EDITORIAL 381 



other matters of interest. Plan to be present it possible. The 

 inspiration is worth the time and money. 



The presjident, five vice-presidents, five directors to fill places of 

 those starred and the secretary-editor are to be chosen. Nomina- 

 tions are made by the Council and will be published in the Decem- 

 ber issue. All subscribers to the Re\iew are members of the 

 Association and are entitled to vote. The vote should be mailed to 

 the Secretary if you are not to be present at the meeting. 



Editorial 



One would hardly anticipate that a review of recent fiction would 

 tend to an appreciation of the influence of the solitary places in the 

 formation of character. Yet in Recent Reflections of a Novel 

 Reader* the author classifies novels as those that are country 

 bom and those that emanate from the city. ''When industry 

 engaged fewer-folk, and agriculture proportionately more, there 

 was something in the world which is being lost out of it. To say 

 that Agriculture tends to make men, and industries tend to make 

 animals, has a shocking sound. No doubt it is a statement quite 

 open to attack, yet it looks toward truth." 



" If we say, instead, that work chiefly in the open air, close to the 

 soil, and the association of men in small and not too homogeneous 

 groups are the only conditions under which large numbers ot human 

 beings fit to possess and improve the earth can be bred and reared 

 continuously over long periods of time we shall come close to a 

 statement impossible to deny. Undeniably, also life under the 

 latter conditions is more valuable to the individual as well as more 

 hopeful for the race. Possessing, as it does, all the elements that 

 give interest and develop personality, it is eternally worth while." 



"The atmosphere of depression, of spiritual and mental squalor, 

 that broods so thickly over these novels in which men and women 

 no longer know blue skies, green grass and the grace of (lod, is in 

 itself enough to condemn their reasoning!" 



All of which seems to confirm Halleck's§ assertion thatthen^ is 

 no great English writer (barring one or two) whose formatiw \-cars 

 have not been spent in intimate touch with nature. Such iiil iina(-\- 

 breeds the type of character that ])ro(luccs real literature. These 



♦October Atlantic Monthly. 



§Halleck, Education of the Central Xervous System. 



