ther literature. Taste
for it must be cultivated in childhood. The common schools must do for
literature what the art schools are doing for art. Not every one can
become an artist, not every one can become a writer--though this is
contrary to general opinion; but knowledge to distinguish good drawing
from bad can be acquired by most people, and there are probably few minds
that cannot, by right methods applied early, be led to prefer good
literature, and to have an enjoyment in it in proportion to its
sincerity, naturalness, verity, and truth to life.

It is, perhaps, too much to say that all the American novel needs for its
development is an audience, but it is safe to say that an audience would
greatly assist it. Evidence is on all sides of a fresh, new, wonderful
artistic development in America in drawing, painting, sculpture, in
instrumental music and singing, and in literature. The promise of this is
not only in the climate, the free republican opportunity, the mixed races
blending the traditions and aptitudes of so many civilizations, but it is
in a certain temperament which we already recognize as American. It is an
artistic tendency. This was first most noticeable in American women, to
whom the art of dress seemed to come by nature, and the art of being
agreeable to be easily acquired.

Already writers have arisen who illustrate this artistic tendency in
novels, and especially in short stories. They have not appeared to owe
their origin to any special literary centre; they have come forward in
the South, the West, the East. Their writings have to a great degree
(considering our pupilage to the literature of Great Britain, which is
prolonged by the lack of an international copyright) the stamp of
originality, of naturalness, of sincerity, of an attempt to give the
facts of life with a sense of their artistic value. Their affiliation is
rather with the new literatures of France, of Russia, of Spain, than with
the modern fiction of England. They have to compete in the market with
the uncopyrighted literature of all other lands, good and bad, especially
bad, which is sold for little more than the cost of the paper it is
printed on, and badly printed at that. But besides this fact, and owing
to a public taste not cultivated or not corrected in the public schools,
their books do not sell in anything like the quantity that the inferior,
mediocre, other home novels sell. Indeed, but for the intervention of the
magazine