His colleague of York, the Most Reverend William Dalrymple Maclagan, is five years the junior of Archbishop Temple, and the son of an army physician. Of Scottish birth and training, a graduate with mathematical honors of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, he served for five years in the Indian army, from which he retired with the grade of lieutenant in 1852. It was not until four years later that he took his first clerical orders. In 1869 he was appointed rector of Newington, and vicar of Kensington, a part of

FROM 8,000 to 10,000 novels yearly appear

the world over. They are a

London in 1875. Three years later he was ap pointed Bishop of Litchfield, and in 1891 translated to the Archbishopric of York. He shared in the editorship of "The Church and the Age," two volumes which thirty years ago attracted much attention, and collected, in 1891, a volume of Pastoral Letters and Synodal Charges." It was his traditional prerogative to crown the Queen after the Archbishop of Canterbury had completed the more elaborate ritual that marks the consecration of the sovereign.

the earth's great stream of print, but they are the largest share. Japan contributes a round half thousand, in 1895, 462. There are a couple of hundred in India,-letters in India still turning to verse in preference to prose, as in primitive Vedic days. The Arab world has its scattering scores; in Egypt, three to five yearly; in Syria, a few dozen. Strange works they are. Some Presbyterian friends of mine. aided to equip a reading room for Arab immigrants, and were aghast at the new novels when a neat typewritten translation of a few pages was spread before them. It was odd-for a Presbyterian reading room. Not in Arabic. The East is open-minded and open-speeched, and ever its fiction harks back to the plain-spoken men who sit in the curving ring of listeners in the market place, telling tales as old as Hammu Rabbi and as new as the Arabian Nights in the hands of a child. Japanese fiction is passing from the interminable Chinese romance to fiction modeled on the European novel. In northwest India, Moslem Lucknow, on the appointed day, fills the street where the monthly numbers of the last romance come fresh from the press. One which had a prodigious vogue a dozen years ago carried a modern hero through prodigies of valor in the Russo-Turkish war. For a decade past in India vernacular fiction, as in Arabic, is taking the place of the tale modeled on old classic examples. The world of the novel, like all worlds, is coming to be alike the world over.

Italy and Spain, between them, issue from 500 to 600 novels in a year, the larger country the larger half. France, the world's school

master in fiction, prints 600 volumes a year. Scandinavian Europe as many more, centering for publication at Copenhagen. Russia supplies, on an average, year by year, from 800 to 1,000. Its vast millions are unlettered, but the appetite of its small educated classes, social conditions, and the absence of libraries and newspapers, stimulate reading. When the copyrights on Pushkin's poems expired, the first twelve months saw 183 editions and a circulation of 2,000,000 copies. What English poet is likely to have this compliment? Each lesser tongue in Europe has its hundred or two of novels, but the editions are small. A sale of 8,000 to 10,000 copies is the limit of success for a new Hungarian novel.

THE TEUTONIC RACE GIVES THE FLOOD OF FICTION.

The great flood of novels comes, after all, from the two great branches of the reading Teuton race, from the 70,000,000 who speak German and the 120,000,000 who speak English. Together, these tongues yearly issue nigh 4,000 titles in fiction, juvenile and novels together,half the world's stories. In 1901, there were issued in this country 914 novels and 434 juveniles. England had of both classes 1,513. Germany published, in 1901, 3,406 issues in belleslettres, novels, drama, and verse. In 1898, out of 3,061 such works, an analysis showed that 1,856 were novels and juveniles. In 1901, there were about 2,000. Duplications reduce the new fiction of Great Britain and America to some 2,000 separate titles, about one-third written in this country and about two-thirds in England. German fiction, it must be remembered, includes all greater Germany, Austria as well as the more northern empire; the German of Switzerland as well as of Russia and that outlying fringe in other

lands, where, as in Belgium or Holland, there has begun a German renaissance on the border. The fiction of the English tongue runs by strange streams, and the sheets on which its most original living genius first appeared in print were damped down by the Ganges.

No full list of the issues of English fiction in a year is ever known. No fiction compares with it in circulation or in audience. France once led all Europe in the circulation of its novels. It is barely thirty years since James Parton, in discussing literary earnings, pointed out that French men of letters alone gained a comfortable competence, because they alone wrote for all Europe. This has ceased. The growth of national spirit since 1848 has rendered literary consumption regional. A single French novel in a year may reach 100,000, as may this year M. Willy's "Claudine en Ménage ;" but in the English-speaking world "Audrey" began last February with 100,000 copies. Miss Corelli's Temporal Power" has just opened its sales with an edition of 125,000. At least four nov. els, Mr. Wister's "Virginian," Miss Rives' Hearts Courageous," Mr. Hough's "Mississippi Bubble," and Mr. Major's "Dorothy Vernon," all American, -exceed any French or German novel of the year. Even in the circulation of Sir Richard Calmady," estimated at 30,000, Lucas Malet 66 (Mrs. Mary K. Harrison), probably exceeds the demand for M. Bazin's "Les Oberlé," the second French success of the year. In Belgium a run of four editions excites • remark, and M. Maeterlinck has not improbably had a far larger circulation in translation in Eng. lish than in his own country in the original.

FICTION EDITIONS

SECOND ONLY TO SCHOOLBOOKS.

Short of school books, no editions in any land equal those of fiction, and their titles average a fifth of those published of substantial books. Only those who check the various returns which appear from time to time of the books" published in various countries are aware how illusory these are and how misleading in comparison. Nothing awakes confidence like an erroneous statement carried out to units, or, still better, worked out in a percentage to the fourth decimal. In countries like Japan and Germany, where a record is made of all issues not periodical, though of only four pages, the yearly number of publications of all orders will rise to 25,331 in Germany in 1901, and 26,965 in Japan in 1895. German university theses alone,-most under 100 pages,—give 5,000 to 6,000 titles in this list yearly. If only new "books" of a substantial size, excluding directories, almanacs, annuals, and mere routine.

lists, like college catalogues, be included in the tale, as is the habit here and in England, the number of books" issued in 1901 will be,United States, 5,496; Great Britain, 4,955. On this basis there are from 45,000 to 55,000 new volumes issued yearly from the presses of the world. Germany has of these 9,000; England and the United States as many more, deducting duplicates separately noted in each; France and Russia 6,000 each; Italy and the Norse lands, 3,000, and the rest of the world's lands run at about 2,000 each.. India, a continent in itself, has about 7,000 a year, though no one presidency and no one tongue has over a third of this number. The world's publications would in a decade fill the largest library in this country, and in twenty exhaust the shelf-room of any library abroad. The flood grows, but at a varying speed. In seventy years ours has deepened twentyfold, doubling every twenty years. In 1833, there were 274 works by Americans and 206 by foreigners published in this country, old and new. The number, old and new, American and foreign, in 1901, was 8,141; but the proportion was altered slightly,-4,701 were by American authors, new and reprints, and 3,440 by foreign writers, old and new, English and European.

National initiative has, after all, made but slow progress. A little over half of our book consumption came from abroad two generations ago. A little less than half now. Germany, like the United States, has doubled its book output in two decades; in Japan it has grown some fivefold; but the total has remained substantially unchanged in England and France. Here, as in so much else, these two lands have reached the top of their progress curve, and maintain a fixed norm. The average yearly output of letters and of books has not changed 10 per cent. in either in twenty years. Russia, like the United States, has doubled. So has India. Italy has grown a third. This record of the annual issue of books is a singularly accurate and penetrating measure of the relative movement of lands in the world current of national evolution and devolution.

TRANSLATED FICTION RARELY SELLS.

Novels are the largest single group in this great flood of volumes. They are the only interchangeable form of the higher letters. No good poems translate. Some translations are better than others, but no man born to a tongue ever saw its better verse in translation without a qualm. Even plays call for "adaptation." Novels translate. Yet the fewest novels have had a notable circulation outside of the tongue of origin. From 50 to 100 novels are yearly published in translation here and in England. Out of 500 or

so issued in the last five years, only one, "Quo Vadis," has won a place among the "best-selling" books. Zola's books are prodigiously talked about in the papers. After the first one, "L'Assomoir," none has sold. The sales of even Tolstoy are small measured against the native novel. But foreign translations have a visible and immediate effect on the native novelist. These exotics cross-fertilize the native bloom, and it sets to fruit of a new flavor. Zola gave realism. Tolstoy modified Howells' methods, and dull pages came, absent from "Their Wedding Journey." "Quo Vadis" began,-though Hur" should and did not,-the sacred novel, half a dozen appearing this year. The influence of French models is on every page of younger men who write with care. But, as every bookseller will tell you, and as every publisher knows, the translated novel may lend dignity to a list; it does not add thousands to the aggregate circulation of the issues of a firm.

"Ben

HENRYK SIENKIEWICZ.

charm and yet refuse transfer to another tongue as familiar. As with Hindu caste, salt sea and boundary line deprive verse of its incommunicable superiority. Great poems are essentially one. Novels, like a local flora, reflect soil and climate. With all modern communication, the novels of various lands not only have inflected differences of tongue and temperament, they occupy separate fields, and address themselves to different tastes. French novels, so easily foremost in form, address themseves to definite social and personal problems. Where else does novelist after novelist find readers willing to follow him through a cycle, as has almost every Frenchman of the first rank in fiction. Empty Gyp's" fiction may be and full of bald suggestion, which the most brazen of American bookstalls would not put on sale; but even the Comtesse de Martel is full of purpose, and never forgets her kinship to Mirabeau. When Mrs. Atherton implies a political creed and propaganda in The Conqueror" it strikes the American as slightly humorous. Zola led France. Could any American novelist or English do as much in his land? What porridge had Thackeray?

66

The Spanish novel as distinctly deals with local, regional, and provincial life taken as a whole and treated as a unit. Was ever the integral life of a provincial town so completely set before the reader as in the "Fourth Estate" by Armando Palacio Valdes? The isolation of the

Peninsula, its early kingdoms still showing their boundaries across the map of the monarchy, the fixed social life of a community which lost its initiative when it burned the Protestant in the north, slew the Moor in the south, and expelled the Jew from both, these all unite to breed the defined study of definite types. As D'Annunzio illustrates in Gioconda," or Matilde Serao in the "Ballet Dancer" and "On Guard," two authors poles apart in style and method, the Italian has as distinctly the distinct power of making a detached mood live, the same power to isolate emotion and use it to personal ends which has given the Italian his detachment from faith, his attitude toward religious emotion, and his dominance in the affairs of the Church. The German novel is as clearly domestic. Its pages reek with personal relations. The first novel in the tongue is, after all, an educational treatise. When a newly-awakened tongue like Magyar turns to the novel, it runs in the last half of the last century, as other lands had earlier, through the long and descriptive historic cycle, -as in Jokai's two hundred novels, - accomplishing what Scott did for his land, not only for the annals, but the scenery of Hungary. In similar fashion, in Bohemia, under the Czech renaissance, Alois Jiráoek has passed down the history of his land in a long series, "U Nás" (With Us"), which has in the past year's issue reached modern times. The Polish novel oscillates between the historic revival in fiction, as in a familiar series, in a land permitted no historic revival in fact, and the introspective speculation of the Pole, which always prevented national decision, as by Sienkiewicz in "Without Dogma" or Eliza Orzeszko's " Argonauts," a study of social conditions. Turgenieff, Tolstoy, Gorky, what are these but the successive awakening in Russia of the educated, the noble, and the serf? Pontoppidan, in Denmark, now at the end of a long life, has given his great work to the awakening of Denmark half a century ago, which has turned starving sandy tracts into the most profityielding farms in Europe, and no Danish novel but reflects this singular victory of the high school and this singular defeat of liberalism by the directing class. Nor need one, to complete the picture, remind the reader how completely the ordinary English novel has become a mere social chronicle, while the American still flounders, its field undiscovered, vibrating, when popular, between a picture of folk life and historical romance.

With this world flood of fiction no critic, however great his industry or wide his knowl edge, can expect to have even a paper-knife acquaintance. It taxes any man's efforts to maintain a direct and personal knowledge of the

notable novels in his own tongue. The usual acquaintance of an educated man with the tongues of the East and West will permit him to report, -it would be dishonest to criticise, -the general direction of this fiction, frankly using those secondary sources by which the journalist, through a wide, if distant view, brings within the range of his reader the affairs and the politics of other lands.

FRENCH NOVELS OF THE YEAR.

M. Zola has lived to see his method, proposed as final in French fiction, already abandoned, though the philosophic teacher who gave him his first impulse, -Taine,-inspires M. Bourget. It was apparent a year ago in "Un Homme d'Affaires." It is as plain in "L'Étape," a novel in which he has sought to show how useless it is to hope to build a stable French life, save on the foundation once. laid by the monarchy. M. Édouard Estaunié, in L'Épave," the life of a small town, continues in the narrow compass of a cabinet piece his pitiless pictures of the provincial life of republican France. He, like M. Bourget, is carrying on a political polemic. Popular interest turns rather to the sentimental appeal of M. Bazin's picture of Alsatian life under German rule in "Les Oberlé," the young Alsatian still enamored of a France from which he has been sundered, a work with that singular power of sketching a region rather than characters peculiar to French letters. M. Jules Claretie makes another appeal to the wounds of the past in Le Sang Français." The sons of a Metz general, M. Paul and Victor Marguerite, continue their cycle on 1870 in "Le Désastre," a minute study, while M. Paul Adam turns an earlier page and recalls a note struck by Musset, in "L'Enfant d'Austerlitz." Books like these are reviewed. The book which is read is the flagrant but skilled record of the nether depths, by M. Willy, in "Claudine en Ménage," the success of the year so far as popular circulation goes.

THE NOVEL SECOND TO THE DRAMA IN GERMANY.

German letters to-day live in the drama. In leading the day's future, it has taken the place once held by France. The novel has become a secondary matter in which the long conflict over old and new romanticists is stilled. What interest can the foreign observer take in Adolf Wilbrandt's development of the value of work as the great teacher in "Ein Mecklenburger," the slow growth of the "noble character, the old maid, "Cäcilie von Sarryn," of Georg von Ompteda, the musical schoolboy genius of Emil Strauss' "Freund Hein," or the two philanthro pists, one of the alley and the other of the field, in Aus der Triumphgasse," by Riccarda Huch,

66

MISS HALLIE ERMINIE RIVES.

and Jorn Uhl," by Gustav Frenssen, a Protestant clergyman? These all do credit to the German heart. How little do they move a foreign attention.

The ideal is the only universal national solvent, and Maeterlinck's "Le Temple Enseveli," translated as The Buried Temple," on the dividing line between essay and self-revealing fiction, is perhaps the first use of the subliminal self in higher letters, a fact of life and a principle of analysis destined to decide the current of the humanities for the next half-century.

THE SITUATION IN SPAIN, ITALY, AND RUSSIA.

66

Spain has this year but a group of rising young men, whose names as yet mean nothing. In Italy, Gabriele d'Annunzio has given himself to a play, Francesca," of dubious success, and the only other novelist known to those without, Matilde Serao, has turned from the task of defending herself and her newspaper from the charge of complicity in the Neapolitan Tammany, to publish "Lettere d'Amore." So wide a shadow may the ill success of an "Englishwoman's Love Letters" cast, though their fame has not helped to success "A Modern Antaeus," by their author, Laurence Housman, one of those books in which the hero is slowly made by hand, page by page, from school to his deathbed. Russia has a new man of short stories, Leonid Andreev, whose first volume has sold like Gorky's, to-day leading Russian sales.

IN AMERICA, -THE VIRGINIAN."

Novels, like all the works of men in the field of letters, have two tests-the demand of the general and the judgment of the trained; but there is this difference, that while it is really of no consequence to the man who writes great verse whether it is read or not, he can wait,the novel, like the newspaper, is written to be read. The novel of the year, like Owen Wister's "The Virginian," sometimes bears both tests, and sometimes, like Mrs. Edith Wharton's "The Valley of Decision," it bears but one. Of American novels this stands alone for distinction of style, for sheer architectonic quality. The average reader found it dull. If you know your Italian eighteenth century, following it to its unsavory lairs in Goldoni and him of Seingalt, if scenery appeals, and you love both the things of the outer life and the inner soul, you will wonder that every one has not read a book which has indeed had, in proportion to its importance, but a moderate sale, handicapped besides by its two volumes.