RECENT PnAsEs. in 1903, for the time being, psychology seemed to have run its course in Eng lish fiction. True, some of the characteristics of Henry James connect him with Meredith; but .lames is master of several manners. The best contemporary work in psychology is represented by Boni Bourget, at the head of a French group. From the older psychology sprang the philosophic novel. The psychologists had their ethical for mula, but it was not all-important. The phi losophers thrust to the front determinism, an ethical theory whereby conduct is made to depend wholly upon heredity and environment ; man is no longer a free moral agent. On this theory was planned the entire series of Emile Zola ( q.v. ) , called Les lhougon-.I1arquc•t (1 571-93 ) . Thomas Hardy now stands for the very best type 111 the newer realism. The philosophical novel belongs rather to the past, and its place has been taken largely by the novel of a more distinct pur pose, often called the problem novel, for it aims at the solution of soot' social problem. Such. for example, is Ilardy's Jude the Obscure (1S951. This kind of novel is in part an inheritance front Dickens and in part a natural development from I:corge Eliot. It discusses, by turn, creeds, redity, class di-.tinciots. agrarian conditions, labor and capital. municipal government, tene ment house reform, the enfranehisement of woman. the failure of marriage. the grounds for divorce. ete. The last three topics on the list have been favorites with many woman novelists. To this kind of fiction dignity has been given by three %%Titers, artists as well as thinkers. each belonging to a different country and each pos sessing his own methods: Tolstoy in Russia, It jr4rnson in Scandinavia, and Mrs. Ilumphry Ward in England.
Other novelists. though equipped with ideas. have depicted eontemporary manners with a less obvious purpose. Somewhat in line with Trol lope were the many stories by Margaret Oliphant, as the Chronicles of Carlinyford, including The Doctor and Salvor Chope/ (18(i3). Henry James amid W. D. Howells, beginning as romancers, worked their way out to a delicate realism; the first under the influence of Turgenieli and Dau det ; the latter under the influence of Tolstoy and of Spanish fiction as represented by Valdes and Galtlos. James may fairly be said to have created
the international novel. Ills field has been suc cessfully invaded now and then, as by DuMattrier in Trilby (1894). In his later work James has studied the English drawing-room. Howells has confined himself to illustrating American types, as' in .1 Modern Instance (1883) and The Rise of Silas Laphain (1S85). From national types, the novel both in England and in the United States has run into provincial types, and conse quently into dialect. J. M. Barrie and John Watson spread knowledge of the Scotch parish. Jane Barlow has described with much sympathy the Irish village. The tragic aspects of life in Devon. Somerset, and London have been presented with much force respectively by Zack (Gwendo line Keats), Walter Raymond, and George Gis sing; sonic phases of South Africa by Olive Schreiner, and both pieturesgeely and psycho logically by Joseph Conrad; and of Australia by Tasma (Madame Convrcur) and Ada Cambridge. Likewise various sections of the United States have been treated by novelists. To New England belong Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nary Wilkins, Sarah Orne Jewett, and many others; to the Mississippi Valley, Nark Twain; to the Far West belong Bret Haste. Owen blister, and Hamlin Garland: to the South, Nary 3lurfree, G. W. Cable, Hopkinson Smith. and T. N. Page. The society novel holds its own. Two notable suc cesses in the last decade were E. F. Benson's Dodo (1893) and ,Anthony Hope Hawkins's Dolly Dialogues (1894).
Of wider amplitude is the work of Rudyard Kipling, who made known an India that had escaped the observation of other Europeans. Manners and customs he describes, and he has. sketched a few types of character. But with him the energy goes mainly to telling a good story. That lie has thus restored to fiction interesting incident is perhaps his great distinction.