unnatural exertions in order to answer the demand, and sell their second best in lieu of their best, which takes more time. Very few of our modern novel-writers exhibit the conscientious care and leisurely method of Mrs. Ward or Stevenson. The temptation is great and the danger extreme. And far worse than this, a horde of hangers-on rush into the field, and by their antics, utterly lacking coherence, with no raison d'être to justify their presence, bring what is a gift, an art, and a consecrated labor, into misunderstanding and disrepute. It is fast coming to the point where a man who has not written a novel gains thereby a certain distinction; and this surely is ominous for the highest interests of Fiction. But it is questionable if the novel will remain indefinitely the dominant type, the maelstrom engulfing the various kinds of literary power and activity. All analogy points the other way, begetting a presumption in favor of some new form or the revival of an old. It is not impossible that with a new impulse in poetry of the narrative or dramatic order, Fiction will find its elder sister occupying her sometime place as a coequal.

Indeed, the forecast for the drama, uniting as it does the most splendid creative literary energy with action of the most direct and universally appealing kind, is especially bright. And the literary movement in this direction of late suggests an ultimate shifting in the relative importance of those forms of literary expression which in our day engage the interest and affection of

men.

II

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE ROMANCE

The now palpable reaction from the realistic, so called, in English fiction to the romantic, as a form and a method, suggests an historical retrospect. The fact is, the romance, in its several kinds, has persisted for centuries in our native novel, and its resurgence to-day is only a demonstration to be prophesied from past experiences in fictional evolution. Nor is the explanation far to seek. All the

world loves a story, as it does a lover; and psychologic interest, the analysis of motive and character, will never take the place of that objective interest which centres in action, situation, and dénouement. Our age takes more kindly to such methods and motives than did its predecessors; indeed, it has been taught to do so, and the novel of subjective tendency may be styled the chosen vehicle of expression. But always those who read as they run, and

the more critical class which seeks in books illusion from the workaday world, will desire the adventure story and the heroic presentment of human life. A host of people agree with Balzac that the writer of fiction should strive to portray society not solely as it is, but as it is hoped it will be in that "possibly better" state suggested by present improvement. One is struck by this in the simple inductive process of inquiry among intelligent book-lovers; the present writer has found that a large proportion go to novels for rest and recreation, rather than for a criticism of life or æsthetic stimulation, least of all for spiritual profit. If this last is to result, let it be unobtrusive, by way of indirection, not through the avowed tendenz fiction, seems to be the cry.

Text-books are fond of emphasizing the birth of the modern analytic novel with Richardson and Fielding, as if thereafter the whole trend were toward the subjective social study. It is true enough that a new impulse and manner were introduced by those worthies; but twenty odd years before Pamela, and Tom Jones, De Foe's Robinson Crusoe was in the

field to represent that undying creature, the Romance; and if Mr. Kipling and Mr. Stevenson, Mr. Hall Caine, Dr. Doyle, and General Wallace hark back to the seamy Daniel as prototype, he in turn derives from the picaresque tales that had gone before, and, to look to origins, is justified by the Spanish fictionists from whom our romance sprang. An early English example of the picaresque is Nash's Jack Wilton, which, clumsy as it is, and naïvely childish to modern taste, does nevertheless explain De Foe on the one hand and the penny-dreadful on the other. Jack, a page in the English army in France at the siege of Tournay, and a fellow of infinite gusto, much travel, and many escapades, is perhaps the first picturesque rascal in a genre to be afterwards enriched by Dumas and broadened and modified by Le Sage, Hugo, Scott, and Dickens. He is the father of harumscarums, and he initiates for all time the type of the picaresque story that division of the romance the essence of which lies in brisk, breathless adventuring and a lusty enjoyment of life as incident and spectacle. Such later divisions, of course,