The whole world seems lately to have resolved itself into a commission on fiction. With an extreme and owl-like gravity mortals write essays in which fiction is treated as if it were, or should be, the last word of humanity. The first recorded word of man was not absolutely accurate, and his last may also be fictitious, but in the mean time one may protest that novels are not a kind of Novum Organon. They cannot contain, and they need not pretend to contain, the whole sum of mortal thought, knowledge, and experience, with a good deal of prophecy thrown in. Yet this attempt is what many earnest novelists are coming to. You take up one book from the library, or you even buy it, and lo! it contains a new religion, or what the author (who may not have deeply studied the history of creeds) thinks is new. The next three volumes are a parable of how ‘life may be lived well,’ when the old morality has been superseded in favour of the new morality – socialism and free love. Now, one may live to see socialism tried, but, to a mature person, it is a great comfort that free love will not affect him. The newer and higher moralists may take the property of the elderly citizen, but they (the young ones at least) will not fall on his neck and embrace him as he takes his walks abroad. This reflection is comforting, but it prevents one from reading novels about how we are to live when we all do as the more emotional of our authors think we ought to do. A third romance neither tells us what we ought to believe, nor the truth as it is in Mr. Mudie's, nor how we ought to behave when that state of things arrives which Carew foresaw and prophesied in The Rapture. The third novel describes, with dismal minuteness, the loves of a piano-tuner and a lady teacher in a high-school. The loves come to nothing, and so does the interest, but the record is so conscientiously dismal that perhaps it is a masterpiece.