e.
I accept his substance at his own valuation, but I want to know what he
makes of it.

Each race that forms part of the substance in our great melting pot is
bringing the richest of its traditions to add to our children's
heritage. That is a wonderful thing to think about. Here, for example,
is a young Jewish writer, telling in obscurity the stories of his people
with all the art of the great Russian masters. And Irishmen are bringing
to us the best of their heritage, and men and women of many other races
contribute to form the first national literature the world has ever seen
which is not based on a single racial feeling. Why are we not more
curious about the ragman's story and that of the bootblack and the man
who keeps the fruit store? Don't you suppose life is doing things to the
boy in the coat-room as interesting as anything in all the romances?
Isn't life changing us in the most extraordinary ways, and do we not
wish to know in what manner we are to meet and adapt ourselves to these
changes? There is a humble writer in an attic up there who knows all
about it, if you care to listen to him. The trouble is that he is so
much interested in talking about life that he forgets to talk about
himself, and we are too lazy to listen to any one who forgets to blow
his own trumpet. But the magazines are beginning to look for him, and,
wonderful to say, they are beginning to find him, and to discover that
he is more interesting and humanly popular than the professional chef
who may be always depended upon to cook his single dish in the same old
way, but who has never had time to learn anything else.

Now what is the essential point of all that I have been trying to say?
It is simply this. If we are going to do anything as a nation, we must
be honest with ourselves and with everybody else. If we are story
writers or story readers, and practically every one is either one or the
other in these days, we must come to grips with life in the fiction we
write or read. Sloppy sentimentality and slapstick farce ought to bore
us frightfully, especially if we have any sense of humor. Life is too
real to go to sleep over it.

To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the
benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and
principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the
task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary
fiction which, when chronicled conscient