It is this relative difference in the permanence of impression that distinguishes the work of the novelist as artist from all the other arts and pursuits of the world. _Trilby_, for instance, was no great shakes of a book in the great scale of things, but an American gentleman asserted to me the other day that that work did more to cosmopolitanize the populations of the Eastern States than any movement of an international nature that has been seen since the Declaration of Independence. I don’t know if that is true, but it usefully puts a point of view--and I am not the one to deny it. It is, in short, unbearable to exist without some view of life as a whole, for one finds oneself daily in predicaments in which some sort of a pointer is absolutely necessary. Even though no novel known to you may exactly meet your given case, the novel does supply that cloud of human instances without which the soul feels unsafe in its adventures and the normal mind fairly easily discerns what events or characters in its fugitive novels are meretricious in relation to life however entertaining they may be as fiction. That the republic--the body politic--has need of these human-filtered insights into lives is amply proved by the present vogue of what I will call novelized biography. Lives of every imaginable type of human being from Shelley to Washington are nowadays consumed with singular voracity, and if some of the impeccable immortals are in the upshot docked of their pedestals there can, I think, be little doubt that, in the process, the public consciousness of life is at once deepened and rendered more down to the ground. And the human mind is such a curiously two-sided affair that, along with down-to-the-ground renderings, it is perfectly able to accept at once the liveliest efforts of hero-worshippers, denigrators, or whitewashers. The amiable mendacities of the parson who gave to us the little axe and the cherry-tree are to-day well known to be the sheerest inventions; the signal reputed to have been given at the battle of Trafalgar is far more soul-stirring than the actual rather stilted message that Lord Nelson composed. And even if Henri IV of France never uttered his celebrated words about the chicken in the pot, humanity must have invented them--and that too must have been the case with the cherry-tree. In the days when these catch-phrases received worldwide acceptance the public was in fact doing for itself what to-day is left to the writer of fiction.