Page:Moral Obligation to be Intelligent.djvu/164

 fiction, which insist on a precise or a continuous or an unselected rendering of experience—realistic and naturalistic schools; and individual masters of realism or naturalism from time to time captivate many readers. But even these individual successes, added together, seem to make no total impression on the reading world. In contemporary fiction characters slough off the past, serpent-like, and emerge brighter than ever; or they change their nature in a twinkling; and it seems that few readers seriously protest against the miracle. Our supposed faith in the logic of personality, our faith that a given character will act in a certain way, our faith especially that a man's conduct or occupation influences his character, that he is marked by what he does—all this we seem to have surrendered, substituting in its place a misty benevolence, a magic of the