ing upon Ferris in his capacity of Amer- | weak points of his manner, and reminds ican consul, in order through him to draw us that no amount of skilful dialogue and the attention of the American government, true description can make up for the lack then struggling with the rebellion of the of that subtle atmosphere, that adequacy South, to a breechloading cannon of his of feeling and motive, which alone make own invention. Ferris unkindly points a story interesting, and bestow a charm out that the cannon is more likely to on commonplace things and persons. damage its friends than its enemies; and The peril of American realism is trivialin the course of his talk with him lays ity, and in "The Chance Acquaintance bare the ignorance, the childlike simplic- Mr. Howells comes dangerously near to ity, the crude scientific dreams of the this Nemesis of his art. His latest story, poor priest. But there is something very "A Modern Instance," is not yet finished, winning about Don Ippolito, and when and no one has a right to judge such the opportunity comes for doing him a minute and delicate work as his while still good turn with the Vervains, Ferris gladly incomplete. But, as far as we can see, it puts the chance of earning some napo- deals once more with a subject of intrinsic leons in his way. Soon Don Ippolito and interest such as was the subject of “A Ferris are equally free of the Casa Ver- Foregone Conclusion," and we have laid vain, the two ladies taking up the priest down the last number of it as confident as in their easy, generous American way, ever in Mr. Howells's future and as sensiand doing their best to brighten a life, tive as ever to his peculiar charm. which, from their point of view, is naturally a gloomy'one. How the shadow of a hopeless passion falls on the poor priest; how for a moment, led by the innocently enthusiastic Florida, he dreams of fling. ing off cassock and cloak and beginning life again as an engineer in America; and how the first revelation of his passion repels Florida and shivers his web of fondly woven fancies, Mr. Howells tells with perfect mastery of incident and phrase. Don Ippolito we feel iş but half a man; his science is little more than dabbling; his ignorance of the world is ridiculous, but at the same time, when the crash comes, our sympathies are all with Florida's bitter and boundless pity for the poor, maimed, forlorn creature. Her last interview with him comes nearer to tragedy than anything Mr. Howells has elsewhere attempted, and nowhere have his qualities of reserve, of condensed and forcible expression stood him in better stead. Of course Don Ippolito dies, and from his grave there springs in time a bloom of happiness for Ferris and Florida. But Ferris is hardly worth his good fortunes, and with the disappearance of Don Ippolito even Florida loses half her charm. It is the greatest triumph of the artist that out of material so little idealized, and by the help of the least pretentious of methods, he should have produced a story of such enduring and pathetic interest.

"The Chance Acquaintance," (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1882), a slight story of a steamboat friendship which ends in very natural disillusion on both sides, is to our mind a long way below Mr. Howells's other work. It shows the

Among Mr. Howells's followers and rivals the most considerable is Mr. Edgar Fawcett, whose "Gentleman of Leisure" (Sampson Low), with all its inferiority to "The Lady of the Aroostook" or to Mr. James's work, is yet vigorous and promising. It is the story of a young American who has been brought up in England, with such success that he is wholly English in sympathies and manners. Business connected with a large legacy from an uncle brings him at last to New York, where he arrives, expecting some amusement but more annoyance from the raw, vulgar, hail-fellow-well-met,sort of society he has always associated with the name of America, and only anxious to get his business done and to go back again. His first dinner party, however, reveals to him that social grades in America are probably more rigid than in Europe, that pride of birth and class rides rampant in what is called good society in New York, and that to despise America, her institutions and her politics, to ape English manners and buy English clothes, and to approximate as closely as may be to the ways and speech of the English upper class, are the indispensable credentials of an American fashionable youth. With regard to social distinctions, he asks his next neighbor at dinner, a thin, aristocratic-looking spinster, bearing the orthodox Dutch name of Spuytenduyvil, to enlighten him a little, and she obligingly takes him in hand.

"It is a very hard matter to explain," she said, "people don't usually talk about it at all. One usually passes over the whole subject. That is thought to be the wisest plan. Í regret to tell you, Mr. Wainwright, that those

power and opportunity. In the second | old effects are worn out, new ones must
place, the literary capacity of the writer is be sought in scenes and topics which
no less remarkable than the strong feeling
of his work. The wit and terseness of
the conversations, the ease and rapidity
of the descriptions, the absence of all
affectation and unreality place it high
among novels and connect it in spite of
its many individualities and its compara-
tive sketchiness of treatment with the
general school of writing we have been
describing.

past generations had at last succeeded in
banishing from the domain of art, but
which the novelist of to-day clamorously
brings back upon us in the name of truth.
Hence the upgrowth of French realism,
of M. Zola and M. Daudet and M. Dumas
fils. If ever a school was marked with
decadence, with the signs at once of lit-
erary satiety and moral extravagance, it
is the school which has produced "L'As-
So far we have been dealing with writ- sommoir" and "Numa Roumestan." It
ers from New England or the more north- draws life, indeed, but life ragged and
ern States. But the New Orleans novels sore and hideous as M. Zola's Parisian
of Mr. Cable contain a delighful promise canaille. Many of us at least have never
that before long American imagination been able to reconcile ourselves to the
will spread itself over the comparatively descent of so dark a fate upon an art
alien South, with its patches of French whose first and last mission is to bring us
and Spanish population, and will find pleasure. And to such rebels against
means of bringing home to us the gayer French aims and methods, these new
colors and fiercer incidents of Southern American novels are full of promise and
life, with the same fidelity, the same mas- consolation. For they prove that, rightly
tery of representation, which it has already scanned, life is as full as ever of subjects
spent upon the tamer, chillier North. On that charm without wounding and amuse
the whole, indeed, it seems likely that a without degrading, that realistic descrip-
wide and multiform development is in tion need not be sensual description, and
store for the art of novel-writing in Amer- that a novelist may escape conventionality
ica. We do well to rejoice in it. For, as without falling back upon topics which
many have felt of late, the fortunes of excite all that is most dangerous and least
European novel-writing are just now in a controllable in human nature.
rather critical condition. Our own En-
glish school seems to have been worked
out. Some of our best writers are re-
cently dead. Those who remain have
long passed their zenith, and produce
nothing more of striking interest. And
of worthy successors to them there are as
yet no signs. Nothing, indeed, could
well be poorer or barrener than the aver
age crop of novels which each season
produces. In France, on the other hand,
there is no lack of power, and at least
some five or six writers of conspicuous
ability are still in the full tide of produc-
tion and popularity. But it is a power
which has gone to service with ugliness
rather than with beauty, the queen and
mistress of all true art. French writers
have perceived the truth that the day of a
certain kind of fiction is done. The con-
ventional love story with the conventional
intrigue and dénouement may indeed keep
its hold on the multitude for some time to
come, but it is no longer worth a clever
man's while to write it. The modern
novelist must go further and deeper than
his predecessors. He must come nearer
to the realities of life, adds the French-
man, be they grim or sordid, or merely
animal and instinctive. Above all, he
must get effects and sensations, and if the

One great European novelist, indeed, there is, whose art is as wholesome as it is original and powerful. But upon Tourguenieff there lies the shadow of Russian unrest and anxiety, of an old European nation struggling with desperate problems and deep-rooted social miseries. Hence his realism, impressive and noble as it is, is always more or less sombre, and runs naturally into tragedy. The light-heartedness and sparkle of American dialogue, the youth of American society, the bound. less promise-filled horizons of the New World, make a cheering contrast to this massive, melancholy art. At the same time the comparison shows us the weak points of such work as we have been describing. It impresses upon us that this new American literature is still greatly lacking in soul, in poetry, in the higher kind of seriousness. Grace, vivacity, truth to nature, tenderness of feeling, it has all these; what it wants we shall never realize so clearly as when we compare it with the finest work of Tourguenieff or, better still, with that of our own George Eliot. No living American writer, so far as we yet know, could have written, say, the scene between Mr. Gilfil and Caterina, after Caterina's flight, in "Mr. Gilfil's Love Story." It is by no

means one of George Eliot's finest scenes, | for the identity between Church and State, but it possesses a peculiar pathetic quality which helped to bring about the overthrow of which, so far, American fiction has of Marlborough and his friends, and to shown few traces. Life, however, is full prepare the conclusion of a far from gloriof just such pathos, and a writer like Mr. [ous peace. During the great struggle of Howells will scarcely reach the highest England against Napoleon, many fluent summit of his art till he has added this English writers of verse strained their note also to his range, till, finally, he has energies in odes to Wellington, and in learnt to move our hearts as powerfully celebration of his splendid achievements; as he has long since charmed and satisfied but the people's heart was never touched as it had been when Campbell sang Nelson and his sailors, and, like Dryden before him, boldly pressed the legendary beings of the sea into the obsequies of our naval heroes:

itself to a treatment of our national history, at once eclectic and comprehensive, in accordance with the double tendency of our age. No doubt a supply of patriotic poetry, whether lyrical or other, is not to be obtained at command like a line of fortresses or an iron-clad fleet; and it would be worse than futile to attempt to predict the course of our own or of any other poetic literature. One thing, however, may be asserted without presumptuousness. Whenever a true poet, who is also a true patriot, seeks to treat our

desire for re-opening cases already settled
for it by its favorite authorities. The
effort is not everywhere readily made to
distinguish between the real queen Eliza-
beth and Gloriana, or between Richard
III. and the Richard of Shakespeare's
play. Thus a task both novel and noble
seems to offer itself to the poets of an age
like our own, more given to critical in-
quiry than its predecessors, and better
equipped for such a purpose than they.
Far from ignoring the impulses of patri-
otic sentiment still common among our
countrymen, or mistrusting the same feel-national history poetically, without losing
ings in themselves, our poets may, with a
fair prospect of success, seek to judge
the great actors and events of our national
history without the partisanship and prej-
udice which were hardly to be avoided by
our ancestors, and may thus stimulate the
"high spirit" of the present age, while
rectifying many a misjudgment of the
past. Nor can there be much doubt but
that the freer the forms in which such
attempts are made, the less likely will
they be to fail of achieving their ends.
No writer of our times will be tempted to
revive, with or without the adornment of
subtle stanza-forms, the versified chronicle
of the thirteenth century, beginning with
the siege of Troy or the foundation of
Troynovant, and duly brought down to
the great thunderstorm which most re-
cently "o'er pale Britannia passed." Nor
is the much-adapted "Mirror for Magis-
trates" capable of readaptation for the
use of the nineteenth century, nor would
another "Albion's England," vivacious
even to a fault as Warner's verse is, fall
otherwise than flat upon modern ears.

sight of the inner continuity belonging to
it, his endeavor must establish a claim
upon the recognition of all in whose moral
and imaginative world the history of their
country has a share. To make the high-
est of all human arts subservient to any
ends but its own, would indeed be to
misunderstand, and thereby to degrade,
poetry itself. And even were this not so,
patriotism is neither the very noblest of
all the emotions that wing the soul of
man, nor one of those which appeal with
the same force to every human heart.
The poet's choice is free; but for an age
which is like our own, in love with its own
indefiniteness, and many of whose chil-
dren find no study so interesting as their
own complex beings, nothing could be
more salutary than that its poets should
"memorize anew the ancestry"
" of the
heroes and the heroism of a great nation
like our own. It is not, I think, going too
far to say that our younger generation at
least frequently takes too narrow a view
of the culture which it professes to wor-
ship, dissociating from it much which is
Whether a second period of splendor not indeed culture's highest end, but
awaits that uniquely English growth, the which itself forms one of true culture's
dramatic history, it will perhaps be time best parts. Such a generation needs in-
enough to discuss when we have againvigorating as well as refining; and for
become possessed of a really national
theatre. No classical or modern litera-
ture has anything which can exactly be
compared to this wonderful growth of
English patriotic poetry. The national
historical element in Attic tragedy was,
as a rule, allusive only; and of the Roman
prætextate we hardly know enough to justo ignore.
tify anything beyond conjecture. The In magnis voluisse sat est, but it is not
dramatic literatures of other modern na- only as a first effort, conceived in a spirit
tions have still fewer analogous growths, worthy of its purpose, in the direction I
except where they have avowedly followed have sought to indicate, that Mr. F. T.
the Shakespearian model. Signs are not Palgrave's recently published "Visions of
wanting that in this direction also the England " will in my belief take their
English drama may once more assert its place in our poetic literature. Nothing
prerogative. But in the mean time a form that Mr. Palgrave does is idly done; and
of poetry more elastic than either the ep- he had reasons which if not all equally
ical or the dramatic will most readily lend | convincing are all worth listening to, for

Englishmen at least the time has not yet come when life would be worth living apart from the duties and aspirations of patriotism. Happily, the duties and aspirations in question are such as neither our own nor any previous period of English poetry has been contented altogether