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"Memories of a Hundred Years", which the Macmillan Co. publish in two attractive and profusely illustrated volumes. It is briefly the story of the nineteenth century in the United States which is here told, with a vivacity, a piquancy, a genius for seizing upon salient facts and putting them in the fewest words rarely equalled. Dr. Hale's own recollections extend over at least seven decades of the century and are supplemented by those of his father, and by family papers, for the earlier period, so that the personal element is strong throughout. Dr. Hale's Americanism is as robust at eighty as it could have been at twenty, and he unfolds the panorama of the national development, depicts the great events and the great men who shaped them, and fills in details of social, industrial, and literary progress with an unflagging interest which his readers will discover to be contagious. Doubtless a more orderly history might have been written, if Dr. Hale had been concerned with so grave a matter as the orderly writing of history, but it would scarcely have been as entertaining. His very asides, his bits of personal opinion, his abrupt changes from the past to the present, and the flavor of humor which gives piquancy to the whole add to the charm of the volumes. A fine photogravure portrait of the author looks out at the reader from the frontispiece.

Of rare autobiographic interest is the "Life and Letters of H. Taine," which E. P. Dutton & Co. publish. It covers but twenty-four years-his childhood, his education at the Ecole Normale, his failure to pass for the Philosophy Agregation, his work in provincial professorships, ampered by the unfriendly supervision which at last forced his resignation, and his return to Paris for independent study-stopping short thus of the time when the earliest of his

publications appeared. But periods of preparation have a significance of their own, and these letters give really fascinating glimpses of the evolution of their writer's thought. By far the larger number are addressed to intimates of the Ecole Normale-the frank outpourings of an ardent, fearless mind on the political and philosophical problems of his day-but these are diversified by light, bantering, affectionate notes to his mother and sisters, which reveal the domestic side of his nature with the same freedom. The translation, by Mrs. R. L. Devonshire, is a very satisfactory one.

A pleasant narrative style, delightful bits of description, dialogue glancing brightly from one to another of the problems of the day, caustic satire of current fads, and a picturesque grouping of striking figures against a New England background-all these are matters of course in Arlo Bates's novels. But his fiction has been weak in that human interest without which the most ingenious plot fails of its purpose. The characters have not been real, and the reader has not really cared what became of them. In this respect "The Diary of a Saint" is decidedly superior to any of its predecessors. Ruth Privet-daughter to the old Judge, and Lady Bountiful for the community-high-spirited and independent, yet keenly sensitive to the niceties of conduct and character,compels the reader's liking at the very outset, and he follows the passing of her love from one to the other of the two men who come to woo her with a sympathy that becomes absorbing toward the close. The most delicate social problems are bound up with Ruth Privet's personal perplexities, and the writer's treatment of them is at once decorous and searching, although his climax seems evasion. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

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It is tolerably certain that criticism will find in prose fiction, if not the greatest, at least the most characteristic achievement of European literature during the nineteenth century. We should be the last to underrate those great outbursts of poetry which attended, and were in part inspired by, the first and second French Revolutions; and doubtless in England Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron are names fully the peers of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Miss Austen, and Miss Brontë. But there have been other poetic periods not less notable than the age of Wordsworth in England, of Hugo in France. There has never before been a period in which the imagination of mankind gave itself over so completely to shaping imaginative thought in prose as that which began with the publication of "Waverley." For although the title of this paper refers to the nineteenth century, we are really concerned with that literary development to the opening of which Mr. Raleigh brings readers in his brilliant little monograph; wisely stopping short where the subject grew beyond the compass of any reasonable

"The English Novel: Being a Short Sketch of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of Waverley'." By Walter Ra

volume. After the appearance of "Waverley," for a few years yet the constellation of poetic genius shone with growing lustre; but soon three of its great lamps-Keats, Shelley, and By ron-plunged suddenly into darkness. Wordsworth began to pale an ineffectual fire, Coleridge to gutter out; while Scott, with a genius that had at last found full scope, went on from strength to strength, uniting in masterpiece after masterpiece the two elements that had hitherto been kept apart in work of the prose imagination -the element of comedy, satiric or good-humored, and the element of

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its existence, or in the first forty-eight numbers, the editor only devoted ten reviews in all to novels; and of these, five were concerned with stories by Miss Edgeworth, an authoress "whose design of affording instruction" entitled her novels, in the editorial eyes, "to more consideration than is usually bestowed on works of this description." Yet, let it be remembered, almost every issue of the Review devoted one article at least to some work in verse, even though the poets to be reviewed were of no greater merit than Mrs. Opie or Joanna Baillie, and often, indeed, were writers whose share has been a still more perfect oblivion. There were, no doubt, novelists doing work not inferior in merit to Mrs. Opie's poems; but the plain fact is that the novel was excluded from the Review's survey because the novel had fallen into the deepest disrepute. Richardson, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Sterne had each been followed by a crop of imitators, but had never established a school. The one writer of the eighteenth century who had succeeded in setting a fruitful example was Miss Burney, among whose disciples we may reckon Miss Edgeworth and another lady who was far greater than Miss Edgeworth, but of whose productions the Review, it must be admitted, took no contemporary cognizance. Miss Austen's "Sense and Sensibility" appeared in 1811, and her five other books within the next decade; but it was not till long after that a first mention of them was made in these pages. Yet among a wide circle of readers the vogue of the novel was, relatively speaking, as great as at present.

"From the Minerva Press in Leadenhall Street," says Mr. Raleigh (and the "Edinburgh Review," noticing "Delphine," bears him out by a contemptuous reference to this same institution), "romances poured forth in shoals during the years before the appearance of

'Waverley.' Of this vast body of worthless literature the single characteristic is imitation-shameless and unintelligent-of the most popular English and French authors. Mrs. Radcliffe, Godwin, and 'Monk' Lewis, Rousseau, Madame de Stael, and the Baronne de Montolieu (whose bestknown novel, 'Caroline de Lichtfield,' had been early translated by Thomas Holcroft) furnished the stuff for innumerable silly composites of sentiment and horror. . . It is worth noting that the largest and readiest sale was found by writers since forgotten."

Mr. Raleigh adds statistics. Two thousand copies of "Vicissitudes Abroad; or, the Ghost of my Father"-a work in six volumes by Mrs. A. M. Bennett -were disposed of at thirty-six shillings on the day of publication. Two thousand copies at thirty-six shillings may be counted equivalent to twelve thousand at the modern price, and in those days the Review computed that "there are in this kingdom at least eighty thousand readers." The staple reading of these eighty thousand was afforded admittedly by these "works of fiction," which, said the Review, in its notice of "Tales of my Landlord," "are generally regarded as among the lower productions of our literature."

But, as the reviewer then admitted, this summary classification had been upset by the apparition of "Waverley" -a work of genius which was promptly hailed by Jeffrey with its true title. Yet it is not a little curious to note how gradually, and, as it were, grudg ingly, the long-standing prejudice was relaxed. The reviewer of "Tales of my Landlord" was at some pains to explain that prose fictions might very conceivably prove preferable to epic poetry. "The great objection to them, indeed," he wrote, "is that they are too entertaining and are so pleasant in the reading as to be apt to produce a disrelish for other kinds of reading which may be more necessary. Neither

science nor authentic history, nor political nor professional instruction, can be conveyed in a popular tale." To this opinion (expressed in 1817) the Review adhered for a period, though noting in 1826 the continuously increasing application of talent to this branch of literature. "For every one good novel thirty or forty years back there are now a dozen." But still the view was held that "the novel is only meant to please; it must do that or do nothing." When Mrs. Gore, in her "Women as They Are," showed signs of writing something that should not be "a mere novel," but should convey information, the reviewer disparaged the attempt, maintaining that nothing should be in a novel which would appear tedious or displaced in a play. But in 1830 an article (dealing with various novels of military or naval life, by Marryat and other officers) opened with a full recantation of this heresy:

This is truly a novel-writing age!

Persons of all ranks and professions, who feel that they can wield a pen successfully, now strive to embody the fruits of their observations in a work of fiction. One man makes a novel the vehicle for philosophical and political discussion; another smuggles in under similar disguise a book of travels, or, as in the case of two recent travellers in Turkey, first sends forth the record of his tour and then a novel by way of corollary.

The case of the officer, the critic goes on to show, is analogous; soldiers and sailors can now without breach of discipline give the world an insight into the very heart of military life. In short,

it has been discovered that the novel is a very flexible and comprehensive form of composition, applicable to many purposes, and capable of combining much instruction with amusement. There is scarcely any subject not either repulsive or of a very abstruse nature which must be of necessity excluded from it.

Plainly, then, the status of the novel had been established as "a more creditable exercise of ability than it was previously considered"; and this change, as the Review said with great justice in the article from which we quote these last words, was due to Scott. We have insisted at some length upon this citation of contemporary opinion to emphasize what is imperfectly realized to-day-the importance of Scott's example, and the depth of the slough from which he dragged this admirable vehicle for thought. It is true that, before "Waverley" was written, Miss Austen had done, in silence and almost without recognition, fivesixths of her whole wonderful work. But Miss Austen, impeccable though she was, lacked what the greatest possess-that personal magnetism which kindles. Realizing, perhaps more fully than any other, that the novel must rest on observation and experience, she confined herself to effects perfectly within a scope so limited that nothing but sheer greatness could draw matter from it. She had no wide first-hand knowledge of life, no treasury of reading to draw upon such as Scott had; had she possessed the latter, she would scarce have utilized it, for fear of those artificialities and imperfections which Scott himself did not avoid. With Scott's resources, she would only have been a kind of glorified Galt; her mission was to intensify, not to extend, the range of observation. She might quicken the sense of comedy, and that human sympathy which lies so near it; she could not enlarge and nourish the imagination. It was for Scott to show outlying tracts of the world, and backward ranges of time, peopled with living creatures, who were not mere human abstractions, like the personages of French tragedy; to carry abroad and into the past something of that noticing eye which makes the present living and significant, and to blend, as Shake

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speare did, romance and comedy, high life and low life, into one many-colored pattern. And, dealing as he did from the first with Celtic peoples, where the point of honor is in no way confined to a caste, and gentility is claimed by the bare-legged follower as well as by the chief, he went far to make an end of the conventional distinctions in art between the motives and the sentiments of gentle and simple, rich and poor. In a sense, Scott, the clansman, paved the way for Dickens, the Cockney, and for the romance of familiar life.

It must be freely allowed that Scott had probably no intention of doing any such thing. No great man of letters, with the possible exception of Shakespeare, ever attached so light a value to his own productions as did the author of "Marmion" and "Waverley." He rehabilitated the novel, perhaps. less in his own eyes than in those of the world; and certainly his last wish would have been to establish a democratic form of literature. Nevertheless, such was the result-a result achieved, as it were, accidentally and by reaction. Scott himself at first accepted bodily the convention of a superior intrigue for the gentlefolk, and a secondary plot for the servants. But his principals, heroes, and heroines were gentlemen and ladies, so impeccable as to be devoid of vitality, while his Cuddie Headriggs, Andrew Fairservices, and the rest were affluent in life, stamped with the individuality of all real creatures.

Beyond the interest of the plot was the interest of the secondary characters, who were, indeed, the living forces that actuated and guided those accurate pieces of machinery, the highspirited young man and the ringletted young lady. And it was not long before even the primary convention dis-. appeared in the "Heart of Midlothian," when he produced a heroine of humble birth, without beauty, without romantic affection for any lover-a creature

of mere prose, and yet indisputably heroic. Jeanie Deans was, perhaps, the first heroine in prose literature sketched consistently with the eye of a humorist, and her strong existence put to shame the phantasmal Lucys and Julias. Scott's failures were only less instructive than his successes. Не showed the compatibility of romance with the most solid stuff of realism, and though from first to last it was seldom that he permitted himself to treat his leading lady or gentleman as he treated Jeanie Deans, yet he made it sufficiently plain how even heroines ought to be treated. And it was only the dashing young man and the pretty young woman of his own class who paralyzed his faculty: kings were handled in his pages with the same free imagination as beggars, and James I. of England or Louis XI. of France is drawn in not less boldly, not less unsparingly, than Edie Ochiltree or Davie Deans. Fundamentally, Scott was a realist; the romancer had his feet planted on the solid ground of fact; only at certain points did his method fail him, or, rather, did he fall short of his method's requirements. He had no desire to write stories altogether of ordinary or uneventful life in the shop or the cottage; in so far as he had theories, this procedure was against them. But, owing to the mere fact that the restraint of certain conventions, from which he never shook himself free, rendered low life in his books far more interesting than high life, both novelists and novel-readers were made ready to look for stories of romantic or tragic cast from which the traditionally picturesque and decorative elements, the obviously romantic, should be entirely excluded.

It must be allowed that this was by no means an immediate result. The first things to be imitated in Scott were not his essential excellences, but his accidental attractions. The Review, in

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