But why not? I say that the trait is as charming as the disturbance of a young girl after her first ball.

Another factor is the unique position and influence of young women in the United States. We are told that it is the women who rule the libraries in England; much more so is it the women who rule the libraries in America. And if you would know what sort of an intellectual creature the American woman is, what a curious mixture of earnest and gay, ardent and frivolous, splendid and absurd, read her especial organ, The Ladies' Home Journal, of Philadelphia, which is one of the most brilliantly-edited papers in the world, and has a circulation of over eight hundred thousand copies a month. Here, in this growing and piquant miscellany, where religion runs column by column with modes and etiquette, and the most famous English-writing authors are elbowed by the Tuppers and Friswells of New England, you will discern at large the true nature of Mr. C. D. Gibson's girlthe width of her curiosity, the consuming fire of her energy, her strange knowledge and her stranger ignorances, her fineness and crudity, her imperial mien and her simple adorations. It is fitting to remark of the American woman that she has a magnificent future. In the meantime she cannot gainsay her Ladies' Home Journal, The Academy.

which stands as absolutely irrefutable evidence both for and against her. She is there in its pages, utterly revealedthe woman of the culture clubs, the woman who wistfully admires the profiles of star-actors at matinées, the woman from whom Paderewski, at the Chicago Auditorium, has to be rescued by the police, the Madonna of the home, the cherisher of aspirations, the desire of men. It is she who reads and propagates "Richard Carvel" and "Janice Meredith," artlessly enjoying the sugar of them, made oblivious of their tedium by her sincere eagerness to "get instruction" from them, to treat them as "serious" works-not as "ordinary novels."

An explanatory word. There are far better historical novels in America than the two mentioned. The best taste in America esteems "Richard Carvel" and "Janice Meredith" as the best taste esteems them here. The interest of these novels lies in their marvellous success, and the clue which they afford to the secrets of a whole people's individuality. For it is not those who read, but those who (speaking broadly) do not read that make a book popular. The former are few, the latter a multitude. The former we know familiarly; the ways of the latter are as fascinating, as mystifying as the ways of children.

E. A. B.

"The Italian novel," says V. Morello, in La revista politica e letteraria, "is no longer a melancholy national aspiration, as the theatre has been for ages, but a living, breathing reality."

Translated for The Living Age by Jean Raymond Bidwell.

We have to-day the French novel, the English and the Russian, and also the Italian novel, made famous by its many well-known writers: Verga, D'Annunzio, Capuana and Matilde Serao, Fogazzaro and Barrili, Farina and D'Amicis. The Italian novel has

come into being, it may be said, in the shade of the French, but, having been so unexpectedly developed, it lives by its own light, its own strength and valor, representing a model of perfection in the face of the forms from which it proceeds. The Italian novel has sprung from the fermentation of the literary elements of other countries. "I promessi sposi" has no national tradition, neither has the "Orlando furioso," and as the wonderful poem of Ariosto derives its inspiration from the canciones and knightly romances of France and England, so may Manzoni's famous novel be traced to an English and French origin. Italian genius possesses a strange quality.

Before the advent of Balzac, the French struggled for two hundred years with trials and attempts, from D'Urfé to Le Sage, passing by Gomberville, Scarron, Calprenède and Furetière, Scudery and Coutils. The Italians, without any preparation, opened their eyes one day upon the Lombardy plains, and beheld the miracle of the apparition of "I promessi sposi;" but they closed them again because miracles are not repeated.

An organic development has been lacking in the Italian novel, just as in former times there was a lack of national preparation. It is true that Manzoni's work resulted in great literary activity, but it is equally certain that of all the labor of the half century that followed his work nothing has remained but the intentions. Nevertheless, if we examine carefully the productions that have not had the honor of reaching the loftiest heights of art-without counting the exquisite Rufini, who is more English than Italian-there may be discovered easily a certain movement towards reproducing in the novel the reality of life. What has Mastriani lacked in order to be the Italian Zola? Art certainly, but also tradition. He was not a stylist, as he

ought to have been in order to give the personal stamp to his work, neither had he two hundred years of novel history behind him. Poverty and hunger made the poor Neapolitan writer more a slave than a master of the pen; and, although there is in his work that "odor of the town" that Zola knew how to infuse in many pages of his "Assommoir," without tradition, Mastriani could only demonstrate once more that art is not and cannot be mere improvisation.

Italian unity having been established, with freedom from political, religious and military preoccupations, the transalpine writers began to study art seriously, for art itself, as an end and not as a means and as a gratification of æsthetic demands. As it began to move beyond the point reached by other writers, and as the limit of glory in the novel was that attained by French naturalism, therefore, French naturalism became the school of the Italian novel.

It is true that naturalism is out of fashion to-day, but Zola's work still produces its effects. The Italian writers, helped by their own good sense and by their own good taste, kept themselves free from over-exaggeration, contenting themselves with adopting the standard of naturalistic simplicity that has made the representation of life, in all its various forms, and the environment of the individual, as well as of groups of humanity, more accurate and realistic. Before Verga reformed the Italian novel after the model of French naturalism, the most audacious writers exaggerated, in the spirit and in the letter, the latest tendencies as well as the social and sentimental antitheses of romanticism. Dumas fils was a great leader of Italian minds until Zola's art unfurled its victorious banner. Even Verga, in his first novel, showed himself to be a docile, passionate imitator of the ro

mantic-aristocratic art of the author of "La Dame aux Camèlias." But, influenced by the new formulas, he became converted at once into a strong and rigid naturalist. Now, Capuana himself, who was Verga's disciple, recognizes, without envy, the superiority of the effects obtained by his friend in the application of the naturalistic method; and, in truth, there is no novel more impersonal than "Malavoglia." The author has effaced himself completely from the book, and there remain in action only the characters who see with the eyes, think with the brain and speak the rude language of fishermen. “Malavoglia” is more than a tour de force, it is a true revelation.

The grade of conscience is higher in "Mastro don Gesualdo," and so is Verga's art. In this book of more than five hundred pages, filled with an unequalled freshness of observation, depth of feeling and vivacity of representation, he relates the story of the tribulations of a Sicilian fisherman in making his fortune and increasing his domain. It is the history of all countries where envy, pride, vanity and luxury harden hearts and mortify the flesh.

In the world imagined by Verga there are fifty different types, each La Espana Moderna.

one stamped with his character, his feelings, his own exclusive mark. In the midst of the world we find Mastro don Gesualdo, the laborer, who, by means of his own hard work, the sweat of his brow, his keen wit and self-denial, has raised himself from his lowly position, and controls the wealth and produce of his neighbors.

An air of sadness runs throughout the whole novel, as terrifying as it is natural, which seems to be not the work of the author, hut a spontaneous exhalation, like the aroma of a flower, from the characters and conditions of the book.

With "Mastro don Gesualdo" the Italian novel enters with flying colors into the grand kingdoms of human truth. There is not in any work of Zola a more vast or profound observation than that contained in this novel and in "Malavoglia." The first steps having been taken, it was easy to advance along the open road. Both behind Verga and at his side there has surged a throng of creators of "the Italian novel," which is worthy of occupying a most honorable and well-earned position in the literary history of the world.

Fernando Araujo.

Professor in the Institute of Cardinal Cisneros

SEVENTH SERIES. Volume VII.

FROM BEGINNING Vol. CCXXV.

Whoever has once ranked with the greatest writers of his age has a penalty to pay. He may solemnly have abjured, at a later period, all the errors of his youth, denounced the vanity of literature in general, and strenuously maintained that brain-labor is inferior in nobility to manual labor; but the day comes when nature is too strong for him. An essential quality of his mind having once impelled him to observe the great pageant of the world and to reproduce, through the medium of art, its manifold and everchanging aspects, he has ultimately to listen to the inner voice, and relapse into the sin of literature. Such is, at the present moment, the case of Count Tolstoï. He had long denied himself the kind of writing which had won hin the admiration of the whole world of letters. He had renounced his vocation as an imaginative writer, an historical conjurer, a painter of society, and that supreme analyst of souls to whom we were indebted for "War and Peace" and "Anna Karénina." A book had become to him a weapon merely; he confined himself to the composition of controversial treatises from which he banished, as far as possible, all literary artifice. Nor have we any reason to suppose that his apostolic

• Translated for The Living Age.

zeal has diminished, his faith in the value of his moral and SOcial teaching wavered, or his opinions changed. They have merely assumed once more a romantic form, and spontaneously organized themselves into a work of art. It is, therefore, from the artistic point of view that we propose to review this new work of an artist who has resumed his true calling. Tolstoï's ideas are well known, and there is no occasion for discussing them here. How it is that these ideas have clothed themselves in a narrative form and been embodied in human characters, whose thoughts and feelings they express, how the author of "Resurrection" has remained the author of his first romances with all his original endowment, and how the long struggle which has been going on within him has modified his own point of view and left its traces upon his new creations,such are the questions which assail the critic in presence of this new literary event. .

"Resurrection" is a study in moral responsibility. A young man of high family, Nekhludov, is juryman at the Court of Assizes. Among the prisoners is a woman of the streets,-one Maslova, who is accused of poisoning. This creature, soiled by years of vice,

who has at last brought herself within reach of the criminal law, Nekhludov had once known as a pure and innocent girl. He had loved, seduced, and abandoned her, and her fall and her desertion by him had been the determining cause of her life of shame. Her entire infamy was thus, in a manner, the work of Nekhludov. It was his own crime which was brought home to him by a startling combination of circumstances, and his responsibility was undeniable. Recalled to a sense of duty by this brutal warning, Nekhludov resolves then and there to atone for his fault by entering upon a new life, in which his conduct shall be shaped by the laws of absolute morality, without reference to the conventional codes and opinions of his world. Maslova is sentenced to hard labor for life, and Nekhludov undertakes to follow her to Siberia. In reality, the verdict was an unjust one. She was innocent of murder, and the man resolves to get her sentence reversed, or, failing that, to obtain her pardon. He will also marry Maslova if he can obtain her consent. He will thus have rescued, from the gulf in which it had been submerged, one human soul, bringing it back to the light by degrees and restoring to it the sense of personal dignity. For his own part, he who had thus far wallowed in selfishness will shake off his moral torpor; he who had been imprisoned in faisehood will break his own chains. We are invited to behold the saving of two souls-a twofold resurrection. One can easily see the capabilities of such a plot, if developed in all its breadth and scope by so powerful a writer as Tolstoï. The moral crisis to which our attention is invited takes place in the soul of a man whose eyes have been opened suddenly, and whose whole view of life is absolutely changed, through the complete regeneration of his heart.

us.

What strikes us first in this new novel of Tolstor's is that he has lost nothing of his old remarkable breadth and fulness of treatment. And here we may take occasion once again to explain exactly what we mean, and to defend Tolstoï against the unfortunate championship of some of his own friends. We need not concern ourselves about the din they raise by their vain and noisy admiration, but they must not be allowed to misrepresent his ideas. According to these fanatics, what gives the tales of Tolstoï their peculiar breadth and freedom is the fact that he disdains what is called regular, balanced and harmonious composition, and is thus delivered from that tyranny of an artificial rhetoric which gives so starved and mean an air to the composition of the rest of Here, in short, is a literature which is no literature. It is unnecessary to point out the childishness, not to say crudity, of such a judgment. However it may differ in some respects from ours,-though much less even so than is ordinarily supposed,the rhetoric of Tolstof is none the less rhetoric. It would not be difficult, either, to analyze its methods, or to point out their mere artificial side. But, independently of these methods, there are certain faults which mar the effect of Tolstoï's finest works, and which are conspicuous in this last book also. There is a prolixity of narrative, there are repetitions and digressions, a loose relation of the characters to one another, and an overwhelming mass of details, of which many are entirely superfluous. These are not the things which produce that impression of life which we receive from the romances of Tolstoï. On the contrary, they divide and disperse our interestand, let us say it quite deliberately, they bore us. We are sensible of these defects in the second, and even more so in the third part of "Resurrection,"