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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

modern music and modern science are the simultaneous expressions of the growth of individuality in man. Richardsqn, the founder of the English novel, was born in 1689; the musician, Sebastian Bach, in 1685, and the scienist, Newton, in 1642. Thus being born in the same half century, he regards them as contemporary results of the Renaissance. He argues that man’s desire to have individual knowledge of his phys­ical environments produced the scientist, man’s desire to utter his individual emotions toward the Infinite gave us the modern art and artist of music; man’s desire to know the life of his fellow-man resulted in the novel. The drama was inadequate for portrayal of the minute complexities of modern personalities. The novelist succeeded the chorus, and the novel was evolved out of the classic and Elizabethan dramas. Before the printing press the multitudes were entertained and instructed by the thea­ter. The reading public of today studies the story of human life. With the progress of the democratic idea of the rights of man has grown a sense of the kinship of men. In England the novel of individual traits, of manners and domestic life, with an avowed or implied moral motive, began with Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, and in this field of fiction the English novel is unrivaled. In his history of European morals, Mr. Lecky charges man’s intolerance to feeble imagination, which prevents him from understanding people of a different religion, pursuit, age, country, or temperament from his own. He claims that men tortured in the past and persecute today because they are too imaginative to be tolerant or just. What they can not realize they believe to be evil, and he says that this “ power of realization forms the chief tie between our moral and intellectual natures.” We think that only those who are intentionally cruel would continue to inflict pain if they knew the suffering they caused. He con­cludes that the “ sensitiveness of a cultivated imagination ” makes men humane and tolerant. Thus imaginative literature is a civilizer w'hen it develops tolerance through sympathy.

The hesitancy of writers in other branches of literature to grant the importance of the novel is due to their failure to see that it is the popular educator of the imag­ination. George Eliot said: “ If art does not enlarge man’s sympathies, it does noth­ing morally, and the only effect I ardently long to produce by my writings is, that those who read them should be better able to imagine and feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures.”

What novelists have done to help mankind is incalculable. Imprisonment for debt is now so hateful to us that Dickens’ ‘‘Little Dorrit” seems a story of a forgotten past. Charles Reade struck heavy blows at abuses in prisons, insane asylums and trade unions in his “ Never Too Late to Mend,” “ Hard Cash,” and “ Put Yourself in His Place.” The People’s Palace in London is the result of Walter Besant’s ‘‘All Sorts and Conditions of Men,” and the sorrows of the poor and the oppressed every­where are told in our novels. It is impossible to measure how much of the prepara­tory work of emancipation was due to and done by “ Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

As human nature is the inspiration of literature, characters of a novel must be natural to be of any literary value, and of this anyone can judge who has had the ordinary experience of life. There is so much fiction written only for sensational excitement, and there are tales of silly sentimentality which can justly be called trash. Mature, busy people often feel that it is a waste of time to read of phenomenally gifted heroes and supernaturally beautiful heroines who keep their lovers in awful suspense until the wedding bells of the last chapter. Novels devoted to expert testi­mony in the art of kissing are unnecessary, and it will always be an experimental science.

John Morley defines literature as the books “ where moral truth and human passion are touched with a certain largeness, sanity and attraction of form.” A novel has not sanity unless it is true to the probabilities of conduct and represents the passions of love in its ratio to the other interests of life. The “ attraction of form ” can not be imprisoned in a definition any more than a woman’s charms can be described