It would be difficult, I think, for any one but a realistic novelist to overrate the good that realism in fiction has done. It has cleared the air of a thousand follies, has pricked a whole fleet of oratorical bubbles. Whatever comes next, we cannot return, in serious novels, to the inanities and impossibilities of the old "well-made" plot, to the children changed at nurse, to the madonna heroine and the god-like hero, to the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices. In future, even those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it most wilfully, will be obliged to put in their effects in ways more in accord with veritable experience. The public has eaten of the apple of knowledge, and will not be satisfied with mere marionettes. There will still be novel-writers who address the gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy old convention and the clumsy _Family Herald_ evolution, but they will no longer be distinguished people of genius. They will no longer sign themselves George Sand and Charles Dickens. In the meantime, wherever I look I see the novel ripe for another reaction. The old leaders will not change. It is not to be expected that they will write otherwise than in the mode which has grown mature with them. But in France, among the younger men, every one is escaping from the realistic formula. The two young athletes for whom M. Zola predicted ten years ago an "experimental" career more profoundly scientific than his own, are realists no longer. M. Guy de Maupassant has become a psychologist, and M. Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who set all the ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books, never has been a realist; nor has Pierre Loti, in whom, with a fascinating freshness, the old exiled romanticism comes back with a laugh and a song. All points to a reaction in France; and in Russia, too, if what we hear is true, the next step will be one toward the mystical and the introspective. In America it would be rash for a foreigner to say what signs of change are evident. The time has hardly come when we look to America for the symptoms of literary initiative. But it is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adapted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty. _1890._ IS VERSE IN DANGER? Is Verse in Danger?