"The trouble with the average realist," he said, "is that he doesn't believe that the emotions are real. As a matter of fact, the greatest source of material for the novelist is to be found in the emotional and spiritual side of human nature. If writers were more receptive to spiritual and emotional impressions they would make better novels. It is the soul of man that the greatest novels are written about--there is Dostoievski's _Crime and Punishment_, for example!" In spite of his criticisms of some of the methods of the modern realists, Mr. Harben believes strongly in the importance of one realistic dogma, that which has to do with detailed description. "Why is it that _Pepys's Diary_ is interesting to us?" he asked. "It is because of its detail. "But if Pepys had been a Howells--if he had been as careful in describing great things as he was in describing small things--then his _Diary_ would be ten times more valuable to us than it is. And so Howells's novels will be valuable to people who read them a thousand years from now to get an idea of how we live. "That is, Howells's novels will be valuable if people read novels in the years that are to come! Perhaps they will not be reading novels or anything else. For all we know, thought-transference may become as common a thing as telephony is now. And if this comes to pass nobody will read!" _LITERATURE IN THE COLLEGES_ JOHN ERSKINE Brown of Harvard is no more. The play of that name may still be running, but of Harvard life it is now about as accurate a picture as _Trelawney of the Wells_ is of modern English life. At Harvard, and at all the great American universities, the dashing, picturesque young athlete is no longer the prevailing type of the undergraduate ideal. Of course, undergraduate athletics and undergraduate athletes persist--it would be a tragedy if they did not--but the type of youth that has been rather effectively denominated the "rah-rah boy" is increasingly difficult to find. His place has been taken, not by the "grind," the plodding, prematurely old student, caring only for his books and his scholastic record, but by a normal young man, aware that the campus is not the most important place in the world; aware, in fact, that the university is not the universe. This young man knows about class politics, but also about international politics; about baseball, but also about contemporary literature. He is much more a citizen than his predecessor of ten years since, less provincial, less aristocratic. And he not only enjoys literature, but actually desires to create it. The chief enthusiasm at Harvard seems to be the drama; indeed, the Brown of Harvard to-day must be represented not as a crimson-sweatered gladiator but as a cross between Strindberg and George M. Cohan. At Columbia--I have Prof. John Erskine's word for it--there has lately developed a genuine interest in--what do you suppose? Poetry!