The Arkansaw traveler., 1888-10-13
MAN-BOOKS.
Rl JULIAN nAw rHoRNK.

portion of their audience. We arc told that women-and unmarried wo- men at that--do three fourths of the novel; reading in t,e world and that, consequently, novels must be so fash- toned as to please and attract tho feminine mind, and especially the jun for feminine. We must have love, and beauty, and heroic self. sacrifice. and gruesome tragedy and pathos. There must be gushing descriptions of scenery, and, as late reviewer in the Critic insists, 1t must symbolixe the moods and even the characters of tho drGmatis persoRa. Men novclists &C., cordingly exhaust their resources In furnishing this sort of stuff; and wo- men novelists easily outdo them both in numbers and in sentimentality, though of them all, only one living woman writer ever produces any ything worth sane mans attention and that one-Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard--writes as men ought to write, If they have brains and courage enough.
 The argument as to tho largeness of the female audience might be met by the reply that the reason 1t Is 70 large is because 1t Is so abjectly catered to. Men have ceased to suppose that novels are written for them and, If they can not read French, and do not wear long hair, and shave their upper lips, they let all novels alone. Not that the French write mascaline novels but they do write improper ones; and poor man, deprived of his natural healthy food, eagerly snaps up his natural unhealthy food. It may be, too, that the feminine novel Is but a sign of the times, and that there are no longer any masculine men in OK. istence. It is the woman's age--a soft, vicious, iDdolcnt, propriety- loving sge. The wholesome, masculine fibre has gone out of 1t. lt has gone out of literature at all events.
 The last man. novel written in this country, with the exception of Mrs. Stoddard's, was published full thirty years ago. It was called "Ksloolah {; or, the Adventures of Jonathan Ro- mer," and its author was Dr. W. $. Mayo. That book was Man from title page to colophon: 1t was of man, for man, by man. It Is true that hd- ioOIdh herself is a woman, and 6 very lovely one. But she occupies her proper place in the story she Is what woman ought to be; she does not loaf and invite her soul all over the book; on the contrary, the book Is the more masculine because she is In it. This admirable work was republished lately but 1t was got up in Christ mas- book form, and we gave It to our boys, and never thought to look into 1t ourselves. Perhaps even the boys themselves failed to appreciate 1t. It seems to me that the American boy of to. day is a good deal like girl in trousers.
 Herman Melville, in his "Typee" and "Omoo," and in his "Moby Dick" and "White- e-Jacket," wrote books that were certainly not meant for women {; but they were not exactly man. books, either, if we except "Moby Dick ;n they were books of adventurc-boy1 books; and, therefore, admirable though they were, and unequsicd since, they did not quite All the bill. "Moby Dick" was published, think, in 1854. That exhausts our native list, back as far as Franklin. As for England, she has, in this century (for we will not go back to Daniel Defoe. Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, a i'd genus aoJiic)--she has, say, George Borrow-honored name 1.-the author of "Lavengro," "Rommany Rye" "Gypsies in Spain; |" a man as origi- nal as new planet, and mans man exclusively. Murray, the London publisher, has lately brought out $ complete edition of his works and If that were the only thing the house of Murray had ever done, it would en- title it to our enduring gratitude. There is meat for men in "Lavengro," 1" and plenty of 1t the roast beef and strong ale of England. l wish we were nourished on 1t. And Borrow, origi- \ nal though he Is, does not stand alone {; beside him, less known and less pro- ductive, but solid as granite, and good ss gold, stands TrelAwDy, the great Trelawny, the friend Of Byron and Shelley, their biographer, and bet- ter man than either. Trelawpy wrote an autobiographicaI romance called "The Adventures of . Younger Son - 1t was published by Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, in London, in 1881 and am not aware that 1t has been republished since then. No man can read that book without consider , ing himself more . man even our be- loved "Jonathan Romer" must be con- tent to occupy : second place in comparison with it: it is % true, 70 strong, @ simple, Q ranx with man nature. After reading t, you uDder- stand better the HMemoirs of Byron, Shelley, and the author" and perceive why those famous poets @ quickly