Many, indeed, are called but few are chosen, and some reason must be found for the low level of our fiction where the output is so great. The fault is not due to unfavorable atmospheric conditions, but to timidity on the part of writers in seizing upon the obvious American material. Sidney Lanier remarked of Poe that he was a great poet, but that he did not know enough--meaning that life in its broad aspects had not touched him. A lack of “information,” of understanding and vision, is, I should say, the fundamental weakness of the American novel. To see life steadily and whole is a large order, and prone as we are to skim light-heartedly the bright surfaces, we are not easily to be persuaded to creep to the rough edges and peer into the depths. We have not always been anxious to welcome a “physician of the iron age” capable of reading “each wound, each weakness clear,” and saying “thou ailest here and here”! It is not “competent” for the artist to plead the unattractiveness of his material at the bar of letters; it is his business to make the best of what he finds ready to his hand. It is because we are attempting to adjust humanity to new ideals of liberty that we offer to ourselves, if not to the rest of the world, a pageant of ceaseless interest and variety. It may be that we are too much at ease in our Zion for a deeper probing of life than our fiction has found it agreeable to make. And yet we are a far soberer people than we were when Mr. Matthew Arnold complained of our lack of intellectual seriousness. The majority has proved its soundness in a number of instances since he wrote of us. We are less impatient of self-scrutiny. Our newly awakened social consciousness finds expression in many books of real significance, and it is inevitable that our fiction shall reflect this new sobriety.