Considerations similar to those which we have adduced regarding the implied philosophy of a story apply to its moral purpose. We cannot demand of the writer that he have no moral purpose or that he leave morality out of his story. For, since the artist is also a man, he cannot rid himself of an ethical interest in human problems or with good conscience fail to use his art to help toward their solution. His observations of moral experience will inevitably result in beliefs about it, and these will reveal themselves in his work. Yet we should demand that his view of what life ought to be shall not falsify his representation of life as it is. Just as soon as the moral of a tale obtrudes, we begin to suspect that the tale is false. We have such suspicions about Bourget, for example, because, as in _Une Divorce_, we are never left in doubt from the beginning as to the conventions he is advocating. And along with the feeling for the reality of the story goes the feeling for the validity of the moral; they stand and fall together. A story's moral, like life's moral, is convincing in proportion as it is an inference from the facts. The novelist, fearing that we may not have the wits to discern it, is justified in drawing this inference himself; yet it must show itself to be strictly an inference from the story--the story must not seem to have been constructed to prove it. "_Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,_" wrote Schiller; even so, the delineation of life is the criticism of life. To show the scope of disillusion, monotony, repression--life's generous impulses narrowed and made timid by the social, economic, and political machine--would be a criticism of our modern world; there would be no need of moralizing. This the Russian novelists seem to have understood; they judged Russian life by describing it. The man who writes literature as a means for promulgating political or moral ideas is either a conservative who desires to return to the conventions of the past, or else a radical who seeks the establishment of a new mode of life. The method employed by the former usually consists in exposing the restlessness and unhappiness of people who live in accordance with "advanced" ideas in comparison with the contentment of those who follow the older traditions. Such stories are, however, inconclusive, because they imply the false sociological thesis that the remedy for present ills is a return to the customs of the past. Happiness can indeed exist only in a stable society; but each age must create its own order to suit its changing needs; it cannot, if it would, go back to the old. These stories, therefore, although they often contain truthful and valuable pictures of the ills of contemporary life, and are useful in helping to conserve what is good in the spirit of the past, are nevertheless bound to be futile in their main endeavor.