the finest in the English language. But there are others where the bestowal of sentiment upon the commonplace and vulgar is felt to be petty, and hard to consider virile and really sincere. So, I think, in performing the details of daily work we regard calmness, and even a large amount of phlegm, as more becoming than any considerable show of enthusiasm.

And, indeed, how dull and well-nigh intolerable does life, with all its round of duties, happinesses, so-called successes, and cares, sometimes appear to the reflective soul! What is the meaning of it all, and what its worth? we ask ourselves and one another. Ecclesiastes may not teach the highest morality, but it forcefully expresses a universal experience in the effort of man to compass his own life. How spontaneous and strong the rush with which the operatives pour forth from the wide doors of the factory when the work of the day is done! In what manner, now, shall the evening hours be spent? Doubtless in the blind effort to find something which shall minister to the other side of the human mind. The old men may, tired out with the toil which is by its results barely to supply the wants of themselves and their families, go to an early bed. But the young men and the maidens will do something to escape ennui, and kill the time that stands between their toil and their sleep. They will seek something novel, something to give a momentary uplift to their otherwise commonplace lives. They will get a waking dream before they give themselves to the dreams of the bedchamber. They will frequent the beerhouses; they will dance, or see a cheap play, or walk the street, or talk or read the romantic stuff which both indicates and gratifies the stage of mental cultivation at which they have arrived.

It is obvious that the modern novel, from its very nature as growing out of and adapted to the modern life of the individual man, has a power to minister to the impulse of which we have been speaking, as no other species of literature can. Its field is the freest artistic treatment of the phenomena of the individual's life. In it we seek for the dream-life that shadows and softens all the life which we call real. It makes far less tax upon the reader, it requires far less of cultivation and of purely intellectual or artistic interest in literature, than does any form of poetic composition. It is a cheaper, more prolonged, and more feasible mode of relieving ennui than the modern drama affords. Moreover, the ability to suit a great variety of tastes and of grades of culture, which modern prose fiction has attained, is incomparably greater than that attained by either of the other most nearly allied species of literature.

It is in such facts and impulses of human nature that we are to discover the psychological origin of the modern novel. But if this view of its genesis and mission be correct, several very important conclusions, touching both the writing and the reading of this species of literature, follow almost as matters of course. Far be it from the professional student of mind to dictate rules to the artist, although the former may perhaps at times be permitted to say, humbly, to the latter: "Thou, too, art a man." For myself, I may say that I have the scorn of the literary critics by trade, and the wrath of the littérateur, too vividly before me to venture far into their sacred domains.

The principal points in debate as to the correct construction of the novel gather about the rival claims of the romantic and the realistic school. The latter is undoubtedly a necessary reactionary result of the extreme romanticism which controlled prose fiction in the preceding age. But what answer to the rival claims of the two schools does that human nature give whose impulses furnish the sources in which the writing and reading of novels arise? Here, as in so many other debates, the answer is a divided one; it consists in discriminating grades and degrees, to which certain general principles may be applied, but about which, in the detailed application, different tastes and judgments will always differ. In general, then, it must be said: "Both realism and idealism are right." Art must contemplate, and build itself upon, and foster itself in a constant communion with, what is real as matter of fact. But art must also interpret and idealize this matter of fact. To find the ideal in the real, and to show in what direction lies that point of union where real and ideal are one, this is the effort of modern philosophy, in its technical study and teaching. The two great schools of realism and idealism have together ruled the world of speculative thought since philosophy began to be cultivated. The chief and most encouraging sign of the philosophy of the present era is the tendency of these schools to find some real Ideal, some ideal Reality, on the Being and attributes of which they can unite.

So, too, in modern painting the study and portrayal, with interpretation and idealizing, of the actual, are engaging the attention of the most intelligent workmen. Technical perspective and anatomy, the moods of nature and the habits and phases of plant and animal life, are all to be most minutely observed and diligently studied; but not that the artist may degenerate into the copyist, but that he may build his ideal on the basis of reality.

Thus built, the ideal is the highest reality. In the art of novelwriting the same effort should be made, by each workman, however, according to his own mission and in his own way.

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It is interesting to notice how the two schools in novel-writing, antagonistic as they avowedly are, both suffer from violation of the same laws of the human mind. The romanticist may work the vein of the romantic in such a way as to beget that very feeling of ennui which the ordinary reader of the novel seeks to avoid; at the same time he surely loses the goodwill of that more thoughtful reader who seeks to recreate and help himself by contemplating the artistic representation of actual human life. On the other hand, the realist who makes his final purpose the mere portrayal of the minutiae of daily experience, or who stops too long by the way to indulge himself in the work of mere copying from nature, violates the rules of his art. He is also sure to beget in his reader the same feeling of ennui. In detailing external surroundings, describing the characters and narrating the conversations, in a work of prose fiction, great discrimination and skill are needed to attain just the right amount of realism, as it The petty arrangements and in themselves distasteful customs of a restaurant, for example, may be all set before us in such a way as either to instruct and please or disgust and annoy. So, too, the talk of common people may be made interesting or wearisome to the reader, according to the faithfulness of the author in depicting, and at the same time his art in idealizing, that which occurs in the speech of every-day life. Tolstoï makes us feel that we can afford to sit through an entire meal and look and listen, with Levin and Stephan Arkadyevitch at the restaurant; but the real experience with the poorest eating-house is scarcely less distasteful and depressing than our repeated visits to "Vatoldi's" in Mr. Stockton's company. Nor can we wholly clear our American authors Howells and Henry James from mistakes in the length to which they carry their realism. What can be more tiresome, whether we meet it in real life or in art, than much of the conversations in the "Bostonians " or the "Minister's Charge"?

Few questions concerning the obligations of art have been more warmly debated than the relations which the writer of the modern novel sustains to morals and to moral influence. On the one side stand those claimants who would make all art avowedly didactic, who would have no fiction permissible unless there were some plain sermon in it. On the other side arises the protest against

the submission or degradation of what is æsthetic under ethical rules, the claim that art must be free to give expression, under artistic limitations alone, to every phase of human experience. A study of the psychological origin and meaning of the novel shows that the truth belongs only in a partial way to either of these extremes. The ideal man and the ideal society are not urged and lifted toward the good by conscience alone. There are other ways of being taught than by sermons, or indeed by any species of didactic composition. And it is perfectly true that there is not a phase of human nature, not a side of human experience, whether it be what we agree to call " wrong" or what we deem "right," the just or the criminal, the elevated or the base, which is not capable and worthy of sympathetic study and artistic portrayal. But it is also true that man has actually, not only an æsthetic but also an ethical nature, and that it is impossible for art to make that which seems morally vile seem also artistically good. Doubtless a great diversity of judgments, a wide range of tastes, must be permitted, and may with safety be indulged.

The painter finds a legitimate field for his art in the swamp and fen, in the poisonous weed or noxious fruit. He may depict the barnyard with its pool and its wallowing swine. But if he choose these subjects, as an artist he is bound to show what of beauty and better meaning is in them all. He is bound to produce in the intelligent beholder somewhat of that pure and elevating pleasure which all real art gives. The same rule applies to the writer of prose fiction. We cannot say that he shall not make the attempt to treat any real phase of human life. We cannot say that he shall not bring us into the acquaintance, not only of those secretly wicked souls in which so-called "good" society abounds, but also of those known to be afflicted with wrong-doing, or even of those wantons and outcasts that are under social ban. But the worthy portrayal of the life of the gambler, the forger, the harlot, the seducer, the adulterer, the drunkard, the opiumeater, is so difficult an artistic achievement that any author may well shrink from it on other than moral grounds. There are subjects where neither coarse indifference to ethical distinctions nor mawkish sentimentality can be indulged. To describe these things so as to commend them, in themselves considered, is intolerable; and few venture to attempt this. But to describe them in all their details and with sentimental effusiveness, is but little if any better, whether it be considered from the æsthetic or the ethical point of view. Nor can we see how, in this regard, Mr.

Roe's "Without a Home" is of any higher moral tendency than Dostojevsky's "Crime and Punishment."

In estimating the alleged evils of novel-reading, I am inclined to think that there has sometimes been an unintentional exaggeration. The proportional number of the patrons of this species of literature is indeed somewhat appalling. But there are few of the readers of novels who, after all, are not employed during the greater part of their time in some form of real work. Nor can we say of most of them, considering the amount of their lives which goes into this work, that the play of romancing in which they indulge themselves is on the whole excessive. Perhaps it may be said that it is not so much a reduction as a redistribution of quantity which novel-reading needs. There are many who would find life less a burden, and its work lighter and cheerier, by increased judicious indulgence in this kind of literature; while there are many others—especially growing boys and girls — whose guardians should certainly take pains greatly to diminish their annual allowance of prose fiction.

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The charges to be made against the quality of the current novelreading are more serious and difficult of alleviation. They do not, however, all bear most heavily in the direction in which they are ordinarily aimed. Just as the music of negro minstrelsy sidered as music and with associations aside — is quite as improving as that of the average Sunday-school, so the romantic literature of the average book-stall considered as literature and with associations aside — is quite as improving as that of the average Sunday-school. And next to the Sunday-school library, as an offender in this regard, stands the public library. Thus do Church and State seem united to widen and deepen the streams of influence exerted by cheap prose fictions. There is little hope, however, to be discerned in the horizon when one is planted athwart the combined activities of Church and State. But the gradual æsthetic and moral development of the people is bringing about a marked improvement in this as in every species of art. By bettering and not by banishing this form of human dream-life we may expect to escape the worst of its evils and secure its choicer goods.

It will always be remembered, also, by the most thoroughly chastened minds, that the mission of art is not to those already cultured alone; its mission is, as well, to the great multitude of men. In order to accomplish this universal mission, it must reach after men somewhere near the level upon which they are stand