another ground for our inadequate creative performance it would be hard to say. Under the circumstances, the wisest course for the imaginative writer to pursue is to ignore all so-called criticism and do his best in his own way, untroubled by journalistic chatter.

Thus far I have been obliged to dwell rather insistently upon the negative side of the situation; and before concluding, it would be well to glance at the other side and try to see what there is of hope for us in getting a more vital, a more representative presentation of ourselves as a people in the imaginative record. There is, of course, much to be said on this side. Our reading public has expanded enormously of recent years, in spite of the motor car, and has become more discriminating and more intelligent as well as better educated. If it were not true that we are gaining in intelligence and discrimination, it would be depressing for us to go on pouring out of our colleges each year tens of thousands of young men and women, who presumably have made some acquaintance with ideas and formed some standards of judgment. The fact that the reading public tends to split up into many different circles, each one demanding its own kind of imaginative food, is another healthy sign of progress, although it has undoubtedly cut down the huge sales of a few popular books. The demand for the works of the more advanced foreign authors, which is now quite considerable in this country, is also an encouraging sign, because an appetite for mature and virile literature once formed cannot be satisfied with froth and frivol. To-day in all our bookstores are found the plays and novels of writers that a few years ago had to be imported specially from Europe. More broadly suggestive than these signs is the evidence of general improvement in the intellectual grasp of our people: they are thinking on tough political and economic problems, trying to realize themselves in this twentieth-century life, and the longer they do that the more insistently will they demand that life as they perceive it be portrayed in the fiction offered them. If

it cannot be said that in general the tone of our amusements has become more elevated, it is certainly possible to satisfy occasionally a more exacting taste at our theaters than ever before. Nothing moves by itself in modern society. Every interest helps in some way every other interest. To make a literature intelligent and virile, there must first be an intelligent and open-minded public, and somehow one feels that we are getting that faster than we are getting the literature. For we await the writer or writers keen enough to perceive the opportunity, powerful enough to interest the public in what it has been unwilling to heed, and of course endowed with sufficient insight to comprehend our big new world.

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The material in that world is crying for expression rich human material as the creative artist has ever had. In place of the narrow individualistic epic of the "captain of industry," we have the social struggle. That struggle is already expressing itself confusedly in our political life, and from it must emerge picturesque and powerful types suggestive to the novelist. Hitherto our novels have scarcely dabbled in politics because for the most part we as a people have merely dabbled in politics. We are beginning now to understand that modern social life must be largely political, that each and all, including women, must take a hand in politics if we are to make our destiny something nearer the ideal than our fathers have made theirs. Already our political life is putting upon the screen certain enticing figures for artistic interpretation - not great heroes, perhaps, but Americans spotted with the weaknesses of our civilization and terribly human. Their types should not be lost in the ephemeral columns of the newspapers. As our less favored classes become more expressive, we may hope to hear from them and have imaginative pictures of those who have lived all their lives in the treadmill of American industrialism. Certain magazine studies of men and women in factory life are the harbingers of a more epic treatment of the labor

subject. Our literature will not continue to ignore for another twenty years the daily lives and spiritual experiences of four fifths of the people, nor of all those of stranger blood whom fate has placed in our social system. In this way, I foresee our novels coming to include the larger interests which occupy the thoughts of many of us. It will not be necessarily a "problem" or "thesis" literature: the imaginative writer ought never to make a propaganda of his social beliefs. But he should represent men and women as they are in the struggle of modern life, actuated by the serious ideas and ideals of their time, not solely as sentimental puppets preoccupied with getting married.

As has been said before, we have the richest background in a purely human way that the story-teller ever had offered him. It abounds with new notes of character, of situation, of theme, of human drama. It is religious and pagan, selfish and generous, adventurous and mean, sordid and splendid, -at one and the same time. Our novels should reveal all that. They should reflect not merely the lives of the successful, the predatory, the indulgent, but also the lives of the small, the struggling, the obscure. They should give us not simply the sensual atmosphere of prodigal spenders, but the strong religious impulses moving in new ways to sanctify our lives. I say our novels - not the American novel, which is a figment of the newspaper critic's imagination. The newspaper critic seems distressed because he cannot find one book that displays all these powers and riches. He complacently discovers the American novel each season the one that most nearly pleased him of the last consignment. Every year a number of these discoveries are proclaimed to be the American novel the epic masterpiece of our civilization. But they quickly fall back into the ranks.

The truth is that we are not yet ready for the masterpiece, if we ever shall be, — if, indeed, one epic, no matter how

splendid, will ever serve for the complete record. Before that appears we must have developed a truly national spirit: our society must have a greater solidarity. We must be clearer about what we want to do, what we think about momentous matters, where we stand as a people. We must lose that excessive consciousness of our individualism that characterizes us now, and become more conscious of our nationalism. When in spirit and in purpose we are truly national, we shall doubtless create a national literature. The local and the individual will be merged in the broader type of the nation. Then we may speak of the American novel.

THE PURPOSE AND SPIRIT OF THE UNIVERSITY 1

GEORGE E. VINCENT

[George Edgar Vincent (1864- ) was educated at Yale and has had much to do with the administration of the Chautauqua Institution founded by his father, Bishop John H. Vincent. While serving as professor of sociology in the University of Chicago, he was in 1911 elected president of the University of Minnesota. Since 1917 he has been president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Though the Commencement address which follows is substantially that which was delivered at the University of Wisconsin in 1911, its characterization of the social aims of modern higher education, and its ringing challenge to youth for service to the commonwealth, make it peculiarly appropriate for study to-day.]

Modern students of human nature have changed the old saying, "Many men, many minds," into the new dictum, "One man, many selves." There is much talk of multiple personality. Our complex modern life reflects itself in a composite person. A man is said to have as many selves as there are social groups of which he feels himself a member. To maintain a business self which can look a moral self straight in the eye, to have a theological self on good terms with a scientific self, to keep the peace between a party self and a patriotic self, to preserve in right relations a church self and a club self such are the present problems of many a man or woman. One way to escape embarrassment is to invite at a given time only congenial and harmonious selves, and to banish from the company the selves that are discordant and disconcerting. The strong soul is he who can summon all his selves into loyal team play. Personality is the name men give to this unity of the self, and purpose is the organizing principle. Only as many groups of thought and feeling are schooled

1 From Science, June 30, 1911. Reprinted by permission.