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 "Ben 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. NATIONAL TASTE DEMANDS A LOCAL COLOR FOR NOVELS. In nothing is the national taste more local than in fiction. The ultimate method of the higher verse is alike in all tongues. If you are fortunate enough to be born to more than one tongue, and no laborious linguistic acquirement in later years equals this in illuminating literary pleasaunce, there is no witchery more inexplicable than the fashion in which higher verse will MAXIM GORKY. 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? 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 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 oscil lates 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 awak. ening 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. of a 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 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. In German letters to-day live in the drama. 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, 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. 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. "The Virginian" has sold. It began years ago in the honest attempt to preserve to the future a fading Western life. This gives it the flavor of the document. The Virginian is the best thing we have done on this side the water; but he will not work, and it is a happy idea to put him, as so many of his class and kind have put themselves, where he has about him deserts of idle hours. Episodes interest the American. There has come, too, if one trace Mr. Wister's stories through the years, an access of philosophic insight. He thinks. This is not common in novels. Given these and a careful habit of writing, and there follows the one book of the year which has marched to great though not record-breaking success under the suffrage.of buyers. AN ABRUPT PAUSE IN BIG SALES OF NOVELS. The year of American novels is without its array of vast circulation, because it has been without any books deserving it. Three years of big sales had bred the comfortable impression that everybody will buy anything. Everybody will not. The Booklovers' Library and the Tabard Inn may play their part, but there has been an abrupt pause to the big sales of the past. These are of two kinds,-sales to the trade and sales to buyers. It is too early to say whether Marie Corelli's "Temporal Power," which begins with the first, will go on to the second. Miss Corelli, who stands in her vogue for the same sort of thing which breeds Christian Science, -inability to know a fact when you see it or to have a logical idea,-will sell in England. Her sales here are less. In this book she has left spiritism for politics, and turns a king into a leader of impossible men in an impossible realm, with evident conviction that she is it. These three books have, for widely different reasons, a distinct place in the year's fiction. The other novels of the year group themselves. Two authors of great vogue in the close past, -Miss Mary Johnston in "Audrey" and Mr. Charles Major in " Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall," have tested fate once more. Both began with great editions, and both have sold, but neither book has cast any shadow. Miss Johnston has written rather better than before, is more skillful, and all the reviewers agree that it is quite wonderful,-this picture of old Virginia and the eerie maiden,-but the new book lacks the touch that moves. Mr. Major is "dramatic." He too has taken more pains than before. are the same tempests, and this young woman, like the other, tears passion and her clothes to tatters. Mr. Henry Harland, in trying, on his part, to repeat a past success, has the advantage that it was based not on plot, romance, and a capacity for incident, but on the power to write with skill on picturesque subjects, used as the setting for a shrewd knowledge, not of human nature, but of human types. While Mr. Harland writes in English, he thinks in French, and "The Lady Paramount, one might almost say, was painted on the lid of the "Cardinal's Snuff-box." OWEN WISTER. There THE SUCCESSORS OF SUCCESSFUL STORIES. The American public is in nothing more alike in all its acts than in the fashion in which it requires each new plea for favor to rest on its merits. In England, an author who has once " JOSIAH FLYNT." sold, sells again; not here. "Castle Craney crow" does not gain because its author, Mr. G. B. McCutcheon, wrote "Graustark." Mr. Will Mr. Will N. Harben in "Abner Daniel" has improved on "Westerfelt," but it is doubtful if this close study of Georgia life wins a like attention, with its evident realism. This local chronicle is still at the point where it is more anxious to spread local color over the picture than to make the picture. Miss Nancy Huston Banks has taken Kentucky for "Oldfield." "The Desert and the Sown" adds the skill of the story-teller to the vision of the Western mountain, but lacks the substance of Mrs. Mary Hallock Foote's past work. 66 Two novels, Hearts Courageous," by Miss Hallie Erminie Rives, and The Mississippi Bubble," by Mr. Emerson Hough, are fitted to large sales and lavish advertising as a coat is fitted to a man. They are chosen for their purpose with unerring judgment. The Revolution in Miss Rives' book, an earlier period in Mr. Hough's, a clear style, much movement, action, familiar figures given life, a fresh hand,-out of these a year's success comes. Of a very different sort is Mrs. Gertrude F. Atherton's "The Con ton. queror." Here there is the direct attempt to reconstruct an historic character, Alexander HamilIt is not Hamilton, but a figure full of Greek fire, a sort of woman's statesman. True or not, it has made its mark on its readers. This was scarcely true of two historical novels by practiced hands, one suddenly stilled by death, Kate Bonnet" (piracy story), by Frank R. Stockton, and "Dorothy South" (Virginia before the war), by George Cary Eggleston. Neither has here the characteristic quality of its author. Nearly three score of these historical novels have this year appeared, and their number has been swollen by the notable increase of publication at the author's expense. HOWELLS AND HENRY JAMES. In the recognized group of novelists who yearly make their appearances, Mr. Howells and Mr. James lead. To one equally interested in the vote of the many and the verdict of the few, there is something pathetic in the middle-aged novel like The Kentons," with the atmosphere of the seventies on every page and a Dutch capacity for painting in the round the arid annals of this Ohio family, whose daughter falls in love in the right way with the wrong man and in the wrong way with the right one. "The Wings of the Dove" returns to Mr. James' earlier subjects and retains his newer method. How amazing and how exasperating that a man can write like this, produce this unique effect of woven words, and yet leave you, so far as reality is concerned, in this picture of the contact between the American and English, with the shimmering sense of the cinematograph, which always seems to be and never is the real thing. InCaptain Macklin," Mr. Richard Harding Davis has the precise fighting hero who stirs and wins. This man has blood in his veins, not ink. With him, "Ranson's Folly," and "In the Fog," Mr. Davis has suddenly emerged again, and readers swarm once more. Sir A. Conan Doyle has recurred to an earlier popularity in the "Hound of the Baskervilles," in which the method of an episode is applied to a longer span. Mr. Fergus W. Hume has repeated his past, "The Pagan's Cup" brimming with artificial mystery. NO NEW POPULAR AUTHOR THIS YEAR. No one new author has made a sudden sweep this year to the first rank. Several suggest a future by a present. Miss Anne Douglas Sedgwick bloomed unseen until the Century published "The Rescue" and the Century Co. brought out the " Confounding of Camelia" and the "Dull Miss Archinard." These three novels have had no run, but they have added Miss Sedgwick to |