Americans do not hesitate to sacrifice beauty and passion to respectability. If an American writer dared to follow the example of either Zola or Balzac in their descriptions of American society, they would be sent to the penitentiary for life. One of the most active forces at work to keep up American civilization is a belief in the universal presence of sin and the need of inquisition to uphold the moral code. Readers familiar with Mr. Mencken’s writings will remember with what fertility of imagination and keenness of wit he illustrated his views on the subject. The richer the Puritan became the more tyrannical he showed himself. His wealth made him intolerant and oppressive. Now that he was assured of his salvation, he turned his energies to convert the world outside by campaigns, crusades and so forth. He tried to make the world safe for righteousness and morality by compulsion, prohibitions and blue laws. As a disciple of Zola and Balzac, and an extreme realist in his descriptions of American society, Theodore Dreiser has not yet been jailed for life, so far as we know. However, he enjoyed enough scraps with the censor to have personal reasons for venting his feelings concerning the Puritan. The author of “Sister Carrie” is not a professional humorist, and yet he can hardly control himself when he contemplates the American scene as ordained by Puritanism. I quote freely from his essay on “Life, Art in America,” in “Hey Rub-a-Dub-Dub.” Theodore Dreiser cannot refrain from chuckling, he tells us, when he sees more than one hundred millions of his countrymen loaded with a wealth which passes the imagination of the most enthusiastic miser and unable to count among themselves a sculptor, a poet, a singer, a novelist, an actor, a musician of the first rank. For two centuries America enjoyed an amazing prosperity. Her land is stuffed with mines, with oil and coal. It is full of beautiful mountains, of large valleys and rivers. There are facilities of all sorts for trade and for travel. And yet, with all her prosperity, America hardly counts an artist or a thinker of mark. Where are we to find, leaving aside Emerson and William James,[4] the American Spencer, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant? Has America any historian to compare with Macaulay, Grote or Gibbon? Has she any novelist like Maupassant or Flaubert? Where is the American equivalent of Crooks, Roentgen, Pasteur? Is there an American critic with the depth and forcibleness of Taine, Sainte-Beuve or the De Goncourts? Has America a playwright like Ibsen, Tchekhov, Shaw, Hauptmann or Brieux? Where are her Coquelins, Sonnenthals, Forbes-Robertsons and Bernhardts? America has produced only one poet since Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters. American painting can marshal Whistler, Inness and Sargent, but two out of the three migrated abroad. America has plenty of inventors, some of them remarkable, but this has nothing to do with art and the freeing of the mind.