instinct seems to warn people that if they were to do that, the particular debate engaged in would immediately branch off either into a prolonged and probably technical inquiry into the precise meaning and limits of the term Journalism or into an interminable and almost certainly violent dispute as to what constitutes Literature. The latter question in especial is full of "excellent differences" for those who care to discuss it: because according to some theorists on the subject there would seem to be scarcely any written or printed matter—when once you have risen above the Postoffice Directory—which is not literature; while with the very superfine class of critics, the difficulty is to find anything that is. Literature begins for the former almost where it began with Dogberry. Anyone who could have "pleaded his clergy" in the middle ages, would in their view apparently have been a literary man. Between this estimate and that of the Superfine Critic who claims to confine the name of literature to some limited class of composition which he happens himself to admire, or perhaps affect, the gap yawns enormous : and I for one have no intention of attempting to bridge it. The true definition of literature no doubt lies somewhere between them; and will be fixed on that auspicious day when it is found possible to determine the exact proportions in which Form and Matter enter into the constitution of literary merit. In the meantime we must content ourselves with admitting that form is certainly, if in an undefined degree, the more important of the two. It would be dangerous to admit any more than this in a day when so many minor poets are abroad; for a considerable number of these, while particularly careful of form, have reduced the value of their matter to a vanishing point, and any encouragement to them to carry the process yet further is to be strongly deprecated. Still this much, as I have said, must be admitted: that it is primarily form rather than matter which constitutes literature."
Among other papers presented at the Thursday session was that sent by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones, who took for his subject "The Future of the English Drama," and forecast it with an optimism quite excusable in the writer of so many serious and successful plays. While this session was in progress, the subject of "Literature for Children" was under consideration in another hall of the building, and papers were read by Mrs. D. Lothrop, Mrs. Elia W. Peattie, and Mr. Hezekiah Butterworth. In the afternoon, a programme of authors' reading for children was carried out in the presence of a very large audience, composed mostly of young people.
"Aspects of Modern Fiction" was the general subject of the Friday session of the Congress. Mr. George W. Cable was asked to preside, and the choice was no less happy than that of the chairmen for the three preceding sessions. Mr. Cable followed the example of his predecessors in the chair, and read the opening paper, his subject being: "The Uses and Methods of Fiction." We extract a passage from the close of this paper:
"We live in a day unparalleled by any earlier time in its love and jealousy for truth. In no field of search after truth have we been more successful than in science. Our triumphs here have kindled in us such energy and earnest enthusiasm, we have been tempted, both readers and writers, to forget that facts are not the only vehicle of truth. In our almost daily triumphant search, through the simple study of facts as they are, for the human race's betterment, we have learned to yield our imaginations too subserviently to the rule and discipline of the fact-hunters, and a depiction of desirable but as yet unrealized conditions across a chasm of impracticability is often unduly and unwisely resented.
"The world will do well to let its story-tellers be as at their best they have ever been, ambassadors of hope. The fealty they owe is not a scientific adherence and confinement to facts and their photographic display, however benevolently such an attitude may be inspired, save in so far as they may help them the more delightfully to reveal the divine perfections of eternal truth and beauty.
"Yet if it is true that there is no more law to compel the fictionist to teach truth than there is to require the scientist to be a poet, there are reasons why in more or less degree, and in the great majority of cases, he will choose to teach. One of these reasons lies on the surface. It is that in fictional literature, at least, Truth, duly subordinated to Beauty as the queen of the realm, is her greatest possible auxiliary and ally. No page of fiction ought ever to contain a truth without which the page would be more beautiful than with it. As certainly when truth ignores beauty as when beauty ignores truth, a discount falls upon the value of both in the economy of the universe. Yet on the other hand beauty in the story-teller's art, while it may as really, can never so largely and nobly, minister to the soul's delight without the inculcation of truth as with it.
"Hence it is that fiction's peculiar ministry to the human soul is the prose depiction, through the lens of beauty, to the imagination and the emotions, of conflicts of human passions, wills, duties, and fates; a depiction unaccompanied by any tax of intellectual labor, but consistent with all known truth, though without any necessary intervention of actual facts. Or, more briefly, it is the contemplation of the truths of human life as it ought to be, compared with the facts as they are.
"If this is the fictionist's commission, is not his commission his passport also in the economist's world ? It would be easy to follow out the radiations of this function and show their value by their simple enumeration. In the form of pure romance it fosters that spirit of adventure which seeks and finds new worlds and which cannot be lightly spoken of while we celebrate the discoveries of Columbus. In all its forms it helps to exercise, expand, and refresh those powers of the imagination whose decay is the hectic fever and night-sweat of all search for truth and beauty; of science and invention, art, enterprise, and true religion. Often it gives to the soul otherwise imprisoned by the cramped walls of the commonplace, spiritual experiences of life refined from some of their deadliest risks, and cuts windows in the walls of cramped and commonplace environments. At its best it elevates our conceptions of the heroic and opens our eyes to the presence, actuality, and value of a world of romance that is, and ought to be, in our own lives and fates."
Mrs. Mary Hartwell Catherwood followed Mr. Cable with a paper on "Form and Condensa-
