I shall not give comfort to the enemy by any admission that our novelists lack culture in the sense that Turgenieff and the great French masters possessed it. A matter of which I may complain with more propriety is their lack of “information” (and I hope this term is sufficiently delicate) touching the tasks and aims of America. We have been deluged with “big” novels that are “big” only in the publishers’ advertisements. New York has lately been the scene of many novels, but the New York adumbrated in most of them is only the metropolis as exposed to the awed gaze of provincial tourists from the rubber-neck wagon. Sex, lately discovered for exploitation, has resulted only in “arrangements” of garbage in pink and yellow, lightly sprinkled with musk. As Rosinante stumbles over the range I am disposed to offer a few suggestions for the benefit of those who may ask where, then, lies the material about which our novelists are so deficient in “information.” No strong hand has yet been laid upon our industrial life. It has been pecked at and trifled with, but never treated with breadth or fulness. Here we have probably the most striking social contrasts the world has ever seen; racial mixtures of bewildering complexity, the whole flung against impressive backgrounds and lighted from a thousand angles. Pennsylvania is only slightly “spotted” on the literary map, and yet between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, nearly every possible phase and condition of life is represented. Great passions are at work in the fiery aisles of the steel mills that would have kindled Dostoiefsky’s imagination. A pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night marks a limitless field for the earnest fictionist. A Balzac would find innumerable subjects awaiting him in the streets of Wilkesbarre! At this point I must bemoan the ill-fortune that has carried so many American fiction writers to foreign shores. If Hawthorne had never seen Italy, but had clung to Salem, I am disposed to think American literature would be the richer. If fate had not borne Mr. Howells to Venice, but had posted him on the Ohio during the mighty struggle of the ’60’s, and if Mr. James had been stationed at Chicago, close to the deep currents of national feeling, what a monumental library of vital fiction they might have given us! If Mrs. Wharton’s splendid gifts had been consecrated to the service of Pittsburgh rather than New York and Paris, how much greater might be our debt to her! Business in itself is not interesting; business as it reacts upon character is immensely interesting. Mineral paint has proved to be an excellent preservative for _The Rise of Silas Lapham_, which remains our best novel of business. But if paint may be turned to account, why not cotton, wool, and the rest of the trade catalogue, every item with its own distinct genesis? In _The Turmoil_ Mr. Tarkington staged, under a fitting canopy of factory smoke, a significant drama of the conflict between idealism and materialism.