mode of the day in letters demanded the essay or the novel, they would as readily have turned in those directions. Peele was naturally a superior controversialist, Lodge could write so exquisite a prose pastoral as Rosalind, Rosalind, whence Shakespeare drew his lovely As You Like It, and Shirley had powers as a lyrist exampled in so dainty a song as that entitled A Lullaby.

At present the novel is the all-engulfing literary form. Alphonse Daudet has asked of late: "What shall be the novel, the literature, of the future?"— as if the two terms were co-terminous and interchangeable. Fiction has made sad inroads upon the ancient and honorable champaign of Poetry; the essay is as naught to it in popularity and applause; while even the stern historian tries to give his chronicle of the past, of "old, unhappy far-off things," a narrative interest, and some boldly throw their history into the guise of an historical romance, albeit their purpose is not artistic, but didactic, the imparting of knowledge rather than the giving of pleasure. Fiction, in short, is the modern magnet toward which all literary product and power

are drawn. That this predominance is in some ways an evil (despite the indisputable virtues of the novel), that it is possibly fraught with danger to general literary production, is a thesis which will at least bear further amplification.

The injury done to poetry has been alluded to. When Walter Scott, after triumphing in narrative and ballad verse, took up the writing of romances and charmed all Europe, he gave English fiction an importance and dignity hardly enjoyed by it before. Without overlooking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's testimony that Richardson's Pamela wrung tears from the chambermaids of all nations, it is pretty safe to say that with the Waverley Novels our fiction, as a distinct form, gained a prestige which, in spite of fluctuations and what at present some incline to call a woful devolution, it has never lost. And verse has suffered a proportionate decay of authority. It has come to pass that verse-men adopt a semi-apologetic tone in putting forth their wares, and the soi-disant scientific spirit of the age tends to look askance at such activity. To be sure, this indifference to poetry

in poetry in an age which made the poetic drama the recognized mode of expression? This, with two or three of his fine ballads in mind, to say nothing of the dramatic instinct in his fiction, is not so superficial a suggestion as might at first appear. But born into these latter-day conditions, he is an Uhlan of story-telling, who only now and then makes a side-charge into the placid domains of Poesy.1

Fiction, again, draws the natural essayist away from his metier. Those heretical enough to prefer the essay-work of Henry James to his novels will think of him in this connection; a humorist like Mark Twain, undoubtedly a teller of tales, but hardly a novelist in the full modern content of the word, is another exemplar. The cult of the analytic in fiction has led many writers, whose forte lay in such effects rather than in synthetic creation, into novel-making; and, conversely, perhaps the analytic tendency has been thus exaggerated, until it has culminated in The Story-That-Never-Ends. Interesting questions and cross-questions arise

This was written, of course, before Kipling's full fame as a poet had come.

here.

But the main contention, that this modern maelstrom, with its secret undertow, has drawn the essayists into its potent circle, to the impoverishment of the essay - delightsome form made luminous by the names of Montaigne, Lamb, Heine, and Arnold — and, as well, to the dubious improvement of Fiction itself, is for easy apprehension. Recently, and in large part due to the brilliant critical papers of such English and American writers as Pater, Stevenson, Moore, Lang, and Repplier, a reaction in favor of the essay is observable, and it may be that this will grow into a veritable renaissance. So far, however, it is little more than a beginning. That the reading of the older and standard essayists has been checked by the novel and its half-breed ally, the newspaper, cannot be gainsaid.

But regarding Fiction alone, what are the effects of this autocracy which it maintains in the world of literature? To our thinking, we get bad novels, and too many of them, because of it. The form has so supreme a power, and the emoluments are so glittering, that those who have it in them to do good work lash themselves to