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Beginning with this number the subscription price of this MAGAZINE will be $1.00 a year to all persons, without regard to whether they are ticket holders in the library or not. The inadequate price of 50 cents has been offered long enough to allow every library member to take advantage of the opportunity to get the book lists for a sum which, when the postage is deducted, would not pay half the cost of printing, to say nothing of the labor of preparing the lists. The management, therefore, from this time on will ask the more reasonable subscription price of $1.00 a year, which is still far below the actual cost of the MAGAZINE.

REREGISTRATION.

On July 1st, a reregistration of all the card-holders of the Library will begin. This is in accordance with the rules which require a reregistration every three years. The reason for this is plain. Many change their residences without leaving notice at the Library. Many leave the

city, cards are lost, and card-holders die, and without some system of checking, our records in a few years would become absolutely worthless.

In this reregistration no one will be exempt. It matters not whether the card has been used once or a hundred times, the same forms will have to be gone through by all. Card-holders will therefore save time for themselves and probably some inconvenience by noting. the date of expiration on their cards, and by applying at least a week in advance.

This will enable us to have the new card ready as soon as the old one expires. Otherwise a wait may become unavoidable as books will not be issued on the old card after the expiration of the time for which it was issued. Applications may be made either through the Delivery Stations or Library. All old cards must be returned before the new ones will be given out. A responsible guarantor will be required in all cases except where the applicant is a property-holder in the city.

FOR NOVEL READERS.

This issue of the MAGAZINE is devoted to the interests of the large class of readers who look to prose fiction for their intellectual recreation. It is hardly fair to use the term "class" even though qualified by the adjective. Do not all, or nearly all, persons who read any books read novels? Various classes of people read various kinds of books,-philosophy, theology, social science, history, etc. Students devote themselves to the particular subjects to which their interests or their occupations lead them. But all turn to the novel for recreation.

If wisely chosen, the novel offers more than intellectual entertainment. It gives a vivid picture of the manners and customs of the country and the time and of the historic events with which it deals. Hawthorne said a novel of Trollope was a section of British soil placed before your eyes with all the people upon it liv

ing their every-day lives. The novel of to-day is used as the medium for conveying instruction on all sorts of subjects, even natural science. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had more effect in awakening the conscience of the nation than the speeches of Phillips and Garrison; and of late years the novel has been used to exploit every conceivable social and economic theory. Bellamy's "Looking Backward" has been called the "Uncle Tom's Cabin " of socialism. The novel, in short, is the accepted form of literary art of the nineteenth century. It presents most vividly "the very age and body of the time." As The Nation said editorially some time ago, "When one speaks of literature he means novels. Fiction is literature nowadays."

With prose fiction constituting from 60 per cent to 80 per cent of the circulation of the public libraries, there is no need of stimulating the reading of novels. What is wanted is guidance to the best. Such guidance it is the object of this. number of the MAGAZINE to give. No one need be shame-faced about reading novels if he reads good ones. There is no greater delight in life. But read the best. To read, to see, to hear, to know the best, is to be liberally educated-is to get the most out of life.

Mr. Frank P. Hill, Librarian of the Free Public Library, of Newark, N. J., makes some very good points in defence of novel reading, after stating that however the figures in reports of different libraries might be combined, a free public library circulated four times as much fiction as all other classes of books put together. Mr. Hill thinks this is not a bad thing when one considers that the greatest writers, from Homer down, have been fiction writers. He instances Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, De Foe, Swift, Irving, Cooper, Scott, Thackeray, Hawthorne, George Eliot and Dickens. He also insists that good fiction should be

provided by the libraries. Most of the modern novels he calls "mainly trash, injurious alike to the mind and morals of the reader." But he finds consolation in the fact that the demand for and circulation of the old standard books that everybody reads and no one talks about, is fully equal to that of the book of the hour which is discussed everywhere. Mr. Hill might have added that a free public library ministers largely to people whose days are filled with work, so that by night a book for pleasure is really more profitable to the tired brain and body than one calling for renewed strain or making demand on serious attention.

Professor Hadley, of Yale, uses the same argument in an address made at the opening of a fine memorial library building presented to the town of Brandford, Conn. (there are few small towns in the East whose libraries are not better housed and endowed than the St. Louis library). Professor Hadley says: "Some people who look at library statistics shake their heads when they find how large a percentage of the books used by the public is made up of novels and other works of fiction. Yet this is by no means an unmixed disadvantage. Most of us have all the work that is good for us in the routine of our daily life. If we tried to read books for improvement rather than for enjoyment, we should often hurt our bodies more than we help our minds. For a large majority of people who use a public library, the first essential of reading is that it shall interest them."

NOTE. The price of Nansen's Farthest North, given by mistake in the June number as $5.00, should be $10.00.

"NOVELS, OH, NOVELS, OH, NOVELS!"

At a library desk stood some readers one day,

Crying "Novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!" And I said to them: "People, oh, why do you say 'Give us novels, oh, novels, oh, novels'?

Is it weakness of intellect, people," I cried,

"Or simply a space where the brains should abide!” They answered me not, for they only replied:

"Give us novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!"

"Here are thousands of books that will do you more good
Than the novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

You will weaken your brain with such poor mental food
As the novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!
Pray take history, music, or travels, or plays,
Biography, poetry, science, essays,
Or anything else that more wisdom displays

Than the novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!"

A librarian may talk till he's black in the face
About novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

And may think that with patience he may raise the taste
Above novels, oh, novels, oh, novels!

He may talk till with age his round shoulders are bent,

And the white hairs of time mid the black ones are sent, When he hands his report in, still 70 per cent

Will be novels, oh, novels, ob, novels!

-From the Library Journal.

THE INFLUENCE OF FICTION.

The influence of fiction on the public is supreme.
You can not find a great many who doubt it;

But still to prove the many right and those who doubt redeem,

I'll just tell here all that I know about it.

John Percy Smith, with cash to burn and nothing else to do,
Spends all his time in reading current fiction,

And if he were but seen by them t'would soon convince the few
The influence admits no contradiction.

For when with military stride and shoulders squared he moves,

It shows how some heroic tale has charmed him;

But if in wild eyed terror he avoids all men, it proves
That some revengeful story has alarmed him.

So having a short time ago some lover's story read,

The love affair's successful termination,

Encouraged him so much that soon all fear of marriage fled,-

He quickly married too, in emulation.

John Percy Smith still reads his books, his moods still daily change,

But he has been quite near a dire disaster,

For if the hero of that book had been a Turk, 'tis strange

How many wives would call John Percy master.

-E. J. MCMAHON.

THE HISTORICAL NOVEL.

A few years ago Mr. George Saintsbury contributed a series of articles to an English periodical on what he says "is perhaps the most purely refreshing of all reading, precisely because of its curious conjunction of romance and reality." He traces the evolution and fortunes of the historical novel from the Cycropaedia of Xenophon, which he says more nearly resembles a historical novel than anything before it or than anything for more than two thousand years after it, down to the present day. That the genius of the Greeks and Romans knew no such form of literature he ascribes to the fact that those nations were making history and had not inherited it. "There was little for a Greek Scott or Dumas to go upon, even had he existed; no materials to work up, no public taste, imagination or traditions to appeal to. Even if instincts and desires of the kind did suggest themselves to any one, the natural region in which it was sought to gratify them was mythology, not history, while the natural medium was verse, not prose.

The historical novel of Greece is a philosophical treatise; the historical novel of Rome is an epic."

Mr. Saintsbury's rules for the historical novel, as it should be, are these: "Observe local color and historical propriety, but do not become a slave either to Dryasdust or Heavysterne. Intermix historic interest and the charm of well-known figures, but do not incur the danger of mere historical transcription; still more take care that the prevailing ideals of your characters, or your scene, or your action, or all three, be fantastic and within your own discretion." These requirements were not met at all before the time of Scott, and Scott's achievement is something remarkable in the history of literature. He at last succeeds in doing with ease what writers had unsuccessfully tried to do in all the ages before him. When the Master, by Woodstock and Ivanhoe and Kenilworth, had shown that the thing could be done and how it could be done, successors and imitators sprang up everywhere. Cooper in America was the first to follow in Scott's path, The Spy appearing in 1821. The

famous Walladmor was published in Ger many in 1823, and Victor Hugo began writing novels in the same year. I Promessi Sposi appeared in Italy in 1827, and in England, of course, followers were many, notably G. P. R. James and Harrison Ainsworth, and later, Bulwer. The greatest of all to bend his genius in the new direction was Dumas, who, however, was devoting himself in Scott's time to writing plays. Later on he adopted the historical novel, and, while some might hold that the pupil had surpassed the master, Mr. Saintsbury does not. Greater skill in dialogue and more excitement in plot he concedes to the Frenchman, but in characterization Scott holds his own, and, after all, it is the character, the personality, that one remembers, and not the things that happen to him.

Toward the middle of the century the historical novel, notwithstanding a crowd of smaller writers on its lines, or perhaps because of them, began in England to fall into disfavor, which, with a few brilliant exceptions, has lasted until within the last few years. Thackeray, who had spent much time and wit in satirizing our subject, produced in 1852 Henry Esmond, of which Mr. Saintsbury says: "In a certain way Esmond is the crown and flower of the historical novel; the flaming limits of the world' of fiction have been reached in it with safety to the bold adventurer, but with an impossibility of progress further to him or any other." Thackeray was the first to make painstaking collections of small items bearing on this subject, to, search through old books and pamphlets for material, and to try to make all minor detail and local coloring historically accurate. Kingsley's two great novels Hypatia and Westward Ho! followed Esmond within three years. Of Hypatia our critic says: "The splendid tableaux of which the book is full, tableaux artfully and even learnedly composed but thoroughly alive, are the great charm and great merit of it as a historical novel. The voyage down the Nile, the night-riots and the harrying of the Jews; the panorama (I know no other word for it, but the thing is one of the finest in fiction) of the defeat of Herac

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M. BRUNETIERE'S OPINION.* The development of the naturalistic novel in contemporary France is the work of criticism, especially of the criticism of Taine. If it had not been for Taine even Zola could not have become what he has become. With that superstition about the past which we all have, the naturalistic writers have sought their ancestors in the English novelists from Richardson George Eliot, just as the naturalistic painters have sought their ancestors in the little masters of Holland. Naturalism is a great theory of art, and my severest reproach to our novelists is that they have wronged it. They lack both the information and the culture to be the descendants of the English novelists. That their one dominating influence was Taine is shown by the fact that since 1875 their position has coincided exactly in its rise and fall with the fate of his theories Zola knew his real origin while Taine helped him, but as soon as he saw that Taine had ceased to be entirely wrapped up in helping him he turned against his critic and took every occasion to attack him, while on his side Taine became somewhat startled at the kind of disciple he had produced, and his last years were poisoned by Zola's success. On the whole the school has produced more disciples than masters, more promises than fruit, and has been more fiery than fertile. Does Daudet really belong to that school? I have sometimes doubted it. The first part of his work is directly inspired by Dickens. They show the same taste in the choice of subjects, the same sympathy for the humble, as they are called, for the dis*From a lecture delivered in New York City.

inherited ones of this world, the same pity, sincere but at times a little nervous and grimacing. Like Dickens, he made a point of connecting himself with his characters.

I cannot protest too strongly against the picture of French society given in the novels of Zola. His dominant quality is force or vigor of imagination, especially constructive imagination, but it must be added that never was any observer less accurate, less conscientious, less true. The peasants of M. Zola are not French peasants, his workingmen are not French workingmen, his middle classes are not the French middle classes, nor are his soldiers and officers French officers and soldiers. We have faults in France, but we have not this sustained grossness, this absolute lack of morality, this perfect cynicism which Zola depicts. His French people are caricatures, pessimistic and calumnious caricatures. He has neither literary conscience nor esthetic sense. I do not deny him talent, but it is difficult for me to value talent when it lends itself to such ignoble tasks. Sarcey himself, who never sacrifices in the slightest degree his own opinion to the beliefs of his fellow-critics, but who gives up at once any belief if he but sees that the mob has changed its mind, Sarcey abandoned Zola, his own disciples left him, and the severest blow of all was dealt to him in the rising fame of three new novelists. Guy de Maupassant began his career with coarse works of a rather puerile pessimism, rather dangerous but less bold than displeasing, for there is no courage in putting immorality before the public, there is only bad taste. In his short stories, which I think much superior to his novels, he became a true observer. Then Maupassant's art is marvelously frank and direct, with a power of lending distinction to any subject, raising it out of the mire as if by a touch of his hand; and perhaps it has made some of his stories the masterpieces of French naturalism. Pierre Loti, happily, perhaps, for us, is a wholly different man. The first of his novels passed unnoticed, but the last three, Le Mariage de Loti, Le Roman d'un Spahi, Pecheur d'Islande, restored to us what I may call the poetic novel. He made a point of never reading, but he does not lack culture. His descriptions are incomparable, and they are never inventories, like the descriptions of Zola and Balzac,

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