do not jostle one another in their eagerness to secure even a semblance of the truth.  The taste of to-day is a strong appetite for sadism; and a novel to be successful must bear the stamp of society rather than the approval of the critic.  The reader has gone slumming, and must be shocked in order to be amused.  Reviewers tell us of a revolt against realism, that we no longer fawn upon a dull truth, that we crave gauze rather than substance.  In fact, realism was never a fad.  Truth has never been fashionable; no society takes up philosophy as an amusement.

But after all, popular taste does not make a literature.  Strength does not meet with immediate recognition; originality is more often condemned than praised.  The intense book often dies with one reading, its story is a wild pigeon of the mind, and sails away to be soon forgotten; but the novel in which there is even one real character, one man of the soil, remains with us as a friend.  In the minds of thinking people, realism cannot be supplanted.  But by realism, I do not mean the commonplace details of an uninteresting household, nor the hired man with mud on his cowhide boots, nor the whining farmer who sits with his feet on the kitchen-stove, but the glory that we find in nature and the grandeur that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his virtue.  Realism does not mean the unattractive.  A rose is as real as a toad.  And a realistic novel of the days of Caesar would be worth more than Plutarch’s Lives.

Every age sees a literary revolution, but out of that revolution there may come no great work of art.  The best fiction is the unconscious grace of a cultivated mind, a catching of the quaint humor of men, a soft look of mercy, a sympathetic tear.  And this sort of a book may be neglected for years, no busy critic may speak a word in its behalf, but there comes a time when by the merest accident a great mind finds it and flashes its genius back upon the cloud that has hidden it.

Yes, there is a return to romanticism, if indeed there was ever a turn from it.  The well-told story has ever found admirers.  To the world all the stories have not been told.  The stars show no age, and the sun was as bright yesterday as it was the morning after creation.  But a simple story without character is not the highest form of fiction.  It is a story that may become a fad, if it be shocking enough, if it has in it the thrill of delicious wickedness, but it cannot live.  The literary lion of to-day may be the literary ass of to-morrow, but the ass has his bin full of oats and cannot complain.

One very striking literary tendency of to-day is the worship of the English author in America and the hissing of the American author in London.  And this proves that American literature is scarcely more popular in England than it is at home.  But may not American publishers after awhile take up a London hissing and use it as an advertisement.  Hissing is surely a recognition, and proves that an author has not been wholly neglected.