revival of romantic
literature], this novel of lust and war does not strike me as being very
high-class art. It may seem good and fine and fresh and inspiring, this
fiction which slays its millions, but I am a good deal of a Quaker. I
would not slay anybody for anything. Therefore, such art does not appear
beautiful to me. I do not believe it is good for our youth to read "yore
and gore" fiction.

There _are_ romancers--Prof. McClintock named one--who have personal
quality. I don't care what school of fiction a man belongs to if he has
something to say to me which has not been said a thousand times by
somebody else. Such a man is Robert Louis Stevenson. He slew men also,
but he uttered something beside war cries. But this "shilling shocker,"
this searching after the dreadful and the unknown which is red with
blood, does not strike me as literature at all. It is all the work of
the cerebellum. It is not the work of the cerebrum. I should put it like
this--If a man can tell us something that has not been told before; if
he can add something to the literature of the world--a real creation--if
he can, like the coral insect, build his own little cell upon the
great underlying mass of English literature, I do not care what you call
him, nor what he calls himself, he is worthy my support.

It is not safe to always reckon a man's merit by the sale of his books.
The author of "Old Sleuth" measured in that way would be the greatest
American writer, in fact, the greatest writer of any time. You can't
reckon the sale of such books by numbers; you reckon them by tons. It is
easy to make a book sell, but the thing is to produce an original work
of art, to put something forth with the imprint of your own personality
as a creative artist.

I believe old Walt Whitman stated the whole problem when he said: "All
that the past was not, the future will be." I do not believe that the
future of the world is to be a future of war. I believe it is to be a
future of industrial peace as Professor Pearson [Charles W. Pearson] has
indicated. And I believe that the literature and the art of that future
will not be based upon war; it will be humanitarian, and at its best
always an individual statement of life. In other words, the whole
tendency of modern art is towards the celebration of the individual by
the individual, and you cannot class writers in any hard and fast
division. There is not an artist living who delineates "things as they
are."