To heighten the effect, they are—almost inevitably—untrue. The attractions and drama are exaggerated, giving a false glamour to the gravest tragedy of human nature. There is here obvious adventure, and far greater variety or colour than we can, most of us, reach in ordinary respectable life. There is even some real liberty for the individual (though far less than these superficial narratives suggest), in dramatic contrast to the slaving drudgery and imprisoned minds—of underpaid long hours of toil and drab unloving homes. The hopeless tragedy, the bitter knowledge, the utter weariness and the slavery of the soul do not provide the novelist with dramatic material, and are—to a large extent—left out of the picture. He slurs over, or altogether ignores, the blunting of moral sense, the coarsening of moral fibre, the lowering of all ideals: the gradual loss of power over oneself, loss of will, loss of freedom, loss—even—of desire. He may use the more obvious foulness and brutality as an occasion for drama—naturally not wishing to be transparently unreal. The moral tragedy is not _there_. But by his own art standard, that demands the exact truth, he is condemned; and he is guilty of just that falsehood which he set out to expose and revile—of treating his characters as a _class apart_, rather types than individuals. As the Victorians assumed, without charity, they were always lower than the "respectable"; he almost conveys the impression that they are necessarily higher—as careless, and far more dangerous, an assumption. We can perhaps see more clearly where this perverse attack upon convention really leads from another example of fiction, frankly designed to sell. It is, indeed, hard to detect the serious object or thought behind such books as _The Age of Consent_. The publisher claims "extraordinary delicacy" for its treatment of a "difficult, perilous, and exciting situation," which is "modern in the fullest sense." There is, we admit, nothing coarse here in language or thought, a welcome exception to-day; and the combination of essential purity, in a very real sense, with a courageous acceptance of life, is revealed with real understanding of morality and of our natural instincts. In other words, Pamela is a true woman; with exceptional possession of herself, heroic impulse and a clean mind; capable of sustained, genuine self-sacrifice and self-restraint. _But when we consider the tests by which her nature is revealed and developed, the sordid vice in which she grew from girl to woman; the whole impression is reversed._ Circumstances and atmosphere are violently morbid and also quite abnormal. We have not only every conceivable variety in the cruel and profit-sharing intrigues of lust (with no sudden impulse to excuse, if not condone); but illustration and discussion of the most extreme and vile form of criminal mania that serves no purpose but to heighten the crude sensationalism.