THE AMERICAN PERRICHON

The English novelist, W. L. George, who, mirabile dictu, has come to visit, not to lecture, has said that "Babbitt" remains the most popular American novel in England. The little salesman, he asserts, with his squandered energy, his lusts, and his pathetic aspirations is not only one of the world's heroes like M. Perrichon, but is, for the Englishman, the prototype of the American.

Many readers of the novel have thought Babbitt, like M. Perrichon, grossly exaggerated to prove a point. There is perhaps a suggestion of Babbitt in every American salesman, but every salesman is not therefore a Babbitt.

According to the New York World, however, there must exist a great multitude of Babbitts, for it says editorially that all who attended the great beauty contest last week at Madison Square Garden were such. Even the master mind of the carnival was a Babbitt, a manufacturer of plastic mud for the complexion. And it goes without saying that Mr. Valentino, who bestowed the golden apple upon the fairest, was under his role of Paris only a Babbitt. What the World failed to note was that the sun did not rise out of the west, nor the moon revolve in great circles about the Statue of Liberty, all because of the Beauty Contest. The fact that the winner has not been swamped with letters from college students is a small proof of the pudding--that Babbitts are not the only pebbles on the American.