scientific discoveries, which were finally to lead the way to our present theories of evolution, were bringing men to a realization that the religious dogmas upon which they had founded their faith were weakening. It was difficult for a thinking man to believe that the world had been made out of whole cloth, but a few thousand years before. Science was in the air; faiths were shattered. Balzac turned to man to determine anew his nature. His was the huge task of presenting man in all his loves and hates, purposes and motives, works and joys. He attempted it, and there has been a great army of writers following in his footsteps. Their aim has been to give a realistic cross section of certain aspects of life, allowing the reader to draw inferences as to its meaning and his personal relation to it.

This is realism. It is most unfortunate that in our country the word has become synonymous with books of a sordid and erotic nature. Realism in literature should show us life as it is, and as life is neither all sordid nor all erotic, neither should literature present only those aspects. The function of this type of literature is a great and important one.

The supreme realist has a God-given power of seeing and feeling the forces and emotions that make up human living. He sees and examines life as if under a microscope, and with this peculiar power he must have the faculty of expression. You may ask how we can apply the words contained in such a novel to our own life? We all feel that there is a great advantage in "understanding life." We try to analyze our own and our friends' ways of living. Let us go to great novels and see what we find there.

Was it a child who said, when going through the British Museum, that he liked the sculpture better than the paintings because he could walk around the sculpture? He spoke more wisely than he knew. The same simile may be applied to the realistic novel. In reading it we may walk about and examine life. From day to day, as we live things happen so rapidly, the world is passing before us so fast that, unless you have a supreme intellect, it is impossible to examine the pageant but from one point of view. You can but look at the front of the picture. It is flat, there is but little perspective.

The genius with the gift for fiction such as had Tolstoy, Balzac or Smollett can encase civilization within the covers of a book. You may read and understand. There is something static. You live a thousand lives by proxy, you enter a hundred homes and have converse with the hearts of men and women. Instead of seeing but the front of things, we walk behind and take in life from every angle. The characters in the drama of life are under a microscope through which we are privileged to look. Tolstoy presents life as it was in Russia forty years ago, but human hearts that are cosmopolitan and eternal, Balzac, the France of the forties, Smollett, England of the eighteenth century. We learn the ideals, the struggles, the way of life of different civilizations, of different ages.

We find that our point of view is a narrow one, that our place in the Sun is perhaps a very small corner, and our hearts and minds are enlarged to a deeper sympathy with all men, a finer understanding of all ideals and practices.

Instead of living in the little village of our own outlook, instead of weighing all experience and action by our own, we arrive at a higher, more cosmopolitan point of view. Whereas we might think that ours is the only century in which people flock to the cities and live material lives of rush and money-grabbing, we find the same thing true of Smollett's England of one hundred and fifty years ago; instead of condemning the woman who cannot get along with her husband we have a broader sympathy for having followed the career of the splendid Anna Karenina in Tolstoy's novel of that name. We break the shell of our petty selves which has made for so many misunderstandings and prejudices. We must not pride ourselves upon our own motives and civilization, until we have at least made an attempt to understand those of others.

Since the days when Nathaniel Hawthorne condensed the spiritual aspects of New England in his immortal "Scarlet Letter," there has been a scarcity of American novels of any high realistic calibre. Ernest Poole has recently done brilliant work in "The Harbor," in which he presents the ideals that have guided a young man of our day and generation. Yet, here we are, in a strange world indeed—the greatest spirits hurling themselves into the strife of ninety-mile-an-hour living, only to be tossed aside to make way for younger and harder workers, more efficient thinkers. The strange growling beast of a great American city, the wide acres of efficient irrigated farming, with the workers in each, have yet even partially to be interpreted by the genius of fiction. When it has been done by the great seers, we will find answered many questions which puzzle us to-day. Not the mirror but the cosmic microscope must be used as the tool. It will not be done by one man; it will take a literary army—let the advance guard come with our generation!

And of Romance—what will we say of the tales which take us away from the dusty world of every-day duties and responsibilities, into a magic turmoil of brave deeds and devoted lovers? We must not forever be muddling about in the mundane sphere in which we make our bread and butter—we must at times for wealth and happiness gaze through

Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

 

We of the Anglo-Saxon race have a glorious heritage in the Waverley Novels. Sometimes, we are told that Sir Walter Scott is becoming a memory, and that of the past generation; but many feel, and I am of that number, that the author of "Ivanhoe," "Kenilworth," "Quentin Durward" and the score of other yarns which have charmed youth and age for now well-nigh a century has a permanent place in our literature, perhaps only surpassed by William Shakespeare. Lucky is the boy or girl who has grown up, and the older persons who still sojourn with the Knights and Ladies, the Kings and Queens, the Highland Fairies, the human serfs who march in an endless, enduring procession through the pages of the Prince of story tellers. For such readers the Past is hallowed with a magic circle that defies tawdriness. How pleasant it is for one who lives in a roaring city to be able by reaching to the book-shelf to forget the affairs of the day and to live in the pomp and pageantry, the heroics and devotions of the Past. The lover of Romance may well say to the reader of modern realism, "Why read of slums, of offices, and city suburbs when you may ride out with Prosper l'Gai in Hewlett's 'Forest Lovers' or be partner in countless intrigues of love and swordsmanship through a dozen of Alexander Dumas' yarns'?" Why indeed?—we sometimes wonder.

It is a marvellous gift, that of the man who can look back into the past and make it alive and breathing for the readers of the present. It is dangerous to take Dumas and Scott for our guides to true history, as they have too often twisted the facts in order to spin a good tale, but as revealers of the atmosphere of history, they are unsurpassed even by the greatest historians, and if we have the atmosphere we have a rich and splendid background in which to place the facts. We may sojourn in ancient Carthage by reading Flaubert's "Salammbo," in Rome by Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis," in Pompeii by Bulwer Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii," in early England by Scott's "Ivanhoe." Even those scornful