IN LITERATURE
inevitable laws; whereas they are really victims of their own ignorance. The laws of human nature, if Colonel Newcome were only wise enough to make them the instruments of happiness, would seem reliable, to wonder at, rather than inexorable, to fear.
Of stories and plays written in our own time it is enough to say that few of them show any persuasion that there is consequence in the world. If you open any of the numerous manuals which tell you how to write fiction, you may read that actions should be motivated, that there should be reasons why things happen—as though cause and effect were subdivisions of the literary art. Few of our contemporary writers seem to practise this instruction, and still fewer of their readers know whether they practise it or not. We have with us still, of course, special schools of
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