This is really an allegory, whether M. Gandillot intends it or not. Thus have those charming, fresh, ingenuous, ignorant, and rather stupid young ladies, the English and American publics, received the attempts which novelists have made to introduce among them what is called, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, the experimental novel. The present writer is no defender of that class of fiction; least of all is he an exclusive defender of it; but he is tired to death of the criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, which refuses to see what the realists are, whither they are tending, and what position they are beginning to hold in the general evolution of imaginative literature. He is no great lover of what they produce, and most certainly does not delight in their excesses; but when they are advised to give up their studies and paint pretty girls on rustic bridges, he is almost stung into partisanship. The present essay will have no interest whatever for persons who approve of no more stringent investigation into conduct than Miss Yonge's, and enjoy no action nearer home than Zambeziland; but to those who have perceived that in almost every country in the world the novel of manners has been passing through a curious phase, it may possibly not be uninteresting to be called upon to inquire what the nature of that phase has been, and still more what is to be the outcome of it. So far as the Anglo-Saxon world is concerned, the experimental or realistic novel is mainly to be studied in America, Russia, and France. It exists now in all the countries of the European Continent, but we know less about its manifestations there. It has had no direct development in England, except in the clever but imperfect stories of Mr. George Moore. Ten years ago the realistic novel, or at all events the naturalist school, out of which it proceeded, was just beginning to be talked about, and there was still a good deal of perplexity, outside Paris, as to its scope and as to the meaning of its name. Russia, still unexplored by the Vicomte de Vogüé and his disciples, was represented to western readers solely by Turgéneff, who was a great deal too romantic to be a pure naturalist. In America, where now almost every new writer of merit seems to be a realist, there was but one, Mr. Henry James, who, in 1877, had inaugurated the experimental novel in the English language, with his _American_. Mr. Howells, tending more and more in that direction, was to write on for several years before he should produce a thoroughly realistic novel.