"Mr. Brownell, in his definitive essay on Cooper, in comparing the material at Balzac's hand with that at Cooper's, remarks on the fact that Cooper's background was essentially nature. 'Nothing, it is true, is more romantic than nature,' adds Mr. Brownell, 'except nature plus man. But the exception is prodigious.' Europe measures behind her writers almost three thousand years of man. "We have in this country no atmosphere of Christian tradition such as that which pervades Europe--English-speaking people parted with historic Christianity before they came here. But, willingly or unwillingly, the English and the Continental writers are saturated with this magnificent background of Christianity--they can't escape it. And what I note as striking evidence of the value to them of this brooding spirit of twenty European centuries is the fact that their very pagans choose Christian material to work with. Goethe himself, fine old pagan that he was, turned to Christian quarries for his _Faust_. The minor pagans turn in likewise, though naturally with slighter results. But to all of them, Christianity, paraphrasing Samson, might well say: 'If ye had not plowed with my heifer, ye had not read--your own riddle of longed-for recognition.'" "Why is it that the art of fiction is no longer taken as seriously as it was, for example, in the time of Sir Walter Scott?" "I don't know how seriously," countered Mr. Spearman, "you mean your question to be taken. It suggests that in the day of Walter Scott the field of novel-writing was still so new that only bolder spirits ventured into it. It was not a day when the many could attempt the novel with any assurances of success in marketing their wares. In consequence we got then the work of only big men and women. Pioneers--though not necessarily respectable--are a hardy lot. "Still--touching on your other question about the great American novel--if I wished to develop great musicians I should start every one possible at studying music, and I can't help thinking that the more there are among us who attempt novels the greater probability there will be for the production of a masterpiece. A man's mind is a mine. Neither he nor any one else knows what is in it. Possessing the property in fee simple, he has, of course, certain valuable proprietary rights. But the only way I know of to find out to a certainty just what lies within the property is persistently to tunnel and drift, or, as Mr. Brownell says, 'to get out what is in you.' And I am in complete accord with him in the belief that temperament is the best possible endowment for a novelist--and temperament comes, if you are a Christian, from God; if a pagan, from the gods." Mr. Spearman returned to his theme of the effect of materialism on literature in the course of a discussion of the French novel of the day as compared to the novel of Zola and his imitators. He said: