his
people has been so little commented on. Perhaps it is because he makes
no obvious appeal for them; but one likes such men as Lord Warburton,
Newman, Valentin, the artistic brother in "The Europeans," and Ralph
Touchett, and such women as Isabel, Claire Belgarde, Mrs. Tristram, and
certain others, with a thoroughness that is one of the best testimonies
to their vitality. This comes about through their own qualities, and
is not affected by insinuation or by downright petting, such as we find
in Dickens nearly always and in Thackeray too often.

The art of fiction has, in fact, become a finer art in our day than it
was with Dickens and Thackeray. We could not suffer the confidential
attitude of the latter now, nor the mannerism of the former, any more
than we could endure the prolixity of Richardson or the coarseness of
Fielding. These great men are of the past--they and their methods and
interests; even Trollope and Reade are not of the present. The new
school derives from Hawthorne and George Eliot rather than any others;
but it studies human nature much more in its wonted aspects, and finds
its ethical and dramatic examples in the operation of lighter but not
really less vital motives. The moving accident is certainly not its
trade; and it prefers to avoid all manner of dire catastrophes. It is
largely influenced by French fiction in form; but it is the realism of
Daudet rather than the realism of Zola that prevails with it, and it
has a soul of its own which is above the business of recording the
rather brutish pursuit of a woman by a man, which seems to be the chief
end of the French novelist. This school, which is so largely of the
future as well as the present, finds its chief exemplar in Mr. James;
it is he who is shaping and directing American fiction, at least. It
is the ambition of the younger contributors to write like him; he has
his following more distinctly recognizable than that of any other
English-writing novelist. Whether he will so far control this
following as to decide the nature of the novel with us remains to be
seen. Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an
analytic study rather than a story, which is apt to leave him arbiter
of the destiny of the author's creations? Will he find his account in
the unflagging interest of their development? Mr. James's growing
popularity seems to suggest that this may be the case; but the work of
Mr. James's imitators will have much