As one who poked many heavy jocosities at it while it lasted, I hope I may now say with good grace that I believe Greenwich Village did a good service to all the fine arts in this great land, and left a valuable legacy behind it. True enough, its own heroes were nearly all duds, and most of them have been forgotten, but it at least broke ground, it at least stirred up the animals. When it began to issue smoke and flame, the youth of the country were still under the hoof of the schoolma’m; when it blew up at last they were in full revolt. Was it Greenwich Village or Yale University that cleared the way for Cabell? Was it the Village or the Philharmonic Society that made a place for Stravinsky? Was it the Village or the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum that first whooped for Cézanne? That whooping, of course, did not stop with Cézanne, or Stravinsky, or Cabell. There were whoops almost as loud for Sascha Gilhooly, who painted sunsets with a shaving brush, and for Raoul Goetz, who wrote quartettes for automobile horns and dentist’s drills, and for Bruce J. Katzenstein, whose poetry was all figures and exclamation points. But all that excess did no harm. The false prophets changed from day to day. The real ones remained. X. ESSAY IN PEDAGOGY 1 On the purely technical side the American novel has obviously made immense progress. As ordinarily encountered, it is very adeptly constructed, and not infrequently it is also well written. The old-time amorphous novel, rambling all over the place and ending with pious platitudes, has pretty well gone out. The American novelists of to-day, and especially the younger ones, have given earnest study to form--perhaps, indeed, too much. For in concentrating their powerful intellects upon it they have lost sight of something that is far more important. I allude, of course, to the observation of character. Thus the average contemporary American novel, though it is workmanlike and well-mannered, fails to achieve its first business. It does not evoke memorable images of human beings. One enjoys reading it, perhaps, but one seldom remembers it. And when it gets beyond the estate of a mere technical exercise, it only too often descends to the even worse estate of a treatise. It attempts to prove something--usually the simple fact that its author is a clever fellow, or a saucy gal. But all a novel of genuine bulk and beam ever proves is that the proper study of mankind is man--the proper study and the most engrossing.