Let us lay aside theory and observe the effects of want upon the artist and his work. As a stimulus to the whole man, a prod to get him into action and keep him active, the spur of poverty is a blessing. But if it enter into the detail of his attention, while he is at work, it is damnation. A man at work is like a string that is vibrating. Touch it with a feather and it is numb. A singer will sing flat if he sees a friend in the audience. Even a trained and cold-blooded lawyer who is trying a case, will not be at his best if he is watched by some one whom he wants to impress. The artist is the easiest of all men to upset. He is dealing with subtle and fluid things,--memories, allusions, associations. It is all gossamer and sunlight when he begins. It is to be gossamer and sunlight when he is finished. But in the interim it is bricks and mortar, rubble and white lead. And the writer--I do not say that he must be more free from cares than the next man--but he must not let into the mint and forge of his thought some immaterial and petty fact about himself, for this will make him self-conscious. Consider how ingenuous, how unexpected, how natural is good conversation. At one moment you have nothing to say, at the next a vista of ideas has opened. They come crowding in, and the telling of them reveals new vistas. It is the same with the writer. In the process of writing the story is made. There is really nothing to say or do in the world until you make your start, and then the significance begins to steam out of the materials. And here, in the act and heat of creation, to have the cold fear thrust in, “I cannot use that phrase because the editor will think it too strong,” is enough to chill the brain of Rabelais. Human nature cannot stand such handling. Do this to a man and you break his spirit. He becomes tame, calculating, and ingenious. His powers are frozen. It is impossible not to see in contemporary journalism a slaughter-house for mind. Here we have a great whale that browses on the young and eats them by thousands. This is the seamy side of popular education. The low level of the class at the dame’s school keeps the bright boys back and makes dunces of them. We have been dealing in all this matter with one of the deepest facts of life, to wit, the influence that society at large has in cutting down and narrowing the development of the individual. The newspaper business displays the whole operation very vividly; but we may see the same thing happening in the other walks of life. There arrives a time in the career of most men when their powers become fixed. Men seem to expand to definite shapes, like those Japanese cuttings that open out into flowers and plants when you drop them into warm water. After reaching his saturation point each man fills his niche in society and changes little. He goes on doing whatever he was engaged upon at the time he touched his limit.