"I remember when one of the most widely read of our magazines was a popular science monthly, which printed articles by great scientists on biological and other topics. That was in the days when Darwin was announcing his theory of evolution--the first great jolt which orthodoxy received. People would not take time to read a magazine of that sort now. They are so occupied with business and dancing and all sorts of occupations that they have little leisure for reading." Mr. Chambers stopped talking suddenly and laughed. "I'm not a good man for you to bring these questions to," he said, "because I never have had any special reverence for books or literature as such. I reverence the books that I like, not all books." "And have you such a thing as a favorite author?" I asked. "Yes," said Mr. Chambers. "Dumas." During the 1870's Mr. Chambers was an art student in Paris, and he has many interesting memories of the French and English writers and painters who have made that period memorable. He knew Paul Verlaine (whose poetry he greatly admires), Charles Conder, and Aubrey Beardsley. "One day," he said, "I was out on a shooting-trip--I think it was in Belgium--and I met a young English poet, a charming fellow, whose work I was later to know and like. It was the poet who wrote at least one great poem--'Cynara'--it was Ernest Dowson. "I knew many of the Beaux Arts crowd, because my brother was a student of architecture at the Beaux Arts. And they were a decent, clean crowd--they were not 'decadents.' I do not take much stock in the pose of 'decadence,' nor in the artistic temperament. I never saw a real artist with the artistic temperament. I always associated that with weakness." Mr. Chambers, although he has intimate knowledge of the Quartier Latin, has little use for "Bohemia." "What is Bohemia?" he asked. "If it is a place where a number of artists huddle together for the sake of animal warmth, I have nothing to say against it. But if it is a place where a number of artists come to scorn the world, then it is a dangerous thing. The artist should not separate himself from the world. "These artistic and literary cults are wrong. I do not believe in professional clubs and cliques. If writers form a combination for business reasons, that is all right, but a writer should not associate exclusively with other writers; he should do his work and then go out and see and talk to people in other professions. We should sweep the cobwebs from the profession of writing and not try to fence it in from the public." To the somewhat trite question as to the effects of the war on literature, Mr. Chambers made first his usual modest answer, "I don't know." But when I told him of the author who had dogmatically stated that war always stops literature, and that the Civil War had produced no writing worthy of preservation, Mr. Chambers reconsidered.