My Contemporaries in Fiction by David Christie Murray

Within the last half-score of years an extraordinary impulse towards freedom in the artistic representation of life has touched some of our English writers. Thackeray, in 'Pendennis,' laments that since Fielding no English novelist has 'dared to draw a man. ' Dr. George Macdonald, in his 'Robert Falconer,' whispers, in a sort of stage _aside_, his wish that it were possible to be both decent and honest in the exposition of the character of the Baron of Rothie, who is a seducer by profession. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Thackeray was, that he was a gentleman, and that his good-breeding and his manliness were essentially of the English pattern. Dr. Mac-donald's most intense impulse is towards purity of life, as an integral necessity for that communion with the Eternal Fatherhood which he preaches with so much earnestness and charm.

That two such men should have felt that their work was subject to a painful limitation on one side of it is significant, but it is a fact which may be used with equal force as an argument by the advocates of the old method and the adopters of the new. It is perfectly true that they felt the restriction, but it is equally true that they respected it, and were resolute not to break through it. Their cases are cited here, not as an aid to argument on one side or the other, but simply to show that the argument itself is no new thing -- that the question as to how far freedom is allowable has been debated in the minds of honest writers, and decided in one way, long before it came to be debated by another set of honest writers, who decided it in another.