on forever, as Charles Lamb expressed it, “encouraging each other in mediocrity.” The present stand of realism, however, is but one more phase of the intrusion of ethics upon art,--the assumption that I cannot have a sincere regard for the welfare of my washerwoman if I do not care for her company either in a book or out of it. Tubs have grown in favor since the day when Wordsworth was compelled, “in deference to the opinion of friends,” to substitute an impossible turtle-shell for the homely vessel in which the blind Highland boy set sail on Loch Leven. All classes and all people, I am now given to understand, are of supreme interest to the loving student of human nature, and it is a “narrow conservatism”--chilling phrase--that seeks to limit the artist’s field of action. But as limiting the artist’s field of action is practically impossible, and not often essayed, it is hard to understand what the respective schools of fiction find to fight over, and why this new battle of the books should be raging as fiercely as if there were any visible cause of war. It is not an orderly and well-appointed battle, either, confined to the ranks of critics and reviewers, but a free skirmish, where everybody who has written a novel rushes in and plays an active part. Conflicting opinions rattle around our heads like hail, and the voice of the peacemaker,--Mr. Andrew Lang,--protesting that all schools are equally good, if the scholars are equal to their tasks, is lost in the universal clamor. The only point on which any two sharpshooters appear to agree is in laying the blame for the “unmanly timidity of English fiction”--a timidity not always so apparent as it might be--on the shoulders of women, who, it seems, will have all novels modeled to suit themselves, and who, with the arrogance of supreme power, have reversed the political situation, and deprived mankind of their vote. This is the opinion of Rider Haggard, and also of Vernon Lee, who asserts that “the ethics of fiction are framed entirely for the benefit or the detriment of women,” and that its enforced morality--a defect which, to do her justice, she is striving her best to eradicate--is fatal to its mission in life.