Among the fairy tales of our day are those centring around psychic phenomena and reporting the conversations of the dead. They are written because they represent the writer's wishes to communicate with the dead and to prove that we do not die. They are needed by some in an era of exact science and a great war as old folk lore was needed in its time. Needless to say this does not speak well for the intellects of the writers of these spiritualistic works. We make something occur because we want it to transpire. Lodge's _Raymond_ is one of the fairy tales of recent times and it has a genuineness because the author, to the amazement of many of us, believes those talks with his son actually took place. The book is really a commentary on his pathetic state of mind after the death of his son, and is his dream of hope. But realistic literature is after all in the ascendant, for it tells us of what we experience in our own life. Don Quixote showed us that love for books dealing with dreams and impossibilities may help to make one mad. Men are interested in their inner struggles and in the problems of the day. Books treating of these have replaced considerably the old romances as serious literature. Romantic and idealistic works are like dreams, fragments of the psychic life of the race when it was young. II The literary works that we like best are those which tell of the frustration of wishes like our own. We prefer to read about troubles like those we have suffered, to lose ourselves in the dreams and fantasies built up by authors, akin to those we have conjured up in our own imagination. We prefer a book that apologises for us, that tells of strivings and repressions such as we have experienced. We get a sort of pleasure then out of painful works, in which our sorrows and wants are put into artistic form, so as to evoke them again in us. It depends often on the character of our repression as to the nature of the books we like. If we have overthrown the authority of our fathers or experienced a painful love repression because we were hampered by social laws, if we have broken with our religious friends or been crushed by some moneyed powers, we may become of a revolutionary trend of mind and hence prefer writers with radical opinions. In our time there have arisen a number of geniuses who voiced such opinions; having experienced repressions on account of the customs of society, they sang and wrote of those repressions and attacked those customs. The great love felt by the young man who does not fit into the social order, for writers like Whitman, Ibsen, Nietzsche, Shaw, and others, is because these writers approve an individualism that he seeks to cultivate. He who is grieved by the tyranny of the philistine and the bourgeois, the hypocrite and the puritan, finds himself consoled by writers who were also victims of such tyranny.