Sometimes these counsellors, not content with commending a copied manner, seriously urge--one might think at the risk of advising plagiarism--that the American author simply transplant the social ideas of some admirable foreign artist to one of our own local scenes. Thus, a year or two ago, in one of our critical journals, I saw the writer of a novel about Indiana state politicians severely blamed for not making the same observations on the subject that Mr. Wells had made about English national parliamentary life in The New Machiavelli. Not long since another American reviewer of "radical" tendency harshly censured the author of a novel about American under-graduate life in a New York college, because the daughter of the college president uttered views of sex and marriage unlike those expressed in Ann Veronica. This sort of criticism--equally unflattering and obtuse, it appears to me, in its perception of the special characterizations of Mr. Wells's thoughtful pages, and in its counsel to the artist depicting an alien topic to insert extraneous and unrelated views in his landscape--proceeds from a certain strange and ridiculous conception of truth peculiar to many persons engaged in the great fields of our literary criticism and of our publishing and political activities. This is a conception of truth not at all as something capable of irradiating any scene on the globe, like light; but as some very definite and limited force, driving a band-wagon. People who possess this conception of truth seem to argue very reasonably that if Mr. Wells is "in" it, so to speak, with truth, and is saying "the thing" to say about sex or about the liberal party, then the intelligent author anywhere who desires to be "in" it with truth will surely get into this band-wagon of Mr. Wells's and stand on the very planks he has placed in the platform of its particular wagonbed. It is an ironical, if tragic, comment on the intelligence of American reading that the driver I have chanced to see most frequently urged for authors here should be Mr. H. G. Wells, who has done probably more than any other living writer of English to encourage varied specialistic and non-partisan expression. We have said that to tell his own truth the American writer will have to sit longer before his subject and will have more to do to express it, than if he chose it from a country of more ancient practices in art, and of longer ancestral sojourns. We have said that he will be urged not to tell his own truth considerably more than an English or German or French writer would be. These authors are at least not advised to imitate American expression, and they live in countries where the habit of copying the work of other artists is much less widely regarded as an evidence of sophistication than it is here.