despite all our rather self-conscious prating about art, and notwithstanding our somewhat feverish enthusiasm over introspective social questions, the clear-headed and sound-hearted folk, who- thank Heaven!

are the warp of our social fabric, do not care to fret and fume for any such thing. They go to the novel for rest, amusement, illusion, as did the lovers of Thackeray and Dickens, of Scott and Dumas; as thousands again did in the case of Trilby, as true a child of the elder romanticists as was ever born. They have a deep-seated prejudice against fiction with a bad ending; so far from wishing to have a great book stamped indelibly on the mind at a first contact, they are glad to possess, as a cultivated reader expressed it to the writer, "the pleasant habit of forgetting a novel," assuring additional delight in the event of re-perusal. "The world is two-thirds bad, I know," says the Advocatus diaboli to the stickler for high art and serious purpose. "Your 'realism' teaches me nothing, it simply repeats unsavory and belittling facts of life; and I would have none of it. Give me lies rather than literalities, or, better yet, the half-truths of a scene

where the light is accented and the shadows put in corners where they belong." Now, this is unphilosophic perhaps, but it is natural and (pace Mr. Howells and those who jump with him) it is healthy, very. The trouble with the Howellsian view of fiction is that it is professional, and so not generally applicable. He is perfectly right — for himself.

But to argue pro and con as to this attitude of the readers who clamor for pleasant and incident-thronged novels, and who are the operative cause of the Romantic reaction we are now witnessing, is, after all, aside from our main line of argument. We are not We are not justifying their position or attacking it: we would simply register the fact of their existence, and express the conviction that, while equal in intelligence and possibly excelling in common-sense either of the two other classes, they are to-day, and will be more surely to-morrow, the strongest in numbers, and thus for practical reasons are to be respectfully regarded by the maker of tales. Mr. Crawford, in his chapters on the Art of Fiction, insists that it is the novelist's primary

business to purvey amusement. The believers in romances have a sneaking sympathy with this position, though many of them would claim, and rightly, that along with the pleasure may go a noble stimulation of ideals affording that instruction, through the divine indirection of art, which is as far removed from didacticism as from the irresponsibility of the thorough-going realist. The advantage of those whose cry is all for illusion lies in their being in the line of a wholesome tradition, since men and women have gone more steadily to fiction for just that than for aught else; and, again, in their now perceptible and daily waxing in strength, a phenomenon due to the noticeable reaction, on the one side from the strained probing of psychologic problems, on the other from the art which substitutes form for substance and a quiescent pessimism for the cheerful bustle and vigor of red-blooded humankind. It is an audience to depend on in any age, this of the romance readers, and in quality such that the writer of fiction may well trust himself to deserve its plaudits; it is a constituency which he should hes

itate to lose, even if there appear to be a temporary appetite for the morbid or the naturalistic. It is a backing which, year in and year out, will sell his books and establish his fame and make his copyright a valuable inheritance to his children.

IV

PERMANENT TYPES IN MODERN FICTION

The distinction of the modern novel the novel of analysis deriving from Richardson and Fielding- is its emphasis of individual character. The fiction of incident and plot is much older, and is still lusty, showing, in fact, within the past few years, an efflorescence in adventure stories, the names of Stevenson, Kipling, Weyman, Doyle, Crockett, and Hope coming to mind. But since Richardson's Pamela the development of the novel of character has been rapid and rich in results, standing for the main tendency; even the so-called novel of incident-exemplified by some notable works of Stevenson has had to pay some attention to analysis. The modern man is more subjective, and his fiction reflects the fact. In a great story that precedes by only a few years the analytic stories of Richardson and Fielding, as we have noted, the method is very