give all his powers to shop or ship, to politics or war. His engrossing action, however, is not wholly hostile to the imagination; it merely summons it to high service in religion or science, in commerce or invention, and leaves it neither time nor desire to weave a tale. Girls as a group start with free imagination-freer than the boys' — and are by circumstance enabled to keep it unspotted from the world.

IV

But now let us look less to the imagination and more to the character of the novel and to the peculiar opportunity which it affords for women's powers; since in the story's substance and in its technique will be found a further reason why woman here finds what is suited to her genius. Here is play for a nature rich in sympathy, repelled by abstractions, and drawn to what is warm and vital.

For of all the free arts, the story lies closest to actual living. And this is seen even in its outer aspects, since it uses no tool but language, in which common life itself always gives some practice. The painter, the sculptor, the composer of music these must learn a special deftness foreign to the habits of our universal life. And even the poet, who also uses speech, is hedged about by the formalities of his task and by its severer honors; he must fit his thought to the tongue, not of men but of angels.

But the tale, like singing, dancing, and acting, employs a natural utterance; and these are the arts in which woman excels. A certain technique is in them, it is true, a practiced control of expression until it falls into rhythm and pause and climax,- yet this is but the refinement of what is in daily use by all.

But beyond and more important, the

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story, like the acted drama, pictures our life in its fullest, its least mutilated form; it transcribes human action almost literally, and therefore is well chosen to appease the hunger for life, so far as anything other than life itself can satisfy. Your other arts have many a gap and artifice. In painting and sculpture one must suggest the movement of life by what is still; its scene is as of hurrying figures lit by lightning. The music of instruments can more adequately restore the lost sequence, but the flow here is of mood and passion, without speech and personality and defined events. Only the playwright tastes the novelist's freedom to face rounded persons, living in voice and very action; but he must satisfy far more exacting conditions: by soliloquies and stage-whispers and 'asides,' and by connective tissue masquerading as dialogue, he must make conversation bear an unnatural burden. The lack of running comment must be compensated

just as action in the moving-picture play is exaggerated to make good the want of speech. Deliberately to construct an elaborate drama, then, requires that one's powers be fenced on every side. But to act in such a play is merely to do in kind what the little girl is wont to do, when in her mother's dress she 'plays lady.' Thus story and acting come closest to woman and the unspoiled man; such arts are but the child's play transfigured, and speak to the least specialized parts of our nature, to our interest in persons and in their behavior under strain. The male, accustomed to rules and abstractions and impersonal machinery, can rejoice to create within the limits set by other arts. But woman, while practicing them, cannot so well express her nature in them, loving rather what reproduces life in fuller measure, pressed down and running over.

A double movement, also, has cur

tailed certain male prerogatives enjoyed in creating romance. The interests of the plain woman have become more varied, swinging further out; and with this, the interests of romance have moved inward toward our common life. The Homeric tales depict a world busied mainly with war and heroic conflict and adventure in distant lands a man's world, where Helen and Penelope, Circe and Nausicaa, are but as motives and complications of man's endeavor. But the modern story, while still unable to escape the spell which war and adventure and unaccustomed places will always exercise, has moved its centre of interest hither toward home and country in time of peace, finding peril and crisis enough in social ambition and marriage and politics and all the unbrocaded intricacies of life. As a consequence, Mr. James commands no raw material that is not also to be had by Mrs. Ward. Democracy, with its sense of the worth of the untitled and unfavored, finds a romance at every street-corner. The poor immigrant and the thrifty bookkeeper elbow the old romantic aristocracy.

But with this incoming of the ring of interest to include what lies at our door, woman's liberty and honorable experience have moved outward. Miss Kingsley explores portions of Africa whither no white man had ever gone. Sophie Kovalevsky and Madame Curie have sipped the nectar, hitherto reserved for men, of adventure into science. Baroness von Suttner's tale shows a range of intimacy with war-with its politics and domestic desolation, its hospitals and battle-carnage-greater greater than appears in Fire and Sword. Woman has always been face to face with character; and now for her the bar to every scene and situation is rapidly being lowered. And even in the new worlds offered for the old, there is still the love-passion, which if women could

not portray, we should be forced to say that it lay too close, rather than that it was remote, unvisited.

Yet the aptitude for fiction centres after all in a certain passionate inconsistency. The tale must have clash of character, and the author himself must live with all the combatants. And therefore a clamor and a gleam hard upon darkness must be within the artist's person. He must teem, must be fairly burrowed and alleyed with population. Could we but have gone prowling through the mind of Dickens! There we should have come upon, not the mere cold knowledge of his characters, but the very sympathies and impulses that give life to Squeers as well as to the Cheeryble Brothers, to Scrooge and Marley as well as to the Spirit of Christmas. In his own heart we should have found hidden away the very blood of the Boffins and the Bagnets, of Peggotty and Mrs. Nickleby, of Sim Tappertit and Mr. Micawber.

No smoothed-out and simplified heart can write a great novel. Cervantes must find in himself something that if set free would have made him a real Quixote, a Sancho Panza, and one ready to jeer at both. Those who have exclusive attachments are therefore ill fitted to create tales; the very solidity of their purpose is a hindrance. The facile Disraeli, on whom statecraft sits lightly, is not prevented; but Bright, or Gladstone, who in all his changes is one and earnest and convinced, could hardly have sheltered that loose populace of motives with which the tale-composer's mind is filled. One who has a programme and a gospel rather than a pied stage within him, will not seek this mode of utterance. Perhaps for such a reason the Roman, with his constant will and his simple and law-ordered mind, has left us heroes for drama and story, rather than story and drama itself. Your Greek, versatile,

many-centred, quarrelsome both with stranger and with kin, was fit for the other work. For him, the discussion even of metaphysics, as in Plato, becomes a human story, with characters warm in the flesh, conversing and in action.

When Emerson says that he does not have to travel the wide world over to find anchorite and Mandarin, general and explorer, but in himself in Concord can discover them and dear Devil and all, he observes something of the secret of the imaginer of life. Any great novelist's proper self must not sit too fixedly upon him; he may feel it, but he must be able to slip it off, and into another, as with a coat.

Now the character of your common male is fastened, rather, like the coat of an animal. His self is too much with him, and resists a sympathetic entrance into contrasting parts. But woman if we attend to the class and not to each individual-is of less rigid structure; she is more mobile in her feelings, readier to answer emotionally at the instant's call. With her there is sympathy, which taken broadly is but a ready entrance into characters different from her own.

This contrast becomes clearer if we look to the abnormal mind, which has a trick of revealing the hidden and threatening element, even in what is sound. The man-child always runs a risk of ending in crime. In him there is a strain which, if unchecked, makes him defiant of the accepted order; makes him ready to see his own person and desires as pivotal in the universe. With women the very opposite of this practical egotism is at the door. Mental shock or serious inner change with her is more apt to produce some weakening of the bonds which hold the self together and maintain a sense of its identity: she feels as though dominated by some wholly foreign power. Thus

the 'trance mediums' of the day are usually women-as were the sibyls and priestesses of old who with heaving bosom and disheveled hair spoke the words of the oracle.

And in still graver changes of this kind we have those bewildering 'alternations of personality,'where one character yields unexpectedly to another, only later to assert itself again. These successive 'personalities' are at times seen in men; but they are far oftener found in women - as is indicated by the long list which includes the names of Miss 'Beauchamp,' Mary Reynolds, Mlle. 'Smith,' Miss Winson, Félida, and Marcelline. Here are no separate persons inhabiting the one body, but the one person is disorganized and no longer acts entirely as a whole. Great systems of ideas and impulses subside, and others emerge to sight and action

- like those changes in the level of a continent, when one part sinks below the ocean's level while another rises.

These wild occurrences are but a magnified image of what exists at times and in some degree in all of us, but in women requires less enlargement to be seen. The average woman possesses a greater variety of character, as of wardrobe, than does the man; she can more readily lay aside or suppress some important part of her, and bring some contrasting feature into view. She carries in herself a ready wealth that is more applicable to the story than to painting or to music. Thus it is that in painting and in music she is to be passed by man with ease, but in the story, if at all, with greatest effort.

There are, then, many forces that urge women further in fiction than in any other of the great creative arts, and cause her to select the novelist's career from among the many ways

that alike seem open. And to catch a glimpse of these forces is the sole purpose of this paper. Yet the query can hardly be suppressed, why with so many inner and outer aids she does not go further in her chosen art, and notably excel the men. May we not be confident that talent clearly supreme will appear among those who show so high a preparation? Why should we not prophesy that the greatest stories will hereafter come only from the daughters of men?

It will perhaps be so. In the realm described by Maeterlinck, where are the unborn children destined to great accomplishment, there may well be waiting a troop of little girls whose work in fiction will crown all that men have ever done or ever can do. We have, however, no assurance.

For in man there is endless daring and a purpose not lightly to be turned aside; and sheer contrivance will often outwit natural gifts. It will be remembered that we found the girl letting her story tell itself; while the boy repeated, retouched, criticized, putting pains in place of spontaneity. And later, in maturity and in an art already developed and difficult to carry to still higher excellence, these male traits may balance the scale. Analysis and selfcriticism and dogged ingenuity and the love of domination may make good the lack of ready and free fertility.

It must also be remembered that we

have examined evidence merely of a more widespread fitness among women as a group, and have not looked to supreme and single excellence. And while the general level of women's aptitude is perhaps higher than men's, yet fame does not rest upon a general level so much as upon individual peaks. For one person who knows of the Thibetan highlands, where for weeks the traveler may never descend to the elevation of Mt. Blanc, thousands know of some single and higher point in Andes or Himalayas. Although there is an amazing distribution of fictional talent in women, so that, lift your hat where you will, your greeting will go to some story-writer of promise, - yet in men Nature strangely heaps her gifts upon few and distant individuals. To man she more often gives the distinction we call genius, which treats the statistician and his dull averages as love does locksmiths. The wind in these matters of the kingdom blows where it lists.

But the world is still young, and even genius is sensitive to circumstance and weather. And women in the past have been exposed to peculiar frost and drought. If we think upon these things, we cannot call quite foundationless the hope that in the story-teller's art women in the end will clearly excel the men, bringing to the race those further riches promised in the imaginative life of little girls.

I

IN In those intimate and incisive letters which he wrote to his wife during the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck attacked the German generalship in the field with almost apoplectic fury. Apart from Moltke and 'good old Roon' - the one a Dane, the other a Dutchman - he held German generals in utter contempt, and he declared again and again that it was only the bravery of the soldiers that saved the incapable leadership from disaster. It was not a very sound judgment, for it ignored the main factor in the swift triumph of Germany. If the capacity of the German generals, apart from Moltke and Roon, was low, that of the French generals opposed to them was infinitely inferior. So much incompetence, perhaps, was never shown on so large a stage as that displayed by the French generals, and no brave people ever paid a heavier penalty for corruption and folly in high places than the French paid. But it is probably true that the victory of 1870-71 was won by Bismarck's diplomacy rather than by Prussian military genius or even French inefficiency. It was his skill in uniting Germany in a common quarrel with France, and in isolating his foe, that assured the result. He knew that Moltke's plans and the adequacy of the Prussian military machine could not fail to consummate his designs against an enemy whose unpreparedness and levity he had thoroughly appreciated.

In the present war the cautious and

far-sighted diplomacy of Bismarck has been wanting, and Germany has had to rely for success on the genius of its generals and the efficiency of the military machine. We can imagine very well the wrath with which Bismarck would contemplate the diplomacy that gambled on the quiescence of England. But what would be his judgment, and what will be the judgment of history on the military conduct of the war? So far as preparedness is concerned, there has of course been no parallel to the astonishing position of Germany when the war burst on Europe. Treated as an art, it may be claimed that the Latins have been the great masters of war; but treated in the modern sense as a science, the supremacy of Prussia has been unchallengeable. It has concentrated the genius of the most painstaking people in Europe on the single goal of military efficiency. To that end every other consideration has been subordinated. Its commerce, its industry, its financial methods, its education, its social reform, its railways, even its recreations have had in reserve that ultimate purpose of making the nation supreme on the battlefield, and its doctrine of the unprovoked war has governed all its statesmanship and diplomacy. Scharnhorst struck the keynote of scientific warfare in Prussia's darkest hour; Clausewitz elaborated the laws of that warfare; Moltke put them into practice with a shattering success that opened a new epoch in military history.

Henceforward war had to be conceived, not as a thing of swift inspira