have benefitted by it, the literary aspirant is lost unless his powers mature at once. But the lack of great leaders, of a strong and self-respecting literary guild (the one results from the other)--is not this our chief misfortune? In the best of circumstances, and considering all the devils that beset the creative spirit, a strong impulse is scarcely enough to carry one through: one must feel not only that one is doing what one wishes to do but that what one is doing _matters_. If dozens of American writers have fallen by the wayside because they have met with insuperable obstacles, dozens of others have fallen, with all their gifts, because they have lost interest in their work, because they have ceased to “see the necessity” of it. This is just the point where the presence of a leader, of a local tradition, a school, a guild makes all the difference. “With the masters I converse,” writes Gauguin in his journal. “Their example fortifies me. When I am tempted to falter I blush before them.” If that could have been true of Gauguin, the “Wolf,” who walked by himself as few have walked, what shall we say of other men whose artistic integrity, whose faith in themselves, is exposed every day to the corroding influences of a third-rate civilization? It would be all very well if literature were merely a mode of “having a good time;” I am speaking of those, the real artists, who, with Nietzsche, make a distinction (illusory perhaps) between “happiness” and “work,” and I say that these men have always fed on the thought of greatness and on the propinquity of greatness. It was not for nothing that Turgeniev bore in his memory, as a talisman, the image of Pushkin; that Gorky, having seen Tolstoy once, sitting among the boulders on the seashore, felt everything in him blending in one happy thought, “I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.” The presence of such men immeasurably raises the morale of the literary life: that is what Chekhov meant when he said, “I am afraid of Tolstoy’s death,” and is it not true that the whole contemporary literature of England has drawn virtue from Thomas Hardy? The sense that one is _working in a great line_: this, more than anything else perhaps, renews one’s confidence in the “quaint mania of passing one’s life wearing oneself out over words,” as Flaubert called it, in the still greater folly of pursuing one’s ego when everything in life combines to punish one for doing so. The successful pursuit of the ego is what makes literature; this requires not only a certain inner intensity but a certain courage, and it is doubtful whether, in any nation, any considerable number of men can summon up that courage and maintain it unless they have _seen the thing done_. The very notion that such a life is either possible or desirable, the notion that such a life exists even, can hardly occur to the rank and file: some individual has to start the ball rolling, some individual