To be brutally frank: Nobody cares what the Critical Court thinks of Whitman or Poe or Longfellow or Hawthorne. Everybody cares what Tarkington does next, what Mary Johnston tackles, what the developments are in the William Allen White case, what becomes of Joseph Hergesheimer, whether Amy Lowell achieves great work in that contrapuntal poetry she calls polyphonic prose. On these things depend the present era in American literature and the possibilities of the future. And these things are more or less under our control. The people of America not only believe that there is an independent American literature, but they believe that there will continue to be. Some of them believe in the past of that literature, some of them believe in its future; but all of them believe in its present and its presence. Their voice may be stifled in the Critical Court (silence in the court!) but it is audible everywhere else. It is heard in the bookshops where piles of new fiction melt away, where new verse is in brisk demand, where new biographies and historical works are bought daily and where books on all sorts of weighty subjects flake down from the shelves into the hands of customers. The voice of the American people is articulate in the offices of newspapers which deal with the news of new books. It makes a seismographic record in the ledgers of publishing houses. It comes to almost every writer in letters of inquiry, comment and commendation. What, do you suppose, a writer like Gene Stratton-Porter cares whether the Critical Court excludes her work or condemns it? She can re-read hundreds and thousands of letters from men and women who tell her how profoundly her books have--tickled their fancy? pleased their love of verbal beauty? taxed their intellectuals to understand? No, merely how profoundly her books have altered their whole lives. Hear ye! Hear ye! Hear ye! The Critical Court is in session. All who have business with the court draw near and give attention! IN THE CRITICAL COURT III IN THE CRITICAL COURT _The Critical Court being in session, William Dean Howells, H. W. Boynton, W. C. Brownell, Wilson Follett and William Marion Reedy sitting, the case of Booth Tarkington, novelist, is called._ COUNSEL FOR THE PROSECUTION: If it please the court, this case should go over. The defendant, Mr. Tarkington, is not dead yet. Mr. HOWELLS: I do not know how my colleagues feel, but I have no objection to considering the work of Mr. Tarkington while he is alive. Mr. FOLLETT: I think it would be better if we deferred the consideration of Mr. Tarkington until it is a little older. COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE (_in this case Mr. Robert Cortes Holliday, biographer of Tarkington_): “It”? Mr. FOLLETT: I mean his work, or works. Perhaps I should have said “them.”