None of the more popular brands of contemporary writing seems to satisfy the craving for national self-expression. It is true that we are going in for universals. Our books reach the hundred thousands, and our magazines the millions. The successful writer of plays, stories, or special articles trades in the thoughts that circulate through a vast community of common education, experience, and environment. The result is to spread and perpetuate the ideals and the liberal hopes that we call American, but also to stereotype and thus weaken their influence. They become counters in a game, or, better still, standardized foods for the imagination, whose popularity is certain until the fashion wears out. The writer of adventurous fiction to-day uses the same formulas as did Cooper, because he writes for a people still true to the mold of that America which they have inherited directly in family life, or indirectly in the schools. But his idealism is faint beside Cooper’s; his “strong, simple Americans” too often mere fabrications when compared with Deerslayer, or crude, vulgarized approximations, like sculptures of the decadent fourth century. Vulgarization is the menace of democratic literature--vulgarization by smart and cheap short stories, by plays where the wit is raw, the sentiment mushy, the characters, like their language, cheap and mean. Slang can be racy; colloquialism belongs to a literature of the people; to be homely is often to be lovable and true: but a literature, no matter how moral, which in its lack of clarity and sweetness is like a glass of dirty water, is a heavy price to pay for mere circulation. The appeal to universals is essential in a democracy, but unless clarified by love and hope and conviction, it leads toward universal vulgarity. Nor does the prospect cheer if one looks to the contemporary Brahmins, who seek not the universal, but the particular; who write for the best, not the broadest, emotions of democracy. Lowells and Emersons have not yet reappeared in our society. No Emerson has philosophized the reactions of America to international obligation; no Lowell assailed militarist and pacifist alike in the war; no Whitman even has sung commonplace America become momentarily heroic in the cause of a half-understood democracy. We have had an abundance of writing directed to fine minds and fine souls, but it has lacked the authentic note of national inspiration.