Therefore at present the satirists and the educators hold the best cards, and most of them are elderly. No one of _les jeunes_ writes with the skill, with the art, of Mrs. Wharton, Miss Sinclair, Tarkington, Galsworthy, or Wells. It should not long be so in a creative generation. In sheer emotion, in vivid protest that is not merely didactic, the advantage is all with the youngsters. But they waste it. They have learned to criticize their elders, but not themselves. They have boycotted the books of writers who were young just before themselves, but they have not learned to put a curb on their own expansiveness. We readers suffer. We do not appreciate their talents as we might, because we lose our bearings in hectic words or undigested incident. We lose by the slow realization of their art. Youth is a disease that cures itself, though sometimes too late. The criticism I have made, in so far as it refers to youthful impetuosity, is merely the sort of thing that has to be said to every generation, and very loudly to the romantic ones. But if these autobiographians are, as I believe, expansive romanticists, that is of deeper significance, and my hope is that the definition may prove useful to them as well as to readers who with an amazed affection persist in following them wherever they lead. PURITANS ALL When anything goes wrong in politics the American practice is to charge it against the Administration. In literature all grievances are attributed to the Puritans. If a well-written book does not sell, it is because the Puritans warped our sense of beauty; if an honest discussion of sex is attacked for indecency, it is the fault of the Puritan inheritance; if the heroes and heroines of new narratives in prose or verse jazz their way to destruction or impotence, it is in protest against the Puritans. Who is this terrible Puritan? Apparently he is all America's ancestor, and whether you were born in Delaware or in South Carolina, in Montana or in Jugoslavia, you must adopt him as great-great-grandfather or declare yourself alien. What was he, or rather, what did he stand for, and inflict upon us, to-day? Here there is some confusion. According to one set of critics he is not so much a hater of the arts as indifferent to their charms, not so much a Milton scornful of easy beauty, as a Philistine, deaf and blind to the aesthetic. But these writers have apparently confounded Great-great-grandfather Puritan with Grandpa Victorian, the Victorian that Matthew Arnold scolded and Shaw made fun of. He is a type as different from the real Puritan as the slum dweller from the primitive barbarian. "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour" to flay such ignorant traducers of those who knew at least the beauty of austerity and holiness.