THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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task of historical fiction has never been better executed, and since Thackeray, only Romola and John Inglesart can be compared with Henry Esmond, which revivified the age of Queen Anne. Emerson felt that it was a “jugglery” for a novelist to com­bine characters and fortunes fancifully and sensationally, for he said there was in nature a “magic by which she fits a man to his fortunes by making them the fruits of his character.” Realism is a protest against “jugglery” with the logic of character. Mr. Hardy in his great novel was guilty of “ jugglery ” when he makes a betrayed girl return to her betrayer. As Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to ridicule the bombastic tales of chivalry, so the realistic novel is a reaction from the hysteria and exaggeration of old-fashioned romanticism. The conscience of realistic art is sincerity in describ­ing the facts of life. Ouida reminds us that the passion-flower is as real as the potato. The reality of the beautiful and the heroic is as much in the province of realism as is the reality of the horrible and the commonplace. Truth is the only restraint of a realist, and whether he writes of flowers or potatoes is a question of taste and, perhaps, of vision.

In our Dubuque library last year, out of a circulation of over twenty-five thou­sand books over nineteen thousand were juveniles and fiction. The report of the Chicago public library for 1892 states that over forty-two per cent of the circulation was English prose fiction, and over twenty per cent was juvenile literature. The Nineteenth Century Magazine for June, 1893, states that the per cent of fiction in the Battersea free libraries of England was four-fifths of the circulation. But of a circu­lation of five millions in the Boston public library, extending over five years, four- fifths of the books were juvenile and fiction.

Novels are the amusement and refreshment of our practical, overworked, over­wrought age. Even children tire of monotony and seek the fairies. Novels are read by those who read no other books, and they are also the recreation of scholars and thinkers. Charles Darwin said they rested him. As long as age cherishes tender memories, and as long as love is the dream of youth, romance will be the most fasci­nating literature. A description of all the novels now being read would be a mirror of the multiform modern mind. Any human interest is a legitimate theme for the novelist, and it is as useless to dogmatize about the sphere of the novel as it is useless to dogmatize about the sphere of woman. There are novels for those who admire philosophic analysis, and for those who want exciting adventures on land and on sea, and also for those who ask that their love stories shall give information about history, science, reform, theology and politics. Harriet Martineau wrote Political Economy in the story form, and I am surprised that there was not a tariff novel dur­ing the last campaign.

In this age of the telegram and the paragraph, the novelist who wishes tobe read must be brief as well as brilliant. Tourgeneff’s method was to condense and to con­centrate. Guy De Maupassant made the short story popular in France by his genius in eliminating the superfluous. His thirteen short tales, published as the Odd Number, are masterpieces of concise but artistically adequate treatment. Our American novel­ists have been most artistic as writers of short stories, whether we judge the result by effectiveness of story telling, or keenness of character sketching or carefulness in lit­erary construction. In the long list of our successful writers of short stories there has been no discrimination against our sex in the awards of honor. Mrs. Jewett’s art is so finished that Howells compares her with Maupassant, to her advantage. I think Miss Woolsen’s finest story is her short novel, “ For the Major,” which has a touch of ideal grace. New England has her Mary Wilkin, arid we in Iowa are proud of our Octave Thanet, who spoke at the literary congress of the American flavor of our short stories. International novels have the charm of cosmopolitan culture, but they are not contributions to a distinctive national literature, which must be written from an American point of view about the characteristics of our people, with their local atmos­phere. The late Sidney Lanier delivered a series of lectures on the development of the English novel at Johns Hopkins University in 1881. He believed that the novel,