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With four illustrations. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. Mr. Skertchly, besides weaving a fascinating story of adventures, has incorporated into it much curious information about the natural history, game, native customs, and annals of Ashanti. JOHN RUSKIN, HIS LIFE AND TEACHING. By J. MARSHALL MATHER. Third Edition. 12mo, cloth, $1. A simple outline of Ruskin's life and teaching, intended for those who purpose a detailed study of his writings. By the same Author. POPULAR STUDIES OF NINETEENTH By J. MARSHALL MATHER. 12mo, cloth, $1.00. A series of talks, or studies, on the style and characteristics of the modern British poets. SHORT STORIES OF LANCASHIRE LIFE. By J. MARSHALL MATHER. 12mo, gilt top, $1.50. These stories introduce the reader to a comparatively unknown type of character. Narrow and Puritanical, there is at the same time a rich vein of humor and poetry running through the peasant and factory life of the County Palatine. 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With numerous Illustrations from Photographs taken by the Author, and Maps. 8vo, cloth, $5.00. Mr. William Astor Chanler's description of his travels and Explorations in Eastern Africa forms one of the most deeply interesting books published in recent years. Mr. Chanler and his companion, Lieutenant von Höhmel, himself a noted explorer, were the first white men to penetrate into many of the regions here described, and the account of their adventures and perils, their achievements and their misfortunes, forms a narrative fascinating, not alone to the traveller and the scientist, but also, and more especially, to the sportsman and to the lover of exciting romance. AN AMBASSADOR OF THE VANQUISHED. Viscount Elie de Goutant-Biron's Mission to Berlin, 1871-1877. By the Duke DE BROGLIE. Translated, with Notes, by ALBERT D. VANDAM, author of "An Englishman in Paris." 8vo, cloth, pp. 282, $3.00. FATHER ARCHANGEL OF By G. and R. B. CUNNINGHAME GRA- THE COURTSHIP OF MORRICE A Romance. Being a Record of the Growth MR. F. MARION CRAWFORD'S NEW NOVEL. ADAM JOHNSTONE'S SON. By F. MARION CRAWFORD, author of "Casa Braccio," "Katharine Lauderdale," "Saracinesca," etc. With 24 full-page Illustrations by A. FORESTIER. 1 vol. 12mo, cloth, $1.50. Vol. XI. The Case of Wagner; The Twilight Idols; Nietzsche contra Wagner. This sole authorized edition of "Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche " is issued under the supervision of the NietzscheArchiv at Naumburg. It is based on the final German edition prepared by Dr. Fritz Koegel, by direction of Nietzsche's relatives. Memoir of Henrietta Renan, by the Author of A Memoir and the Letters of ERNEST and HEN- THE PILGRIM, and Other Poems. By SOPHIE JEWETT (Ellen Burroughs). MEMOIRS OF FREDERICK A. P. BARNARD, THE STATESMAN'S YEAR-BOOK. Statistical and Historical Annual of the States of the World for the Year 1896. Edited by J. SCOTT KELTIE, Assistant Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, with the assistance of I. P. A. RENWICK, M.A., LL.B. Thirty-third Annual Publication, Revised after Official Returns. With 4 Maps.-1. To illustrate the Anglo-Russian Delimitation of the Pamirs. 2. The Anglo-French Arrangement, 1896, with respect to Siam. 3. The British Guiana and Venezuela Boundary Dispute. 4. To illustrate the recent arrangements in Bechuanaland. Thick 12mo, cloth, pp. xxxii.-1164, $3.00 net. The four maps which are prefixed to this year's addition of the “Year-Book" will serve to elucidate more clearly than words can do the questions which they are intended to illustrate. The sections relating to the navies have been thoroughly revised by Mr. S. W. Barnaby, so that it should be easy to ascertain the comparative naval strength of the different powers. MACMILLAN & COMPANY, 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK. A Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Biscussion, and Information. THE DIAL (founded in 1880) is published on the 1st and 16th of each month. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION, $2.00 a year in advance, postage prepaid in the United States, Canada, and Mexico; in other countries comprised in the Postal Union, 50 cents a year for extra postage must be added. Unless otherwise ordered, subscriptions will begin with the current number. REMITTANCES should be by check, or by express or postal order, payable to THE DIAL. SPECIAL RATES TO CLUBS and for subscriptions with other publications will be sent on application; and SAMPLE COPY on receipt of 10 cents. ADVERTISING RATES furnished on application. All communications should be addressed to THE DIAL, 315 Wabash Ave., Chicago. Vol. XX. THE PIONEER OF AMERICAN JURISPRUDENCE. PAGE 225 THE TRIUMPH OF THE NOVELIST. During the greater part of the nineteenth century the novel has been the most distinctive of literary forms. Historians of literature have so amply recognized the fact and critics have so copiously moralized over it that the subject has become almost as hackneyed as that of the weather. The Puritan prejudice against novelreading, once almost as potent as the Mohammedan injunction against graphic portrayal of the human form, has so completely vanished from the general consciousness of the public that we look with curious wonder at the belated preacher who still here and there voices a protest that would have found much support a generation or two ago, and that now falls upon absolutely unheeding ears. We read novels nowadays as a matter of course, just as we go to the theatre and eat mince pies, although all of these practices were condemned by the sterner morality of our forefathers. And not only do we read novels without compunctions of conscience, but we are actually encouraged to read them by those to whom we look for intellectual and spiritual guidance. Our high schools and 233 colleges prescribe courses in novel-reading, and our clergymen take them as texts for their sermons in a sense very different from that in which they used to be taken by gentlemen of the cloth trained in the traditions of an older school. 227 230 232 236 239 241 243 246 247 248 248 While nineteenth-century readers have been, as a class, almost universally addicted to the fiction-habit, there is no reason for thinking that the readers of the twentieth century will be any the less so addicted. Philosophical critics sometimes tell us that the novel will run its course and be replaced by something else, just as the drama and the poem and the essay have at other times and in other lands run their respective courses, and lapsed from favor. But these critics do not give us any very definite forecast of what the coming literary fashion is to be, and the novelist meanwhile snaps his fingers at all such iconoclasts. He simply keeps on producing what the public wants, with small regard for the opinions of those who tell us what the public ought to want. He has ridden upon the top wave of prosperity to the very verge of a new century, and it is his evident intention to carry into that century the prac tice of the arts whereby his conspicuous fortunes have heretofore been achieved. Nearly all the prizes of the literary life come to him, and he finds it very pleasant to have them. Yachts and villas and other expensive luxuries are within his reach, and he looks down with patrician pride upon the poor poet in his garret, or upon the mere thinker whose intellectual work is done in the hours that can be spared from the uncongenial toil upon which he must depend for subsistance. A reflective person, contrasting the position of the popular novelist with that occupied by the scholar whose strenuous pursuit of truth receives but slight recognition from his generation, can hardly refrain from a certain indignation at so unequal a distribution of the gifts of fortune. The fiction-writer who succeeds in catching the popular ear finds his path made easy ever thereafter. Intellectually he may be one of the feeblest of mortals, yet the halo of fame encircles his head for the time, and he may with comparative impunity wax oracular even upon subjects of which he is most densely ignorant. On the other hand the quiet thinker must struggle to get an audience, even for ideas which he is perhaps the best-qualified man in the world to express, and may count himself fortunate if his laborious days earn for him an existence of the most precarious and exiguous sort. He does, indeed, take comfort in the assurance that his work is done for a posterity that will have forgotten the very name of the writer who now basks in the sun of popular favor, and in this faith may find strength to scorn the delights of the present day, but his task is none the less a thankless one, and the age is none the less dishonored that makes it such. Think, for example, of what the world has done for Mr. Rider Haggard and Mr. Herbert Spencer. A few novels, considered as literature almost beneath contempt, have earned for the one many times over what has been earned for the other by the forty years that have gone to the building up of one of the most imposing and substantial edifices of thought ever added to the possessions of mankind. Doubtless, this material view of the reward of effort is not the only view that should be taken, but the lives of most men are so hedged about by material limitations and conditioned by material necessities that it must be reckoned with in determining the balance of justice between every man and his contemporaries. If the triumph of the novelist were a condition that concerned only the best producers, there would not be so much cause to rail at the degeneracy of an age that exalts the writer of fiction over literary workers of other classes. Fiction, at its highest, is one of the noblest of the arts, and it would be difficult to bestow recognition too generous upon a Scott or a Thackeray, a Balzac or a Tourguénieff, a George Eliot or a George Sand. But the deserved triumph of such writers is attended by an absurdly exaggerated estimate of the hosts of the undeserving. The whole mass of contemporary fiction benefits by the lift given the art by its masters, few in number as they are. And the best writers are by no means the most successful. Mr. Hardy and Mr. Meredith are far less popular than Mr. Hall Caine and Mr. Rider Haggard, although the latter are mere bunglers, while the former, for all their perversities, are artists of distinctive genius. The attitude of our present-day public towards fiction-writers as a class encourages the notion that anybody knows enough to write a novel, and this notion, which might otherwise be harmless enough, is made perniciously effective by the publishers, who make it possible for almost anybody to get a novel printed. And so we have every year new novels by the hundreds, by the thousands, novels that have not the slightest claim upon any genuine intellectual interest, preposterous inventions that can only blunt the artistic sense of those who are foolish enough to read them, exploitations of every variety of diseased fancy and perverted imagination, guides to the conduct of life by young persons who know nothing of life themselves, books written with no higher aim than amusement that are too dull even to achieve that aim, productions of incompetent scribblers who might have found honest employment in farming or in housekeeping, and made their activities of some real use to society. Professor Brander Matthews, in a recent magazine article, draws an ingenious parallel between the art of novel-writing and the game of whist. Dr. Pole recognizes four stages in the evolution of whist, the Primitive Game, the Game of Hoyle, the Philosophical Game, and the Latter-day Improvements. Four stages, not dissimilar to these, may be recognized in the evolution of the novel. Professor Matthews dubs them the Impossible, the Improbable, the Probable, and the Inevitable stages. The "Arabian Nights," "Les Trois Mousquetaires," " Vanity Fair," and "The Scarlet Letter," are given as examples of the four kinds of fiction. But, just as all four forms of the game are still practised by different sets of during the War: "We cannot even pretend to keep our countenance when the exploits of the Grand Army of the Potomac are filling all Europe with inextinguishable laughter," and adds "we know not whether to pity most the officers who lead such men, or the men who are led by such officers" (Vol. 90, pp. 395-6). And again, in January, 1862: "Englishmen are unable to see anything peculiarly tragical in the fact that half a million of men have been brought together in arms to hurl big words at each other across a river" (Vol. 91, p. 118). Again, in April, 1862, "Blackwood" tells us that Americans "do not demand our respect because of their achievements in art, or in literature, or in science, or philosophy. They can make no pretence to the no less real, though less beneficent, reputation of having proved themselves a great military power" (Vol. 91, p. 534). And in October, 1861, "Blackwood" said exultantly: "The venerable Lincoln, the respectable Seward, the raving players, the later having failed to displace the earlier ones, so all the four forms of fiction are still produced by different sets of writers, and each still finds its own public. The parallel is interesting, and reasonably justified by the facts, but its formulator should have added that there is, and always has been, a fifth kind of fiction, corresponding to the variety of whist known as bumblepuppy. And our pride in the developments that the art of fiction has unquestionably made during the last half-century must be considerably tempered when we reflect that the great mass of modern novels comes from writers who do not play the game in accordance with the rules of any system, primitive or phi- editors, the gibbering mob, and the swift-footed warriors losophical. In a word, the ascendancy of fiction in our latter-day literary production is not altogether the mark of a heightened appreciation of art. The triumph of the novelist is, to a considerable degree, a triumph of ineptitude over ability, of lower over higher ideals, of slovenly over painstaking workmanship, of incoherence and disproportion over measured and organic art. COMMUNICATIONS. THE RED BADGE OF HYSTERIA. (To the Editor of THE DIAL.) Must we come to judge of books only by what the newspapers have said of them, and must we abandon all the old standards of criticism? Can a book and an author, utterly without merit, be puffed into success by entirely undeserved praise, even if that praise come from English periodicals? One must ask these questions after he has been seduced into reading a book recently reprinted in this country entitled "The Red Badge of Courage, an Episode of the American Civil War." The chorus of praise in the English papers has been very extravagant, but it is noticeable that so far, at least, the American papers have said very little about the merits or demerits of the book itself. They simply allude to the noise 'made over it abroad, and therefore treat its author as a coming factor in our literature. Even THE DIAL'S very acute and usually very discerning critic of contemporary fiction (Mr. Payne) treats the book and the author (in your issue of Feb. 1) in very much this way that is, as a book and an author to be reckoned with, not because of any good which he himself finds in them, but because they have been so much talked about. The book has very recently been reprinted in America, and would seem to be an American book, on an American theme, and by an American author, yet originally issued in England. If it is really an American production one must suppose it to have been promptly and properly rejected by any American publishers to whom it may have been submitted, and afterward more naturally taken up by an English publisher. It is only too well known that English writers have had a very low opinion of American soldiers, and have always, as a rule, assumed to ridicule them. "Blackwood's Magazine" is quoted by a recent writer as saying of Bull's Run, are no malicious tricks of fortune, played off on an unwary nation, but are all of them the legitimate offspring of the Great Republic," and is "glad that the end of the Union seems more likely to be ridiculous than terrible" (Vol. 90, p. 396). We all know with what bitterness and spitefulness the "Saturday Review" always treats Americans; and with what special vindictiveness it reviews any book upon our late struggle written from the Northern standpoint. And so it is with all British periodicals and all British writers. They are so puffed up with vain-glory over their own soldiers who seldom meet men of their own strength, but are used in every part of the world for attacking and butchering defenseless savages, who happen to possess some property that Englishmen covet, that they cannot believe that there can be among any peoples well-disciplined soldiers as gallant and courageous as their own. "the Under such circumstances we cannot doubt that "The Red Badge of Courage" would be just such a book as the English would grow enthusiastic over, and we cannot wonder that the redoubtable "Saturday Review" greeted it with the highest encomiums, and declared it the actual experiences of a veteran of our War, when it was really the vain imaginings of a young man born long since that war, a piece of intended realisin based entirely on unreality. The book is a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies. The hero of the book (if such he can be called youth" the author styles him) is an ignorant and stupid country lad, who, without a spark of patriotic feeling, or even of soldierly ambition, has enlisted in the army from no definite motive that the reader can discover, unless it be because other boys are doing so; and the whole book, in which there is absolutely no story, is occupied with giving what are supposed to be his emotions and his actions in the first two days of battle. His poor weak intellect, if indeed he has any, seems to be at once and entirely overthrown by the din and movement of the field, and he acts throughout like a madman. Under the influence of mere excitement, for he does not even appear to be frightened, he first rushes madly to the rear in a crazy panic, and afterward plunges forward to the rescue of the colors under exactly the same influences. In neither case has reason or any intelligent motive any influence on his action. He is throughout an idiot or a maniac, and betrays no trace of the reasoning being. No thrill of patriotic devotion to cause or country ever moves his breast, and not even an emotion of manly courage. Even a wound which he |