He qualifies his doctrine by the statement that the novelist must not let his purpose run away with his story. I have an idea he must have let publishers and critics persuade him he had done that in “The Octopus”; for in “The Pit,” the second volume of his proposed trilogy, he is more tame and conventional. He tries to interest us in a grain broker and his wife as human beings--and he cannot do that, because parasites are not and cannot be interesting, except in satire after the fashion of “Babbitt.” We miss the epic sweep and bigness of “The Octopus,” and we are not consoled by the fact that “The Pit” had twice the sale. The relationship between the novelist’s purpose and his story is very simple; the two things are one, and of equal importance, and the novelist must have them both in hand at every moment of his work. The consequence of losing either is equally fatal. The novelist who loses his grip upon the story and the characters who are living the story, begins at once to write a tract or a sermon--I know all about that, having done it. But equally fatal it is to lose your grip upon your purpose; for then you are doing meaningless reporting, and becoming a camera instead of a creative intellect. I am prepared to hear it said many times that the author of this book does not know the difference between a tract or sermon and a work of art. But those who read the book, not to get material for ridicule, but to learn the truth about art, will note that I have praised in this book only the artists who were big enough and strong enough to keep both their imaginative impulse and their intellectual control; I have failed to mention a goodly company of artists who fought valiantly for freedom and justice, but who do not belong among the greatest, for precisely the reason that their impulse to teach and to preach ran away with their inspiration. That is why you miss such names as Plato and Sir Thomas More and Ferdinand Lassalle and Bertha von Suttner and John Ruskin and Walter Besant and Charles Kingsley and Charles Reade and Robert Buchanan and John Davidson and Richard Whiteing and Francis Adams and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward Bellamy. CHAPTER CVI THE OLD-FASHIONED AMERICAN David Graham Phillips affords an interesting illustration of the power of bourgeois criticism to suppress and abolish those writers who threaten its ideology. He was by all odds the greatest novelist of the period in which he wrote, a sturdy and vigorous personality, who looked at the world about him with his own eyes and really had something to say. He was worth a dozen of the imitation novelists who were acclaimed as great during the first ten years of the century. But Phillips was a “muck-rake man,” a prophet and a satirist; therefore the critics patronized him, and since his death they have forgotten him. No biography has been published, and a new generation will have to make the discovery that he wrote the biggest piece of American fiction of his time.