I wonder if one could not start a literary journal that should be contributed to solely by the unspoiled readers of books, since, from the standpoint of the novelist, it seems wholly inappropriate that he should criticize the work of his brothers who are, also, inevitably his rivals! However, since the critics are usually too lordly to bother their heads about anything so humble as the inside problems of mere novel-writing, it is difficult to see who is to do that rather necessary job. The most, therefore, that one ought to permit oneself is a friendly hail across space, using the press as it were as a sort of broadcasting apparatus. Then, one may give forth an exposition!

I shall, thus, permit myself to say that I like Dodsworth much better than Elmer Gantry and that I like Mr Dodsworth much better than Mr Babbitt as being the more convincing, the more human and, I daresay, more ‘felt’ by his creator. With an immense admiration for Babbitt as a book, I always had behind me the dim feeling that Mr Babbitt himself was a little of a Robot, moved here and there by his creator in an unimaginably real projection of Main Streets – the landscape, as it were, being in the major chord. Humanly speaking (I am not here attempting literary criticism), this is a relatively wrong way to look at a landscape. The fact is, if you go to look at a landscape or to observe a country you won’t much do so, your impressions being too self-conscious; whereas, if you live and are your normal self and, above all, suffer in any given environment, that environment will eat itself into your mind and come back to you in moments of emotion and you will be part of that environment and you will know it. It is because Mr Dodsworth suffers and endures in odd places all over the European and semi-European world that both he, as a person, and the settings in which he suffers, as settings, seem to me to be very real. Perhaps that is only saying that Dodsworth is a poem which Babbit isn’t.

Indeed, the title might just as well have been ‘Europa, an Epic’. For Mr Lewis presents to you practically all of Europe that counts in our civilization, including New York which isn’t America. He also poetizes these places so admirably through the emotions of the sympathetic Mr Dodsworth that when you have finished the book you, too, will have suffered and had your own emotions in the rue de la Paix – genuine emotions and not limited to the fact that in a shoe-shop they tried to charge you one hundred and fifteen francs for paste shoe-buckles instead of one hundred francs which is the price on the label. Indeed, I lately heard a lady say that Egypt was a rotten country because you could not get shredded wheat biscuits in Shepherd’s Hotel, which was not true at that. I learn from another that Corsica is a bum island because the New York papers could not be had in an obscure mountain village, whereas it is a known fact that the birthplace of Napoleon might as well be sunk beneath the sea, but for American money.

That is the sociological value of Dodsworth and the benefit it may do to civilization. Indeed, I think it is safe to say that the superiority of Mr Lewis as a sociological writer far in advance of others lies in the fact that he has a remarkable gift for rendering and the restraint which keeps him from pointing morals. Of course, his characters do indulge themselves in a great number of expository disquisitions but Mr Lewis makes it sufficiently clear that he backs neither set of views when they do discourse. Thus, things remain very much as they were at the beginning and the final impression is one of a sort of solidarity of mankind from Altoona to the Adriatic and back.

That is a great achievement and I hope that Dodsworth will diffuse itself by the million on both sides of the Atlantic. It will do more to spread a knowledge of the world and its friendlinesses and freshness and attractions than a wilderness of Baedekers. Besides, it is a good novel, a good story. I found myself towards the end of the book really hoping that the hero might get his young woman – hoping against hope and turning to the last page to make sure. This is the real test – more particularly for a book that is going to do good: for it must be read for itself and the moral must sink in unperceived as do the morals that we draw from life itself. To that end, we must identify ourselves with the characters and live in the scenes.

I found myself, as I have said, hoping that Mr Dodsworth might have his luck because, subconsciously, I regarded it as an omen that I might have mine; and that is to read a book as one read in the old good days before fifty or so winters and half a century or so of books had besieged these brows. That is the real, unconscious tribute and the real, true, friendly hail!