The trend away from the literature of art to the literature of satire is all the more remarkable in our day because the exigencies of satire compel the American to deny wholesale his better self. There might be some apparent reason for not writing in the epic or the tragic tone if in order to do so we had to assume virtues we all knew we lacked; but why make a religion of writing satire, when to do so we must conceal the few virtues we are sure we have? Mr. Howells took it to be his duty to tell the unvarnished truth about human society as he knew it, but you would not guess from his novels that America ever produced so charming a man as Mr. Howells and those literary friends of his of whom, outside his novels, he wrote lovingly. So Mr. Lewis pictures America today—leaving out of the picture the satirical criticism of America in which he leads, and so Mrs. Wharton shows us the narrower world of fashion, with no one in it so gifted, so admirably trained, as Mrs. Wharton. The best of us is hard enough to express, as Rabbi Ben Ezra knew, but how odd that we prefer not to express it, whether difficult or easy—that we deliberately conceal what we have set our hearts on. We name half a dozen characters from his plays in whom Shakespeare seems to be portraying himself, and without too subtle a discrimination we recognize ideals of our own in all of them. Pendennis seems to be Thackeray himself, and so seems Henry Esmond and Clive Newcome, and we flatter ourselves that the great novelist incorporated in those portraits some of our own best features. We—and Cervantes—are incarnated in Don Quixote.