The daily morning journal and courier., 1905-10-25
THE NOVEL OF TO-DAY.
DELIGHTFUL FEATURE OF.
 TEACHERS CONVENTION

"ElNeEh oA tue DaS-hdEA A"aAH
 Greatest Living Writer of English.
 One of the delightful features of the afternoon session of the Teachers Con vention at Hartford last Friday, was the address on "The Novel of To-day" by Professor William Lyon Phelps of Yale College. Professor Phelps referred to the popularity of the novel, and said that it had been growing during the past thirty years and faster during the past ten years than for any period pre- viously. The novel is the most prOmi- nent form of literature. It has had a tremendous rise in responsibility. Not long ago it was an intrinsically wicked thing to be a novel reader. The novel has lost its glamor of being wicked. She's only a novel reading girl was formerly a remark of ex- treme contempt. The novel had not only. lost its flavor of wickedness, but it has become a sinless source of pleas ure. In Shakespeare's time the sonnet abounded. After Milton's time the son. net departed. It took Browning forty years to get the people to listen to him. The quality of the novel has risen with the increase in the quality of novels The novel occupies the place which the drama occupied in the time of Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare, Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher and others wrote plays. The stage in those days was the channel of literary effort. There is no telling what may be rammed down our throats in the shape of fiction. Russia, England and France lead the world in lIigh-class fiction. The Germans can- not write good novels. Berlin, the capi- tai of Germany, is the intellectual workshop of the planet, and it sur- passes in many other things. The req son of the inability of Germans to write novels is they don't know when to stop. Their stories are prodigiously long. The Germans, in writing fiction, have no sense of proportion. They have not an eye for the salient point, they have no humor and they have too much sentimeptality. It is remarkable that the Germans, who are such ruth less iconoclastic, should be so extraor- dinarily sentimental. The moon and the moonlight have always prominent place in German fiction. German fic- tion writers are hopelessly unscientific in this respect. The light of the moon always shines full on the face of the heroine, just as the calcium light shines on. the face of the character on the stage. Tn America we have no great living literary genius of the first order, if we may except Mark Twain. Mark Twain is absolutely and not merely relatively a great writer. Nathaniel Hawthorne is the greatest master that America has produced. Howells has the power to charm the reader. But has he the divine spark that thrills one? Isn't he, after all, a man of con- sumnate talent rather than a genius of divine inspiration? About Henry James. Who dares to talk intelligently or any other way about Henry James? Professor Phelps recalled that when he was a small boy in Hartford he read ''Daisy Miller," and he thinks 1t infln- itely better than other stories written by Henry James. Henry James has the critical spirit. The critical, except in the case of Goethe, is always at war with the creative. Henry James suf- fers from over-subtility. Jack London may produce a masterpiece. Harold Frederic had he lived might have pro duced the American masterpiece. Mark Twain is far and away the greatest living writer of English. His "Hucl1le- berry Finn is an epic of the Missis- sippi
 Russia has produced two great mas Hers of -Turgenieff, who died in 1883. and Tolstoi. He thought Turge- nieff the most perfect artist in fiction writing the age has seen George Moore says he. is the greatest artist since antiquity. Tolstoi is in. a class by himself France has produced great novelist in Victor Hugo, A. Dumas and Balzac. Les Miserables," by Hugo, is realism written in a romantic vein and with the exaggeration of over-empha- sis. There is not to-day a writer of ab- solutely commanding genius The nov els of ZoIa are the incarnation of art. There are only twenty miles of salt water between France and England, and yet how different the peoples of both countries are! The Frenchman never gets excited over morals, and the Englishman never gets excited over art. George Moore an 'Irishman, who has had a French education--a combi- nation that wrought so much havoc with oscar Wilde--is a, writer, that is prominent to-day: As for Mrs. Ward -l4-let us pass to Kipling Qaughter). Kipling has not fulfilled his mission. He has never written any work of fic- tion which is the equal of '"The Man Who Would Be King" He Professor Phelps) did not consider that Hall Caine and Marie Corelli belonged to literature at all. Thomas Hardy is at the head of English fiction. William Blacks novel, "Madcap Violet,'' is not worth reading.
 There was a hearing yesterday after oonY hnforn tho dirnctnY of ro11roIio