When we turn back from our architecture to our books, we have the right to ask why poetry and the novel address themselves exclusively to what is in essence satire, to the portrayal of us as worse than we are, or with our aspirations left out; why we as readers must be invited to absorb mere information about ourselves and our country; why we so seldom meet in the pages offered to us the kind of men and women we admire or ought to admire. The arts all express the same thing, at any given moment, and if we are equally proficient in them, they ought to achieve the same grandeur and the same beauty. Against the trivial and drab contents of much of our poetry and the condescending realism of much of our prose American architecture now stands, a reproach and an indictment; for the imaginative power and sweep of our buildings is hardly discernible in our books. The architects have followed old wisdom, by making their work ideal, better than life. The writers, in a stubborn wrong-headedness, in defiance of the readers’ psychology, portray characters worse than in actual life, and sometimes ask us to admire them. III To ask what characters are proper to literature as an art, and to point out that the character better than life will express our ideals, and that the character worse than life will invite our satire, is only to raise in another way the old problems of the universal as against the particular in art, of the contemporary as against the eternal. To be strictly personal is in the end to be contemporary, and to be strictly contemporary is to give, whether or not we intend it, the effect of satire. If our picture of life is to appeal to the reader, and to many readers, as their own world, not simply as their neighbors’ private house into which they are prying, it must have general human truth beyond what is strictly personal; and if it is to be read with that sense of proprietorship by many people over a stretch of time, it must not limit itself to the peculiarities of any one moment. It is true that the writer himself lives but one life and is circumscribed by time and place; if there were no such thing as imagination he would only record what he is, for the enlightenment of others who are just like him; without imagination he would not know of a better character than his, or of a worse one, and we should be spared the discipline of satire, but at the price of art. The problem for the writer, as for any other artist, is to imagine the lives of other men, and the lives that he and other men aspire to; his business is to select from personal adventure what is generally important, and to see it against the background of universal experience. Can any one imagine universal experience? Perhaps not, but the nearer he comes to this difficult success the more readers the world over will find meaning in what he writes. To have a personal career is no ground for conceit in an artist—every one has as much; the achievement is