master and mistress, and threw him all unfit upon the world, with a ballot in his hand but no wisdom. in his brain. Yet no question of past political expediency, no consideration, even, of exaggeration in the book, as regards the average condition of the negroes in the Southern States, can blind our eyes to the essential and enduring success of the novel. It is far from faultless in development of plot, delineation of character, or literary style; but it strongly seizes a significant theme, treats it with immediate originality and inevitable effect, and meanwhile adds several individual characters to the gallery of fiction. It was everywhere an anti-slavery argument because its pictures of episodes in the history of slavery were so manifest and so thrilling. Read in every state of the North and in parts of the South, and translated into twenty languages of Europe, it aroused the indifferent and quickened the philanthropic. Its power was felt, perhaps unconsciously, before a quarter of its pages had been read.

The author of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had the wisdom-not possessed by the pessimistic or selfblinded delineators of later woes in Russia-to brighten her pages by touches of humor and kindly humanity, and to obey the canons of the novelist's art as well as those of the moralist's conscience. Thereby her force was quadrupled, for literature both popularizes and perpetuates morality, while morality without art is fatal to literature. The book remains a vivid panorama of people and scene in a bygone time, now re

manded by final war to a past that must ever be historic and can never be repeated. The "abolition of tribal relations in Christ" was the broad theme of a Christian woman; and in treating it she produced an art-result of such inherent merit that the hand helped the soul as much as the soul the hand.

CHAPTER XII.

LATER MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN FICTION.

As the closing years of the nineteenth century have worn away, fiction has monopolized more and more of the attention of writers and readers in England and America. As a means of popular amusement it has completely overshadowed the drama; and it has demanded for itself threefourths of the circulation of many public libraries. The masters-Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Hugo, Tourguéneff, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poehave departed, leaving no successors for the time being; but the hope of easily winning money or notoriety, mayhap even fame, has crowded the literary ranks with story-tellers of every temper, theme and residence and of every ability save the highest. Watching the motley procession of fiction-makers, the critic is tempted to say with Omar Khayyam:

"A moment's halt-a momentary taste

Of Being from the well amid the waste-
And lo-the phantom caravan has reach'd

The Nothing it set out from-oh, make haste!"

But the later and younger story-tellers, novelists, and romancers of America have brought to their work a zealous if irregular ambition, a com

prehensive eye, and a skilful pen. Their best short stories are unsurpassed in the literature of the time; and while few indeed of their books or names will live, half a generation sometimes envelops a novelist's "fame" in permanent shade, -the average excellence of their work proves clearly enough the general resources of the American mind in this division of literature, and the certainty with which "the long result of time' promises to produce, once more, works of genius and imagination in the full sense. American story-tellers since the civil war have shown powers distinctly in advance of those of the lesser novelists in the years immediately preceding that conflict; and their keener vision and simpler methods have summoned before us many American types and scenes previously unnoted or unfamiliar. This manifest improvement in the quality of minor fiction since 1861 has been chiefly due to an honest attempt to describe American life as it is, in its breadth, height, and depth.

These later writers of fiction, however, though they fill a large place in the immediate literary landscape, have not completed their work nor given sure indication of their ultimate place in the intellectual history of their country. Many of them are still in youth or middle life, with their larger hopes unfulfilled and their more ambitious. plans unmatured. The only valuable method of studying their works is obviously to pay small heed to single volumes or individual writers, though intrinsically more praiseworthy than some

of their predecessors chronicled in these pages; and simply to take note of the principal tendencies of the American fiction of the time. This may readily and profitably be done, for the lines. of subject and method are drawn with sufficient clearness to serve both as a record and as a proph

ecy.

The first and most significant tendency, as I have said, is toward the production of novels of the soil, and the presentation of American types and scenes. The earlier writers had indeed followed to some extent this obvious and common method, but their successors have discovered new fields and characters, even more typical and interesting because less enveloped in the haze of the authors' own intellectual fancy. They have given large play to humanity, with its hopes, fears, loves, hates, and ordinary experiences; and a true realism has portrayed men and women as they are, creatures with souls as well as bodies and minds. The portrayal has been more successful in sketch than in finished picture, in short story than in rounded novel; but it has been well worth making, and has been well made. The dash, and fresh wholesomeness, and full-blooded life of the hastily-written and posthumously-published tales of Theodore Winthrop, issued in the midst of the civil war, fitly ushered in a fashion of plain truth-telling in fiction, which never- Theodore Winthrop, theless remembered that life has

1828-1861.

its color and romance as well as its dun tameness, and that from its wood and ashes the fire of aspi