These are some of my own guesses as to why individual impressions of our national life are few and why they are not greatly in vogue in America. Whether they be poor or good guesses they represent one Middle Western reader's observation of some of the actual difficulties that will have to be faced in America by the writer who by temperament desires to follow that golden and beautiful way of Flaubert's, which Mr. Galsworthy has mentioned. This writer will doubtless get from these difficulties far more fun than he ever could have had without them. They are suggested here in the pages of THE LITTLE REVIEW, not at all with the idea of discouraging a single traveler from setting out on that splendid road, but rather as a step towards the beginning of that true and long comradeship with effort that is worth befriending which our felicitous English well-wisher hopes may be THE LITTLE REVIEW'S abiding purpose. "Henceforth I ask not Good Fortune: I, myself, am Good Fortune." Impression GEORGE SOULE Her life was late a new-built house-- Empty, with shining window panes, Where neither sorrow nor carouse Had left red stains. A passing vagrant, least of men, Entered and used; her hearth-fire shone. She mellowed, he grew restless then-- Left her alone. Now she is vacant as before, Desolate through the weary whiles; Yet play about the darkened door Shadows of smiles. Art and Life GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER Odium theologicum--it is a deadly thing. But the ridicule and obloquy, formerly characteristic of credal fanaticism, seem to have passed over in recent years into the camp of art connoisseurs. No denying it, it was a Homeric warfare that reverberated up and down the earth from land to land, and from century to century, between what was ever the "old" faith and the "new." In this year of grace, however, it is the disciples of "classic" art--aureoled with the sanctity of some antiquity or idealism--and "modern" art--in whatever nuance or novelty of most disapproved and screaming modernity--who hereticize each other, who even deny each other right of domicile, save, perhaps, in the unvisited solitudes of interstellar spaces. To be sure, those august and frozen solitudes of the everlasting nothing may be conceivably preferable to the theological Inferno, though probably this question has not yet received the attention from critics and philanthropists that its importance would seem to merit.