t something is due
to the speakers. Four barrels is a light load, I am told, for a
Kentucky colonel, and I have the pleasure of introducing the
original 'Kentucky Colonel,' Mr. Opie P. Read."]

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--The drift of latter-day fiction
is largely shown by the department store. The selling of books by the
ton proves a return to the extremes of romanticism. People do not jostle
one another in their eagerness to secure even a semblance of the truth.
The taste of to-day is a strong appetite for sadism; and a novel to be
successful must bear the stamp of society rather than the approval of
the critic. The reader has gone slumming, and must be shocked in order
to be amused. Reviewers tell us of a revolt against realism, that we no
longer fawn upon a dull truth, that we crave gauze rather than
substance. In fact, realism was never a fad. Truth has never been
fashionable; no society takes up philosophy as an amusement.

But after all, popular taste does not make a literature. Strength does
not meet with immediate recognition; originality is more often condemned
than praised. The intense book often dies with one reading, its story is
a wild pigeon of the mind, and sails away to be soon forgotten; but the
novel in which there is even one real character, one man of the soil,
remains with us as a friend. In the minds of thinking people, realism
cannot be supplanted. But by realism, I do not mean the commonplace
details of an uninteresting household, nor the hired man with mud on his
cowhide boots, nor the whining farmer who sits with his feet on the
kitchen-stove, but the glory that we find in nature and the grandeur
that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his
virtue. Realism does not mean the unattractive. A rose is as real as a
toad. And a realistic novel of the days of Caesar would be worth more
than Plutarch's Lives.

Every age sees a literary revolution, but out of that revolution there
may come no great work of art. The best fiction is the unconscious grace
of a cultivated mind, a catching of the quaint humor of men, a soft look
of mercy, a sympathetic tear. And this sort of a book may be neglected
for years, no busy critic may speak a word in its behalf, but there
comes a time when by the merest accident a great mind finds it and
flashes its genius back upon the cloud that has hidden it.

Yes, there is a return to romanticism, if indeed there was ever a turn
f