so fast that a short lifetime can mark the growth. New fields
are opening and new laborers are working in them. But it is no swift
and easy matter to disabuse the race mind from attitudes and habits
inculcated for a thousand years. What we have been fed upon so long we
are well used to, what we are used to we like, what we like we think is
good and proper.

The widening demand for broader, truer fiction is disputed by the slow
racial mind: and opposed by the marketers of literature on grounds of
visible self-interest, as well as lethargic conservatism.

It is difficult for men, heretofore the sole producers and consumers
of literature; and for women, new to the field, and following masculine
canons because all the canons were masculine; to stretch their minds to
a recognition of the change which is even now upon us.

This one narrow field has been for so long overworked, our minds are so
filled with heroes and heroes continually repeating the one-act play,
that when a book like David Harum is offered the publisher refuses it
repeatedly, and finally insists on a "heart interest" being injected by
force.

Did anyone read David Harum for that heart interest? Does anyone
remember that heart interest? Has humanity no interests but those of the
heart?

Robert Ellesmere was a popular book--but not because of its heart
interest.

Uncle Tom's Cabin appealed to the entire world, more widely than any
work of fiction that was ever written; but if anybody fell in love and
married in it they have been forgotten. There was plenty of love in that
book, love of family, love of friends, love of master for servant and
servant for master; love of mother for child; love of married people for
each other; love of humanity and love of God.

It was extremely popular. Some say it was not literature. That opinion
will live, like the name of Empedocles.

The art of fiction is being re-born in these days. Life is discovered to
be longer, wider, deeper, richer, than these monotonous players of one
June would have us believe.

The humanizing of woman of itself opens five distinctly fresh fields
of fiction: First the position of the young woman who is called upon to
give up her "career"--her humanness--for marriage, and who objects
to it; second, the middle-aged woman who at last discovers that her
discontent is social starvation--that it is not more love that she
wants, but more business in life: Third the interrelation of women with
wome