. It has become well-nigh a
fashion, a fad, to deal with these picturesque and once
unexploited elements of the human passion-play.

This interest does not stop even at man; influenced by modern
conceptions of life, it overleaps the line of old supposed to be
impassable, and now includes the lower order of living things:
animals have come into their own and a Kipling or a London gives
us the psychology of brutekind as it has never been drawn
before--from the view-point of the animal himself. Our little
brothers of the air, the forest and the field are depicted in
such wise that the world returns to a feeling which swelled the
heart of St. Francis centuries ago, as he looked upon the birds
he loved and thus addressed them:

"And he entered the field and began to preach to the birds which
were on the ground; and suddenly those which were in the trees
came to him and as many as there were they all stood quietly
until Saint Francis had done preaching; and even then they did
not depart until such time as he had given them his blessing;
and St. Francis, moving among them, touched them with his cape,
but not one moved."

It is because this modern form of fiction upon which we fix the
name Novel to indicate its new features has seized the idea of
personality, has stood for truth and grown ever more democratic,
that it has attained to the immense power which marks it at the
present time. It is justified by historical facts; it has become
that literary form most closely revealing the contours of life,
most expressive of its average experience, most sympathetic to
its heart-throb. The thought should prevent us from regarding it
as merely the syllabub of the literary feast, a kind of after-dinner
condiment. It is not necessary to assume the total
depravity of current taste, in order to account for the tyranny
of this latest-born child of fiction. In the study of individual
writers and developing schools and tendencies, it will be well
to keep in mind these underlying principles of growth:
personality, truth and democracy; a conception sure to provide
the story-maker with a new function, a new ideal. The
distinguished French critic Brunetiere has said: "The novelist
in reality is nothing more than a witness whose evidence should
rival that of the historian in precision and trustworthiness. We
look to him to teach us literally to see. We read his novels
merely with a view to finding out in them those aspects of
existence which