"James--we will call him that--is red-headed, freckled, plain, and generally not at all dudish. He is, however, true, loyal, devoted and determined to do some good in the world. He tries to meet her every day after work. He often brings a flower with him, tucked up in his sleeve. Once we saw him press it to his lips, for soon the bloom will be hers. But she is reading an historical novel, and even the flower fails to deliver his message and fades without fulfilling its mission. Of course, James has this advantage over the ideal hero in the novel: that he really exists; but what is reality to the glowing fancy of a youthful maiden? And in spite of his existence, where does James come in? "These are local and popular incidents I have mentioned, but in a measure all literature, all art has created impossible dreams, unattainable ideals. This is probably the reason why so many aspirations have failed. They were not founded on reality. There are in life considerations 'without which the noblest dreams are a form of opium eating.' Who knows how many have gone grieving through life because they have followed the phantoms conjured up by the false standards of art? With all that is great and grand, heroic and epic in real life there is still such a thing as '_The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,_ _The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky._' "Anyway, it is about time to protest against the false heroes of paper and ink, who cut us out of our earthly paradise, to give our rivals in fiction the death stab; about time to remember that that which is not cannot be great, and that all the beauty of this universe is in real life. It is about time to deny the existence of that which does not exist. "This demand for the superhuman is inhuman. We are not what we are not. We cannot do what we cannot do, and these platitudes are as profound as they are obvious. The weakness of the world is pointed out by its heromania. That we look for our heroes not in life but in artificial creations shows how blind we are. The most striking sign of our imperfection is our longing for impossible perfection. Life has a great grudge against art. It has been slighted, disregarded, abused. With its misleading models it has set up an unjust competition against life. The hope is that the artists to come will give life a hearing and adjust matters. As for the novelists, every time the good Mr. Howells horsewhips the swashbucklers I heartily applaud him. But I am not going to lay down any principles. I don't feel like it to-day. Perhaps things as they were were for the best. Perhaps it is for the dreams of women that there are real men in the world to-day. Perhaps it is their longing for the impossible that made the best that is possible to-day. I sometimes think that a woman's reason is the very acme of all wisdom. But I am going to treat this thing more fully in my volume of essays--if I ever get around to writing them."