I don’t believe that this is a healthy state of affairs. I believe that business should be left to commonplace and insensitive minds, and that men of originality, and hence of genuine charm, should be sucked automatically into enterprises of a greater complexity and subtlety. It is done in more ancient countries; it has been done from remote antiquity under civilizations that have aged in the wood, and are free from fusel oil. But it is not yet done in These States. Only an overwhelming natural impulse--perhaps complicated by insanity--can urge an American into the writing of fugues or epics. The pull is toward the investment securities business. That pull, yielded to, leads to high rewards. The successful business man among us--and only the sheer imbecile, in such gaudy times as these, is not successful--enjoys the public respect and adulation that elsewhere bathe only bishops and generals of artillery. He is treated with dignity in the newspapers, even when he appears in combat with his wife’s lover. His opinion is sought upon all public questions, including the æsthetic. In the stews and wine-shops he receives the attention that, in old Vienna, used to be given to Beethoven. He enjoys an aristocratic immunity to most forms of judicial process. He wears the _legion d’honneur_, is an LL. D. of Yale, and is received cordially at the White House. The literary gent, however worthy, scales no such heights under our _Kultur_. Only one President since the birth of the Republic has ever welcomed men of letters at the White House, and that one, the sainted Roosevelt, judged them by their theological orthodoxy and the hair upon their chests. A few colored poets were added to make the first pages; that was all. The literati thus wander about somewhat disconsolately among us, and tend to become morose and dull. If they enjoy the princely fees of the train-boy magazines, they are simply third-rate business men--successful, perhaps, but without the Larger Vision. If they happen to be genuine artists--and now and then it _does_ happen--they are as lonely as life insurance solicitors at a convention of Seventh Day Adventists. Such sorrows do not make for _Gemütlichkeit_. There is much more of it in the pants business. 3 _Birth Pangs_