"Of course, the ideal novelist would at one time or another have been anything. The ideal novelist has two passions, people and words, and he should have had and should continue to have as many points of contact with life as possible. But if he has reached the point where he can write to please me, I want him not to waste time doing anything else. "Personally, I wish I might have been, for varying intervals, a Russian Grand Duke, an Eighth Avenue undertaker, the manager of a five-and-ten-cent store, a head waiter, a burglar, a desk sergeant at the Thirtieth Street Police Station, and a malefactor of great wealth, preferably one that gets into the snapshots at Newport, reading from left to right. But Heaven has denied me practically all of these avenues to a knowledge of my humankind, and I am too busy keeping up with the current styles of all millinery fiction to take to any of them at this late day. "Besides, I have a bad example to deter me, having just read _The High Priestess_, by Robert Grant, who has another business than novel writing--something connected with the law, I believe, in Boston. I have no means of knowing how valuable a civic unit he may have been in his home town, but I do feel that he has cheated the world of a great deal by keeping to this other business, whatever it may be. "From the author of _Unleavened Bread_ we once had a right to expect much. But _The High Priestess_ chiefly makes me regret that he didn't have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have forgotten--for he did know it once--that a novelist may or may not think straight, but he must feel. "Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist would starve in any other business." I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their time." Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?" he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway? True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain, arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have attained the world stature--so that we must go back and back to Cervantes to find his like." _THE PASSING OF THE SNOB_ EDWARD S. MARTIN