I asked Mr. McCutcheon if he believed that a writer could produce sensational and poorly constructed fiction in order to make a living and yet keep his talent unimpaired; if a writer was justified in writing trash in order to gain leisure for serious work. He replied: "There are writers to-day who persist in turning out what they vaingloriously describe as 'stuff to meet the popular demand.' They invariably or inevitably declare that some day they will 'be in a position to write the sort of stuff they want to write.' "These writers say, in defense of their position, that they are not even trying to do their best work, that they are merely biding their time, and that--some day! I very much doubt their sincerity, or, at any rate, their capacity for self-analysis. I believe that when an author sets himself down to write a book (I refer to any author of recognized ability), he puts into that book the best that is in him at the time. "It is impossible for a good, conscientious writer to work on a plane lower than his best. Only hack writers can do such things. "There is not one of us who does not do his best when he undertakes to write his book. We only confess that we have not done our best when a critic accuses us of pot-boiling, and so forth. Then we rise in our pride and say, 'Oh, well, I can do better work than this, and they know it.' "It is true that we may not be doing the thing that we really want to do, but I am convinced that we are unconsciously doing our best, just the same. It all resolves itself into this statement--a good workman cannot deliberately do a poor piece of work. "I am free to confess that I have done my very best in everything I have undertaken. It may fall short of excellence as viewed from even my own viewpoint, but it is the best I know how to do. "So you may take it from me that the writer who declares that he is going to do something really worth while, just as soon as he gets through doing the thing that the public expects him to do, is deceiving himself and no one else. An author cannot stand still in his work. He either progresses or retrogrades, and no man progresses except by means of steady improvement. He cannot say, 'I will write a poor book this year and a great book next year.'" Mr. McCutcheon is so unashamedly a romanticist that I expected to find him an enthusiastic partisan of the first and greatest master of the romantic novel in English. But, to my surprise, he said: "I suppose the world has outgrown Sir Walter Scott's novels. It is quite natural that it should. The world is older and conditions have changed. The fairest simile I can offer in explanation is that as man himself grows older he loses, except in a too frequently elastic memory, his interest in the things that moved him when he was a boy."