The daily morning journal and courier., 1902-05-15
COLLECTED EDITIONS.

And the Young Readers Outlook.
 It is good to see monuments to de- parted greatness, such as these collect ed editions in literary period when from Dan to Beersheba all is barren. The young and foolish, crude in taste in education and experience, and eager, as is natural youth, for the novelties of their day insure what seems mon strous popularity for certain writers of novels in vogue at present. It IS swollen, too, by others who have not their excuse of youth and inexperience, whose minds are not so much uniformed as non-existent, so far as Judgment and enjoyment of literature are in question Who are the writers now
 whose works we can suppose will be collected forty years hence. and take
 their place among the Olympians of the
 library, and be establishtd as the Lares
 and Penates of every cultivated house.
 hold It would be an unhappy prospect
 for the before mentioned young people
 when they become sensible persons of
 middle age, if there were not such
 collections as these awaiting them.
 We who have attained that difficult
 age when a novel is the most tedious of
 all human performances with the ex-
 ceptlon of impotent poetry, if it is
 nothing more than the love story of an
 irnmatuie boy and girl, would other
 wise greatly pity them. They came too
 late in the nineteenth century to read
 as they appeared, the works of the
 novelists who will be found worthy of
 collected editions, How unfortunate
 for them that the writers whose
 acquaintance they made in the circula-
 ting libraries had ponderosity and
 dulness without genius, or were melo
 dramatic and extravagant without
 mystery, charm or taste! Taking the
 novel reading period from fifteen to
 thirty, when the crave for novels be-
 gins to slacken, unless the reader is an
 i'll educated woman. this must have
 been the experience of most people still reading current novels. The hest they can have known will have been Steven
 son, Mir Stanley Weyman, MT. An thony Hope and Dr. Conan Doyle, who have certainly not been ponderous
 because they have had too little sub
 stance, but to whose melodrama we must grant a certain style and good sense and discretion which raise them out of the class of coarse melodramatic novels And then there are one or two other writers who during this supposed novel reading life will have added
 something to the permanent stock. MT. Meredith, perhaps with Diana of the Crossways," or One Of Our Con- auerors;" or there may be John Ingle-
 sant" or "Aylwin." MT. Meredith's collection is being made. It will be ready for those whose novel req ding is confined to the collected editions of the masters ranged on their own library shelves, and for whom the productions of the day have no charm. Then we may hope that when they have be- come bored, their curiosity in imagin- ary lives having been sated through experience of their own. they may have enough love of literature to turn to the collected editions Of works of other days, in the absence of anything of value remaining of their own. They will leave the young and foolish to read the novels telling of brand new loves, and fussing about social and other pro-
 blems that have come into existence since they formed their own conclusions about things and settled down to the plan of life possible for themselves.
 Old ways of living, old ways of think ing old scenes, old loves, these are the objects that we can dwell on for re- freshment of mind. The masters of the novel know this, and the novels we read were written either in the past tense, as we may say, or they have be- come that tense to us in the effiuxion of time.-Saturday Review.