“But a novel purports to be a picture of life.” “Yes, exactly--a picture; and a picture isn’t life itself; it is, or ought to be, after all, a picture,” said Smith, momentarily triumphant in turn. “The human body, for instance, has been painted and sculptured from the beginning of civilization, and, indeed, before it, but even to-day, with all our modern passion for fact or verity or whatever you choose to call it, even the most realistic of sculptors and painters has a tendency to grope toward beauty of form, to portray human beings without clothes more as they ought to look rather than as they actually do. This, it seems to me, is the wonderful privilege and function of art. It should embellish life, not perpetuate its ugliness. Toward the writing of novels I feel much the same. There are entire sides of life that do not strike me as a proper field of exploitation in a tale, a narrative, a novel.” “But what is a poor, unhappy man of talent to do?” exclaimed Jones. “Here is Wells. He has observed with microscopic fidelity a young girl whose character, habit of thought, conception of life, her attitude toward the entire universe, in short, has developed and been formed in an epoch grotesquely different from that in which her father and aunt received their indelible impressions. The result is a domestic tragedy. It interested Wells; he sees all around it; it strikes him as being of immense value in the history of human shift and change; he wants to record it; he does so with the marvelous vividness and truthfulness of which he almost alone is at present master, and then you go and call him offensive and objectionable and a lot of other things. What do you want a man like that to do? Ought he to observe and reflect merely for his own instruction, and then when he puts pen to paper, perpetrate a new series of the ‘Elsie Books’ or ‘Dottie Dimple’?” “Now, of course, you have become extreme and unfair,” objected Smith. “I need hardly say that even during my earliest years I couldn’t endure the ‘Dottie Dimple’ and ‘Elsie’ tendencies of fiction. Besides, you know perfectly well the sort of books I enjoy. You know that, strangely enough, I revel in both Thackeray and Dickens. I have read ‘Middlemarch’ six times and hope to read it many times more. I can always re-read the Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell and Meredith and Hardy. Howells has rarely failed me. Henry James used to charm and enchant me and he still always interests me even when I have to work hard to translate him. But what’s the use of naming any others? The list is sufficiently comprehensive to show that I am not narrow-minded.”