“The Bamboo Trap” illustrates the struggle of the American scientist far afield. John Mather’s adventure in the Andes, wherein his problem is to escape from a hole in the mountain side is enlivened by spiders. He escapes through a gallant physical fight. It is impossible to resist reference to a suggestion made by a reader of this story, a reader who is avowedly of the camp preferring Russian to American fiction. This tale would be more life-like, he said, if it ended on the unfinished struggle. “Why have that flood tear down the remaining barrier? Accident, wasn’t it?” But if Mather had not very nearly destroyed the barrier, accident would have availed him nothing. An Oriental in that trap doubtless would have concluded, “If I am fated to die I shall die.” Therein is exemplified the difference between the philosophy in literature of the negative and philosophy in literature of the positive. Life in America is not torpid, sick, neurasthenic, if one agrees with Theodore Dreiser, as he expressed himself in a recent interview.[F] “What I am driving at is the fact that the portrayal of American life does not lend itself to Russian atmosphere, to a Dostoyefsky plot, to Gorki treatment.” Mather’s escape is not so much the ingenious end to a clever plot as it is the logical end of just such a situation in real life, provided the chief actor be American and not Russian. The fighter may escape, the weakling dies. If the ideal of a people be annihilation, death the easy surrender either to indifference or to a divine nostalgia, just so surely literature will reflect that ideal. Not before America as a nation embraces pessimism will its literature be affected seriously by the literature of pessimism. And, incidentally, it will be worth while watching the literature of New Russia for a change of ideals.