so much, either, because of manners, as because an author is not supposed to utter a word about any work of art save one that he can obviously better himself. That is: unless my own novels are as good as Paul Bourget's, I may not say that Paul Bourget is second-rate even though, in the same breath, I make myself clear by saying that Balzac is first-rate. It may never have occurred to me that my own novels were anything like so good as Paul Bourget's; but every one will say that I think they are better. Every one will at once leap to compare my work with his, to the great detriment of mine. In other words, you must give up your standards, if you are going to write anything yourself or else keep the silence of the grave about them. - - I have had bitter experience. I know whereof I speak. Because I once in answer to earnest solicitation ventured to express my opinion about a certain author (my opinion appeared in print) I was deluged with attack. Editorials, letters to the newspapers, anonymous letters addressed to me personally. The burden of them all was: did I think that my insignificant product could be matched with the work of that great man? My own insignificant product had never occurred to me in that connection. I judged him, as I supposed any enlightened person did, from what I knew about the achievements of the great masters in his genre. In a class-room, it would have been a simple duty to attack him, if discussion of him had come up. But because I 'write,' I have lost all claim to my fastidiousness. Yet we all listen to critics, and some of us take some of them seriously. And very few of our most famous critics do creative work of their own. There is no reason to suppose that, if they took to novel- or verse- or play-writing, they would be any better at it than Sainte Beuve, let us say, or Jules Lemaître, at their 'creative' work. Matthew Arnold wrote good poetry; but he did not write so good poetry as Shelley or Byron or Wordsworth, all of whom he freely criticized. Ought he and these other gentlemen to have held their critical tongues forever because they wrote, themselves, second-rate fiction and poetry and plays? No sane person really thinks so; for any sane person knows that the greatest critical acuteness does not necessarily involve the least creative ability that the two things are quite separate. We cannot silence all our critics because we suspect that they could not write as good novels, say, as the novelists they criticize. Now, it is very easy to say that each had better stick to his own métierlet the critic criticize and the author write. As a rule, that would not be such a bad thing-though we should lose if we applied it, retrospectively, to Dante, for example, or Ben Jonson. But in just one way the rule would be certain to work perniciously. For whether or not the possession of a rigid literary standard tremendously improves the creative work of an author, it is certain that the lack of literary standards is, in the end, bad for our authors. The public seems to take it as an assertion of arrogance that a poet or a novelist should have a poor opinion of the product of any other poet or novelist. In fact, if X says of Y that he is not so great as Shakespeare, people leap to the conclusion that X considers himself as great as Shakespeare, and proceed to sit on him. And unless X is Mr. Bernard Shaw, they are probably mistaken in their conclusion. Nothing makes more for humility than to keep the great works constantly in one's mind; just as nothing makes more for conscientious work on one's own part. That fact is assumed in Arcadia-Academe; that is why Arcadia Academe is such bad preparation for the market-place. In Arcadia we assumed -over-optimistically, no doubt that all writing folk were doing their best-perfectly conscious, meanwhile, that there were infinite grades of goodness in their heterogeneous achievement. And certainly it never occurred to any of us that it could ever conceivably be our duty, if we ourselves came to 'write,' to criticize our fellow toilers any less rigidly than we did ourselves. It would not, perhaps, be the best manners for a novelist to spend all his leisure time in pouring insults on the heads of other novelists, even on the assumption that he deserved his own insults equally with them. But the present public attitude amounts to muzzling. Surely it is not right that a man who is working hard at writing should be expected to abandon forever all his critical sense about writing in general. For it is not merely uttering the criticism that people object to: they object to its being mentally made. And I feel sure that it would be better for us all if we had things out, on the basis of common intellectual standards, in the Arcadian- the academic-spirit. It is inconceivable to me that, if any one wrote an essay on my work (I certainly do not expect that any one ever will), he should be rigid with me only in case he had never himself written my kind of thing, but should lay himself out in meaningless and dishonest flattery, if he had happened to print a few pages, himself, in the genre that I affect. It is strange that an editor ever asks an author to write him a literary essay. But it is one of the seven wonders of the world that an author ever does it. THE PERILS OF TELEPATHY The present period is marked by an increasing distrust of science. We are waking up to the fact that some of the fairest provinces of uncertainty are threatened by the invasion of accurate knowledge. The encroachments of scientific exactness upon guesswork are so insidious, that unless we strengthen our defenses in time, we may lose some of our trustiest strongholds. We have been used to view one spot as well nigh impregnable to clear understanding, and that spot is our own self. For a good many æons we have lived along comfortably, each in a sturdy tower, divining each other's interior only by fallible peepholes, and communicating, when we care to communicate, by means of safe little subterfuges called words. We have been reasonably secure from approach by earth, air, or sea. The whole fabric of society is built on the assumption that we can never get at each other, never really know what our next-door neighbor is up to. It is about time that some one noticed that science is plotting a descent upon this pleasant privacy. If we flatter ourselves that we are going to be allowed to think our own thoughts in isolation, it is high time that we listened to some of the threatening voices that go unheeded. I quote one such, which advocates introducing to this mortal scene the chief inconvenience incident to post-mundane existence. 'One could communicate with extraordinary swiftness and ease by imagination alone. Talk soul to soul, as it were. It is a simple trick and can be practiced between human beings while on earth, and is indeed the best form of conversation.' Do we actually fail to perceive the audacity of the menace implied? The mere indecorousness of naked sincerity is the least of the evils that telepathy will let loose upon us. Courtesy could not exist in a world where people perfectly understood each other. Our manners are none too good as it is, but how the beast and the boor in all of us. would break forth if never controlled by the effort to appear more polite than we feel! If the thoughts, for example, of guest and host were utterly undressed, the one before the other, how long would the gentle amenities of hospitality survive? Who would have the courage to go to a dinner if he had to endure the clatter of people's thoughts about him pounding their way into his brain? Yet in the passage just quoted telepathy is actually advocated as a practice to be encouraged! Fortunately most of us are still so clumsy at it that we are not ready to forego the use of the tongue when we wish to speak; yet at times we are so shortsighted as to deprecate the use of words. Let us, rather, cheerfully continue not to understand each other, mindful how much worse off we should be if we did understand. Although telepathy has not yet come into popular social usage, we occasionally meet people not ashamed to exhibit it as an accomplishment. Such people are most discouraging to conversation. When a person knows what we are going to say before we say it, the effort of expression seems futile; the racy epithet, the felicitous phrase go unspoken. There would presently be no bons mots to be quoted; life would not be enlivened by the twinkling passage of repartee, that light rebound of thought and word, striking against surfaces they cannot pierce. When there are no walls for talk to knock against, and no gates to be opened or shut to other people's penetration, the art of conversation will die, and social intercourse be reduced to a fatuous smirking at each other's faces-or perhaps to a fierce clawing of them, when the thoughts of all hearts shall be revealed. The universal employment of telepathic communication would do away with another prerogative of society, the right to gossip. In our present im perfect means of knowledge, everybody presents a different aspect to everybody else. To gossip is to bring forward for discussion all the data each observer has gathered; it is a comparison of various angles of misunderstanding tending to diffuse unenlightenment and thus to protect the person under examination from an intrusively accurate analysis. Now, if his soul were presented in the same crystalline fidelity to each of us, he himself would neither enjoy privacy of spirit, nor we our game of guessing. If telepathy were once established as being what its advocates claim, 'the best form of conversation,' several established arts, several enjoyable diversions, would fall into immediate desuetude. Novels and plays would cease to be written. Romance and drama are constructed on the assumption that we can never really know one another's thoughts, combined with the illusion that we can if we try. We go to the play, we go to the book, because we delight to observe the infinite permutations and combinations of impact arising from the truth that people cannot read each other's purposes. If the puppets on the stage the playhouse stage and the world stage equally all knew each other's intentions, there would immediately result, for the actors, the paralysis of the plot, and for the audience, all the boredom of omniscience. It is because none of us can tell where other people want to go that we bump into them. Telepathy would introduce the possibility of precaution and thus deprive life of its chief stimulus, unforeseen contact. What we enjoy in a novel is seeing how the author is going to steer his characters to their goal when they are continually being shoved away from it by collisions. In a wretched Utopia, where everybody understood everybody else, there would be no fun in either reading or writing, and literature would languish and disappear. What keeps life going is that it keeps us guessing. Our pet vanity is our power to divine character. Human idiosyncracies are a mystery forever alluring and forever eluding. Now telepathy proposes to come in and reform all this, proposes to teach us how to read souls as easily as spelling-books. Science has the effrontery to present the innovation as ushering in a millennium. I have no desire to go marching into a privacy that bewitches me with invitation so long as I merely peep. Suppose I should find only dust and emptiness in rooms now magic with surmise! I have shown how a system of telepathic communication would disrupt our social life and destroy the literature constructed to reflect that life. There are, however, two darker and deeper dangers incident to letting everybody use the aerial apparatus. If the introduction of telepathy would undermine social intercourse, it would absolutely annul solitude. The wings of the dove could never outdistance the impudent wings of the wireless. Anybody who wished could send his thoughts forth to investigate anybody else's nest in the wilderness. Privacy would rapidly become a prehistoric privilege. Solitude is the chief support of the affections: it would be impossible to love your fellow man if you knew you could never get away from him. Last and most painful peril of all: it is not only my own and my neighbor's retirement that I would preserve impenetrable to mutual invasion: but there are other regions I do not wish to enter with any clear certainty, the skyward chambers of my own high tower of secrecy, where I sometimes entertain a mysterious visitor. If telepathy taught me the language of the spirit, I might inadvertently learn to under stand my own. Let not science be so sacrilegious. When I loaf and invite my own soul, I want the guest to come to me without any telepathic eavesdropping on the part of other people, and without any profaning analysis on my own part. Let no telepathy interrupt my communing with that august presence, my own soul. FLETCHERIZING IN LITERATURE We are all of us familiar with the teachings, if not with the actual writings, of Mr. Horace Fletcher. Moreover, most of us believe those teachings, in substance, to be true. To our shame, however, it must probably be confessed that few of us practice them with any degree of faithfulness. The principles which, between meals, seem acceptable as well as sound, are apt to vanish suddenly when we sit down to a substantial feast, and feel ourselves equipped to do it justice. When the grim form of indigestion steals toward us under cover of the night, however, and we awake to feel his grasp upon our vitals, we resolve henceforth to Fletcherize. The master of mastication, we decide, shall have another faithful and obedient disciple. It is not given to many men or women either to lend their name to a popular cause or movement of reform. But this is a distinction which belongs to Mr. Fletcher. Whether he deserves the honor or not, is another matter. There is no new thing under the sun, and we have it on the authority of the omnivorous Macaulay that the famous Count Rumford unfolded to the Elector of Bavaria a very practical scheme for economizing on the rations of his soldiers. The plan of the scientific count was very simple. The soldiers were to be compelled to masticate their food thoroughly.' For, said the man of science, a century and more ago, ‘a small quantity of food thus eaten would afford more sustenance than a large meal hastily devoured.' Whether or not the Elector of Bavaria acted upon Count Rumford's counsel, history does not say. Perhaps he lacked compelling power over the jaws of his soldiers, and kept on overfeeding them. The Kaiser, however, might issue orders as to the amount of mastication to be applied to bread and sausages in the army and among civilians, and so solve, in part, the present lack of food-supply in Germany. One wonders that it has not been considered, and I hesitate to write these words lest they furnish the Teutons with a weapon whereby to nullify in part the blockade which England has established. It is a poor teaching, however, which does not apply to more than one of life's departments. Adaptability is a law of life as well as an attribute of genius. Man does not live by bread alone. The mind is fed by books. I want to suggest, therefore, that we need another Mr. Fletcher to apply this doctrine, not to the dining-room, but to the readingroom; and not merely to the pantry shelves, but to the shelves of our public libraries. There is a form of literary gluttony prevalent at the present time, which is positively distressing, and which bodes ill for the mental health of coming generations. In our schools and colleges, stuffing is mistaken for studying, and cramming for learning; while among the public generally, skimming takes the place of careful reading, and reading comes to be a substitute for thought. Mental health would certainly be promoted if people should select carefully a few good viands and chew them thoroughly. Many people complain, for instance, of their wretched memories. They read a book this week and have forgotten all about it the next. Perhaps it is well at times that they should forget it. Perhaps there was nothing in it worth remembering. But the process is not wholesome. We remember things when we have cause to think about them; without careful thought there is nothing for memory to lay hold upon. We cannot, of course, lay down any hard-and-fast rule in regard to things like these; nor did Mr. Fletcher himself seek to do so in setting forth his famous system. 'One person,' he declared, 'may dispose of a morsel of bread in thirty mastications so that the last vestige of it has disappeared by involuntary process into the stomach. Another person, of similar general health and appearance, selecting as nearly as possible an equal morsel of bread, may require fifty acts of mastication before the morsel disappears. The next week, by some change of conditions, this order may be reversed.' The methodical Mr. Gladstone, who was no less punctilious at the dinnertable than he was at his desk, found saving grace in the number thirty-two. 'Chew each morsel of food at least thirty-two times,' was the mathematical announcement that he made to the world, as solemnly as if he were dealing with an item in a national budget. But, as Mr. Fletcher well remarked in referring to the English statesman's rule, 'the dictum has little value except as a general suggestion. Some morsels will not resist thirty-two mastications, while others will defy seven hundred.' He himself had found, so he tells us, that 'one-fifth of an ounce of the mid-way section of the garden young onion, sometimes called "challot," has required seven hundred and twenty-two mastications before disappearing through involuntary swallowing. After the tussle, however, the young onion left no odor upon the breath, and joined the happy family in |