be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
in general has flourished from mediaeval times, and at this moment is
almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.

Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very characteristic
school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
Impressionist,--the school of authors who desire to strike the
imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who e