However wisely critics and philosophers may argue about fiction and other forms of art, inexperienced readers will be narrowing their outlook if they make up their minds, after one or two experiments or as a result of a critical opinion which they get at second hand, that there are certain classes of stories that they do not like. If one knows that Stevenson is a romanticist and happens to have read “David Balfour” and failed to like it, it is foolish to rule out the romantic, for perhaps Dumas will prove better. Some people are tired beyond recovery of historical novels, because so many bad ones have been urged upon the public during the last fifteen years. Some people have decided that they do not like stories that end unhappily. This seems a thoughtless decision because many of the great fictions from the “Iliad” to “The Mill on the Floss” terminate with the death of the principal characters and sadness for the characters that survive. When we hear some one say, “There is tragedy enough in real life, I want something pleasant to read,” we may suggest that the great tragedy that is told in the Gospels has brought more lasting joy and good feeling to the race than any other story. Not to make so high an argument, I feel that I could give to any person who pretends to like only “pleasant” fiction a half dozen tragic novels that would capture and delight this sad soul that has seen enough of “tragedy in real life.” Arguments are unnecessary, for fiction itself outstrips them or defeats them and triumphs. The public is tired, we say, of historical romance, and it cannot be charmed by sad stories which end in death and disaster. Yet during the past winter one of “best sellers” was Miss Mary Johnston’s “Lewis Rand.” This is an historical romance laid in Jefferson’s Virginia. It is a tragic romance; the finest gentleman is killed, the titular hero goes to prison on the last page, a ruin of ambitious genius, and the heroine, his wife, parts from us at the end to enter, in the world that lies just beyond the covers of books, a life of inevitable sadness. Individual vitality is what makes the good book. When the good book appears we like to classify it and examine its form and material, but its vitality defies us. You may group all your friends and acquaintances in familiar types, and in thinking of them when they are absent you may assure yourself that they fall into definite intelligible classes. But in the presence of any one of them, the most transparent and simple, you recognize the mystery of a person, a power, however slight, that is unlike other powers, a vital soul that baffles analysis. And so it is with books: each makes its effect as a living individual and it may have an entirely different effect from the book that seems nearest like it.