To this he replied that he felt I had supplied the clue which had baffled him, and asked me if I did not discover a chaos of a different sort in English life and literature since the armistice. I agreed that I did discover such a chaos, but that it seemed to me a chaos which was an end rather than a beginning, a chaos in which the Tower of Babel had fallen, and men had come to babble with more and more complete dissociation of ideas, or else, on the other hand, were clinging desperately to such literary and social traditions as had been left, while their work froze into a new Augustanism comparable to that of the early years of the eighteenth century.
Next year, in conjunction with John Cournos, I shall begin in a parallel series of volumes with the present series, to present my annual study of the English case. Meanwhile, for the present, I deal once more with that American chaos in which I have unbounded and ultimate faith. From now on I should like to take as my motto almost the last paragraph written by Walt Whitman before he died: "The Highest said: Don't let us begin so low--isn't our range too coarse--too gross?--The Soul answer'd: No, not when we consider what it is all for--the end involved in Time and Space." Or, as the old Dutch flour-miller put it more briefly: "I never bother myself what road the folks come--I only want good wheat and rye."
To repeat what I have said in these pages in previous years, for the benefit of the reader as yet unacquainted with my standards and principles of selection, I shall point out that I have set myself the task of disengaging the essential human qualities in our contemporary fiction which, when chronicled conscientiously by our literary artists, may fairly be called a criticism of life. I am not at all interested in formulæ, and organized criticism at its best would be nothing more than dead criticism, as all dogmatic interpretation of life is always dead. What has interested me, to the exclusion of other things, is the fresh, living current which flows through the best American work, and the psychological and imaginative reality which American writers have conferred upon it.
No substance is of importance in fiction, unless it is organic substance, that is to say, substance in which the pulse of life is beating. Inorganic fiction has been our curse in the past, and bids fair to remain so, unless we exercise much greater artistic discrimination than we display at present.