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abundance of things, that will serve the needs of everyone. If Mr. Ford had put his mental and physical energy into the coal industry or the textile industry he would not have bettered existing conditions, and perhaps would have only made them worse. He chose instead to apply it to new lines of endeavor, and has greatly benefited us all. With more

such ideas, and adequate capital backing for them, the workers, released from the production of present commodities through the increase of productivity per man, will find satisfactory employment in the production of new things to enlarge the common life, and the production-control problem will solve

itself.

I DOUBT whether the American novel exists, as a phenomenon separate from the English just as I doubt whether just as I doubt whether the English novel exists, as a phenomenon separate from the American. The same tradition prevails for both literatures; the attempt to get novelty and emancipation is in both literatures similar; and, broadly speaking, both literatures have the same gods and the same devils. It may not always be so. It may soon cease to be so. The field of the novel far wider than any other field of inquiry for the literary critic is so immense that many corners of it are bound to be overlooked. Nobody can cover the ground. Nobody can keep pace with the growth and change. Somewhere, in America or in Britain, there may be at this moment the beginning of a new tradition one cannot tell. The survey is bound to be perfunctory; the conclusions are likely to be false. But in general one may say that the art of the story is still the old story, and the new schools are still at school.

Go back to the influence of Henry James. It was shed impartially on the two sides of the Atlantic. It is still felt. But all that was peculiarly Jamesian has fallen away from it. All that accumulation of mannerism, with which the later James disguised the fact that he could tell a story, counts now for nothing. There is little trace of it in those writers in whom his influence is most apparent and most beneficial. They have learned from him something of his psychological concern; they have largely discarded his verbal tortuosities. They do not when they are most successful so much follow the master as get on with the story. When they suffer themselves to be diverted into labyrinths, they fail. The history is typical. You can reënforce the interest of the novel if you accept the fact that first and foremost it is a story. Forget or deny that, and there is no interest to be reënforced. Complications presuppose the original and central simplicity.

The same moral can be drawn from any other trail we choose to trace. Mr. Theodore Dreiser, still insufficiently

known in England, has exercised an enormous influence in the United States. Like Henry James, he has moulded writers rather than readers; but he has moulded readers through writers. The younger American novelists have learned from him courage in approach, augustness of vision, patience in elaboration of detail. That is to say, they have learned from him exactly what they have learned from any other grand-scale story-teller they happen to have read. Another generation, younger still, seems to have learned from him nothing but the resolution to put in print those things which, when he was first writing, were in many quarters pusillanimously regarded as unprintable. It is a pity; for speaking out, like listening in, is nothing meritorious in itself. All depends on what there is to listen to, and what to speak.

On this question of what to say and what to leave unsaid turns the main method of modernity. All is whether the artist is content with the soul or prefers the outside of the cup and the platter. The Pharisees thought it important to make the cup and the platter clean; many of our young men and women think it important to make them surprising the error is the same. It is the exaltation of the empty form over the living spirit. It is the preoccupation with the irrelevant, with the inexpressive. It is the error called psychological. Blake said the last word about it in his injunction to get down to essentials:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower:
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

II

Mr. James Joyce is an Irishman, Mr. D. H. Lawrence an Englishman, but I

take it that their vogue is as remarkable in America as in Great Britain. Both have genius, and each illustrates the ineffectiveness of preoccupation with one aspect of life. But what strikes an English reader of the novels which come to him from America many of them brimming with intelligenceis that those which follow the Joyce or the Lawrence method add to it a sort of schoolboy gusto which Mr. Joyce and Mr. Lawrence most noticeably lack.

There is, in these American books, the child's delight at being 'naughty.' The barriers are down, and we break into the hidden places not with the painful inquisitiveness of the psychological adult, but with the shy, assertive boisterousness of the excited immature.

There is this paradox at the heart of the neopsychological attack - the deeper it goes, the more superficial it remains. Feverishly it cuts, hacks, probes - and does not notice that it is experimenting on a corpse. Did it think the soul dwelt between the sinews? Alas, it apparently did, and will not admit its error.

I wrote some years ago, in my English Novel of To-day, some words about modern methods, with particular reference to verse:

Loosen the ties of art and scrap its limitations! it is what our young poets are always inviting us to do. Rhyme, they say, is a fetter; strike it off! But it is not a fetter: it is a form. You cannot merely strike it off; you must replace it. Anybody can be negative, anybody can be reactionary. If art progresses, it must be in the direction of greater coherence; the control of the conscious mind increases; rebel chaos yields to the form conceived of God. But this modern movement is backwards towards fear and night.

Minute psychological reactions are elaborated with such persistent reference to the one occasion dealt with that they cease to have value any as revelations of character: character, instead of being explained, is literally explained away. One gets the impression that the oddity, instead of showing So-and-so to be concretely and individually So-and-so, merely shows So-and-so to be as odd as everybody else, and odd in the same way as everybody else. . . . There is no sharpness, no differentiation, no interplay, no coherence. Individuality is dissolved 'by the discandying of this pelleted storm.'

Examples could be quoted literally by the thousand; one may be pardoned for choosing, from contemporary and influential English fiction, one not less comic than most. There can be no doubt at all that in his novelette, Glad Ghosts, Mr. Lawrence has a profound idea; but what shall we say about his way of creating the atmosphere supposed to be appropriate to the idea? A Mr. Morier tells the story. Carlotta married Lord Lathkill, who was very unlucky. Mr. Morier went to stay with them. The dowager was there, with 'heavy hips' the hips are greatly insisted upon. There was Colonel Hale, with his second wife, who had a 'dusky, dirty-looking neck,' and whose thighs receive honorable mention. The Colonel (who 'seemed, somehow, to smell') complained that he was being haunted by his first wife; she would n't let him go near his new one. There was dancing. The Colonel went to bed, but returned in distress and a dressing gown. Lathkill explained to him that in some way he must have failed his first wife. 'Don't you see, you may have been awfully good to her. But her poor woman's body, were you ever good to that?' And again: 'Why don't you, even now, love her a little with your real heart?' So the Colonel unbuttoned the top of his pyjama jacket, and sat perfectly

still.' The dowager came to ask what was the matter; Lathkill explained that the family ghost was walking. In the course of his explanation he declared: "The Colonel's breast is quite extraordinary.' He said: 'Oh, Mother, thank you for my knees and my shoulders at this moment!' (Strange omission of hips and thighs!) 'Don't you forget yourself, my boy?' asked his mother. Mr. Morier went to bed and was visited by a ghost. The following autumn he heard that both Carlotta and Mrs. Hale had become mothers. "The Colonel is very well, quiet, and self-possessed. He is farming in Wiltshire, raising pigs.'

All summary is unfair, all comment partial; but those familiar with Mr. Lawrence's later manner will recognize here, even in summary, the reason why so powerful a mind so often falls to absurdity. There is a pursuit of the bizarre. There is an attempt to raise fact to poetry without the poetic selection; and the sordid is paraded in place of the solemn.

The method here considered has been carried perhaps even further, on the whole, in America. (Nobody, it is true, could go further in incoherence than Mr. Joyce - except Miss Stein!) It is illustrated in Miss Fannie Hurst, with her

The hexameter of the wide, white feet that the earth sucked unto herself in fond little marshes, as they ran through the forests surrounding the Cathedral Under the Sea;

The reality of you and me. The reality of the biology of us;

her 'tearless fashion of a dry locked torment'; her 'Ida, great welt of her'

phrases in which the gush of Victorian sentimentalism wholly fails to disguise itself in the spasms of modernity. Little Nell in Lido pyjamas is still

Little Nell, and from a Dombey to a 'dumb-bell' is but a step. But it has most curiously escaped notice that Dickens, who in the lapse and bathos of his genius ladled out his still-adhesive treacle, drew, at the height of his genius, a perfect picture of the latest thing in novelists. That broken style, that butterfly inconsequence, that readiness to be led up the garden to where the demented gentleman from next door throws vegetables and compliments over the wall they are the insignia of the New School, as they are of Mrs. Nickleby. It is quite true that the human mind works at random, caught now by a sudden silence and now by a passing sigh; but how strange that psychologists should suppose themselves to be penetrating into the subconscious, when they record these superficial divagations of the conscious! How strange that anybody should suppose the vaguer to be the truer! The very meaning of the word 'psychology,' so widely and loosely used, has been forgotten. It is (if it is anything) a logos a science, an order, a rational synthesis. It is treated as an excuse for mere artistic fecklessness. Listen to Mrs. Nickleby:

'She was n't well for some days after that day she dined here, and I can't help thinking, that she caught cold in that hackneycoach coming home. Hackney-coaches, my lord, are such nasty things, that it's almost better to walk at any time, for although I believe a hackney-coachman can be transported for life, if he has a broken window, still they are so reckless, that they nearly all have broken windows. I once had a swelled face for six weeks, my lord, from riding in a hackney-coach - I think it was

a hackney-coach,' said Mrs. Nickleby reflecting, though I'm not quite certain, whether it was n't a chariot; at all events I know it was a dark green, with a very long number, beginning with a nought and ending with a nine- no, beginning with a nine, and ending with a nought. . .

And so on. It may be objected that this is too clear, intellectual, and coherent for Miss Stein. She said a hackneycoach. A hackney-coach. Chariots of Fire. Fire and coaches. A hackneycoach she said. It was as if as if it was. A hackney-coach. Tokens and signs that she was. Widowhood and hackneycoaches. Hackney-coaches and widowhood. A widow she was. She was a widow. Her head was swelled her head her face was swelled her head. As if

It is n't that this sort of thing is too silly so much as that it is too easy. Miss Stein's resolve not to write like anybody else has had the result that anybody else can write like Miss Stein.

Meanwhile, the steady stream of narrative goes on. Those who have anything to say, say it. Those who have a story to tell, tell it. Mr. Sinclair Lewis is probably the most notable writer of fiction in America to-day, simply because he has enormous creative energy, and disciplines it to the forms of art. Elmer Gantry may or may not be just as a social document, — it would be impertinent for an Englishman to hold an opinion about that, but it is a story. It is packed with character and incident. The author has time in devising fanciful theories of so much to say that he cannot waste how to say it so much to say that he cannot say it at all until he has subdued it to 'proportion, season, form.' The same truth is illustrated by writers as different superficially as Miss Ruth Suckow, who deals in plain language with bare life histories, rural, domestic, and Mr. Joseph Hergesheimer, whose imagination is fired by the outlandish, and shaped by his immense knowledge of the world. It is illustrated again by Mr. Stribling, whose narrative vigor is delightfully diversified with irony. The tradition goes on, in brief; the art

of the story has room for a thousand methods. But the method must be a method

We recognize in contemporary American fiction a main tendency, and divergences, of which two leap to the eye; these two may overlap, and often do so, but may equally well be observed apart. One is dissolution of manner; the other is dissoluteness of matter. Both are experiments, and experiments that fail. Both are attempts at adventure. Both show rawness, crudity; to neither is it possible to deny sincerity, but the latter certainly gives greater evidences of sincerity than the former. Indeed, of the former we have said enough. It is a mistake, and can come to no thing, and need not be taken seriously. But the latter has the pathos of fierce and frightened youth. It may in some cases be a sign of preoccupation with vice; in most it is more probably a sign of vigor. There seems, at any rate to the English reader, to be a great outpouring from America of sociological fiction, with the motif of the pocket flask and the 'petting party.' We are introduced to a world almost hysterical with drink, jazz, and the intimacies and abandons of sexual precocity. Is it a true picture? Again it would be impertinent for an Englishman to express an opinion. He can only wonder- and remember that his own country provides, though not in such profusion, a similar type. Can he understand the English product, before he ventures to survey the American?

Let us consider, anyway, a Frenchman's explanation. Says M. André Maurois, in his Études Anglaises, with a typical blending of wisdom and wit:

Ce n'est pas seulement en religion que la jeune génération s'estimait libérée. Pour VOL. 142-NO. 1

les choses du corps, le freudisme avait fourni à l'esprit anglo-saxon (en Amérique comme Angleterre) le masque dont il avait besoin pour oser.

All generalizations are to be mistrusted; but I think it will scarcely be denied that the art of fiction in the English tongue has been limited by prudery. Of course, limitation in one direction may mean enfranchisement in another; it is possible that English fiction has extended itself into new interests under compulsion of the very fact that it was debarred from regarding sexual misconduct as the allembracing and all-sufficing topic. But there is shrewdness and truth in M. Maurois's thrust: to get free, the English writer has pleaded not preference but science. He looked askance at the bedroom till he could pass to it through the consulting room. The release, equally pseudoscientific, has in America been even more riotous. The tradition of the story has been preserved; even the plain Tom-Jonesian biographical plot still flourishes; but its interest is sought in two adjacent, and indeed overlapping, spheres. The themes are adolescence and adultery.

Why, so, it may be said, are the themes of Tom Jones. That is true, and irrelevant. For the point is that the abstract idea of these two topics has rarely before been given the prominence it now enjoys, or been entrusted with the direction of so many imaginary lives. Looking back over recent American novels with these preoccupations, I take as typical the works of Mr. Charles Norris, Mr. Floyd Dell, and Mr. William Bullitt. I have written about these novels in various places, and I shall not shrink from quoting freely, without acknowledgment, from myself.

The very titles of Mr. Norris's volumes indicate an attitude. 'Brass,' 'bread,' and 'pig iron' are substances at once special and simple. The book