As I have said, it is not the artistic merit and dignity of a novel, but often simply its content as document, that makes for its success in the United States. The criterion of truth applied to it is not the criterion of an artist, but that of a newspaper editorial writer; the question is not, Is it in accord with the profoundest impulses and motives of humanity? but Is it in accord with the current pishposh? This accounts for the huge popularity of such confections as Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” and Blasco Ibáñez’s “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Neither had much value as a work of art—at all events, neither was perceptibly superior to many contemporary novels that made no stir at all—but each had the advantage of reënforcing an emotion already aroused, of falling into step with the procession of the moment. Had there been no fever of muck-raking and trust busting in 1906, “The Jungle” would have died the death in the columns of the _Appeal to Reason_, unheard of by the populace in general. And had the United States been engaged against France instead of for France in 1918, there would have been no argument in the literary weeklies that Blasco was a novelist of the first rank and his story a masterpiece comparable to “Germinal.” Sinclair was made by “The Jungle” and has been trying his hardest to unmake himself ever since. Another of the same sort is Ernest Poole, author of “The Harbor.” “The Harbor,” judged by any intelligible æsthetic standard, was a bad novel. Its transactions were forced and unconvincing; its central character was shadowy and often incomprehensible; the manner of its writing was quite without distinction. But it happened to be printed at a time when the chief ideas in it had a great deal of popularity—when its vague grappling with insoluble sociological problems was the sport of all the weeklies and of half the more sober newspapers—when a nebulous, highfalutin Bolshevism was in the air—and so it excited interest and took on an aspect of profundity. That its discussion of those problems was superficial, that it said nothing new and got nowhere—all this was not an influence against its success, but an influence in favor of its success, for the sort of mind that fed upon the nebulous, professor-made politics and sociology of 1915 was the sort of mind that is chronically avid of half-truths and as chronically suspicious of forthright thinking. This has been demonstrated since that time by its easy _volte face_ in the presence of emotion. The very ideas that Poole’s vapid hero toyed with in 1915, to the delight of the novel-reading _intelligentsia_, would have damned the book as a pamphlet for the I. W. W., or even, perhaps, as German propaganda, three years later. But meanwhile, it had been forgotten, as novels are always forgotten, and all that remained of it was a general impression that Poole, in some way or other, was a superior fellow and to be treated with respect.