We must escape from this carving of cherry stones, this contentment with the day of littleness, this use of the novel as a plaything where it pretends to be something else. And it occurs to me at this juncture that I might have saved myself a considerable expenditure of ink by stating in the first place that what the American novel really needs is a Walt Whitman to fling a barbaric yawp from the crest of the Alleghanies and proclaim a new freedom. For what I have been trying to say comes down to this: that we shall not greatly serve ourselves or the world’s literature by attempts to Russianize, or Gallicize, or Anglicize our fiction, but that we must strive more earnestly to Americanize it--to make it express with all the art we may command the life we are living and that pretty tangible something that we call the American spirit. The bright angels of letters never appear in answer to prayer; they come out of nowhere and knock at unwatched gates. But the wailing of jeremiads before the high altar is not calculated to soften the hearts of the gods who hand down genius from the skies. It is related that a clerk in the patent office asked to be assigned to a post in some other department on the ground that practically everything had been invented and he wanted to change before he lost his job. That was in 1833. Courage, comrade! The songs have not all been written nor the tales all told. THE CHURCH FOR HONEST SINNERS THE young man who greeted me cheerfully in the lobby of the hotel in Warburton, my native town, and handed me a card setting forth the hours of services at St. John’s Church, evidently assumed that I was a commercial traveller. I was in no wise offended by his mistake, as I sincerely admire the heralds of prosperity and sit with them at meat whenever possible. I am a neurologist by profession, but write occasionally, and was engaged just then in gathering material for a magazine article on occupational diseases. A friend in the Department of Labor had suggested Warburton as a likely hunting-ground, as children employed there in a match-factory were constantly being poisoned, and a paint-factory also was working dire injury to its employees. “I’m afraid,” I replied to the engaging young representative of St. John’s Men’s League, “that my religious views wouldn’t be tolerated at St. John’s. But I thank you, just the same.” I had been baptized in St. John’s and remembered it well from my youth. On my way up-town from the station I had noted its handsome new edifice of impeccable Gothic. “We have the best music in town, and our minister is a live wire. He knows how to preach to men--he’s cut big slices out of the other churches.” “Gives the anxious sinner a clean bill of health, does he?”