In brief, a first-rate novel is always a character sketch. It may be more than that, but at bottom it is always a character sketch, or, if the author is genuinely of the imperial line, a whole series of them. More, it is a character sketch of an individual not far removed from the norm of the race. He may have his flavor of oddity, but he is never fantastic; he never violates the common rules of human action; he never shows emotions that are impossible to the rest of us. If Thackeray had made Becky Sharp seven feet tall, and given her a bass voice, nine husbands and the rank of lieutenant-general in the British Army, she would have been forgotten long ago, along with all the rest of “Vanity Fair.” And if Robinson Crusoe had been an Edison instead of a normal sailorman, he would have gone the same way. The moral of all this is not lost upon the more competent minority of novelists in practice among us. It was not necessary to preach it to Miss Cather when she set out to write “My Antonía,” nor to Abraham Cahan when he tackled “The Rise of David Levinsky,” nor to Sinclair Lewis when he was at work on “Babbitt.” All such novelists see the character first and the story afterward. What is the story of “Babbitt”? Who remembers? Who, indeed, remembers the story of “The Three Musketeers”? But D’Artagnan and his friends live brilliantly, and so, too, I believe, will George F. Babbitt live brilliantly--at all events, until Kiwanis ceases to trouble, and his type ceases to be real. Most of the younger American novelists, alas, seem to draw no profit from such examples. It is their aim, apparently, to shock mankind with the vivacity of their virtuosity and the heterodoxy of their ideas, and so they fill their novels with gaudy writing and banal propaganda, and convert their characters into sticks. I read novel after novel without getting any sense of contact with actual human beings. I am, at times, immensely amused and sometimes I am instructed, but I seldom carry away anything to remember. When I do so, it is not an idea, but a person. Like everyone else, I have a long memory for persons. But ideas come and go.