If this recalls the processes of Roosevelt, hardly less does it recall those of Mr. Churchill.  Once taken by an idea for a novel he has always burned with it as if it were as new to the world as to him.  Here lies, without much question, the secret of that genuine earnestness which pervades all his books:  he writes out of the contagious passion of a recent convert or a still excited discoverer.  Here lies, too, without much question, the secret of Mr. Churchill’s success in holding his audiences:  a sort of unconscious politician among novelists, he gathers his premonitions at happy moments, when the drift is already setting in.  Never once has Mr. Churchill, like a philosopher or a seer, run off alone.

Even for those, however, who perceive that he belongs intellectually to a middle class which is neither very subtle nor very profound on the one hand nor very shrewd or very downright on the other, it is impossible to withhold from Mr. Churchill the respect due a sincere, scrupulous, and upright man who has served the truth and his art according to his lights.  If he has not overheard the keenest voices of his age, neither has he listened to the voice of the mob.  The sounds which have reached him from among the people have come from those who eagerly aspire to better things arrived at by orderly progress, from those who desire in some lawful way to outgrow the injustices and inequalities of civil existence and by fit methods to free the human spirit from all that clogs and stifles it.  But as they aspire and intend better than they think, so, in concert with them, does Mr. Churchill.

In all his novels, even the most romantic, the real interest lies in some mounting aspiration opposed to a static regime, whether the passion for independence among the American colonies, or the expanding movement of the population westward, or the crusades against slavery or political malfeasance, or the extrication of liberal temperaments from the shackles of excessive wealth or poverty or orthodoxy.  Yet the only conclusions he can at all devise are those which history has devised already—­the achievement of independence or of the Illinois country, the abolition of slavery, the defeat of this or that usurper of power in politics.  Rarely is anything really thought out.  Compare, for instance, his epic of matrimony, A Modern Chronicle, with such a penetrating—­if satirical—­study as The Custom of the Country.  Mrs. Wharton urges no more doctrine than Mr. Churchill, and she, like him, confines herself to the career of one woman with her successive husbands; but whereas the Custom is luminous with quiet suggestion and implicit commentary upon the relations of the sexes in the prevailing modes of marriage, the Chronicle has little more to say than that after two exciting marriages a woman is ready enough to settle peacefully down with the friend of her childhood whom she should have married in the beginning.  In A Far Country a lawyer who has let himself