In the end, however, what humanity needs is that burdens should be carried, and provided that things get from place to place the name of carter or horse is of very secondary importance. If it is in the fashion we will go down to the meadow and watch the colts cavorting: but all the while we are aware that the business of words as of colts or of the arts is to carry things and we tire reasonably soon of watching horse-play! For if I say: “I am hungry,” the business of those words is to carry that information to you, and if you read the _Iliad_ it is that the art of that epic may make Hecuba significant to you. Consider the prose of Cranmer! CHAPTER THREE TOWARDS FLAUBERT It may at first sight seem curious that a section of a small work devoted to the English--and of course the American--Novel should be captioned with the name of a French novelist. But in the first place the art and still more the frame of mind of the Sage of Croisset are so deep-embedded in the art and frame of mind of the English and still more of the American novelist and all thought of the great, Nordic work of “that poor dear Gustave,” as Mr. Henry James used to call him, is so cast out of all French literary practices or aspirations to-day that if Flaubert is not an English novelist his Titanic and Norman ghost has no place at all. To state one of those half-truths that are infinitely illuminating, you may say that without _Madame Bovary_, _Babbitt_ could never have existed and without _Bouvard et Pécuchet_ there could have been no _Way of All Flesh_. For all I know Mr. Sinclair Lewis may never have read a word of Flaubert and I will bet my hat that, for the purposes of this discussion, the shade of Samuel Butler would declare that he knew no French at all. But the point is that, without those two works in French, those two national monuments in English could hardly at this time exist or weigh with the public since the public would not be prepared for them. Let us go a step further and declare that without Cranmer we should have had another three centuries to wait for Flaubert, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Joseph Conrad, Mr. John Galsworthy, and my friend “Red” Lewis. For without the English Prayer Book and its follower in date and style the English Bible, with or without Cranmer’s suppressed preface, and without the followers in date and style of Defoe, Bunyan, and Samuel Richardson, how should we have to-day any English prose, novel-form or any English frame of mind? Or any Anglo-American Concord literature; or any British Empire or any Anglo-Saxon anything?