hundred young men and women are diligently, day and night, learning the rudiments of art.  The result is already apparent.  Excellent drawing is seen in illustrations for books and magazines, in the satirical and comic publications, even in the advertisements and theatrical posters.  At our present rate of progress, the drawings in all our amusing weeklies will soon be as good as those in the ‘Fliegende Blatter.’  The change is marvelous; and the popular taste has so improved that it would not be profitable to go back to the ill-drawn illustrations of twenty years ago.  But as to fiction, even if the writers of it were all trained in it as an art, it is not so easy to lift the public taste to their artistic level.  The best supply in this case will only very slowly affect the quality of the demand.  When the poor novel sells vastly better than the good novel, the poor will be produced to supply the demand, the general taste will be still further lowered, and the power of discrimination fade out more and more.  What is true of the novel is true of all other literature.  Taste for it must be cultivated in childhood.  The common schools must do for literature what the art schools are doing for art.  Not every one can become an artist, not every one can become a writer—­though this is contrary to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds that cannot, by right methods applied early, be led to prefer good literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its sincerity, naturalness, verity, and truth to life.

It is, perhaps, too much to say that all the American novel needs for its development is an audience, but it is safe to say that an audience would greatly assist it.  Evidence is on all sides of a fresh, new, wonderful artistic development in America in drawing, painting, sculpture, in instrumental music and singing, and in literature.  The promise of this is not only in the climate, the free republican opportunity, the mixed races blending the traditions and aptitudes of so many civilizations, but it is in a certain temperament which we already recognize as American.  It is an artistic tendency.  This was first most noticeable in American women, to whom the art of dress seemed to come by nature, and the art of being agreeable to be easily acquired.

Already writers have arisen who illustrate this artistic tendency in novels, and especially in short stories.  They have not appeared to owe their origin to any special literary centre; they have come forward in the South, the West, the East.  Their writings have to a great degree (considering our pupilage to the literature of Great Britain, which is prolonged by the lack of an international copyright) the stamp of originality, of naturalness, of sincerity, of an attempt to give the facts of life with a sense of their artistic value.  Their affiliation is rather with the new literatures of France, of Russia, of Spain,