an epitaph upon Ann Rutledge, the girl Lincoln loved and lost; and Vachel Lindsay, in Lincoln’s own Springfield, during the World War thought of him as so stirred even in death by the horrors which then alarmed the universe that he could not sleep but walked up and down the midnight streets, mourning and brooding.  It is precisely thus, in other ages, that saints are said to appear at difficult moments, to quiet the waves or turn the arrow aside.  Without these more vulgar manifestations Lincoln nevertheless lives as the founder of every cult lives, in the echoes of his voice on many tongues and in the vibrations of his voice in many affections.

The novelists, unfortunately, fall behind the poets in the beauty and wisdom with which they celebrate the figure of Lincoln, though they have produced scores of volumes associated with it, upon the life not only of Lincoln himself but of his mother, of his children, of this or that friend or neighbor.  Of the various novels—­from Winston Churchill’s The Crisis to Irving Bacheller’s A Man for the Ages—­which have sought to mingle the right proportions of rural shrewdness and honorable dignity, no one has yet been equal to the magnitude of its theme.  They have followed the customary paths of the historical romance without seeming to realize that in a theme so spacious they could learn from the methods of Plato with Socrates, of Shakespeare with his kingly heroes, of the biographers of Francis of Assisi with their gracious saint.

Few literary tasks are harder than the task of the critic holding a steady course through the welter of novels which make a tumult in the world and trying to indicate those which have some genuine significance as works of art or intelligence or as documents upon the time.  How shall he dispose, for example, of such beguilers of the millions as Gene Stratton Porter, who piles sentimentalism upon “Nature” till the soft heap defies analysis, and Harold Bell Wright, who cannily mixes sentimentalism with valor and prudence till the resultant blend tempts appetites uncounted?  Popularity has its arts no less than excellence; and so has it its own kind of seriousness.  Much as the advertiser and the salesman have done to market tons of Mrs. Porter and Mr. Wright, they could not have done it without the assistance furnished them by the fact that their authors believe and feel the things they write.  They throb with all the popular impulses; they laugh when the multitude laughs and weep when it weeps; and they have the gift—­which is really rare not common—­of calling the multitude’s attention to their books in which is displayed, as in a consoling mirror, the sweet, rosy, empty features of banality.