Fiction should be delightful, absorbing, and above all inspiring. Genuine art may sadden, but it cannot depress; it may bring a fresh sense of the anguish of humanity, but it must from its very nature join with this the consolation of an ideal. The tragedy of human life is in art held to be the source of new courage, of nobler aspiration, because it gives grander opportunities for human emotion to vindicate its superiority to all disasters, all terrors, all woe. The reader does not leave the great tragedies with a soured mind or a pessimistic disbelief in life. "Lear," "Othello," "Romeo and Juliet," tragic as they are, leave him quivering with sympathy but not with bitterness. The inspiration of the thought of love triumphant over death, of moral grandeur unsubdued by the worst that fate can do, lifts the mind above the disaster. One puts down "The Kreutzer Sonata" with the very flesh creeping with disgust at human existence; the same sin is treated no less tragically in "The Scarlet Letter," yet the reader is left with an inspiration and a nobler feeling toward life. The attitude of art is in its essence hopeful, and the work of the pessimist must therefore fail, even though it be informed with all the cleverness and the witchery of genius. It is, I believe, from something akin to a remote and perhaps half-conscious perception of this principle that readers in general desire that a novel shall end pleasantly. The popular sentiment in favor of a "happy ending" is by no means so entirely wrong or so utterly Philistine as it is the fashion in these super-æsthetical days to assume. The trick of a doleful conclusion has masqued and paraded as a sure proof of artistic inspiration when it is nothing of the kind. Unhappy endings may be more common than happy ones in life, although even that proposition is by no means proved; they seem so from the human habit of marking the disagreeables and letting pleasant things go unnoted. Writers of a certain school have assumed from this that they were keeping more close to life if they left the reader at the close of a story in a state of darkest melancholy; and they have made much parade of the claim that this is not only more true to fact, but more artistic. There is no reason for such an assumption. The artistic climax of a tale is that which grows out of the story by compelling necessity. There are many narrations, of course, which would become essentially false if made to end gladly. When the ingenious Frenchman rewrote the last act of "Hamlet," marrying off the Prince and dismissing him with Ophelia to live happily ever after, the thing was monstrously absurd. The general public is not wholly blind to these things. No audience educated up to the point of enjoying "Hamlet" or "Othello" at all would be satisfied with a sugar-candy conclusion to these. The public does ask, however, and asks justly, that there shall be no meaningless agony; and if it