In one radical respect the art of fiction is not in the same position as the other arts. They--music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and the drama--possess a magnificent fabric of accumulated tradition. The great traditions of the art of fiction have yet to be made. Ours is a young art, struggling desperately to reach expression, with no great past to guide it. Thus, it should be a matter for wonder, not that we stumble into certain pitfalls, but that we do not fall headlong into a hundred more. But, if we have no great past, we have the present and the future--the one abundant in facilities, the other abundant in possibilities. Young men of to-day have enormous chances: we are working under exceedingly favourable conditions. Possibly we stand on the threshold of a very great period. I know, of course, that the literary artist is shamefully ill-paid, and that the man who merely caters for the public taste, amasses a rapid and respectable fortune. But how is it that such an arrangement seems other than entirely equitable? The essential conditions of the two cases are entirely distinct. The one man is free to give untrammelled expression to his own soul, free to fan to the full the flame that burns in his heart: the other is a seller of wares, a unit in national commerce. To the one is allotted liberty and a living wage; to the other, captivity and a consolation in Consols. Let us whine, then, no more concerning the prejudice and the persecution of the Philistine, when even that misanthrope, Mr. Robert Buchanan, admits that there is no power in England to prevent a man writing exactly as he pleases. Before long the battle for literary freedom will be won. A new public has been created--appreciative, eager and determined; a public which, as Mr. Gosse puts it, in one of those admirable essays of his, "has eaten of the apple of knowledge, and will not be satisfied with mere marionnettes. Whatever comes next," Mr. Gosse continues, "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 their productions more in accordance with veritable experience. 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 men of genius. They will no longer sign themselves George Sand or Charles Dickens."