"If you question your own youthful acquaintances, you will receive in most cases, I dare say, similar answers. I am afraid if Giotto had been a Wyoming shepherd-boy he would want to be a steel-maker. Anything that tends to attract the young to the pursuit of literature as a calling strengthens our fiction, and the magazine should have credit for an 'assist' in this direction. Don't forget, of course, that the magazine itself derives directly, by way of advertising, from business." "Do you think, then," I asked, "that our writers are producing work as likely to endure as that which is being produced in England?" Mr. Spearman smiled whimsically. "Your question suggests to me," he replied, "rather than any judgment in the case, the reflection that the average English writer has possessed over our average American writer the very great advantage of an opportunity to become really educated; to this extent their equipment is appreciably stronger than ours. If you will read the ordinary run of English fiction or play-writing and compare it with similar work of ours, you cannot fail to note the better finish in their work. And in expressing a conviction that our writers are somewhat handicapped as to this factor in their equipment, I do not indict them for wasted opportunities; I indict our own substantial failure in educational methods. For a generation or more we have experimented, and from the very first grade in our grammar-schools up to the university courses there have resulted confusion and ineptitude. I instance specifically our experimentation with electives and our widespread contempt for the classics. To attempt to master any of the arts and not to be intimately familiar with what the Greeks and the Romans have left us of their achievement--not to speak of those, to us, uncharted seas of medieval achievement in every direction following the twelfth century--is to make the effort under a distinct disadvantage. "The average English writer has had much more of this intimacy, or at least a chance at much more of it, than the average American writer. In the sphere of literary criticism I have heard Mr. Brownell speak of the better quality of even the anonymous English literary criticism so frequently to be found in their journals when compared with similar American work. There is only one explanation for these things, and it lies in the training. All of this not implying, in indirect answer to your question, that the English writer is to bear away the prize in the competition for literary permanence. American Samsons may, despite everything, burst their bonds; but if they win it will often be without what their teachers should have supplied.