"Our roads won't last forever; they're built in a hurry to be used in a hurry. But they're better roads to drive and motor over than those old Roman roads of Europe. Our office-buildings won't last as long as the Pyramids, but they're better for business purposes.
"Personally, I've never been enthusiastic over things that have no virtues but age and ugliness. I'd rather have a good, strong, serviceable piece of Grand Rapids furniture than any ramshackle, moth-eaten antique."
"But don't you think," I asked, "that the permanence of a book's appeal is a proof of its greatness?"
"I don't see how we can tell anything definite about the permanence of the appeal of books written in our time. And I don't mean by literature writings that necessarily endure through the ages. I believe that literature is the expression of the mind, the sentiment, the intellectual attitude of the people who live at the time it is written. I admit that our literature is ephemeral—like everything else about us—but I believe that it is good."
Mr. Rex Beach was not pacing his floor nervously; he was crossing the room with the practical intention of procuring a cigarette. Nevertheless, his firm tread lent emphasis to his remarks.
"There is a sort of literary snobbery," he said, "noticeable among people who condemn contemporaneous literature just because it is contemporaneous. The strongest proof that there is something good in the literature of the day is that it reaches a great audience. There must be something in it or people wouldn't read it.
"The people are the final judges; it is to them that authors must appeal. Take any big question of public importance—after it has been discussed by politicians and newspapers, it is the people who at last decide it.
"A man may have devoted his life to some tremendous achievement, and have left it as a monument to his fame. But it is to public opinion that we must look for the verdict on the value of his life's work.
"Take Carnegie, for example; when he dies, you bet people will have his number! His ideas are a tremendous menace, and the people who believe as he does about peace will find themselves generally execrated one of these days.
"It may seem to you that this has nothing to do with literature. But it has a good deal to do with it. I know that many things have been said about the effect on literature of the war. But I want to say that the war will have, I hope, one admirable effect on American writers—it will make them stir up the American conscience to a sense of the necessity for national defensive preparation. The writers must educate the people in world politics and show them the necessity for defensive action. Americans have a sort of mental inertia in regard to public questions, and the writers must overcome this inertia.