To suppress or to ignore the world of vice and sin is not to be moral; to portray it is not to be immoral. But to gloat over it, to dwell fondly upon it, to return to it, to exaggerate it, to roll it under the tongue as a sweet morsel,--that is to be immoral; and to treat it as time and nature do or as the great artists do, as affording contrasts and difficulties, and disturbing but not destroying the balance of life, is within the scope of the moral. Art must make us free of the whole; every work must in a measure reflect the whole of life; if it dwell too much on that part called sin and evil, it is false to its ideal; it must keep the balance; it must be true to the integrity of nature. All things are permissible in their time and place. That a thing is real and true is no reason why it should go into the artist’s picture; but that it belongs there, that it is organic there, a part of a vital whole, and that that whole is a fair representation of human life--in this is the justification. Not every scene in nature composes well into a picture, and not every phase of human life is equally significant in a creative work. That nature does this of that is no reason why the artist should do it, unless he can show an equal insouciance and an equal prodigality and power. He must take what he can make his own and imbue with the spirit of life. I lately read a novel by one of our most promising young novelists, in which there was a streak of vulgar realism, forced in, evidently, under the pressure of a theory,--the theory that art is never to shrink from the true. It offended because it was entirely gratuitous; there was no necessity for it. If it was true, it was not apt; if it was real, it was not fit; it jarred; it was dragged in by main force; it was a false note. Is not anything disagreeable in a novel of the imagination a false note? Disagreeable, I mean, not by reason of the subject matter, but by reason of the treatment. Dante makes hell fascinating by his treatment.