We have had, to be sure, many examples of the business and political novel, but practically all of them have been struck from the same die. A “big” politician or a “big” man of business, his daughter, and a lover who brazenly sets himself up to correct the morals of the powerful parent, is a popular device. Young love must suffer, but it must not meet with frustration. In these experiments (if anything so rigidly prescribed may be said to contain any element of experiment) a little realism is sweetened with much romance. In the same way the quasi-historical novel for years followed a stereotyped formula: the lover was preferably a Northern spy within the Southern lines; the heroine, a daughter of the traditional aristocratic Southern family. Her shuddersome ride to seek General Lee’s pardon for the unfortunate officer condemned to be shot at daybreak was as inevitable as measles. The geography might be reversed occasionally to give a Northern girl a chance, but in any event her brother’s animosity toward the hero was always a pleasing factor. Another ancient formula lately revived with slight variations gives us a shaggy, elemental man brought by shipwreck or other means into contact with gentle womanhood. In his play _The Great Divide_ William Vaughn Moody invested this device with dignity and power, but it would be interesting to see what trick might be performed with the same cards if the transformed hero should finally take his departure for the bright boulevards, while the heroine seized his bow and arrow and turned joyfully to the wilderness. When our writers cease their futile experimenting and imitating, and wake up to the possibilities of American material we shall have fewer complaints of the impotence of the American novel. We are just a little impatient of the holding of the mirror up to nature, but nevertheless we do not like to be fooled all the time. And no one is quicker than an American to “get down to brass tacks,” when he realizes that he must come to it. Realism is the natural medium through which a democracy may “register” (to borrow a term from the screen-drama) its changing emotions, its hopes and failures. We are willing to take our recreations in imaginary kingdoms, but we are blessed with a healthy curiosity as to what really is happening among our teeming millions, and are not so blind as our foreign critics and the croakers at home would have us think as to what we do and feel and believe. But the realists must play the game straight. They must paint the wart on the sitter’s nose--though he refuse to pay for the portrait! Half-hearted dallying and sidling and compromising are not getting us anywhere. The flimsiest romance is preferable to dishonest realism. It is the meretricious stuff in the guise of realism that we are all anxious to delete from the catalogues.