would be complete without the mention of another writer— one whose classic pen has endeared to the national heart several quaint old hamlets, half real and half legendary, that nestle under the shadows of the mountains along the Hudson River, and one who probably forever will be the acknowledged prince of American prose. But Washington Irving was a sketch writer, rather than a novelist. He attempted no large canvas, but his "Rip Van Winkle" and "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" show of what polish and point a tool is capable. With him and Hawthorne we get the first smack of Helicon, the so-called sixth sense, the artist's secret of mixing his colors with brains. With the other writers there had indeed been no lack of brains, but generally at the cost of the story. Poe may have been the greater genius, but he was a blind and untutored Cyclops, his a weird voice out of the human soul singing without rhythm or motive. These better artists play upon our finer sensibilities or touch our moral sense, as the appeal to life is always more valuable than the mere eccentricities of genius, as the tiniest flower that the bee visits has more glory than towering ice-fields under the eternal shades.

There were other novelists of this period writing in a minor key. William Gilmore Simms, portraying passions rather than characters, was the originator of fiction of the dime story type. Catherine Maria Sedgwick led a long line of women romancers whose pens have constrained the public eye. Fanciful instead of imaginative, evincing ingenuity in place of skill, she interests rather than absorbs the reader. Lydia Maria Child, of nearly equal stature, did some fair work, but, lacking both the Hawthorne power to concentrate and the Kipling genius to transmute, can hardly hold more than a third-rate place. John P. Kennedy, whose character drawings are generally worthless, survives by his Horse-Shoe Robinson, probably the best work of fiction treating of the American Revolution.

About this period-the middle of the century-attracted perhaps by the success of Hawthorne, scholars of every walk in life entered the field. The historian left his books, the painter dropped his brush, the poet turned a deaf ear to his muse, and even the preacher sloughed his sacred stole, all to woo the fickle goddess of fiction. When we open the book at the second

half century, although there is no sharp line of demarcation, there is a decided change in the character of the work. The tone is deeper. Our national life was growing more serious; slavery, temperance, and labor problems were coming to the front. There was the hush of impending conflict. In 1852 appeared that epoch-making book, Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. It was a fiery Gospel disguised as a story, a hot typhoon out of the South, an incisive tooth that bit into the Northern conscience. The author was well equipped for her task, for she had in her veins the fearless blood of the Beechers, in her intellect the imagination of a Walter Scott, and in her heart the sympathies of the great Son of Sorrow. No tale of fiction ever so aroused the moral passions. It is not a classic in style, but as an ethical force it is perhaps unparalleled outside of the Bible, save in the incomparable "Faust" of the great German. Several women authors followed in the wake of Mrs. Stowe-chief among them Mrs. Spofford, who harked back to Poe and Brown for her inspiration; Mrs. Alcott, who is peerless in her representations of boy and girl life; Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney, who worked in the same vein, but paid attention chiefly to the children of her own sex; and Mrs. Stoddard, who discovered "Dickensites" even under the mask of the solemn Puritan.

But the civil war came, and the scenes of that gigantic struggle, as well as the complications of the reconstruction period that followed, afforded rare material for the novelist's art, but no enduring monument of fiction has yet been reared to those years of awful memory. Some have done fair work in this direction-notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, with his versatile genius; J. G. Holland, whose didactic element is mechanically rather than chemically mixed with his story; and Judge Tourgée, who is more drastic than dramatic and has more sympathy than symmetry. These scholarly pens have given us charming passages of wit, vivid sketches of scenery, and vigorous portrayals of character; but the cunning magician who can do for "Yank" and "Reb" what Sir Walter Scott did for Highlander and Lowlander, or the deft hand which can work up the abundance of war material with the marvelous skill that Sienkiewicz employed in molding the heterogeneous

voices that made Quo Vadis the book of its year, if not of its decade, has not yet appeared.

In fact, the recent successes of fiction have been on quite other lines. Just as the life of the most popular over-sea writer ebbed out, a star of similar hue and almost of the first magnitude rose over the Sierras of the Far West. Bret Harte, the antipode of Henry James, was the cousin of Charles Dickens, although the one found his heroes in the wilderness and the other in the metropolis. Unlike in many points as these authors are, yet Miggles is the kin of Micawber. The charm in the case of the American is in the contrast, and the contrast is of many kinds-fine literary art working on coarsest clay, humor playing over hellish passions, the grafting of saintly qualities on the most depraved of sinners, the angelic and the demoniac in a juxtaposition never dreamed of by Dante, the Gospel of salvation in the lowest pit of human nature. Add to this the journalistic craft that always hits the happy word, knows when to pad and when to prune, and never misses the right minute to ring the curtain down, and you have the secret of Bret Harte's magic.

This hasty survey of the American novel brings us down to the times of William D. Howells and the reign of realism. Fictionists, like physicians, have always quarreled about their art, but with the former the dispute has been chiefly one of motive. What ought to be the novelist's aim? Should his work have the fidelity of the photograph or the freedom of the painting? The answer to this question has divided the forces of fiction into two camps. The old writers never sought anything other than to interest and amuse. They were storytellers, pure and simple. Their origin-if we go not even back to Homer and Herodotus-writers under the guise of poet and historian-was among the trouvères and troubadours of the Middle Ages. It was the still more ancient folklore set to song and story. But, of late, there has arisen a school, principally French and Russian, whose teaching is that the novel should portray life-not life possible, exceptional, or even probable, but life actual and inevitable. Motives must be analyzed, natures must be natural, characters must be not heroic but prosaic, and all the machinery of life must be drawn on the

Philistine pattern of bread and butter getting. It eliminates the strange, the startling, and the supernatural, advising not, with Emerson, "Hitch your wagon to a star," but, "Tie your fiction to a fact." Of this theory Mr. Howells and Mr. Henry James have been the uncompromising advocates. The latter is the Matthew Arnold of fiction. He is the critic under the mask of the novelist, the painter of civilization rather than life, the refiner of silver and not the miner of the mountain's wealth. With him fiction is saturated with the scientific spirit; what cannot be declared to the ounce and the inch has no place. Conscientious even to his finger points, he must put in every petty detail. He is not the master artist who brings out the figure with a few swift touches of the brush. He has wit, but it is ill-secreted in his cells of thought; he possesses marvelous analytic power, but his characters seem to analyze themselves in their brilliant though often tiresome conversation. In felicity of phrase he reminds us of George Meredith, and in over-elaboration he recalls George Eliot, while he lacks the delicate sympathy of the one and the moral force of the other. Cold as a star, correct as a statue, clear as a pearl he never loses himself, never cries out, never is capable of a surprise. All his men and women are sane, all are sharp, and all, in one form or another, are Henry James himself. Through all his monotonously sparkling pages-slabs of fine ice-the ear aches for a shout, and the eye is parched for a tear. Here is realism, but it is realism of the sentence, not the soul. His work in its merits and demerits may be summarized in a single clause-it is art without heart.

But the head and front of realism in the United States is Mr. Howells, especially so since Mr. James has betaken himself and his English goods to a London drawing room. Mr. Howells is more American than Mr. James, and his style is more elastic. With the reportorial instinct for seeing and recording everything, with a touch as sure as Turgeneff, and a grasp on his characters as strong as George Eliot, he has made good his claim as a master of the realistic art. But his art is a limited one. In his forty or more novels he scales no heights, he fathoms no depths, he explores no dark continents of the human soul. He depicts superficial life with fidelity, and dis

sects externals with surprising skill, but his types, though wonderfully real, are all of the mediocre kind. Through his faultless diction and countless idioms we can read his theory of life. There are no villains, he would tell us, only weak people; no heroes, only obliging persons. When we nod over the pages of passionless people-the constructions rather than the creations of this literary autocrat and his half-English colleague, Mr. James-and place over against them the giant figures bodied forth by the genius of other lands-the Jean Valjean of Hugo, the Père Goriot of Balzac, the Countess Irma of Auerbach, the Anna Karenina of Tolstoi, and the other volcanic natures that have given their authors a reputation world-wide and doubtless time-long-we see how these tame characters of our most finished writers suffer immeasurably by the contrast. Mr. Howells would indeed tell us that there are no such intense people, no villains because men are too lazy, and no heroes because they are too busy. With equal truth it may be said that God never made a man like the souls of Angelo or a mountain like the summits of Turner, yet the human race will ever delight in these masterpieces of chisel and brush.

It was but natural that many clever writers should follow in the trail of so pronounced and prolific an authority as Mr. Howells, but they have all been more or less overshadowed by the chief apostle of their school, and can hardly have a hearing in this rapid survey. Others, however, more independent or more impatient of the leader's whip, must have place. These are Samuel L. Clemens-our inimitable "Mark Twain ""never in bondage to any man," whose humor has the stamp of universality, but whose misfortune it is, having begun as a fun-maker, not to be taken seriously by his public; Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett, who excels in placing characters over against each other and emphasizing by contrast, an art she has undoubtedly learned from George Eliot; Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who, spurred on by the popularity of Gates Ajar, ventured Beyond the Gates, though celestial fiction must in the very nature of the case be a failure; F. Marion Crawford, who would do better work if he did not do so much, taking time to stand back as an artist and look at his toil, but who