The characteristic is primitive and childlike; it amounts to a belief in miracles, for what is a miracle but a short-cut? And it argues a conviction that life is a very simple affair, all black and white, with some one secret that you may at any moment hit upon if you are lucky. The attitude of mind is that you are very ill or very ignorant or very poor now, but may in a flash become very well or very wise or very rich; never that you are not as well as you should be now, but may gradually become somewhat better, or that you may through assiduous study moderately improve your education or your financial position. This black-and-white, miracle-spotted world in which we children of faith believe, is in reality a poor and barren world, as is revealed by our novels that exhibit it. I have no interest in the question of whether our contemporary novelists are better than, for example, the English, or theirs better than ours; but I do assert that the novel in England is vastly richer than the novel in America--not glaringly black-and-white, but full of half-tones, shadows and subtleties. To take two British novelists of not very strong creative ability, Mr. J. D. Beresford and Miss Ethel Sidgwick, where among American writers can you parallel their fine balanced observation, their delicate study of character? It is not that they are more talented than any one of a number of our own novelists, only that the world they describe is a richer world than the world as we see it or have ever seen it. For years our novels were all sunny, optimistic and sweet; now they are all drab, cynical and hopeless. Once the village was the abode of quaint, but pure-souled and kindly people unspoiled by the wicked city; now it is a horrid hole. Once our young girls were appallingly pure; now they are appallingly impure. Mr. Wells alone among the English authors of note lives in, and writes of, such a black-and-white, miraculous world. He, too, has always some short-cut to offer, that, if adopted, would transmute life into pure gold; and he, too, has always forgotten his short-cut of the year-before-last. Which is no doubt the explanation of the vastly greater esteem he enjoys in America than at home. I have turned to the novel for an example simply because in it you get, not by any means a true picture of American life as it is, but a very perfect picture of the American attitude toward life. But you will see the same thing, more directly if more fragmentarily, wherever you look. I.W.W’s are all wicked; La Follette was either a hero or a villain; ‘_If Winter Comes_ may well last as long as the poem from which it takes its name’ (William Lyon Phelps).