own opinion in such matters, there is no reason why we should quarrel with either the Russian or the Englishman for their chosen principles. But Ruskin is no greater as an essayist because he approves of war, and Tolstoi gains nothing as a novelist because he adheres to peace. The glory of the battlefield, its pathos and its horror, are all fitting subjects for the artist's pen or pencil. He may stir our blood and rouse our fighting instincts, like Homer or Scott; or he may move us to pity, and sorrow, and shame, by the revelation of all the shattered hopes and bitter agonies that lie beyond. But his own greatness depends exclusively on his treatment of the subject, and not on his point of view. Who knows and who cares what De Neuville thinks of war? He paints for us a handful of men roused at dawn, and rushing gallantly to their deaths, and we feel our hearts beat high as we look at them. The terror, the awfulness, the self-forgetting courage, the gay defiance of battle, all are there, imprisoned mysteriously in the artistic grouping of a few blue-coated soldiers. But Verestchagin, who aspires to teach us the wickedness of war, is powerless to thrill us in this manner. He is probably sincere in his opinions, and he has striven hard to give them form and expression, but, lacking the artistic impulse, he has for the most part striven in vain. His huge canvases, packed with dead and dying, are less impressive, less solemn, less painful even, from their monotonous overcrowding, than a single Zouave, whose wounds De Neuville has no need to emphasize with vast expenditure of vermilion, when the faintness of a mortal agony draws his weary body to the earth. "All real power," says Ruskin, "lies in delicacy." To trouble the senses is an easy task, but it is through the imagination only that we receive any strong and lasting impressions, and no sincerity of purpose can suffice to turn a crude didacticism into art.