SOMEONE, it seems to me, ought to point out to certain optimistic critics of our minor literature that there is a great and vital difference between taking one's art seriously and taking one's self, the artist, so. In Mr. Howells's recent defence of contemporary writers, for instance, in reply to Mr. Phelps's paper in this Magazine, they were most excellently championed on the safe ground of sincerity of effort and nonmercenary aims; but there is one accusation, perhaps only implicitly made, if at all, in Mr. Phelps's indictment, though often elsewhere, to which I should like to hear this most kindly advocate plead for his clients that of the self-consciousness of much of the work from which he looks for great results.

It is almost a waste of time to say that this does not apply to Mr. Howells himself, or to his type of workers. If he has given us occasion lately, by his criticism and performance, to wonder whether he had reversed the old saying, to make it read video deteriora proboque, meliora sequor, he has never left a reader in doubt that in him at least the cause-the aim of what he was doing-obliterated every smaller consideration and left him free to use his art at its best. And, indeed, there is no reason at all to drag him into this bit of ungrateful meditation, except that he takes his native contemporaries at the pitch of their aspirations rather than their deeds, and so rouses the latent spirit of the advocatus diaboli that is in every one of us.

It may be that the present generation of

VOL. VIII.-12

younger writers is destined to great achievement: Heaven send it-and on the whole I for one fully believe it of a goodly number. But was there ever a generation that made such an ado over its own attitude and deportment about its work? or that had in some respects so large an alloy of the artificial in its frame of mind? Perhaps it is only the over-expectant critic who especially notices the solemnity of this squaring of the elbows, of this discussion of technic-the "short-story form" (note well the hyphen); the "cycle" of novels (with prefatory references to the Comédie humaine or the recurrence of the Warrington strain from "Esmond " to "The Newcomes "-I should have liked to have Thackeray hear it called a "cycle," by the way): the machinery of dedications, prologues, and epilogues; in fine, the whole disproportion of the cackle to the size of the be-cackled eggs, of however excellent quality the latter may be. Perhaps such a critic is dyspeptic, and perhaps he reads too much of the self-consciousness of the processes into the results -an easy matter; but enough of his belief is true, nevertheless, to make it worthy of the notice of more sanguine souls. There can hardly be too strong a desire for a good technic, for a thorough mastery of the tools of one's work; certainly there cannot be too strong a self-respect in a man of letters, if in any man; but self-respect is perfectly compatible with humility before one's task; and as for technic, it ought to be remembered that it is not the work itself; as the White Knight said to Alice in "Through the

recall times in his life when there was a magic light on all he saw, and magic music in all he heard? It is a common remark in extenuation of the inconvenience of not having very much money that people of ordinary fortune can eat as much as millionaires; and if we find that we can love as easily and as extensively on small incomes as on greater ones, we may safely consider that we have the better of the rich again. Perhaps we can; wealth offers so many diversions that sometimes the pleasure there is in loving is overlooked. The impression certainly exists that great riches have a tendency to clog the affections; and great inequalities of fortune are a barrier between man and man, not insurmountable but appreciable. Love is personal, and very great possessions almost inevitably throw personal qualities into shadow. We love men for what they are, not what they represent.

We cultivate the muscles because it is fun to use them, and because it brings us the happiness that comes of health. For like reasons we make a business of the cultivation of our minds. How simple it is of us to neglect to the extent that most of us do the systematic cultivation of our hearts! Now and then someone discovers that to love one's neighbor with enthusiasm is the best fun there is, and makes a business of doing it; and then the rest of us lean on our muck-rakes and gape at him, and wonder how he can spare so much time for such an object.

THE imagination of Mr. Grant Allen continues to be distressed by a learned phantom in petticoats who tries to earn her own living, and is supposed to think meanly of the natural vocations of her sex. In a recent magazine article he records his fears that if the theories of the advanced women are not checked, the invaluable faculty of intuition, which is a distinguishing feminine characteristic, will be educated away, with the direful result that men of genius will cease to be born. For the intuitive faculty pertains to genius as well as to femininity. Genius does not stop to reason. It arrives, by a sudden and immediate process which it inherited from its mother. It knows, it knows not how. It only knows that it knows, as women do.

It would be a dreadful pity to have genius stumbling about in limbo for lack of a woman fit to be a mother to it. Let us hope it will not really come to such a forlorn extreme as that. Would it be inexcusable to derive the impression from Mr. Grant Allen's magazine articles, that, learned as he is in natural history, his knowledge of the human female is defective? To my mind she seems to be constructed of much tougher materials than Mr. Allen imagines, and the influences that tend to make a man of her seem enormously overbalanced by those whose tendency is to keep her a woman. For my part I am not a bit afraid but that when God made woman He endowed her with persistence enough to maintain the characteristics of her sex. Monkeys may have evolutionized into Herbert Spencers; but have the females of any species ever yet evolutionized into males? Of course there are masculine women; women afflicted from birth with mannish minds and predisposed to channels of usefulness which are more commonly navigated by men.

Such women are not all Sally Brasses either. Some of them even presume to marry and have children. But they are exceptional creatures, and are easily counter-balanced by the feminine men. The average woman is a thorough-going woman, and is not to be educated out of it. You may teach her Latin, you may let her operate a type-writer, or teach school, or work in a factory, or dot off language by telegraph, and become as independent as you please. She is a persistent female still. If Mr. Allen will only stir up his males, and see to it that they are competent, faithful, and good providers, he may cease to distress himself. The proportion of the gentler sex who insist upon reasoning by logical processes and competing with men in bread-winning avocations, will not be great enough to afford him legitimate distress. Take care of your men, Mr. Allen, and your women won't have to take care of themselves. And if they don't have to, they won't do it. The fact that some women who have no one else to take care of them are taught to take care of themselves seems a remote reason for alarm. A woman even with blunted intuitions is better than a woman under six feet of earth.

APROPOS of successful achievement, it has been said that those who succeed are those who go on after they are tired. The observation bears a family likeness to the one about genius being the capacity for taking infinite pains, and both amount simply to this, that the people who arrive are those who don't have to stop until they get there. To many of us it happens that there are bits of thought-sometimes they are bits of verse-that come into the mind when it is too tired to follow them up. It can just grasp them and go no further. Such waifs are like the feathers that enthusiastic little boys who chase chickens on the farm find in their hands when the bird that they have almost run down gets away. Cuvier, they say, could construct a whole skeleton from a single bone, but it isn't told even of him that he could fix up a whole chicken from a few tail-feathers. Nevertheless, these intellectual relics are not to be wholly despised. Feathers that do not assume to be complete birds may still have a secondary sort of merit as feathers.

An odd lot of such strays that turned up the other day in the corner of a drawer, included some pennæ that in hands entirely great might have come to something. One that seems to have been begotten of an inquiry into the grounds of contemporary renown makes such an appearance as this:

So mixed it is, a body hardly knows
If fame is manufactured goods, or grows.
Douce man is he whose sense the point imparts
Where advertising ends and glory starts.

Another grasp of plumage, gleaned, it would seem, in another chase after this same bird, disclosed this:

And here the difference lies, in that, whereas
What a man did was measure of his glory
In those gone days, now gauged by what he has
He reads his title clear to rank in story.

The patriot lives, obscure, without alarms;
The poet, critics tell us, smoothly twaddles.
The patent-tonic man it is who storms

The heights of noise, and fame's high rafter straddles! Soap is the stuff

With the rest of that last broken feather

the bird in the hand became the bird in the bush. In the next lot:

No saint's physiognomy goes to my soul

Like the features that beam from that brown aureole

suggests a quest after some female bird; and this also seems to belong to the same theme:

More welcome than shade on a hot summer day
Is the shadow she casts when she's coming my way.
You can see she's a goddess! Just look at her walk!
Defend me from virgins whose talking is tattle,
Whose ears are mere trash-bins, whose tongues merely
rattle;

I own I adore her: there's bones in her talk!

Whose brains are but mush, and their judgment a sieve

Invertebrate discourse is all they can give.
What profits mere beauty where intellect fails?

Oh, give me the woman whose mind will hold nails!
That was quite a grasp of plumage to be

sure.

When the tennis ball skims by the fault-finding net

is an odd feather from some fleet male bird, perhaps, who got easily away.

Not as dry as vast Sahara, Just a sand-bank in July,

suggests a parched throat, and seems masculine too; and so does the sudden terminal curve of

One cannot be a dying swan
Offhand.

It seems as if there might still be fun enough in some of the birds that shed these things to pay for another chase, if only one could get sight of them. The worst of these fowl though, is that the best feathers and the longest legs seem to go together. It takes quick steps and a power of endeavor to catch ostriches.