Would you be an essayist, sketching graphic stories or typical characters; an historian, cataloging the treasures of archives, and chronicling epochs of catastrophe and calm; or a philosopher, systematizing theories of Stoics, Hedonists, Peripatetics and Scholastics; or a poet, composing idylls and madrigals, lyrics and odes with strophes and the epics with episodes, you are mine. Without me you have not talents or ideas or paper or ink. Mine are your grammar and syntax, your syllables, your paragraphs with their commas and colons and parentheses, your lexicons and encyclopedias and card-catalogs, your topics and themes for ecstatic rhapsodies or for austere logic, your fantastic paradoxes and your idiotic theories. ’Tis I who phrase for you your axioms, caustic criticisms, laconic epigrams, all your irony and sardonic sarcasm. If your technique is idiomatic, your methods puzzling or crystal, your tropes are metaphors graphic, your fancies hectic or anæmic, you are mine. I am your enthusiastic stenographer, jotting down and synopsizing your ideas and typing them to be stereotyped in your authentic tomes, whether anonymous or under a pseudonym. I apologize for my tautologies, for this monotonous labyrinth, for the phalanx of technicalities and for the etymological mosaic which strangles your larynx with “ics” and “isms.” Whether it is all abysmal bathos, or the climax and acme of the practical, I am to blame for it. But pause before you ostracize me from my schools; pause ere the nemesis of chaos and disaster is yours; but if you are to be characterized as adamant and without sympathy, let the poets echo a threnody about my coffin; let there be a chorus of pæans under the cypress and cedar, the larch and osier, the myrtle and amaranth, about my cenotaph; let there be in my cemetery a mausoleum with a monolith, and on it my epitaph: The Lexicons of Europe Are the Trophies of Greece. NOTE: THE NATURE OF ESTHETIC ENJOYMENT Esthetic pleasure or the enjoyment of the beautiful is generally admitted to be disinterested. Possession and ownership do not enter into the esthetic act. The ownership of Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is not an object of indifference or of disinterested attention. Thieves scheme for the ownership, thousands covet it, guards protect it. But the enjoyment of “Mona Lisa” is not selfish and exclusive in its nature. Esthetic enjoyment makes abstraction of possession and of selfish good. It follows therefore that esthetic enjoyment is a function of man’s knowledge, not of man’s desires and appetites. The only condition upon which the appetites, whether bodily or spiritual, can operate is that they be energized by personal good. Volition may be free, but it cannot be disinterested. You may enjoy another’s picture; you cannot eat his dinner, nor can you be indifferent to what you know to be for your good.