I have been able to make only rapid allusions to the bonds which tie the American novel of to-day to the English novel, but what American writer of the twentieth century is not conversant with the works of Conrad, D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce? There remains one stiff problem, that of documentation. In what measure are we entitled to apply to the American novel and to the human types which it presents to us the _ab uno disce omnes_? What is there in common between the United States and its customs and the novels which describe them? A difficult question, harking back to the problem of literature conceived as the expression of society, the Taine’s problem of the three factors. If I had had the time and the courage to front it, I would have attempted to solve it by a _distinguo_ reminiscent of Molière. We have society and society. The more liberal and varied the morals, the less chance apparently for literature and manners to correspond. On the other hand, the more stereotyped, conventional and automatic the morals, the less chance that literature should differ from them. And that seems to be the case in the United States, if my studies are accurate. There has been such a development in the unanimity of thoughts, feelings and aspirations, such a standardization in America, that it has become impossible for the freest minds to express themselves independently of their surroundings. This uniformity having become tyrannical, the most liberal artists have only been able to shake it off by studying it as a phenomenon in itself. To describe it faithfully has become for them the best way of denouncing it. For my own part, I think that there is a great resemblance between what the American novelists have described and the actual facts. Even if that were not so, there would remain this amazing unanimity in thinking and in realistic observation. Even if Puritanism and repression, as Hawthorne, Howells, Henry James, Mrs. Wharton, Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Anderson, Cabell and others describe them, were a fiction, there would be, in the universal character of this fiction, an evidence of a state of mind capable of impressing a psychologist. Allowing that Puritanism is a vice, a malady of the mind, an obsession, is it not remarkable that we should meet with it among the most notable American novelists of yesterday and to-day? How could such a general obsession be fictitious and exist without corresponding to something which explains and justifies it? But I am firmly convinced of the great value of the modern American novel from a documentary, psychological, moral and social standpoint. As one critic expresses it, “just like the American skyscrapers, the American novel has sprung from the soil, awkward, utilitarian, often amorphous, more agreeable to the eye than to the intellect, queer, painfully searching for new modes of expression, with almost no relation with the site upon which it is growing or with what