The English novel is varied and abundant, and its characters, collectively, form a populous democracy. Everybody is in it somewhere from peasant to king, and if some of us and our friends have been left out, new novelists are at hand watching every kind and grade of life and preparing to fix it in a living page. The American novel is not yet old and broad enough to have captured all our types of men and women and recreated them in fiction. But a good beginning has been made. The varied voices of the American country town are heard from all corners of the land, but so far most of them have been voices of short compass, incapable of sustained utterance. We still depend for studies of American character on sketches and short stories, and these in the mass are an important body of literature. New England, Virginia, California, the Middle West, the great cities, have had their short-story writers. The novelists are still on the way. Our national life is so scattered and changing that the novelist has difficulty in keeping a group of Americans together long enough to plot them into a large book. In Europe where a small town contains every kind of society the novelist finds the compact social stage all set and characters in abundance. Anthony Trollope, with little care to plot, sets society to turning in the quiet eddy of a small cathedral town and presently we are looking into the heart of England. He introduces the same people into novel after novel and we are always glad to see them again. The success of his many novels supports the contention that characters are the staff of fiction. A defect of plot is easier to pardon than a defect in character drawing. Untruth to human nature, violence either to its waking experiences or its dreams, destroys a book, destroys the living world it represents and leaves us holding a thing of ink and paper. The other day I was reading a novel which has multiplied itself over the land by force of printing presses and sensational advertising. It is a story about modern people of an undistinguished but potentially interesting kind; the heroine is, if I remember right, a confidential secretary to a business man. The author makes her say something like this to her lover: “Ere I knew you, there had come into my life but few pleasures and diversions; I had been like a bird shut up in a cage; and you set me free. Yet it was not that alone which attracted me to you. Grateful as I was, I was charmed, too, by your conversation which was so totally different than (_sic_) anything I had known heretofore. You saved me from the wretched monotony of commonplace existence and took me into a new world, and my gratitude for that blossomed into love”; and so on.