Mr. Wister has the gift of picturing real, vital characters, and his stories are full of a brilliant and moving life. His people are not only alive, but intensely and actively alive. A man bred in the best social traditions, a graduate of the oldest American university, Mr. Wister was fortunate enough to know the frontier at the very moment when the forces of business and the second great Western movement were about to destroy it. Most men who wrote about the old frontier, either in fiction or in plays, were concerned with its melodramatic aspects,--its guns, and shirts, sombreros, and bucking broncos. Mr. Wister saw the character behind these stage costumes; he recognized the fiber of the men,--their courage, their spirit of comradeship, their rough but genuine humor, their passion for wide horizons and the freedom of the life of the plains. In “The Virginian,” and the short stories from the same hand, our fiction has a series of studies of types of character now almost extinct, and of a stage of life which has disappeared. When “Lady Baltimore” appeared, Mr. Wister had passed from society in an elemental stage to a Southern community which has preserved its oldtime qualities of refinement of manner, dignity of habit, and a hospitality which is the very flower of high breeding and ease of condition. And Mr. Wister was as much at home in Charleston as on the old frontier; a fact highly significant of the quality and fiber of the man. Among American novelists he will hold a place of his own by reason of the vitality and artistic skill of his work. [Illustration: OWEN WISTER’S FAMILY PLACE, IN GERMANTOWN, PA.] [Illustration: EDITH WHARTON] Mrs. Wharton’s stories, even more than those of Mr. James, describe a social life which has taken its tone largely from an older and more conventional society, which has lost its moral simplicity in the complexity of an age of highly organized luxury, and which has taken on the easy ways of a social life that is entirely comfortable in conscience so long as it feels itself secure in matters of taste. In art Mrs. Wharton is an expert by intuition and practice. The author of “The House of Mirth” is analytical, and secures her most striking effects, not by boldly projecting her characters on a large canvas, but by uncovering their most elusive moods, their obscure motives, the conflict of temperament, character, and social traditions. Such a power of lighting up hidden processes of thought as Mrs. Wharton possesses needs the reënforcement of an art which is both vigorous and sensitive; and this art is always at Mrs. Wharton’s command. She has both precision and delicacy. She can draw a character in detachment with such vitality of insight and of portraiture that it holds the attention without the aid of accessories; or she can sketch a cross-section of society with convincing energy of stroke. She is the recorder of a highly sophisticated society, more or less relaxed in tone and corrupted by luxury.