as the pastoral romance early exampled in Lyly's Euphues and Sidney's Arcadia, and finding its modern representation in Mr. Black, Mr. Blackmore, and others

and the bombastic pseudo-romance borrowed from the French of Scarron et Cie., and thank Heaven! — pretty much dead to-day, swell with contributory streams the now stately river of romance. But the adventure-tale that eventuates in Kidnapped and The Refugees is to be tracked down to Jack Wilton, artless product of Elizabethan times.

Nor, if we overlook the mere matter of prose-form, may we hesitate to go farther back in looking for the genesis of the spirit and purpose of the English romance. We shall meet with it several centuries earlier, in that sterling, sturdy literary form, the ballad; in certain of the verse narratives of Chaucer; yes, in the Old English epics themselves. Other times, other customs, and saga, epic, apologue, ballad, or novel may be the chosen vehicle; but the liking for story is a constant factor. The instinct for romance is the instinct for illusion, a request for pictures of a livelier and lovelier world than that we live in; it were fool

ish not to expect its gratification in art all along in the development of our literature. With this continual outcropping, this cyclic persistence, of the romance in English fiction, notable contributions in this kind may be anticipated in the near future, as a rebound from the deification of the psychoanalytic. The public is eager for it (apply the test of sales in the case of recent prominent romantic novels); and the writers of fiction take heart for the attempt, or by a natural resilience are of the tribe of Dan. But whether the movement produce marvels of romantic composition this decade or the next century, it is safe to say that the field will always be cultivated, appealing as it does to a permanent taste and satisfying an inevitable hunger. By no means is it to be said that the school of Messrs. Howells and James is in its decadence; fruitful and important work is sure to come thence, and its possibilities, especially in the domain of psychology, are as yet but half realized. But it is well to bear down on the fact that the pedigree of this school is no better than, is indeed not so old and honorable as, that which has De Foe as past master in the last

century, and is vigorously championed in fin de siècle English letters by Messrs. Kipling and Stevenson.

And it should be understood that this reaction toward incident in fiction is a phase of the wider protest against the abuse of that misnamed realism for which partialism is a fitter term. It is part of a tendency which has produced in Paris, the stronghold of the opposite influence, a revival denominated neo-idealism, resulting in symbolism in poetry and M. Wagner's noble trumpet-call to the young generation. Romanticism is to idealism in the novel what the garment is to the soul. In this broader implication, the romance includes Mrs. Ward's David Grieve and Mrs. Hunt's Ramona, books treating life in its more ideal aims and relations. The romance of the future will present such high interests, keeping pace with the evolution of society; and its vantage-ground over the romance of years agone will be that it is firm-based on truth to the phenomena of life, and is thus, in the only true sense, realistic. Nobler in content and persistent in type, the romance, broadly

the a posteriori analyses of the critics, an opinion of some solidity may be attained. The writer has made a point of conversing with all sorts of folk who care for fiction (and who, outside of the absolutely illiterate class, does not care for it?), and has been both interested and instructed by the testimony thus derived. Blending the illumination gained in this way with that from other sources, he has concluded that novel-readers may be divided, roughly, into three classes: first, those who care for fiction as art primarily, and get their main pleasure from its truth to life, its character analysis, and its construction; second, those whose interest centres in the thesis of the book, and who care little or nothing for form, style, and other distinctively literary features; and third, those to whom a novel is above all else a story-something to amuse and charm, an organism with movement and zest of life.

That division of novel-readers which looks for and relishes to the full the art of a bit of fiction is comparatively small, and for obvious reasons. Here belong the critics, the connoisseurs of literature. To such it matters not so much if a story be

pleasant, or whether or not it teaches. sound morality and superinduces a better opinion of one's fellow-men. If it have construction, vital character-drawing, and verisimilitude, if it possesses stylistic distinction and dramatic power, they are satisfied. The analytic student of the novel comes in the course of time to put his attention on these things to the exclusion of everything extraneous; he reads more as a scientist and less as a human being. This is at once the privilege and the penalty of the critical function. It is only the very great books that can wrest him. from this self-conscious and dubious coign of vantage and set him cheek by jowl with ordinary humanity, breathless in watching a piece of life and personally involved in the fortunes of the dramatis persone-in the grip of the sweetest and strongest of obsessions. Such, as a rule, is the critic's place and state of mind. Not always, even in his case, however. Mr. Andrew Lang, suffering, one one might almost say, from a surfeit of culture, likes nothing so well as the novel with "go" and color and life, contradistinguished from that of analysis and the mooting of problems. Conceiving the end