casionally we bought theater tickets from scalpers. Young fellows holding positions similar to mine drove their own runabouts. My thoughts turned back toward business.

I had been reading Mencken. Because Stuart P. Sherman had helped me a good deal through letters about my stories, patient, sympathetic letters, written with uncanny insight into my writing process, letters dynamically stimulating, I got his book of essays, "On Contemporary Literature." It opened new worlds to me. His precise classification, his lucid definition of his point of view, his painstaking, but never laborious, thoroughness, conveyed to me a suggestion of the fundamentals of how to think about human life. I discovered, as I should have known at nineteen, what an idea is. Without quite realizing it, I faithfully followed his technic for irony, for he uses irony with a masterly touch.

I turned back toward business, helped by Sherman to see it aloofly. I wrote a story in which I viewed with a bit of amusement the typical earnest young man in business, ambitious, egotistical, sentimentally in love. But I was not a Sherman in temperament or in equipment, and I could not sustain the irony. The virus of the magazine was still in me, and is yet, and may be as long as I live, and so I straddled the fence. The plot of "The Romantic Realism of Rosalie," one of a series of stories about the earnest young man, is one which any cash girl or shipping clerk could swallow without a decrease in efficiency as an employee; but the handling is a bit aloof, patronizing, and critical. I may have written that kind of plot because I deliberately wanted to get into the magazines and

make money; but this I do believe, that I could not then have written otherwise, even if I were writing on a desert island for an audience of one Ph.D.

Then, quite by accident, I got hold of George Moore. I loitered about a book-shop, and the proprietor recommended "A Story Teller's Holiday." I suppose it is a pornographic book, but I do not know when I have read a more beautiful one. I read also and reread "Avowals," and, later, other works of George Moore.

How many teachers recommend Moore to students? To how many does it occur that for a sensitive youngster without background George Moore may serve as an excellent introduction to Matthew Arnold, to Turgenieff, to Balzac, to Shakspere?

I was as different in temper from George Moore as I was from Sherman, but I reveled in the music of his sentences as I reveled in the clarity of Sherman's paragraphs. I wrote to Sherman about him, and he wrote back, saying that one novel of George Moore's would give me more than a hundred ordinary American novels. How different in spirit is this from what Sherman says in his printed essay on George Moore! And how much more helpful it was to me! And how much more helpful it would have been to thousands of others like me! For in his essay Sherman says, in effect, "of course George Moore can write, but what a cur he is!" I wanted him to say, "George Moore may be a cur, but how he can write!" This is what I thought, and I mulled it over in my mind, asking myself if Sherman would not have been even more effective than he is if he could have included the spirit and feeling of such a per

sonal remark with the spirit and feeling of the essay he has written for publication.

It seems to me that a writer who can take his doubts with a touch of seriousness and his convictions with a touch of humor and who can put them down side by side with clarity and definiteness is a writer with more than a touch of greatness. Mencken attempts to do it at a stroke by labeling his books "Prejudices." His works, however, frequently belie the spirit which caused the title. They often are prejudices, but I recall few instances where, as he puts them on paper, Mencken realizes that they are.

Mencken, among other things, warns us against professors. His instinct is right, but his action is based on failure to understand the larger meaning of his problem. He wants us to live vitally and honestly. Professors, he feels, are emasculating and befuddling influences. So he tells us to avoid them. A more hopeful and helpful performance would be to suggest to the professors how to be stimulating and illuminating, how to help us to live vitally and honestly, a process the first step in which is to intimate to them the nature of their pupils. The fact that our professors need a certain simple kind of education seems to disgust Mencken, and he throws up his hands.

Sherman is more complex. He warns us against Mencken, although as a penetrating student of human experience and its expression it must be obvious to him that Mencken, because he has the style of a stevedore, attracts us and delights us by showing us that a table-thumping, beer-drinking person also may be educated, thus introducing us to the novelty of sophis

ticated thinking by rude force, which we need at first. Sherman is afraid that Mencken will convert us to Nietzschean ideas, whereas what happens is that Mencken jolts us, for the first time in our experience perhaps, into having ideas at all.

But what I learned from the style and technic of "On Contemporary Literature" I shall never lose. As for its ideas, although they served admirably in conversation with young advertising men more ignorant than I, they proved, by the test of creative work, not to be legitimately my property. erty. When I tried to use some of them creatively, I could only produce "Nicotine and Tricolette," which tries to prove, what Rupert Brooke at my age could n't bring himself to believe, that "kindliness" is better, on the whole, than "love." Up to the point where I attempted to inject this idea, the story, I believe, has some respectable qualities, but where this argugument begins, it becomes weak, false, sentimental. How much more potent is "The Allure of Luachet," written under the influence of George Moore, where the stimulus was style rather than semi-foreign ethical theory, emotion rather than unrealized concept!

After "Luachet" I still realized that Sherman was brilliant, heroic, extraordinarily intelligent, but that most of his attitude was to be explained by his nature, and that his nature is distinctly different from mine. This left his work a real stimulus and help to me. I could assimilate him now. But how much more easily, how much sooner, might not this have happened to me and to many others like me who must be undergoing similar influence, if Sherman

had mellowly recognized himself as one who, in order to be at his best, must believe that he is fighting for the liberation of all mankind and must believe that his weapons and his plans are, all in all, the best! Such a spirit of soberly smiling at himself would make his thesis more persuasive to some and less shackling to others of us who have not yet come into the light.

Pulling away from Sherman and somewhat liberated from Mencken, I found myself very much alone and troubled. About that time I left advertising to go West to live by writing fiction. In the Rockies I tried for a month to write more earnest-youngman stories, but could n't, although my funds were running low. I abandoned the effort finally and gave myself a rather free, wild time in a story called "Carole," which allowed range for my doubts, my emotions, some of my ideas, and which did not limit me to an office and a street and an engagement-ring. It gave me spiritual elbowroom. But I did n't have many spiritual and poetical resources, for after “Carole" I was exhausted, and could go back easily to the comparatively parsimonious material of the earnest young man, who paid the railroad fare to California, grocery bills, rent, and for the leisure of six months with books.

But I took one month off and wrote "The Day of Atonement," without the slightest expectation that any magazine would take it, for it touches on the Jew-Gentile question, and I had a notion that most popular magazines prefer to avoid that question. It came originally as a striking feeling about Al Jolson, who is the son of a cantor; the synagogue and the Winter

Garden presented a stimulating contrast as short-story material. In planning my story, I thought again about the Jew, and the contrast between the Jew and the Anglo-Saxon came to me more vividly and articulately than before. It is a dangerous practice, I know, to attempt to explain a character on a race theory, and the best literature is most likely to be written with a human being in mind rather than a social theory or a historical formula. "The Day of Atonement" suffers in its art in the degree in which I attempted to make its hero symbolical of what I believe to be the peculiar qualities inherent in the Jew as a member of his race-a poetical gift for religion, a strong protective instinct, and the courage which comes from a simmering, half-frustrated ego rather than from a simple, direct love of battle. I try to show how these qualities in an unintellectual Jew, bereft of the resources of his race's tradition, translate themselves through the common phenomena of life in New York-the clash and blend of color and of sound which is essentially Broadway and unlike New England and the pioneer West. The Anglo-Saxon in "restraint" seems natural to me; the Jew, as well as the Celt and the Latin, in the full swing of emotional expression seems as natural. That a blend of the two will furnish the flavor of to-morrow's America I believe strongly.

Weary of the eternal paradise which is California, and consciously hungry for education, I came back for a year to my alma mater, to study, to try to write a novel about Mid-Western college life, and to teach, of all things, "Business English." From books and disciplined study I learned a good deal, I believe; and from my teachers

from some of them despite themselves, because I was patient and forbearing with them and could understand, now, what they were trying to convey. I became acquainted in various degrees of intimacy with faculty men, but there were too many occasions when I preferred the company of undergraduates. It was not exactly the year I had expected to spend, and my limited point of view is exhibited fully in "Lizette."

Although loaded with data, I was unable to do the novel. Here at hand were learned men, men with the materials of urbanity, but not one of them lifted me out of the chaos of undergraduate life. Why, I am unable to say. Quite likely a good deal of the difficulty rests ultimately with me. I do believe that not many of them are vitally alive, and most of those who are, apparently found other things more eminently worth while other things not particularly concerned with me or my kind.

87

And that is all. I started out to sketch, with the use of my stories and myself as illustrative material, the writer who is more than likely to be the kind whom the American common people to-day will produce. I believe he is in all significant ways like me. New York is full of him, and Chicago and St. Louis and Minneapolis and Denver and San Francisco. If he is not a Jew, his problem of Americanization is in a large degree different from that of the Jew. But, after all, that part of it is not as important as the other part-the influence of movie and

magazine, sky-scraper and bungalow, newspaper and jazz-time song.

Genius, they say, will out despite all handicaps. On that I do not feel particularly qualified to speak. I suppose it is so. Frankly, I nurse no secret conviction that I have genius, but I do believe I have a flickering of talent, and it is mainly for young men of talent that I speak. Talent will not out so easily; it requires nursing.

I have tried to suggest to our teachers, in whose hands our salvation and the salvation of the country lie, that the stupidities of to-day, when they are embodied in our young people, should be treated with sympathy and patience and humility. When our teachers give us Ovid's "Metamorphoses" to read, and we say, "What dull stuff!" they answer, and rightly: "If you saturate yourself in Ovid's times, you will find it very interesting, if not great. All things cannot be appreciated by current standards of to-day; often truly great literature, to be comprehended, requires historical background in the reader." May we not say to them, similarly, when we present a creative effort, the result of travail and woe: "Do not condemn this, even if it is not great. Do not judge it by the standards of ancient Greece or of ancient Rome or even of nineteenth-century Great Britain, but judge it as a manifestation of twentieth-century America. And remember, while you are judging, that there is one immediate distinction between us and Ovid. He is dead, and we are alive. You cannot change him, but us, if you will, you may bring nearer to the gods."

I

FIRST met Aristides Simonides in the Latin Quarter of Paris. We were of the same age, twenty. Life, as I looked upon it, was but a bridge, an escalator. I was on one of the steps and going upward. There was the usual afternoon talk with friends in the "Café de la Belle Etoile," where all things were discussed while we drank black coffee and light wines. Everything from the latest in music and literature to the fall of the ministerial cabinet passed in review under our youthful analysis. Then before night fell each one brought his petite amie and returned, locked arm in arm, marching in step to the rhythm of a new poem or the melody of a street

song.

We were a noisy lot, and our women companions, since become famous the world over in all branches of the arts, were as noisy as we. In groups of twenty or more nightly we invaded the peaceful streets of the neighborhood and serenaded loudly and long until some young head framed itself in a window. We were not particular as to whom the head belonged. It was our nightly lark. We called that "making love to the world at large." The neighborhood as a whole never objected to our noise. Even the policeman looked on with amusement. "Young students; they amuse themselves."

We were an international group.

All the nations were represented; all the nations and all the continents. We studied hard at times, but we played harder than we studied. We followed our own curriculum, the curriculum of youth, the noisy, wise, happy youth of Paris.

I said "we." "We" is all too inclusive. The exception was the Greek student, Aristides Simonides. He was handsome; "the Greek god" we called him. Tall, lithe, straight, he followed wherever we went, but never actually took part in any of our games and frolics. He listened to our singing, but. did not sing. He accompanied us in our nightly larks, but did not lark. His pale face never showed the slightest emotion. His movements were slow, but precise, and his gestures measured. To one who did not know his great strength he appeared like a man just out of a hospital, recuperating from a serious illness.

After the second bock, we acted as we should have acted after the twentieth, had any of us had money enough to drink that many. We anticipated the effect of the twentieth. We gambled a little. Not for gain; just for the excitement. If one won or lost ten cents at the end of a gambling session, his sensations were akin to his who had lost or won a fortune. Not so Simonides, win or lose. It was all the same to him. He derived no pleasure from beer or gambling; neither gave him