"In Michael Angelo's day public interest in solving problems in manufacture and transportation did not overshadow that in painting and sculpture. Leonardo in our day would be building railroads, digging canals, or inventing the aeroplane--and doing better, perhaps, at these things than any man living; he came perilously close to doing all of them in his own day. "Before you can bring our steel-founders and business men into literature you must make success in literature and its kindred arts esteemed as the greatest reward. As it is, I fear it is likely to be chiefly those who through lack of capacity, inclination, or robust health are unequal to the heat and burden of great business that will be left for the secondary callings, among which we must at present rank literature. It would be interesting, too, to consider to what extent this movement of men toward business rewards has been compensated for by the opportunities afforded to women in the field thus deserted; we certainly have many clever women cultivating it." "But what," I asked, "about materialism--not specifically commercialism, but materialism? Do you think that its evil effects are evident in contemporary literature?" "Materialism--you mean the philosophy--has quite a different effect on any literature--a poisonous, a baneful effect, rather than a merely harmful one," Mr. Spearman answered. "Can you possibly have, at any time or anywhere, great art without a great faith? Since the era of Christianity, at any rate, it seems to me that periods of faith, or at least periods enjoying the reflexes and echoes of faith, have afforded the really nourishing atmosphere for artistic development. Spirituality provides that which the imagination may seize upon for the substance of its creative effort; without spirituality the imagination shrivels, and the materialist, while losing none of his characteristic confidence, shrinks continually to punier artistic stature." Something in what Mr. Spearman had said reminded me of Henry Holt's criticisms of the modern magazines. So I asked Mr. Spearman what effect the development of the American magazine, with its high prices for serials and series of stories, had had upon our fiction. He answered: "Good, I think. Our fiction must compete in its rewards with those of business. One of the rewards of either--even if you put it, in the first case, the lowest--is the monetary reward, and the more substantial that can be made, the more chance fiction will have of holding up its head. "I have had occasion to watch pretty closely the development of the inclinations and ambitions of a number of average American boys--boys that have had fairly intimate opportunities to consider both literature and business. I have been startled more than once to find that as each of them came along and was asked what he wanted to do, the substance of his answer has been, 'Something to make money.'