This is not an essay in reform; it is content to be a question mark; but one bit of preaching may slip in at the end. Why give eye and ear all the fine experiences? Why not do something for poor, slovenly mind? The truth is that we are lazy. In a stage full of shimmering beauty, in a concert of chamber music, in a fine building, or an admirable sketch, others do the work, we have only to gaze or listen in order to pluck some, at least, of the fruits of art. But fine novels take fine reading; fine essays take fine thinking; fine poetry takes fine feeling. We balk at the effort, and ask, like the audience at the movies, that eye should take the easier way. And hence the American reader still faintly suggests the Fiji Islander, who wears a silk hat and patent leathers on a tattooed naked body. For all we can tell, that may be the direction of Progress. In 2021 New Yorkers may be gazing at a city beautiful, where even the subways give forth sweet sounds; and reading novelized movies in words of one syllable. Eye may win the race and starve out the other members. It would be a bad future for publishers and authors; and I am against it, even as a possibility. Hence my energies will be devoted to poking, thrilling, energizing, tonicking that lazy old organism, half asleep still--Mind. OUT WITH THE DILETTANTE A few years ago drums and trumpets in American magazines and publishers' advertisements announced that the essay was coming to its own again. We were to vary our diet of short stories with pleasing disquisitions, to find in books of essays a substitute for the volume of sermons grown obsolete, and to titillate our finer senses by graceful prose that should teach us without didacticism, and present contemporary life without the incumbrance of a plot. The promise was welcome. American literature has been at its very best in the essay. In the essay, with few exceptions, it has more often than elsewhere attained world-wide estimation. Emerson, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes were primarily essayists. Hawthorne and Irving were essayists as much as romancers. Franklin was a common sense essayist. Jonathan Edwards will some day be presented (by excerpt) as a moral essayist of a high order. And there was Lowell. Have they had worthy successors? In the years after the Civil War certainly none of equal eminence. But it is too early to say that the trumpets and drums of the last decade were false heralds. The brilliant epithets of Chesterton, the perfect sophistication of Pearsall Smith (an American, but expatriated), the placid depth of Hudson's nature studies, are not paralleled on this side of the water, yet with Crothers, Gerould, Repplier, Colby, Morley, Strunsky, we need not fear comparison in the critical genre, unless it be with the incomparable Max Beerbohm.