The value of fiction lies in the fact that it can give us what actual existence cannot; that it can resume in a chapter the conclusions of a lifetime; that it can omit the trivial, the vague, the redundant, and select the significant, the forcible, and the characteristic; that it can satisfy expectation, expose error, and vindicate human nature. Life, as we experience it, is too vast, its relations are too complicated, its orbit too comprehensive, ever to give us the impression of individual completeness and justice; but the intuition of these things, though denied to sense, is granted to faith, and we are authorised to embody that interior conviction in romance.... And stories of imagination are truer than transcripts of fact, because they include or postulate these, and give a picture not only of the earth beneath our feet, but of the sky above us, of the hope and freshness of the morning, of the mystery and magic of the night. They draw the complete circle, instead of mistrustfully confining themselves to the lower arc.[20] Notwithstanding the attractiveness of this artistic creed, the ranks of the out-and-out romancers have gradually thinned, as we have seen. Professor Boyesen believed that Bret Harte was the last of these. Slowly the realists, led by Howells and James, have gained ground, and for the last twenty years have almost steadily held the field. Of late, indeed, there have been some signs of a reaction; but it has as yet taken no very pronounced form. A necessary concomitant of this tendency toward realism has been an increase in the number of “novels of the soil.” Writers have drawn what they knew best: Miss Woolson, the Lake region; Cable, Creole New Orleans; Ella Higginson and Emma Wolf, the Pacific coast; Allen, Kentucky; Miss Murfree, Tennessee; Fawcett and Bunner, New York; Henry B. Fuller and Miss Wyatt, Chicago; Miss Jewett and Mrs. Wilkins Freeman, New England. One reason why the “great American novel” has not yet been written is the very bigness of the country. No great personality has yet risen who can combine all the elements of our vast modern life into one harmonious structure. Meanwhile we have had most of the various sections of our country described in fiction by skilful hands. Types of a life that is passing away have been caught and preserved in a fiction which, though assuredly not immortal, is destined, we believe, to a long life.