peared the very remarkable story called Democracy. For a long time it was anonymous; but whoever wrote it, the claim on its title-page to be an American novel was exactly true. Never, before or since, has there appeared such a truly national work of fiction, neither local, as breathing the air of a single section of our country, nor provincial, as having a squint towards Europe. The writer wastes no time in descriptions of Washington, any more than Thackeray does of London; but assuming that Americans know their own capital, he goes straight to its heart, with a firm hand on the knife from first to last.

The fashionable widow, who after exhausting all the attractions, frivolous or serious, of New York society, comes to see what interest the national government can have for her, and the imperious partisan senator, to whom political advancement is life, are set against each other with consummate skill, and with a strict sense of proportion that never allows description to retard the story. Diplomats from various nations, Americans in and out of Congress from various states, all true to life, are combined in a very likely but serious plot. How the heroine feels almost too late the fascination of political manoeuvring to be almost fatal, attracting her with the deadly charm of a handsome serpent, and how she is saved from its magic at the last moment, is capitally told. The list of these characters is but short after all, reminding one of a like limitation in Balzac and in Hawthorne; but such is Washington life. where the same associates are always recurring.

There is one obvious criticism on Democracy: it is all a satire. Unless the author sadly belies himself, the existing development of American government gives him no pleasure, but is a sort of organized hypocrisy. The following sentence, not spoken by any of the characters, but as part of the narrative, shows the pure animus. Speaking of early spring the author says:

"This is the moment when the two whited sepulchres at either end of the Avenue reek with the thick atmospheres of bargain and sale. The Old is going; the New is coming. Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest? Who hates with most venom? Who intrigues with most skill? Who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most political work? He shall have his reward."

Terrible, whatever the truth of the picture, that an American offers it to his countrymen, in a frame of keen wit and deep pathos.

Democracy was followed, after a long interval, by The Honorable Peter Stirling, the work of the ill-starred Paul Leicester Ford. This book at once became popular, and a new edition has lately been called for. It is rather a fictitious biography than a novel, tracing the hero's career, not quite like Tom Jones's, from his cradle, but from his college days to the age of forty. Peter Stirling is a Harvard graduate, who has attained a peculiar popularity among his classmates, but cares for no woman but his mother. He contrives however to fall deep in love, and being rejected goes to New York as an unknown candidate for legal practice, and becomes known to the politicians of the sixth ward through their children, whom he has made his playmates, and whom he protects by a bold attack from the poison of "swill-milk" dealers. This leads to his becoming a power among the Democrats of New York, city and state. Then after many years the forgotten romance of his life is revived by the daughter of his early love. Both parents are equally his friends; and he steps forward to save the wife from misery by taking upon himself the guilt of an intrigue which belongs to the husband. As soon as this love-affair comes to the front, politics falls back, to be indirectly recalled by Peter's behavior as colonel of a city regiment in a strike riot where dynamite is used; in the end he is chosen governor,

The book is long; yet it holds one from first to last. This result comes in spite of certain dissertations on the philosophy of practical politics, delivered by Peter Stirling, which are not particularly entertaining or instructive. The love-making distinctly injures what is the chief interest up to its appearance; and however ingenious, is not novel. Indeed the detail of how a young lady, really goodhearted, yet not above coquetry, plays a big fish which she has hooked but is somewhat afraid to land, might be cut down, or even cut out, with very little detriment. The tale of how Stirling, in the teeth of race, of culture, and of natural sentiment, contrives gradually to win first the affection, then the confidence, and finally the unquestioning allegiance of his accidental constituency, while contending with other leaders of the party at both its ends, shows great imaginative and constructive force, and the interest it wakes is at times thrilling, but lacking in the power of conviction. Peter goes through twenty years of contention with every kind of New York politician, exposed to influences which are at least of questionable probity, and emerges without any weakening of his own; fighting fire with fire, yet with his garments unsinged, not unsmoked, however, for though a total abstinent to please his mother, he is an unstinted and uncontrolled devotee of tobacco. There is a still worse defect if the book asserts itself as an American political novel: the author has no interest in any politics but those of New York. New England exists only as a feeder, and Washington as a fly-wheel for New York; and the rest of the Union does not exist at all.

The like criticism is true of Mr. Winston Churchill's Coniston. Here the interest is confined to a state which, if not absolutely and solely New Hampshire, its author formed out of portions of that and other states, assuredly without the required constitutional assent. Here it is

without romance in his nature, that is entirely modified by a love, in this case purely paternal, for the daughter of the woman he had longed to marry. A book so fresh in every one's mind needs no detailed analysis. The politics of a New England village and state capital are very different from those of Manhattan and Albany; but Mr. Churchill has made them fully as interesting, and, it must be maintained, far more probable. The indignant charges of inaccuracy he has encountered go far to prove, as in the kindred case of Mr. Cable's Grandissimes, that he is not inaccurate; no one would be bitterly angry at a portrait that was not a pretty good likeness. It must remain a puzzle, however, by what means Jethro Bass, after acquiring his hold over his neighbors' votes by means of mortgages on their estates, contrived to get similar holders all over the state to give him their votes from mere financial brotherhood. In one respect both Mr. Ford and Mr. Churchill will ill stand comparison with the author of Democracy, whose English is faultless. Mr. Ford should have known that a "hallway' is a rare adjunct to the houses of cultivated people; that a Welsh "rarebit " is an amiable fiction; and that to speak of keeping up a struggle “that long" is anything but good talk. Mr. Churchill is happily still alive to learn that “subserviated is a ludicrously false creation of his own; that "impractical," which he did not invent, is an illegitimate cross between "impracticable” and “unpractical;" and that it is possible to write a good long novel without once using the word "silhouetted."

Of the host of attempts at political novels and short stories to which the last twenty years have given birth, not very much need be said, except that they share in the defects of their betters. They are in general too local; they follow with no little vividness and penetration the course of political ambition and intrigue in some section of the Union: but they are inter

esting and even intelligible only in a qualified sense to those who live outside that pale. Such, for instance, is the case with Mr. Charles Warren's witty and thoughtful political stories founded on his experience as secretary to Governor Russell. They have such a strong smack of the Bay State that it is to be feared many Americans would make nothing of them. Yet if our political novelist goes to Washington, where the national political interest centres, in which every American from Houlton to Brownsville has a share, he runs into that strange isolation of the Capital City, scarcely knowing the real life of the states, and scarcely known of them.

And there is another element, generally conspicuous in all our political fictions, which injures their complete effectiveness as novels. They are always dealing not with the immediate questions of political life, but with the ethical problem, how far an American politician can keep his moral dignity and selfrespect. It is always the fight between "Politician" and "Reformer," — both with a Capital and quotation marks. A good instance of both these failings is afforded by The Gentleman from Indiana, where a young man fights his way up to political supremacy in that well-known state, against enemies open and secret, operating by moral intrigue and physical violence, solely by the resistless force of his exalted purposes. Now it is sadly true that this problem, how far a practical politician can be an honest man, does cast a dark shadow over our politics, city, state, and national; yet if Mr. Sleary's dictum is true, "People mutht be amuthed, Thquire; they can't alwayth be working nor yet thtudying," the eternal harping on this ethical string will be fatal to the production of a really satisfactory political novel. Let it be supposed that an author is writing a novel founded on the events of some war, our own wars or any other; and should be eternally exhibiting his generals and captains and troopers holding

conferences with themselves and one another on the justice of war in general, and of this particular contest into which they have thrown themselves. It might be the very question for a historian or a statesman, but it would not help to make a good novel.

The fundamental difficulties that political novelists have to encounter is whence to draw their situations and chief characters. Are they to invent political intrigues and crises, raising questions that never have arisen in our history? or are they to reproduce some contest that once occurred? Mr. Ford and Mr. Churchill do the latter. The swill-milk scandal actually convulsed New York; the encounter of militia with strikers, and the merger of railroads are memories rather than creations. A novelist who undertook to invent a wholly new controversy in national politics as the basis for his plot would need amazing ingenuity. Trollope was so hard put to it that he brought forward the Disestablishment of the Church of England to unseat one of his Prime Ministers, and left another without any national policy at all, the perplexed head of an ill-assorted and short-lived coalition. Yet Mrs. Ward has done this very thing brilliantly; and there are in the United States many important questions that never have been fairly brought out, and might afford excellent material for possible and even prophetic complications.

Still harder is the problem of the novelist's political heroes and villains. Are they to be portraits from the past, imaginations of the future, or composite photographs of the present? One thing is certain: the public will have it that they are the first, however the author may deny it. They know who Jethro Bass was, and can give you name and place. When I first read Democracy, I was resolved to see Senator Stephen A. Douglas in the fictitious Senator Radcliffe. Douglas may have given the author some hints; but to identify the men was absurd. Many of these persistent

identifications remind one of a country Democrat's reading of the inscriptions under a remarkable group of statues exhibited in New York in 1854. In the ill-fated "Crystal Palace" of that year were shown Thorwaldsen's Christ and the Apostles. The Saviour faced one on entering, and the twelve were ranged in a semicircle, six on either hand, and underneath, the names, Andrew, Thomas, James, and the rest. The countryman walked up and began reading: "Andrew - Jackson; Thomas― Jefferson; James Madison; Bartholomew Bartholomew - Oh, that's one of those Western Presidents."

There is no space to go beyond our own language in the study of the political novel. It may be said, however, that

Son Excellence Eugène Rougon is perhaps the feeblest of Zola's memorable series, and that Numa Roumestan is a work of great power. This line of fiction has nearly won its assured place, but has by no means reached perfection. So far as our own country goes, political

novelists must cultivate a wider national sympathy and a sterner economy of detail, with a determination, while never renouncing that moral sensitiveness which the subject demands, to employ it in due proportion to the claims of creative

art.

Matthew Porter, a political novel by Gamaliel Bradford, Jr., the author of The Private Tutor, did not appear till the above article was in type, and it was too late to add a suitable notice.

PRAYERS FOR RAIN

THE time was when I thought that praying for rain was an indelicacy and intrusion, but I am now ready to engage in any concerted action for either the early or the latter rain. Since I have found out what it does for my soul, and how it enters upon its best and most intelligible passages on a rainy day, my mind is wholly changed. It took me years to realize and confess that a secret and modest delight thrills through my whole being when the day is bad. Let it mount to a storm and my happiness is complete. Each fresh gust against the pane means that one more kind friend will leave me alone to-day, and as it wanders through the town it will smite other windows and bring a lively hope to my fellows that they will not be bothered with me. I could never brave conventionality enough to shut them off myself. If any one wants me I am powerless to say No, because of the number of baccalaureate sermons I have listened to, and an obsession of serviceableness which they have produced in me; but the rain or snow can absolve me without appearance of neglect. So, though I have come late to the conflict, is it any wonder that I am now ready to pray for rain and a lot of it?

Every one testifies to the pleasant sensations produced by the sound of rain on the roof. Strict poetry requires a shingle roof, but it sounds good even on a tin roof. And the banging shutter produces a sense of peace and contentment which we do not analyze as we ought. It is due to the assurance that nobody will come. And some assurance of that sort is what all the world's a-seeking nowadays. It is the hunger for some such assurance that makes us hunt up sanatoriums and other mechanical contrivances for solitude. Sometimes I have wondered if we might

not need a new reign of the monastery. All these things I have turned over in my mind, canvassing all the feasible forms of taking to the woods, and lo and behold I find that a good drizzling day will do most of the things I require of a monastery. That anything so millennial in character could be achieved by just an ordinary downpour of two days' duration makes me feel that when the world was set going it was well supplied with all recuperative agencies. Give me health and enough rainy days and I will make the monastery look ridiculous.

Here I was thinking that things would never be any better until we had hit upon a brand-new and perfect economic system. But a little sleet or the promise of an all-day storm I find composes the human spirit in a way that economics is unable to approach. Results which I supposed impossible except on the basis of a trained nurse and a sanatorium and a nut diet, I find ensue naturally in the presence of sufficient rainfall. I was nerving myself up to chew every mouthful thirty-three times, but in a good dripping day I quite forget all these nostrums because of the growing tide of contentment and cheerfulness which rises in my heart. My straying faculties of mind, which had become more and more centrifugal, are now drawn in and centralized. I go like an arrow to the thing I like best to do and have been meaning to do all these months. The deferred task comes quietly out of the drawer and I go to work upon it as if I had never stopped. I feel condensed and drawn together. I luxuriate in minding my own business instead of trying to run the whole world. My very being relaxes and my fussiness departs. The world seems ample, generous, and good-natured.

They noticed this at Concord long ago when Emerson spoke of the tumultu

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