if she had risen. 'This must be put a stop to,' said she. 'We've stayed here long enough. I'm going home.'

"Louisa never mentioned Lily Dyer to him. She simply told Joe that while she had no cause of complaint against him, she had lived so long in one way that she shrank from making a change."

The titles of books from which these characteristic extracts are taken have not been given here, as the ordinary reader of American fiction may be interested in placing the sketches for himself. But as he glances over these variegated patches of color on the borders of the national domain and recalls the vast territory encircled by its boundaries, the diversity of its scenery and modes of life will be forced upon him. The next reflection will be upon the unity which encompasses and binds together all this variety of race and dialect into an individual people having common interests and purposes; and then the conviction will follow that more and more as facilities for intercommunication and interchange of views increase will sectional differences disappear and be replaced by a growing identity of speech and dominant ideas.

XXXVI

OTHER PHASES OF FICTION

THE writers of fiction mentioned in the last chapter nearly exhausted local fields of the present time in the United States. What they left has been cleaned up by followers and imitators. The Indian, the mining camp, the Spanish mission, the creole, the negro in several shades, the mountaineer, and the Yankee will yield nothing new for the present generation. Leading novelists saw this some time ago and cast about for fresh material. Some found it in foreign fields and in times that have become historic. Mrs. Catherwood and

Historic
Fiction.

Gilbert Parker, when a Canadian, following the lead of Parkman, the historian, found the old régime in Canada nearest home in place and time. "The Romance of Dollard," "The Lady of Fort St. John," and seven other volumes are the work of a novelist who found a rich vein of romance in the French and English struggle for supremacy in North America. Parker has found a similar "lead" in the old cities on the St. Lawrence in the days of Louis XIV., of which his "Seats of the Mighty" furnishes a good example of his interesting method in historical fiction.

General Lew Wallace went back nineteen centuries for his "Ben-Hur: a Tale of Christ," and to the Orient for the setting of a story which has been read by more people than any other during the last twenty years. He has had

competitors in a field which will be turned over again and again as long as the gospel is read, but no single writer has lent so much new interest to the old familiar story. As far back as 1837 William Ware was a pioneer of eastern romance in his "Zenobia" and "Aurelian" and "Julian," but later writers have made proportionate progress in oriental fiction.

The cosmopolitan American, Marion Crawford, has found material for his novels in India and Italy, in Arabia and Austria, in Europe and America at large. Foreign Twenty-five books in twelve years are the prod- Subjects. uct of a diligent and rapid writer. If all are not of equal interest and worth, the choice of them is large enough to satisfy the ordinary reader, who will begin, perhaps, with "Saracinesca" and end when he is tired or desires a change. The same must be said of other voluminous novelists. There are too many authors to be read to let any one of them monopolize attention. Quality tells for more than quantity since Cooper's laudable attempt to provide stories for a nation in a time of comparative scarcity. But when the years of plenty came, readers began to grow fastidious and to pick only the best, among which are several of Crawford's novels, especially those grouped about the one mentioned above and the oriental "Zoroaster."

From fiction of remote times and lands one may turn to that which is nearer home but yet international. are the fabrics that have been woven out of

Anglo

Such

Novelists.

Anglo-American material with ocean steam- American ships for shuttles. Travellers back and forth find that the Anglican family is essentially one, notwithstanding incidental squabbles between the older and

younger children, and that Americans are more at home in London than in Paris. Some of them have domiciled in the English metropolis long enough to set forth with tolerable justice the traits of both branches of the Saxon race, incurring at the same time the charge of emphasizing unfortunate peculiarities. Henry James, Jr., is the most prominent of this class. Educated abroad from his twelfth year in Paris, Boulogne, Geneva, and Bonn, he came to know European literatures and social life at an early day. This knowledge has become intimate by subsequent residence in foreign capitals, and is added to that inherited acquaintance with his own country which a native cannot easily shake off, even if he has the inclination. Besides, there are always enough Americans abroad as tourists or residents to keep an exiled fellow citizen reminded of the progress the nation is making. This is sufficient to save him great mortification, unless it be at his own withdrawal from his home and country. But there are always people in every country who can easily become acclimated in another, and where there is one American living constantly in foreign lands there are ten thousand foreigners here who have no desire to return to the conditions they left behind them.

Caricature.

The chief regret concerning our American authors who have become aliens from their native country is, that instead of representing its best they sometimes choose to caricature its worst. In this they are able to outdo the superficial foreigner who goes through the states" in a bee line for San Francisco and returns by way of Vancouver, Manitoba, and Montreal. What an American-born foreigner says of the best at home will always be taken with a grain of salt, but his portrayal of

the worst will be implicitly and gladly believed. In this our native critics resident in Europe have not the excuse that the home-staying censors have-namely, to correct and educate their neighbors, as Holmes and Lowell did. If the schoolmaster must stay abroad,let him confine his attention to dispelling the abundant ignorance he finds there about his native land, beginning with its geography and grammar and ending with its institutions. Lesser matters relating to the joyous and elastic spirits of its young people, and their startling freedom from conventionalities and traditions that have descended through oppressive centuries in Europe can be slurred over. Even the aspirations of ambitious older people are better than sluggish submission to inherited limitations. The international novelist has great opportunities for cultivating the knowledge which produces amity between nations, but it is not the best way of accomplishing this end to descend to the ludicrous exhibition of minor differences and eccentricities.

In the Inter

Realism.

The apology for this microscopical treatment rests in part upon a realistic theory of portraiture. Things must be reported with photographic exactness and minuteness of detail. Formerly a character est of was indicated by broad lines or by suggestive revelations of mental states. If a somewhat general and indefinite conception resulted, there was room for ideal reconstruction by each reader according to his personal bias. In the inevitable change of literary fashion a time. came when generalities would not do for leading writers. It was no longer satisfactory to say that the heroine had brown hair and an abundance of it. How it was dressed became an equally important question. And if the hero was said to wear a blue necktie, could that broad statement