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 Kipps and Mr. Polly. Mr. Wrenn, age thirty-five, sales-entry clerk in the Souvenir and Art Novelty Company of New York, is described as "a meek little bachelor—a person of inconspicuous blue ready-made suits, and a small unsuccessful mustache." What makes this little clerk significant is a rudimentary poetic impulse. With a hunger for adventure stimulated by the moving-picture and the work of Mr. Kipling and Jack London, the hero gently revolts from the routine of office, visits England in a cattleboat, and finds romance incarnate in a red-haired art student in a green crash smock, Istra Nash, who amuses herself with his guileless Philistinism; but he returns in the end to a good domestic Nelly and the evening paper with seven cents' worth of potato salad from the delicatessen shop.

In this, his first picture of Main Street, Mr. Lewis utilizes a formula which is perhaps more or less familiar to students of the Saturday Evening Post. But already one can mark his possession of faculties which are to give new interest and seriousness to the ancient tale of the grocer's apprentice. Here is a mastery of the racy American vernacular unequalled since O. Henry flourished; vivid and abundant observation; the realistic "discovery" of the cattle-ship. Here the Middle-Western Rotarian is introduced in a single synoptic sentence: "An American who had a clipped mustache, brisk manners, a Knight-of-Pythias pin, and a mind for duck-shooting, hardware selling, and cigars." Here is an imag-

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 ination which explores with equal success the small mind of Mr. Wrenn superheated in a sales campaign, and the psychology of a frustrated art student from California, cursed by ambition without power. And here finally is a point of view, detached, critical, illumined by the comic spirit—a point of view from which the romantic hunger of Mr. Wrenn and his kind, and the artistic and intellectual aspirations of the girl with red hair and her kind, can be treated with that "mixture of love and wit," which Thackeray declares is the essence of humor. Says Istra Nash to Mr. Wrenn, speaking of the Bohemians: "Being Free, of course they're not allowed to go and play with nice people, for when a person is Free, you know, he is never free to be anything but Free." It is a sentence indicative of that early maturing of the critical faculty which distinguishes the first novel of Mr. Lewis from, let us say, the first novel of Mr. Floyd Dell.

His second book, The Trail of the Hawk, 1915, is dedicated to "the optimistic rebels (including his present publisher), through whose talk at luncheon the author watches the many-colored spectacle of life." It is on the surface a story about one of the earlier successful American aviators; but I find, under this curious disguise, the nearest approach that Mr. Lewis has yet made to an "autobiographical" novel, to a revelation of the motives and the influences which have shaped his own career. The imaginative progeny of the realist is, of course, usually related in some fashion to the seven wrestlers

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 who struggle within himself. The animating passion even of little Mr. Wrenn—his quest for romance in love and travel—Mr. Lewis doubtless found duplicated in his own heart; but in the case of Mr. Wrenn, he diluted the passion and gently caricatured its embodiment. In The Trail of the Hawk he treats the same quest but he treats it seriously, and he endows his hero with an important additional passion—the desire for distinction, the love of glory. Carl Ericson of Joralemon, Minnesota, a second-generation Norwegian, is described as "heir-apparent of the age," the typical American of his period: "It was for him to carry on the American destiny of extending the Western horizon; his to restore the wintry Pilgrim virtues and the exuberant, October, partridge-drumming days of Daniel Boone; then to add, in his own or another generation, new American aspirations for beauty."

There is our theme: the emergence of a typical American from our midwestern frontier, in the generation who were small boys in 1890. The stages are interesting. First, there is a healthy athletic boyhood in an American small town, where a spark is dropped by a village radical who has read Robert Ingersoll, Karl Marx, and Napoleon—a preliminary sketch of Bjornstam in Main Street. "Life," says this rural philosopher to the boy, "is just a little old checker game played by the alfalfa contingent at the country store unless you've got an ambition that's too big to ever quite lasso it. You want to know that there is something ahead that's bigger

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 and more beautiful than anything you've ever seen." Next comes a course in Plato College, a course terminated abruptly by the boy's open championship of an instructor from Yale who has ruined his usefulness to the institution by discussing the works of H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw and by admitting the existence of the theory of evolution. There follows a period of miscellaneous adventure as chauffeur, traveling actor, porter on the Bowery, mechanic in the Canal Zone and Mexico, then an apprenticeship in a school of aviation in California, flying for country fairs, a series of prize flights followed by intoxicating ovations, the development of the Touricar company, a love affair on the Palisades and in the Berkshires, respectability and entrance upon contemporary "civilization," such as it is, including modern plumbing, individual bed-rooms, candles on the dinner table, Sunday morning breakfasts with a choice of conversation or auction-bridge; and the reading of Tono-Bungay, David Copperfield, Jude the Obscure, The Damnation of Theron Ware, Madame Bovary, McTeague, Walden, War and Peace, Turgenev, Balzac and William James. In a free poetic fashion, I assume that this narrative sketches Mr. Lewis's own flight from Sauk Centre, Minnesota, by way of Yale College, New York and San Francisco journalism, and the short story magazine, into literature.

The Trail of the Hawk is a book with extravagant variety of scenes and atmospheres, the first two-thirds of it written with much gusto. It is

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 important for our study of Mr. Lewis's development as exhibiting the intellectual stuffiness of the stagnating midwestern town, which was the point of departure for his own "revolt." It is still more important as disclosing plainly some of the things which his taste and intelligence recognize as beautiful and desirable. Mr. Lewis is a good hater, but, contrary to the common rumor, he is not all compact of antipathies. He has, I am convinced, a generalized conception of the Good, which, if he were a lyric poet, he could capture in a net of images, like Shelley addressing the Skylark. He likes free air, the swoop of the hawk, arrows that go straight to the mark. Everything that is candid, crisp, fresh, alert, clean, supple, active and darting, he likes. He has felt the allurement of "beauty with a touch of strangeness"; but he instinctively revolts when beauty is touched with morbidity. From Kipling, perhaps, he acquired an inclination for purposeful young men who keep themselves fit and are capable of bridging the Ganges, and for young women to match, with temperament controlled by intelligence—of the Beatrice type. Of Istra Nash, who reappears in The Trail of the Hawk, he remarks significantly: "She always wants new sensations, yet doesn't want to work, and the combination isn't very good." Carl Ericson, the flyer, relishes his adventures, and Mr. Lewis reports them with such sense of flight and clouds and the upper air as I have felt nowhere else save in Mr. Norman Hall's

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 High Adventure. But this enterprising young man is notably hard-headed, a hard worker, with a good workman's prejudice in favor of keeping himself and his tools in order. Mr. Lewis's beauty is always tonic—never relaxing. I remember hearing him say, with a grimace, that he liked best in Main Street the purple patches over which he had sweat blood, but that no one else noticed them. His use of landscape is rigorously economical, but there are paragraphs, even in this earlier book, done with a touch that recalls Tolstoy and Turgenev in their great hunting scenes. Here is a whiff of the hero's boyhood in Minnesota:

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 If Mr. Lewis could "abandon his mind" for a season to landscape and the joy of our American seas and mountains, he could give us our most exhilarating tale of country life. He has the eye and the zest. But as yet he is so jealous for his purely human interest that he is capable of cramming all California into a parenthesis.

There is good writing, there are humor and invention, there are various milieus effectively rendered in Mr. Lewis's first two novels; but in his third, The Job, presented in 1917, there are three or four admirable pieces of characterization and a sobriety and firmness of composition which entitle this book to a place next to Main Street and Babbitt. As he swooped to meet the airmen in 1915, so he swoops, in 1917, to meet the new woman making a career in business. Una Golden of Panama, Pennsylvania, graduate of a business college, who becomes a stenographer in New York, works into suburban real estate, and then into the assistant-managership of a line of hotels, is, you may say, a typical heroine of the "success" magazines. Agreed: in a sense, so she is, just as Arnold Bennett's Clayhanger is their hero. The editors of the "success" magazines guiltily share with novelists like Mr. Bennett and Mr. Lewis a sense for recognizing the significant types of our changing civilization. Una Golden differs, however, from the smart short-story writer's girl-with-the-powder-puff as, to take a familiar illustration, Lear's daughters differ from their sketches in Holinshed. She has been seriously and minutely

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 considered. She has been sympathetically and intelligently studied. She has been understood in her pathetic relations to her mother; in her variously irritating relations to a series of employers; in relation to the humdrum suitor that she leaves in Panama, the brilliant young cub who leaves her, the fat-necked voluble commercial traveller whom she marries; in relation, finally, to the intimate inner conflict between her sexual and emotional instincts and her desire to respect herself and to "amount to something." The thing is, as Henry James used to say, "done," and with great precision of stroke. Una Golden lives, and her futile mother. The erratic and "dynamic" young cub, Walter Babson, lives. Eddie Schwirtz, the commercial traveller, a gorgeous beast, lives. And they and dozens of subordinate characters move without confusion through dozens of offices, apartments, boarding-houses and streets, each eruditely saturated with the appropriate elements of its own atmosphere.

Not an interesting group, till Mr. Lewis became vividly interested in it. What value does he see in Una Golden? What beauty? Well, he sees her as an intelligent and purposeful feminine will, emerging from the respectable helplessness and hopelessness of girls who married their first choice and "settled down" in Panama, Pennsylvania,—emerging into the beauty of a self-directed life. He sees her as a girl with youth's hunger for enchantment, with arms outstretched for it, missing it, but closing resolutely upon what the wisest among the

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 children of men generally accept as the second best. From the lights of Main Street in Panama, also from certain city lights here flashed upon her, this adventurer derives her "value."

Readers who turn to fiction for "heavenly rest" are not a little disturbed by the presence in all Mr. Lewis's books of certain signs of what is called "social unrest" or, with more overtly hostile intention, "socialistic feeling." Of Una Golden, for

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 example, we are told that, "Into her workaday mind came a low light from the fire which was kindling the world; the dual belief that life is too sacred to be taken in war and filthy industries and dull education; and that most forms and organizations and inherited castes are not sacred at all." Now, to the intelligent mind there is really nothing less perturbing than the emergence, in classes and individuals, of intelligence and taste, bestirring themselves, in an imperfectly adjusted world, to seek their own level. That kind of unrest does not destroy, it creates, the "divine order." The unrest of girls like Una Golden is the hope of the middle-class; and the middle-class, Mr. John Corbin has just assured us, is the hope of our society. From the time of the Rape of the Sabines to the time of Samuel Clemens there has been a danger, in unsettled societies, that social bandits would dash in from the border and carry off the carefully nurtured daughters of "first families." That danger is the spice of life in a democracy, which offers no more kindling incentive to its undiscovered talents than admission, after due ordeals and the probation of a generation or two, into its first families. I for one regret to observe that our ancient custom of assuring every schoolboy of his right to hope for the Presidency is falling into desuetude—without the slightest visible reason why it should. A novelist who inspires the Younger Generation by reviving this and kindred conceptions of democratic oppor-

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 tunity and reward is restoring one of our invaluable traditions.

I make this solemn transition to Free Air, 1919, because it is a "light" novel, constituting a humorous interlude in Mr. Lewis's realistic march. Gravely captious critics may be disposed to dismiss it as a pot-boiler, prepared for the fancy of our touring automobilists. We have frankly admitted that Mr. Lewis is opportune. I do not see how anyone who has ever cranked a Ford can resist this crisp tale of the girl from Brooklyn in her Gomez-Dep roadster and the ingenious young mechanic in his "bug" from Schoenstrom, Minnesota, who discover each other's attraction in an exciting drive, by way of Gopher Prairie and the Yellowstone, to Seattle, with an engineering education and a Sabine marriage just ahead. The plot is, indeed, anybody's; but the execution is that of a masterly realist on a lark—not raising any question about the main conventions and conditions of his modern fairy-tale but playing the game with such zest that one almost forgets to enquire whether a nice girl from Brooklyn ever could so far forget herself on a summer vacation as to find anything in common with a garage man. Love as a specialized passion is, as Mr. Lewis treats it in his most serious vein, but a welcome additional zest to companionship in the adventure of life. Here, it is but a fillip to the intensely serious consideration of extricating a car from a "morass of prairie gumbo" or piloting it in safety up the last pitch of the continental divide. If in the end Milt Daggett

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 has learned something about the care of his nails from his association with Claire Boltwood, and she something about shifting gears from him, the affair, like the Beggar's Opera, is carried off with too light an air to effect subversively the foundation of society.

Main Street, 1920, is another story. Mr. Lewis had been incubating it for six or seven years, though I suspect that his faculties were edged for its final revision by his comparative study of American small towns, made on that excursion over the Lincoln Highway, which he so gaily chronicled in Free Air. A second novel as deeply rooted in his native soil and in his own past would be as difficult a feat for him as, for their respective authors, a second Huckleberry Finn, a second David Copperfield, a second Mill on the Floss, a second Pendennis, a second Clayhanger. Like these other five great novels, Main Street appears to be the harvest of the writer's best land, which is so often his native heath and the deep impressions of early life, ineffaceable by the lapse of years, and poignantly touching the heart through the revisiting eyes of age. In its exhibition of the interwoven lives of the community, it has the authority, the intimacy, the many-sided insights, the deep saturation of color, which no journalist can ever "get up," which are possible only, one is tempted to say, to one who packs into his book the most vital experience and observation of a lifetime. One must have lived that stuff in order to have reproduced it as living organism. And it is with some vague sense that a man can contain only one great

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 autobiography that many readers of Main Street have prophesied against Mr. Lewis's future.

To those who wish to believe that they have found not merely a new novel but also a new novelist, capable of fresh flights for distance and altitude, certain reassuring considerations may be presented. Main Street, unlike three-fourths of the novels of the day, is not autobiographical. It is to an extraordinary degree an objective representation of contemporary society extended through a period of not more than half-a-dozen years. In this society Mr. Lewis himself has not a single "personal representative." Neither Dr. Kennicott, nor Carol, nor Guy Pollock, nor Vida Sherwin, nor Sam Clark, nor Percy Breshnahan, nor Erik Valbord, nor Miles Bjornstam, nor Fern Mullins, nor Mrs. Bogart is his "register." Each one of these persons is a perfectly distinct individual with firm centre and contours honestly constructed after innumerable observations and hard, earnest work of the realistic imagination. Mr. Lewis will not exhaust his material while he retains his present capacity for research. Deeply indebted as he may be to Mr. Wells for the illumination of his point of view as an observer of the human spectacle, he has studied the art of constructing the novel under other masters with far greater respect for their profession than that famous producer who semi-annually charges a new lay figure with the task of communicating to the world the latest state of his own consciousness. The contemporary English novelist whose best work is

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 most comparable with Main Street is Mr. Bennett—in The Old Wives' Tale and Clayhanger. But the book from which, I should say, Mr. Lewis, without losing a particle of his own idiom or the independence of his American vision, has learned his most valuable "secrets," is Madame Bovary.

Both Main Street and Madame Bovary are mordantly critical representations of contemporary civilizations. In each case, the criticism is intensely focused upon the bourgeois society of a representative provincial town. In each case, the "hero" is a country doctor, who is, thanks to an insensitive æsthetic organization, sufficiently content with his lot and in love with his young wife. In each case, the "heroine" has been touched by literature and contact with the city to revolt against the Philistinism of her husband and the restrictions of her life, in behalf of romantic ideals of which she is unable to find any worthy incarnations. In each case the searching criticism which plays over the scene and the actors is delivered indirectly by an intricate system of contrasts and the cross lighting and reflected lighting of subordinate characters. I will add an observation which many readers fail to make: Flaubert was in love with Emma and Mr. Lewis is in love with Carol; and both authors analyze and expose the object of their affection with a merciless rigor which no woman can either understand or pardon—she can understand the rigor but not the love which inflicts it and survives it. Their heroes they treat with similar austerity—with the difference

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 that Flaubert despises his, and the American author does not. To the student of Mr. Lewis's indirect analytical method, I commend his remorseless twenty-fourth chapter, beginning with the "thesis": "All that midsummer month Carol was sensitive to Kennicott"; likewise his subtle record of Carol's reaction to Breshnahan in relation to her husband. So much for the parallelism between the French master and the American disciple.

As for the divergence, it is not all to the advantage of Flaubert. Mr. Lewis saw more types of people, more kinds of activity, more meshes of the social network in Gopher Prairie than Flaubert saw in Rouen. Without destroying their artistic subordination, he made more of his secondary personages. He increased greatly the significance and the tension of his novel by choosing, as the principal representatives of middle-class revolt and middle-class stability, characters with a far higher degree of general and professional intelligence than is possessed by the French protagonists. He faithfully presents the specific erotic passion as only occasionally or seasonally perturbing the average American temperament—not obsessing it, not hounding it. Flaubert sees this passion as the centre of his theme. Mr. Lewis does not. If our novelists generally were not dissuaded by the terrors of our censorship, if they dared to tell the truth, would they, like many of their European colleagues and like one or two of their American confrères, would they represent the average middle-class American as living feverishly

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 from one liaison to the next? Mr. Lewis does not appear to think so. Dr. Kennicott had, before his marriage, been around "with the boys," and perhaps he never became utterly incapable of a slip; but I doubt whether Mr. Lewis has been guilty of any important suppression of the truth in declaring that the doctor's mind was absorbed in his five hobbies: medicine, land-investment, Carol, motoring, and hunting. As for Carol—that well-turned, dynamic, rather intensely feminine, too taut young woman, whom I meet with greater frequency each year, flinging her coat into chairs and "exploding" into other living rooms than those of Gopher Prairie, to the disgust of the stodgy and to the delight and the refreshment of the others—she might be more simply happy or more simply miserable if the sex instincts were stronger in her; if she could content herself with being either mother, wife or mistress; if she could repeat ex animo that sweet and wistfully cadenced lime of Byron's which, alas, I have forgotten, to the effect that love is only an incident in a man's life—tis a woman's whole existence"—something like that.

When I found that I had forgotten the exact words of this phrase, which in my youth I have heard a hundred times on plaintive lips, I went to some friends one generation older than mine, and confidently asked them to recall it. I wanted it, as you see, to conclude the preceding paragraph. But they too, had forgotten it, or they remember it, rather, as I remember it—as something that people

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 used to repeat, or as something that Robert Browning might have excogitated in meditating on the early life of that eminent early Victorian, the authoress of Aurora Leigh. The oblivion which is overtaking this "familiar quotation" is a straw indicating a shifting of the winds of social change. The words no longer give an echo to the seat where modern love is throned.

Opportunities for women opened by the war, the steady stimulation of middle-class daughters by the state universities, and various other causes are making the situation of intelligent girls marooned in our innumerable Gopher Prairies appear acutely painful and almost intolerable. The clear-eyed and hard-headed ones see in time, and the others too late for easy solution of their problems, that a girl who lets love become her "whole existence" is snared, excluded from the special interests and activities of her age, and in a fair way to become tedious to her husband and to herself. In this new middle-class society which is forming around them, the clear-eyed and hard-headed ones perceive that abstract "womanhood" is destined to receive less lipservice and specific women more attention than they have received in the past. The woman who counts, like the man who counts, will be esteemed more and more for the developed virtues of her own individuality, whatever they may be, and less and less frequently conceived of as a "skirt," whatever its quality.

Now so far as Main Street is "the story of Carol

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 Kennicott," it shows an eager young creature beating her luminous wings rather wildly, as young creatures do, yet not without some sense of the direction in which light and freedom are. A "back-yard" affair with Erik Valborg—that for example, she discovers decisively, is not the way out. That might be an alleviant to the yearnings of Emma Bovary but it would not be even a temporary sop to her. With true insight into the significant aspect of the present unrest among young women, the revolt of Carol is shown to have very little relation with the much advertised movements for "sexual freedom." Carol is, on the contrary, rebellious precisely at the fetters which accepting the things of sex as a "woman's whole existence" has imposed upon her. Her revolt is inspired by a general hunger of the heart for its own development through appropriate activities of hand and will and brain. In so far as this is true, I judge her revolt to be not only significant but beautiful and not altogether hopeless, as I should attempt to show if I had space to discuss the "improvable greatness" of Mr. Kennicott and to prognosticate his wife's ultimate discovery of it, and their transmission of their complementary virtues to their offspring.

But that, adequately done, would demand another novel, dealing with the Kennicotts of the second generation, which I hope Mr. Lewis will write when that generation has revealed itself to him.

At present, however, while his satirical powers are at their height, the younger people who are

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 just emerging from college may be congratulated that his devastating searchlight is still playing upon the middle-aged. His new novel Babbitt is not a sequel to Main Street but a parallel and co-ordinate extension. It is a picture of contemporary American society not in the small towns and villages but in the cities of some numerical pretensions. Zenith, the prosperous midwestern city of 350,000, in which George F. Babbitt, the prosperous "realtor," establishes himself on Floral Heights, is inhabited largely by people who had in their youth ambition enough to get up and get out of the "hick burgs." They flatter themselves that, leaving behind them all the elements that constituted the dinginess and dreariness of Gopher Prairie, they have pressed forward to the mark of the high calling of hustling, right-thinking, forward-looking boosters, good-fellows, and 100% Americans. For iron they have substituted copper sinks in the kitchen; for the Saturday night tubbing, the daily bath; for goldenoak, near mahogany; for the Ford the limousine; for the dirty ramshackle huddle of shops and visibly suspendered tobacco-chewing shopkeepers, blocks of aspiring office buildings and hotels with manicure girls attending in the Pompeian Barber Shop; for the somnolent barn-like church, an up-to-date competitive "community centre" with press-agents, military organization, and pep-masters; for cigars and poker in the parlor with Sam Clark and "the boys," monogrammed cigarettes and mixed auction bridge at the country club; for "open meetings" of the

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 Thanatopsis society, week-end parties with prohibition anecdotes and cocktails.

With comprehensive and mordant notation of detail coupled with a formidable power of generalization, Mr. Lewis shows how the city attempts to solve the problem of the small town. Between Gopher Prairie and Zenith, there is the material progress of a generation—a long march in America. But between Gopher Prairie and Zenith, civilization, according to this record—civilization, judged by the decisive tests—has not advanced an inch. The quantity of human happiness has not increased, nor has its quality improved. The people are not more open-minded nor more upright nor more beautiful nor more interesting. This is not the story of Carol; and the unrest among young women, which she so vividly illustrated, finds here no adequate representative. The "leading lady" does not lead. Myra Babbitt, Mrs. George F., is a woman, "definitely mature," who has, in a dull fashion, accepted her universe: "She was a good woman, a kind woman, a diligent woman, but no one, save perhaps Tinka, her ten-year-old, was at all interested in her or entirely aware that she was alive"—a tragical sentence, applicable enough to the average middle-class American woman of forty. This is primarily a story of a man's unrest. This is the story of Babbitt, the graduate of a state university, the "swaddled American husband," the prosperous American broker, the Rotarian, the leading citizen, the consequence and cause of civilization as it exists

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 in Zenith, and the embodiment of nearly all its vices and its virtues.

Babbitt is a more important character than Dr. Kennicott in that he is more nearly ubiquitous. Less trustworthy as a man, he will perhaps be found more interesting as a "hero," because he has less of character and more of temperament. Unlike the Doctor, he is highly self-conscious, he has a "soft" streak, he is an egotist, and he is eager for the applause and admiration of men and women, not excluding his wife, for whom he feels an habitual tolerance, and including his stenographer, whom he wishes to impress as a "great man," and his manicurist, to whom he is willing, in relaxed and erratic moods, to appear as a person with possibilities of romance. In the morning Mr. Babbitt wears a well-made, well-pressed gray suit with white piping on the V of the vest. In the evening he wears, when there is important company, a "Tuxedo" which Mrs. Babbitt vainly insists that he should call a "dinner-jacket"—that is the precise "note" of their social status. He is diligent in business and not more crooked than William Washington Eathorne, President of the First State Bank, a chilly old gentleman who lives in an old brick house of the Civil War period, and who impresses Babbitt as "the real thing" by quietly ringing for a whiskey toddy, instead of mooing and baying around the subject, as in his own circle is the custom when the host produces something illicit from the ice-box.

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 whether the potential defendant could satisfy a judgment was not a permissible purpose under the statute); see also Duncan, 149 F.3d at 427 (“While a lawsuit occasionally may give rise to a ‘legitimate business need’ for a consumer report … trial preparation generally does not fall within the scope of § 1681b.”). Thus, subsection (a)(4) broadens, not limits, the power of child support enforcement agencies to obtain consumer credit reports.

Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a child support enforcement agency may obtain the consumer credit report of a person owing or potentially owing child support. When requesting a consumer credit report to establish an individual’s capacity to pay support or to determine the appropriate amount of payment, the child support enforcement agency must comply with the certification requirements of 15 U.S.C. § 1681b(a)(4). But when, as in this case, the agency seeks to enforce an already existing order of child support, the certification requirements of § 1681b(a)(4) are inapplicable.

Here, the BFSO properly obtained Hasbun’s consumer credit report to enforce an existing order of child support. In so doing, the BFSO was engaged in the “collection of an account” under 15 U.S.C. § 1681b(a)(3)(A) and therefore had a permissible purpose for obtaining it. The law requires no more.

AFFIRMED.

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 This is one of the many incidents by which Mr. Lewis illustrates the peculiar pathos of his hero's situation. With all that the civilization of Zenith can offer at his disposal, Babbitt is restless and unsatisfied. He has money enough, things enough, physical comforts enough. He has, like great numbers of our prosperous middle-class, reached the point where the multiplication of things gives no addition of content. There is a gnawing hunger in him but he can think of nothing that he wants to eat. In a vague way he desires "the right thing" for himself, for his family, for his community; but there is no authoritative standard, there is no one to tell him, there is nothing in the society of Zenith to show him by example, what the "real right thing" is. Consequently, in the restlessness of satiety and inner boredom, Babbitt unintelligently and unimaginatively gropes for his missing felicity in unfruitful directions: in imitating Mr. Eathorne, in speechmaking and prominence at business men's conventions, in running off to the Maine woods where one can wear old clothes and chew tobacco and "cuss" in freedom, and finally in various experiments in marital infidelity. But from all these ventures he returns with the taste of sand and ashes in his mouth. And the only gleam that lights the final pages of the book is his indulgent humor towards his children, one of whom is studying the drama and labor statistics, while the other, his son, has just revealed his secret off-hand marriage. To the boy he says:

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I have no high expectation regarding Babbitt's son. He gives as little promise as his father of capacity for finding delight in the things of the mind. The daughter may conceivably become an interesting individual, perhaps only an intense and difficult one.

Babbitt is not a representation of the highest American standards of morals and manners. But neither is The Rise of Silas Lapham nor Huckleberry Finn nor Henry James's The American. Neither is Vanity Fair a representation of the highest standards of morals and manners in England, nor is David Copperfield, nor Pride and Prejudice. It is not the business of the realistic novelist nor dramatist to confine his studies to those small and isolated spots in which the society of his contemporaries approaches perfection. To propose such an aim is absurd. A jury of award which accepted it would at once be obliged to exclude from its consideration

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 practically everything that is worth considering. In the age of Elizabeth the acceptance of such an aim would have excluded from consideration the chief tragedies of Shakespeare and all the comedies of Ben Jonson. The most important business of the capable painter of contemporary society from Balzac to the present day has been the portrayal of the great representative types. In an immense and motley democracy, booming furiously through the stages of material progress, few of the great representative types know anything about the "highest standard of manners and morals in America."

All that we may fairly demand of our novelists—and it is a large demand—is that they themselves, as observers of the human spectacle, should be aware of this "highest standard," should paint their great representative types at a point of view at which the best society is at least within their vision. It is a large demand but it is a fair demand to make of a class of men who undertake to govern us through our imaginations. It is a fair demand ta make of men whose profession involves a connoisseurship of truth and beauty. It is a necessary demand, if their criticism of life is to have any social value; Vanity Fair, for example, though it is for the most part a picture of a selfish and disagreeable world, is obviously written by a man who understands what an unselfish and agreeable world might be, while Mr. Dreiser's Genius, for another example, is a picture of a selfish and disagreeable

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 world, written by a man apparently incapable of conceiving anything else.

Now Mr. Lewis, with increasing clearness of apprehension and vitality of presentation, has devoted himself to the portrayal of the representative. There is no denying the vigor or the representativeness of the types presented in The Job, Main Street and Babbitt. Nor is there doubt in anyone's mind that Mr. Lewis's contemporary scene is drenched in irony and raked with satire. The one rather serious objection which one hears raised against his work is that the standards, the existence of which are implied in any consistently satiric picture of society,—the standards by which Mr. Lewis judges, for instance, Gopher Prairie and Zenith—are not sufficiently in evidence. The publication of Babbitt is likely to increase the frequency of that objection; for while in Main Street there are at least four persons, including Carol, with quite definite conceptions of what ought to be done to increase beauty and interest in Gopher Prairie, in Babbitt these quite definite improvements have been made, without essential increase of beauty or interest in the lives of the citizens; and no one in the book seems to understand what to do next. We are on the brink of a Tolstoyan problem. The artistic charm and vivacity of this novel, to say nothing of its social stimulation, would have been heightened by somewhat freer employment of those devices of dramatic contrast of which Mr. Lewis is a master—by the introduction of some character or group capable of

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 reflecting upon the Babbitts oblique rays from a social and personal felicity, more genuine, more inward than any of the summoned witnesses possesses. Eventually, if Mr. Lewis does not wish to pass for a hardened pessimist, he will have to produce a hero qualified to register in some fashion the result of his own quest for the desirable; he will have to give us his Portrait of a Lady, his Pendennis, his Warrington and his Colonel Newcome. Meanwhile I am very well content to applaud the valor of his progress through Vanity Fair.

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For the realistic novel which enlarges and quickens our consciousness of the world we live in—especially for the novel in which the characters, setting, and "problems" possess a genuine representative value—I have an almost insatiable appetite. Since the New Year's night when I sat up till two o'clock feasting on Main Street, exulting from chapter to chapter in my sharpening sense of the characteristics of my countrymen, I have read many more or less satisfactory tales of provincial life, more or less inspired by the man from Minnesota; yet few of them have prevented my dropping off to sleep at my customary hour. The fictional gleaners in the small towns have not gone into the field with the gusto of discoverers. They have appeared rather to regard Main Street as a harvest which any industrious writer could duplicate by driving Mr. Lewis's mowing machine along the parkings of any midwestern small town and gathering up the results with an ordinary hay rake. "Yes," one began to mutter, "still another bale of that midwestern hay. The second crop is not up to the first." There seemed to be little more to say about the small town,

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 just now—at least, from the point of view of a satirical intellectual; and Mr. Lewis himself, leaving the mowing machine to rust in Gopher Prairie, had promptly "twitched his mantle blue," and moved upon Zenith, the booming stronghold of the Rotarians.

Then came Edith Summers KellyKelley [sic] with Weeds, and I discovered under the midnight lamp that we hadn't done with the provinces yet, and that the satirical Intellectuals were attempting to dispose of our yokelry and our Rotarians in altogether too summary a fashion. This is another "social study," that is, a picture of an American community from a critical point of view, somewhere outside it. But it is no mere aftermath of Main Street. It is a fresh harvest in a new field. The scene is rural Kentucky. The characters are small tobacco growers. The manners are not those of materialized "puritans"—New Englanders pushing grimly westward. No; from the first page you feel yourself in the presence of another spirit. A softer and warmer air caresses the cheek. You are touched by a breath of the South. You find yourself in a community of a slower tempo. You are subtly invaded and surrounded by impressions of a certain lovable slackness and leisure and lazy kindliness and hospitality and easygoing humor. Of modern literature, romantic hungers, and scientific curiosity these good people are as innocent as our first parents in Eden. They are not within hailing distance of the rural civilization denoted by the possession of Ford cars

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 and victrola. They are still at the accordion and lumber wagon stage, where they were left by their great-grandfathers, and there is no "drive" in them to indicate that they will ever emerge from it. On the contrary, their old stock is degenerating from and excessive childbearing and malnutrition and corn whiskey and too long and too exclusive association with "hawgs" and mules. The community as a whole is slowly falling below its own traditional folk standards—it is running to weeds.

Except in the biting monosyllabic title, this conclusion is not preached at you in any didactic fashion. It emerges with gradual cumulative force as the inner significance of a singularly intimate and vital artistic representation. Of Bill Pippinger's weedy family, one daughter, Judith, receives by the incalculable chances of heredity far more than a Pippinger's share of vital energy, mental and physical. A vivid little jet of passionate animation, she darts out early in the story to rescue a tortured cat from the neighborhood boys: "Naow, then, one of you jes dass come near here an' I'll run this knife right in yer guts! See if I don't!" As Wordsworth so sweetly sings, "the floating clouds," "the stars of midnight"—the various other aspects of holy nature not noted by the poet—"mold the maiden's form by silent sympathy." Eager, fearless, self-reliant, she finds her man when her mating season comes, and together they enjoy a brief period of lively affection and high spirits as they settle upon their farm. Then, little by little, they become serfs

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 of the soil and slaves of circumstances. The heavy routine of daily life beats at them and drags them down. Children, too soon and too many; ignorance of housekeeping and farm management; sickness and ignorance of hygiene; drudgery; crop failure and high prices, and abundant crops and no market; corn bread and salt pork, whiskey and patent medicines; cold and hunger and labor and hopelessness, break them down and wear them out and defeat them. The characters do very little wailing—like sheep before the shearers they are pretty dumb. They feel themselves lapsing into defeat by irresistible processes which they don't understand. They accept defeat with the mild querulousness with which we accept bald heads, false teeth, and old age—as the unlovely but inevitable order of nature.

Neither does the author wail much over her tragedy. I think, in fact, that she is curiously and secretly smiling over it. She is not smiling with the derisive smile of the satirist; her book is full of an intimate but quite unsentimental sympathy with her Kentucky farmers—a sympathy and humor which steadily preserve the narrative from drabness and oppressiveness. She knows that these Kentuckians, unlike Mr. Lewis's hard-shelled midwesterners, are not fit subjects for satire. They are not complacent. They are not impervious. They are not hidebound. They are merely desperately ignorant and helpless. Before they can become proper subjects for satirical comedy, something must be done by a power not themselves; they must be con-

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 nected by some kind of State road with—Main Street.

I did not unadvisedly begin the discussion of this book by a reference to Main Street and the Rotarians. And one who will take the trouble to read Weeds, Main Street, and Babbitt in succession will find himself willy nilly becoming a sociologist. The three books represent three distinct stages in the "march of civilization"—only the Kentucky community hasn't begun to march. The author of Weeds must forgive me if I state baldly what seem to me some of the more obvious social implications of her book.

First, it strikes me as perfectly obvious that her *. Kentucky community is degenerating precisely from the lack of such efficient internal organization as is effected by an ordinarily intelligent band of Rotarians, Kiwanis, or Lions. Second, it seems obvious that the most serious economic need of the small tobacco growers is some system of coöperative marketing which shall make it more profitable to haul in their crop than to burn it in the dooryard. Third, it is clear that the Kentucky legislators, instead of debating whether the doctrine of evolution should be taught in the schools, had better employ their leisure in devising some means of giving country boys and girls an education in household science and scientific agriculture. Fourth, in Kentucky and elsewhere it will be very profitable for legislators to consider whether scientific birth control or primitive methods of abortion furnish the better solution

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 of the problem of a degenerating physical stock, due to excessive childbearing.

When the rural community has reached the level of Main Street, then we may begin to talk satirically about the "culture" of its inhabitants; then we may begin to ship in carloads of Maeterlinck and Dunsany and Max Beerbohm. But while the rural community remains in the condition so powerfully depicted in Weeds let us quite unabashedly thank God for the Rotarians.

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Mr. Tarkington has written another of his nice novels.

The reference in it to the time when Saratoga was the place to see the social world recalls naturally enough the "passing" of the Saratoga trunk. It is not the least of Mr. Tarkington's titles to our gratitude that he was himself a pioneer of the change—that he was among the first to feel the convenience and pleasure of travelling light, of carrying all one's belongings in a hand bag. If one eliminates top hats, frock coats, starched shirts, woolen underwear, hoops and whalebone-and-steel contraptions, it is astonishing how many essential things of fine smooth texture one can pack into a hand bag or into a bead purse or even pull through the circle of a wedding ring. None of our novelists is fonder of travelling light than Mr. Tarkington; and yet he is always nicely, even "niftily," garbed. He steadily succeeds in being our best-dressed novelist; and he has been that so long that, quite unlike the begoniaed dandies of a later generation, he never calls the slightest attention to his dress.

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 In the provinces, a change of fashion is completed slowly. And so when a midwestern novelist announces a new book, one instinctively glances over his shoulder for his Saratoga trunk; and when he takes the little thing out of a handbag, one tends to conclude that the visitor comes on no very serious errand. After I had read The Midlander, there was a perceptible interval before I thought of it as anything more than another of Mr. Tarkington's nice novels. It is neat but not dapper. Its tone is nearer nonchalance than emphasis. It hasn't a particle of western "breeze" or a single note of western stridency. It doesn't seem to present truth through the colored medium of temperament; its atmosphere is as pellucid as window-glass. It presents, in level gentlemanly voice, the following situation:

The two Oliphant boys, Harlan and Dan, sons of an old midwestern family in comfortable circumstances, are different. Harlan is bookish, close, conservative, inadventurous. Dan as a boy likes to make things with his hands; he is expansive, progressive, and subject to sanguine enthusiasms. An admirable midwestern girl, big, healthy, with little or no nonsense in her, lives in the big house next door. But the boys go to an eastern college. Dan fools around for a while in New York, and then brings home as his wife a New York girl who may briefly be described as a neurasthenic "flapper." There are some parents and a wealthy grandmother who react in various ways to the eastern wife; and

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 Dan and his wife contribute one child to our present younger generation.

One doesn't expect the adventure to turn out very well. It doesn't. At the time Dan married he had already conceived his life-work: he is to develop an "addition" to his midwestern city. With an unsatisfactory home life, he himself develops into a mere megaphone for his real-estate business. We will not divulge his domestic or pecuniary troubles beyond this point, nor shall we speak further of the cold-hearted Harlan. What one feels, at first, about all these people, except Dan's tough-minded old grandmother and the "hickory" father of the girl next door—what one feels is, that one has had hardly any feeling whatever. What they do and say is all real enough, plausible enough; yet there is no mordancy or bite in their total effect. Nothing unexpected ever falls from their dusty lips. They never burst or blurt or blunder into any arresting actuality. All there is to their lives is on the surface: the inside, if there is an inside, is without distinction and without charm—it is devoid of interest. It neither rejoices one nor hurts one—much.

When I finished The Midlander, I asked myself what it had said to me—what its theme was. It isn't the familiar story of the discontented wife or the disillusioned husband. The girl is an uncomfortable enough little beast, so far as Mr. Tarkington has indicated her. But she really isn't "done": discontented wives are infinitely richer in the resources of misery than this shallow creature shows

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 herself. And as for the husband's conjugal experience, neither Mr. Tarkington nor the husband himself seems to regard that as matter of much consequence. There is no intimate illumination of the "sexual problem" whatever. What The Midlander said to me, on first consideration, was simply this: "If you are a well-rooted midwestern man with a stake in your section of the country, for heaven's sake don't marry one of these silly little New York flappers, but marry the fine big healthy midwestern girl next door." And so I wrote, as the heading for this review: "Mr. Tarkington Discountenances Sectional Miscegenation."

The argument for this view is that the mild humor of the book is an intersectional humor. The author has considerable legitimate midwestern fun at the expense of our metropolitans. The New York girl and her family are place-proud and family proud; and they think of the west and westerners as "just awful"—without, of course, really knowing anything of the subject except what they learn from the red barbarians of the Chicago school. Mr. Tarkington makes a valuable contribution to intersectional understanding by showing that old midwestern cities also have their old proud families, proud of their bank accounts, and their brains, and their achievements,—yes, but proud also of their blood and their ancestors, and aristocratically hostile to the dilution of their virtues by with wasters and wastrels.

But the more I think of it, the more I suspect

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 that Mr. Tarkington may possibly have desired The Midlander to say something to us a little deeper than this. Under the surface humor, under the apparently superficial representation of character, there is a discoverable tragedy. I have said that Dan Oliphant, a various and lively youth, becomes at maturity a mere "megaphone" of his real estate business. He becomes the almost impersonal expansiveness of an ugly booming city. This explains the curious fact that the reader suffers little when Dan is checkmated and ejected from his own enterprise. All that was real in Dan is preserved in roads, factories and bungalows. He has lost all his private personality. The tragedy of the novel is precisely the defeat and extinction of his personal life. And that is the tragedy which, up to date, midwestern civilization has been fondest of inflicting upon its loyal pioneers.

Accept that view, and you have a kind of artistic defence of the thinness and deficient vitality of the characterizations. The true Midlander, perhaps the author would have us understand, is personally a thin, empty man. If Mr. Tarkington really meant to say all that, if our nonchalant and best-dressed novelist actually sauntered up to say anything as profoundly melancholy and disillusioning as that—well, he has said a "mouthful," and we must never trust these languidly jaunty fellows with light traveling bags any more! If it is true, then The Midlander isn't a nice novel at all.

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A wise book, charmingly written, is the autobiography of Oscar S. Straus, called Under Four Administrations. The reasons follow. Between an outspoken natural man and a public official there is something like the difference which exists between an "instructed" and an "uninstructed" delegate. By an apparent paradox the uninstructed delegate appears to possess more intelligence than the instructed delegate. This is really creditable to human nature, for it shows the superiority of a man over a marionette. An official is often so much a marionette, so fully operated by strings which are yet out of sight, that he is almost customarily credited by the press, before his term of office has expired, with being a blockhead. But no man, not even a journalist, can really believe that presidents, judges and Congressmen are actually as stupid as he says they are, or as they sometimes appear, even to the laity, to be. It is incredible. No one has a right to expect in an official such exhibition of heart and brains as one expects in an outspoken natural man, any more than one has a right to expect a satisfactorily thrilling embrace from William

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 James's "automatic sweetheart," however plausibly the behavioristic philosophers may have argued that it ought to be "just as good" as the genuine article.

Whenever, from excessively reading the results of the intelligence tests, or the daily newspapers, or the weekly journals of opinion, or the seasonal output of small-town biographical novels—whenever from too long immersion in the turbulent surf of our discontent, one emerges, chilled and despairing of the Republic, one should read as a stimulant and as a restorative the biography of one of our representative men who have "returned to nature" by retiring from office.

The season's biographies and the season's fiction, as fiction is written nowadays, equally recite, with a fair degree of veracity, the adventures of contemporary men; but in the one case the hero is ordinarily a quite insignificant person enmeshed in a Freudian "complex" and depicted with entire disregard of the Aristotelian maxim that "no very minute animal can be beautiful," while, in the other case, the hero is usually a person by nature "of a certain magnitude," increased by his participation in the great affairs of the world. Whenever one wonders why so much of our fiction seems ugly and depressing and why, on the other hand, so much of our biography affects us as stimulating, consolatory and beautiful, one should recall that neglected assertion of Aristotle's: "Whatever is beautiful must be of a certain magnitude." And then one should recklessly thank whatever gods there be that

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 America has not relied exclusively upon a hereditary public service nor a "trained diplomatic corps," steeped in the hopeless cynicism of the profession, but has so often picked unspoiled men of heart and brains, wherever she has found them—a Page, a Lane, a Hoover, a Straus—and has set them to work out, with splendid "indiscretions," the salvation of the people.

The career of Mr. Straus illustrates with peculiar force the wisdom of calling many, even when few are to be chosen. In a double sense, he belongs to the Chosen People, having been set apart by birth in a race which achieved civilization so many centuries before the Russians, Germans and Anglo-Saxons emerged from barbarism that the latter even now find it difficult to "keep up." There is reason to believe that he, with his eminent brothers, began life in America with a special family inheritance of intelligence and character. His success does not prove that a fool or a knave will find every door of opportunity in America wide open. But in other respects, the demonstration of "democratic opportunity" is here as complete as can be desired, since, but for the advantages of nature, Mr. Straus started at the scratch.

Nothing in his memoirs is more charming in tone than his simple and: affectionate treatment of the beginnings of the Straus family in America, with its pictures of the father, a Bavarian immigrant of 1852, first peddling his wares among the hospitable Georgia planters, then setting up his store in Tal-

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 bottom, bringing over his young family in 1854, entering the children in school and swiftly adapting the ways of his household to the spirit of a new community. On the persuasion of a Baptist minister, the boys were sent to a Baptist Sunday School, but, remarks Mr. Straus significantly: "My main religious instruction came from conversations with my father and from the discussions the ministers of various denominations had with him, which I always followed with great interest." This Bavarian peddler, who seems to have had Franklin's attraction for "ministers of various denominations," had brought into the country something more than the small merchant's stock in trade; he had brought an ability to explain to the hard-shell, slaveryupholding Southern Baptists that the Bible is an his torical record, requiring historical interpretation, and that the Biblical sanction of slavery is a shaky foundation for modern institutions.

If one were to single out the dominant trait in the Straus family, which was to be most strikingly represented in Oscar Straus, it would be the instinct for civility in its broadest sense, including the duties of good citizenship and considerably more than the average sensual man's preference of intelligence to force in the adjustment of human relations. This instinct reveals itself at the outset in the promptitude with which the family allied itself with whatever intellectual and spiritual elements a small Georgia town afforded, in its appreciation of Southern courtesy and hospitality, in its dislike of slavery,

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 its disgust at the immoderate gin and whisky drinking of the country squires, its revolt from the hazing of the Georgia Military Academy, and its general sense of dismay at the destruction of the elementary ideas of brotherhood by civil strife, in which incidentally most of its own savings were swept away by the looting and burning of a rabble led by drunken Federal soldiers. In consequence of the war, the family moved to New York; and there once more the members of the Straus family showed their practical instinct for civilization by pooling their resources in order to allow one of their number to contribute in their behalf to the intellectual and professional life of their adopted country—to be set apart and "chosen" for the second time and in the American sense.

One dwells on these beginnings, because in spite of all that is occasionally achieved by vagrants who enter the vineyard at the eleventh hour, so much depends upon beginning right and beginning early. Mr. Frank Jewett Mather has a pretty passage in which he tells how John La Farge rebuked him for speaking as if an artist, after starting his picture, were free to develop it in various ways: "He went on to show how the first firm line set on a canvas excludes all incompatible lines thenceforth, so that by the third or fourth leading contour the design must advance by a kind of fatality."

When Oscar Straus entered Columbia College in 1867 he did not see the picture of himself escorted by eight royal carriages to the Sultan's palace or

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 presiding over the Department of Labor in Roosevelt's Cabinet, but he had determined the "color" of the picture, he had set the "first firm line" on the canvas. He had already "a restless ambition to have a useful career," and in this environment his intellectual eagerness developed rapidly. He read widely in biography and history, which he then preferred, and still prefers, to fiction. He strove to excel in his studies, and was one of three nominated for the Alumni Prize, awarded to "the most deserving student in the graduating class." He records gleefully that he defeated Brander Matthews for the office of class poet. But perhaps the clearest premonitory sign of his diplomatic talent was his restoring to order an insubordinate class in the Evidences of Christianity—an incident which for inward sweetness is comparable only with the tumult of the bands playing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," at every town in New York where this progressive Jew spoke in his great campaign for Governor.

"The fervent aspiration" which animated him at Columbia was to devote his life to the nation. He had applied personally, with recommendations from President Barnard, to President Grant for an appointment to the United States Military Academy; but as these appointments were reserved for the sons of officers killed in the war he fortunately settled in his senior year upon the law as his vocation, and was graduated from the Columbia Law School in 1873. If one examines his photograph taken at about this period, with its thoroughly awakened,

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 clear-eyed and almost luminous expression of intelligence and refinement, one has no difficulty in understanding the ease with which the young lawyer found his place in the best legal circles of New York and won the friendship and confidence of such eminent gentiles, for example, as Joseph Choate and Henry Ward Beecher—without, on the other hand, for feiting the confidence of his own people. It was indeed part of his ambition to prove that a man's Americanism is independent of his race and the form of his religion and "by a personal demonstration" to show the entire compatibility of his own race and religion with the most useful type of citizenship. In conjunction with his friends he organized the Young Men's Hebrew Association. He was secretary of the executive committee of an independent group organized to re-elect a good Mayor. He was secretary of the New York Business Men's Association organized in 1884 to assist in the election of Cleveland.

His diplomatic career began in this fashion. In 1885 he commenced as author with "The Origin of the Republican Form of Government." This book attracted the attention of Senator Gorman, who first proposed to him the Turkish mission. Carl Schurz, Straus's intimate friend, and the editors of the Times and the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung bestirred themselves to bring the matter to the attention of Cleveland. The President was impressed, but since the principal business of the Turkish Minister was to look after the interests of Christian

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 missionaries, he hesitated to send a man who might be persona non grata. This objection was overcome by the hearty support of the Prudential Committee of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and by an urgent and enthusiastic letter from Henry Ward Beecher! Finally Cleveland seems to have made the appointment, not in spite of the fact that Mr. Straus was a Jew, but rather because he was a Jew and a Jew so without reproach that his appointment afforded an opportunity to emphasize the non-sectarian basis of American citizenship and eligibility for honorable service. From one point of view the most impressive thing in these memoirs is precisely this: Mr. Straus's ability to serve wisely and successfully all sorts of conflicting interests, and, on the other hand, their hearty concurrence in being served by him.

Without making a detailed review of his public services, certain significant features may be noted. The salary of Minister to Turkey when Mr. Straus accepted the mission was $7,500; he spent four times that sum and got his compensation in wide acquaintance with the world, in serving his country and in leaving an honorable name to his family. He won the applause of his government and the cordial favor of Abdul Hamid, and he threw himself with ardor and enjoyment into his work at Constantinople—as long as he was instructed and permitted to devote his energy chiefly to protecting educational interests and safeguarding human rights of Jews and Gentiles and removing occasions for armed con-

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 flict. When, however, under Mr. Taft's Administration, he was sent for a third time to Turkey, in despite of promises to retain him in the Cabinet, and when Mr. Knox instructed him to give his main attention to advancing "prestige" and commercial railway interests in the East, Mr. Straus asked to be relieved, being convinced that the Administration was preparing the way for dangerous and imperialistic entanglements, in which he was unwilling to be involved. He had entered public life to advance public, not private, interests.

This action was becoming in that kind of independent who may be described as at heart an old-school philosophical Democrat. Beginning his public service under Cleveland and continuing under two Republican Presidents, he was naturally twitted with being on both sides of the fence. He replied, half jestingly, that "the fence had moved." As a matter of fact, he seems to have devoted himself to the same sound human and truly American objects through all four of his administrations. In 1898, for example, he urged upon President McKinley a pacific plan for obtaining the virtual independence of Cuba and at the same time saving the face of Spain. The plan fell through because, though McKinley liked it and thought it feasible, he could not resist "the jingo agitation in Congress and the storming for war of the American press."

Mr. Straus does not conceal the fact that he was fascinated by the talents of McKinley's successor and by the heart-warming cordiality of his friend-

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 ship. Whoever serves to some extent complies; yet he managed to serve even Roosevelt in his own way. It was he whose appeal to our greatest publicity expert not to outstep the modesty of nature elicited the famous retort: "This is a poster, not an etching." With regard to the Alaska boundary dispute, Roosevelt had expressed with characteristic vigor his repugnance to arbitration. He had made up his own mind: that was enough. Then he turned mockingly on Straus and exclaimed: "Straus, you are a member of The Hague Tribunal; don't you think I'm right?" "As a member of The Hague Tribunal," replied his Secretary, "I should first have to hear what the other side had to say." "And we all had a good laugh," adds Mr. Straus.

At what did they laugh—at The Hague Tribunal or at Mr. Roosevelt? Perhaps each at his own subject of merriment; but Mr. Straus, one feels sure, in the covert of his beard smiled at his Master with some of that secret irony which Disraeli employed toward his royal Mistress. In each case I believe the Jew was by instinct and inheritance a more thoroughly "civilized" being than the Gentile. He served Roosevelt indeed most truly by pressing upon our great advocate of the Big Stick the uses of "sweetness and light" in promoting industrial peace at home and harmonious relations abroad. While his friend, relying on the prestige of his own personality, gesticulated with the navy, Mr. Straus sought to strengthen the permanent instrumentalities of arbitral justice and international law.

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 Perhaps the most piquantly characteristic, if not the most important, bit of his diplomatic service was arresting the descent of the Big Stick. While he was in Constantinople he had discovered that in the Philippines, over which our inexperienced flag had newly risen, there were considerable Moslem elements which recognized the Sultan as their spiritual head. He suggested to the Sultan, to whom this fact seems also to have been a discovery, that he extend his spiritual jurisdiction by advising his co-religionists to submit to the authority of the United States. It was then ascertained by a telegram that two Sulu chiefs were on a pilgrimage to Mecca. Prompted by Mr. Straus, the Sultan instructed them to return home and prevent bloodshed, in consequence of which action the Sulu Mahometans refused to join Aguinaldo's insurrection. The sequel: In 1902 an American soldier in the Philippines was killed while laying a telegraph line in the territory of these Sulu Mahometans. Our press announced that a "punitive expedition" of twelve hundred men would be dispatched—according to the approved imperial methods of dealing with "subject peoples." Mr. Straus, then a private citizen in the United States, immediately advised President Roosevelt against this use of the "strong hand" as likely to provoke a general uprising. He urged instead a diplomatic inquiry, with the assistance of our Mahometan friends, whom his chiefs from Mecca had pacified. This course was successfully followed.

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 A man with a passion for peace is one thing. A man with the tact to get the Sultan of Turkey, Sulu chiefs and. Theodore Roosevelt working together for a solution of their problems without resort to brandished lance, shaken fist or shining armor possesses, as I have said, an instinct for civility. The spirit of this incident was curiously reproduced at a later period, when Mr. Straus, then devoting himself with full heart to his great work for industrial peace, found a basis upon which capitalists and laboring men could confer face to face at the White House, and Andrew Carnegie agreed to meet the leaders of the Homestead strike at the ex-Ambassador's dinner table. As one of the four United States members of the Court of Arbitration at The Hague, as Secretary of Commerce and Labor, as vice-president of the National Civic Federation and the International Law Association, as chairman of the overseas committee of the League to Enforce Peace and in all the various capacities in which he served during the late war and through the protracted ordeal of the so-called peace conference, Mr. Straus has wrought diligently and consistently at his lifelong purpose: to be useful to a nation whose higher spirit this memoir proves that he understands—a spirit which his entire activity as an author has been devoted to explaining. His life work has been crowned with as much success as can be sagely hoped for by a man who attempts to make the ideal of civility effective in a world which is still more than half barbaric.

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Criticise the book before you, and don't write a parallel essay, for which the volume you have in hand serves only as a peg. This is No. VII of Twelve Rules For Good Reviewers, formulated by Brander Matthews in an essay on "The Whole Duty of Critics," 1892.

I should try to follow this rule if its maker himself had not led me astray by sub-announcing in "The Tocsin of Revolt" a theme which he does not develop. Here is the theme which lurks in the first short essay:

When a man finds himself at last slowly climbing the slopes which lead to the lonely peak of three-score-and-ten he is likely to discover that his views and his aspirations are not in accord with those held by men still living in the foothills of youth. He sees that things are no longer what they were half a century earlier and that they are not now tending in the direction to which they then pointed. If he is wise, he warns himself against the danger of becoming a mere praiser of past times; and if he is very wise he makes every effort to understand and to appreciate the present and not to dread the fu-

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 ture. He may even wonder whether he is not suffering from a premature hardening of the arteries of sympathy. He finds himself denounced as a reactionary; and he doubts whether he has the courage of his reactions.

Whenever I turn away from this paragraph to comment on the other essays in this volume, I seem to see Brander Matthews peering into a dusky street, and to hear the sound of the tocsin bell.

"The younger generation is knocking at the door. "That is the pretty phrase which used to be employed to describe the coming of age of a numerous group of new talents. It evokes the image of eager but modest youngsters, rather timorously offering their maiden speeches, their first poems, and their unsunned paintings to the critical scrutiny of their elders and their masters. And as a matter of fact one can call up out of literary history actual instances of such behavior on the part of the younger men—even in America, and even among critics and poets. With such deference the youthful William Dean Howells approached James Russell Lowell. With such reverence, Whitman offered his Leaves of Grass to his master Emerson. For the moment I am unable to think of other American cases. But then consider the respect of Johnson for Pope, of Pope and Congreve for Dryden, of Dryden for Honest Ben, or the religious tribute of the young Milton to his immediate predecessor, Shakespeare. The graceful antique mode of "knocking at the door" is now so completely for-

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 gotten that I must be allowed to present one exquisite illustration of it by a Son of Ben:

The beauty of this antique relation between the elder and the younger writers is lost because the younger generation no longer knocks at the door. It thunders at the door, it batters, it hammers, it bangs, it thumps, it kicks, it whacks, it wrenches, it lunges, it storms—it would require a Rabelaisian vocabulary to express all the indignities which the younger generation substitutes for knocking at the door. This somewhat barbaric performance, Brander Matthews, with his unfailing courtesy of phrase, calls sounding a "tocsin" at the door.

The ringleaders of this innovation in manners, "the most impatient of our young people, are hardened journalists of forty, with a following of youths upon whose caustic lips the maternal milk is hardly

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 dry. They are determined to have a better time than their fathers had. I sympathize with the object. But I am not always sure that they are going about "the great task of happiness" in the best way. From Samuel Butler of saintly memory, for example, they have adopted the theory that the chief obstacle to happiness in the path of children is their parents. At first thought the idea perhaps commends itself as offering to youthful impatience—generally so vague and objectless—something definite to work upon. But then I pick up the morning paper and read that one of our young people has confessed to having placed poison in her father-in-law's coffee because "he was old and such a care." That obstacle to her happiness is removed, but now another has arisen in its place. To put the matter in the happiest light, there is a certain want of amenity in the act, which one suspects, will rather poison the pleasure which the act was intended to procure. There is an inauspicious rowdiness about the present picnic on Parnassus, Laurel wreaths snatched from the heads of others seem somehow to lack the significance of laurel wreaths bestowed—the leaves are scattered, the garland is bare.

It may be due to a Chinese prejudice, but I have never been able to join with any great alacrity of spirit in the nearly universal contemporary sport of deriding the classics, or indeed any perpetuated mold in which the human spirit of a bygone age or generation expressed all that it knew of grace or

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 charm or power. In cruel old myths, in grotesque images of primitive art, in the hard brilliance of early eighteenth century verse, in the perhaps excessive saccharinity of early Victorian representations of women, even in fashion-plates five years old, there is the pathos of things that Time, the "eternal philanderer," once loved and caressed and swore eternal fidelity to, and then left behind him in the vacant banquet halls and the grey solitudes of history. One of our newspapers has the custom of displaying every Sunday, side by side with the latest idols of stage and society, the idols of 1900, in all the borrowed glories that twenty years have filched. If we think a guffaw the right reaction to the best effect that 1900 could produce, we had better laugh quickly and have it over with, before our laughter is drowned by an outburst from the chucklers at our heels. But in the contemplation of these contrasts, the finer sense will shiver, knowing how soon le dernier cri becomes the farewell of warm life frozen into the past.

The literary Mohawks, however, are somewhat deficient in the finer sense. As the fighting organization of the younger generation, they fear the past as an enemy at their rear, and they hold that military considerations demand the devastation of the territory immediately behind their lines, and the destruction of all able-bodied men who will not actively enlist in their band. For some time, as everyone knows, they have been trying to blow up the National Academy of Arts and Letters as the

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 stronghold, precisely, of the preceding generation. At frequent intervals their chieftains have advanced whooping to the portals of that serene citadel, and, uttering every taunt known to them, have challenged the Academicians collectively and severally to come forth and do battle. In the interior of a national academy there broods the quiet of a club organized by old field marshals. Its membership is made up for the most part of men who are remembering, not fighting, their campaigns. In the judgment of their peers, they have reached the head of their professions. They have passed through the cold spring of experimentation and the dusty summer of struggle and unrecognized achievement to that clear autumnal season in which one writes one's memoirs, and composes tributes to one's departing comrades, and turns an eye of curiosity and unenvious welcome upon the promising work of younger men.

If you are a member of the Academy, as Brander Matthews is, and if you hear ringing through the streets and alleys of the Republic of Letters the shouts of the Mohawks and the detonation of their bombs against your door, you will probably feel some astonishment at the alteration in literary manners during the last decade, and some irritation at the disturbance of your peace. You do not understand what grievance the Mohawks have against you.

You have, to be sure, reached the age when the transitory fashions of the hour no longer impress

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 you as overpoweringly interesting, nor the fashions of twenty years ago as overwhelmingly funny. You are interested now rather in those permanent human passions and virtues and powers, in that play of wit and imagination, in that instinct of craftsmanship, in that study of perfection, in all those fluid elements of the intellectual and artistic life which are present in every great age, and which make the artists and scholars of all ages, in the higher sense, contemporary. You can appreciate the talent of Charlie Chaplin, and yet remember without humiliation your admiration for Coquelin and Edwin Booth. Your relish for the work of contemporary playwrights does not, to you, seem to require the "scrapping" even of so old a workman as Molière. You have given many younger men their "start," and have been the first to salute their maiden efforts; and yet you have not denounced your own masters, Arnold and Lowell, nor renounced your own coevals. You have dared to honor the memory of many men, friends of yours, who were born in your own time or a few years earlier or later—Aldrich, Bunner, Lounsbury, Stevenson, Austin Dobson. Andrew Lang, Howells, Stedman, McDowell, Mark Twain, Saint-Gaudens, and innumerable others.

With that eagerness to understand the world you are living in, which has always characterized you, you lean from your window to catch the hostile shouting of the Mohawks in the street, so that you may learn the head and front of your offending.

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 From the cries that come up, you find that they hate all things that begin with P. They are carrying on a propaganda against the following: Propagandists, Prohibitionists, Prudes, Purists, Puritans, and Professors. You scrutinize your conscience. You find that in strictness you are none of these.

You were ever a "clubbable" man. You stepped without struggle into a congenial and intelligent society which you had no desire to "reform." You have regarded literature and the arts not as instruments of social salvation but rather as part of the accomplished expression of society. You have sought to give distinction to the American short story by perfecting its technique. You have been a zealous friend to the living drama and to all the arts of the theatre. You followed Lowell in your graceful defense of the independence of American writers and of the free creative American use of the English tongue.

They may charge you on technical grounds with being a professor; but in your own conscience you know that you have never been that. You were formed before pedagogy had a chance to deform you. You were forty before you ever told anecdotes in a professorial chair or brought the intoxicating airs of Bohemia and the great world of letters within the drab walls of a classroom. No Mohawk hates the pedantries of scholarship more sincerely than you do. You have successfully resisted the laws of gravitation. You are a lover of artistic form, you are a craftsman, and in whatever you

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 have touched, criticism, the informal essay, the story, the drama, even the New York Times, you have shown your delight in literary workmanship. Your immense acquaintance with the interesting people of your time at home and abroad, your French clarity and ease of expression, and your sense that the highest use of learning is to increase the vivacity and the charm of human intercourse during a man's own lifetime—these things have made you what the Mohawks are howling for, a man of letters who is also a man of the world.

What, then, is the young people's grievance against you? Your unpardonable sin is that you are seventy. Therefore they batter at your door. It is the new manners.

In these circumstances a wise man, after due reflection, will probably be inclined to treat the disturbance like the bombardment of Halloween revellers. But there are three methods of dealing with Halloween revellers. One is to close shutters and say nothing. That is what is called "giving the absent treatment." One is to discharge a shotgun among the crowd. This is bucolic incivility. Brander Matthews is incapable of incivility. It is an incapacity which he shares with most of the distinguished writers of his generation. He adopts the third method. He steps out on his verandah, makes a charming speech to the Mohawks on youth and age and their common need of the traditions of their art, and then he distributes cider and apples

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 —he blandly discusses American aphorisms, American architecture, repartee, conversation, cosmopolitan cookery, the length of Cleopatra's Nose, the modernity of Molière, Roosevelt, and memories of Mark Twain.

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Some time ago Sherwood Anderson had an article in the New Republic of the sort that every one likes to read. It was a discussion of the three or four living writers who are "really worth while." I regret that I have mislaid this article and that I have forgotten who Mr. Anderson's important writers were—all but one. I seem to remember, however, distinctly enough that the article had a climactic structure—that Mr. Anderson led us rather disdainfully up the rungs of appreciation till we emerged at a dizzying level. "And here," said our guide in a voice of utter reverence—"and here is Gertrude Stein!" I had never seen a line of Gertrude Stein's work nor had I even heard a whisper of her name. Yet here she was at the pinnacle of expression, engaged, we were assured, in marvellous experiments with English words. It was exciting.

Months went by during which I went about murmuring vainly, "Who is Gertrude Stein?" I began to think her a creature of myth, a fabulous being evoked by the idealizing imagination of the author of "Many Marriages." To-day there lies on my desk a substantial volume, 419 well-printed pages,

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 with the haunting name on the title-page, Geography and Plays, and with a jacket full of biography: Pennsylvania birth, early years in Vienna and Paris, Radcliffe, Johns Hopkins Medical School, return to Paris and art, friendship of Matisse and Picasso, publication of two famous books—The Portrait of Mabel Dodge and Tender Buttons—war work with a Ford car, a long silence, and now Geography and Plays. It was all real.

Better still, there is an introduction by Sherwood Anderson. It is exciting, just as that article in the New Republic was. One lingers over it in breathless expectation, and, after reading the book, one returns to it in brooding retrospect. Taken by itself, it makes very good and very absorbing sense. Some of the arresting sentences are these:

What I think is that these books of Gertrude Stein's do in a very real sense recreate life in words.

To these sentences should be added this shy little tribute from the wrapper:

Out of her early experiments has sprung all modern writing.

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 Of a writer so little known yet so overwhelmingly important we had better have some specimens before us before we attempt to add anything to Mr. Anderson's appreciation. Her work, it may be said, though various in theme, form, and style, is of singularly even quality, so that we may dip in almost at random and find a perfectly characteristic bit. Let us have first the opening sentence from a nine-page Portrait of Constance Fletcher.

To this let us add a paragraph from France:

Finally let us have a morsel from Scenes:

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 Delbert J. Barnard, Barnard & Pauly, Seattle, WA, for the defendants-appellants.

Roger R. Myers and Lisa M. Sitkin, Steinhart & Falconer, San Francisco, CA, for the plaintiffs-appellees.

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California; Garland E. Burrell, District Judge, Presiding. D.C. No. CV-01-00701-GEB.

Before: SILVERMAN and GOULD, Circuit Judges, and WEINER, Senior District Judge.

GOULD, Circuit Judge.

In the Copyright Act, Congress sought to benefit the public by encouraging artists’ creative expression. Congress carefully drew the contours of copyright protection to achieve this goal. It granted artists the exclusive right to the original expression in their works, thereby giving them a financial incentive to create works to enrich our culture. But it denied artists the exclusive right to ideas and standard elements in their works, thereby preventing them from monopolizing what rightfully belongs to the public. In this case, we must locate the faint line between unprotected idea and original expression in the context of realistic animal sculpture. We must decide whether an artist’s lifelike glass-in-glass sculptures of jellyfish are protectable by copyright. Because we conclude that the sculptures are composed of unprotectable ideas and standard elements, and also that the combination of those unprotectable elements is unprotectable, we reverse the judgment of the district court.

Plaintiff Richard Satava is a glass artist from California. In the late 1980s, Satava was inspired by the jellyfish display at an aquarium. He began experimenting with jellyfish sculptures in the glass-in-glass medium and, in 1990, began selling glass-in-glass jellyfish sculptures. The sculptures sold well, and Satava made more of them. By 2002, Satava was designing and creating about three hundred jellyfish sculptures each month. Satava’s sculptures are sold in galleries and gift shops in forty states, and they sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on size. Satava has registered several of his works with the Register of Copyrights.

Satava describes his sculptures as “vertically oriented, colorful, fanciful jellyfish with tendril-like tentacles and a rounded bell encased in an outer layer of rounded clear glass that is bulbous at the top and tapering toward the bottom to form roughly a bullet shape, with the jellyfish portion of the sculpture filling almost the entire volume of the outer, clearglass shroud.” Satava’s jellyfish appear lifelike. They

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 "All modern writing," we are told, has sprung from "experiments" like these. One thinks first perhaps of the "masterpiece" of James Joyce. That literary physician who has lately been looking obliquely at literature, Dr. Joseph Collins, extracts some fragments from Ulysses which superficially resemble these by Gertrude Stein. That is, he declares that to the ordinary reader they mean nothing, but that to the initiated they are transparent. Though I do not profess any special psychopathic initiation, I myself find long tracts of Ulysses in which the verbal symbols seem to correspond to intelligible sensational experience with attendant mental phenomena. From this fact I infer that James Joyce is not a "modern writer" of pure derivation from the source. He therefore can shed little light on the problem before us.

As I studied Gertrude Stein's work, endeavoring to understand its purpose, I will admit that once or twice it occurred to me faintly that it might just possibly be a joke. But it is impossible to make a joke out of 419 such pages. If you set out in quest of hilarity, before you read twenty pages you are ready for hara-kiri. It is no more like a joke than the Mojave Desert or the Dead Sea. I dismissed that hypothesis.

I tried the guess that the entire book is written in a cipher of which the publishers possess a key purchasable at an enormous price, but then I thought of a man who deciphered the Etruscan inscriptions in six volumes, yet couldn't find a pub-

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 lisher. The notion seemed repellent—commercially; and I abandoned it.

Next I explored the assumption that Gertrude Stein's epoch-making experiment was designed to show what words can do by themselves with practically no assistance from the manipulator or with mere mechanical manipulation. I took a sheet of paper and made five columns. In the first I wrote at random fifteen or twenty adjectives; in the second the same number of nouns; in the third a job lot of conjunctions, prepositions, and articles; in the fourth, verbs; in the fifth, adverbs. I then cut up my columns and placed the separate words face downwards in five piles of parts of speech. Then I played off the words something in the style, I suppose, of Canfield (which I don't play). I thrust in a bit more punctuation than Gertrude Stein employs, and this was the result:

I drew back in astonishment from the result of my own little experiment. My Hercules, what phrases!—"red stupidity," "loud orchards roaring darkly," "pretty" people slipping through daffodils in "green doubt," and then those "bitter fish" flying so grandly, and the proclamation of "life, the pur-

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 ple flame." "Drink gloriously" struck me as a little too close to "gloriously drunk," which is of course a cliché; but even there the hortatory note adds a kind of foaming and exuberant novelty to the concept. Life had leaped from my parts of speech in tongues of flame. By a mechanical manipulation I had recreated life in words. And when I compared my specimen of it with Gertrude Stein's exhibits, it appeared to me indisputable that the vividness, the color, and the abounding energy of my "work" made hers seem gray and protoplasmic.

It is necessary, therefore, to discard the theory that her book was written by any kind of mechanical device. It seems almost impossible by any unimpeded mechanical process to assort words in such a fashion that no glimmer of mind will flash out from their casual juxtapositions. The thing can be done only by unremitting intelligence of the first order—if it can be done at all. Now we know on the high testimony of Mr. Anderson that Gertrude Stein possesses intelligence of this order. The work before us leads me to believe that she has attempted precisely the difficult feat which my scissors and shuffled parts of speech failed to accomplish. And so far as the perfection of the enterprise is humanly possible, her efforts have been crowned with success.

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Until I met the Butlerians I used to think that the religious spirit in our times was very precious, there was so little of it. I thought one should hold one's breath before it as before the flicker of one's last match on a cold night in the woods. "What if it should go out?" I said; but my apprehension was groundless. It can never go out. The religious spirit is indestructible and constant in quantity like the sum of universal energy in which matches and suns are alike but momentary sparkles and phases. This great truth I learned of the Butlerians: Though the forms and objects of religious belief wax old as a garment and are changed, faith, which is, after all, the precious thing, endures forever. Destroy a man's faith in God and he will worship humanity; destroy his faith in humanity and he will worship science; destroy his faith in science and he will worship himself; destroy his faith in himself and he will worship Samuel Butler.

What makes the Butlerian cult so impressive is, of course, that Butler, poor dear, as the English say, was the least worshipful of men. He was not

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