To return to the domain of literature and the novel, it is fortunate that in following its natural bent Young America should have instinctively found this truth. It’s an ill wind that blows no good. No matter how much of a rebel, of a skeptic, of a dilettante and of a cynic Young America has been, it is much more earnest than it appears. It is in quest of a new ideal. It does not believe in salvation through restraint and puritanical resignation. It does not hope any more to find its ideal in a system of repressions which is a negation of the beautiful and the good in the human soul, nor yet in a philosophy, no matter how transcendental, which forgets the man or the woman of flesh and blood. Neither does it seek its ideal in the goods of this world. Young America applies the dictum that man does not live by bread alone. It says with Emerson that the value of this world is not measured in bales of cotton or sacks of dollars. It tries to find its ideal in a more felicitous, and in the last analysis, more artistic, conception of life. It feels with justice that in art there is a profound harmony which seizes us and which expresses us in the deepest part of ourselves, a synthesis in which nothing is forgotten, a vast tolerance founded upon a sense of real values. This ideal cannot serve for the masses, but it can rejuvenate and humanize the schemes of the leaders. Young America is making a slow, painful march towards this goal. Awkward, and often violent in its efforts, it has already been rewarded in its quest. It is impossible to doubt it after one glance at the great crop of original works in prose and verse which it has gathered in the last decade and a half. * * * * * I have arrived at the end of my labors. My one ambition has been to present to the reader as complete and as faithful a panorama of the modern American novel as possible. I have not said all, but I do not think I have omitted anything essential. There remain to be cleared up several points which are closely related to my subject. There is the question of influences, especially of French influences. I have alluded to the panegyric of Balzac by Theodore Dreiser. I could have added that of Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourts, Huysmans, and especially of Maupassant, who is still very popular in America. The American novelists of to-day have not failed to acknowledge their debt to the French realists, realizing that without them, they would not have been what they are. An autonomous and autochthonous phenomenon as far as origins and ends are concerned, the American novel has gone to France to seek lessons in art and in frankness. From Balzac to Marcel Proust, the American novelists know their French literature thoroughly. The vogue in America of the French novelists has only been equalled by the Russians, who are better able to play on the mystical chords characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon.