responsibilities, and is contentedly expounding the notions of George Moore. So one must not take these realistic novels over-seriously. That sort of realism--the realism of "the human document" and the selected "corner of creation," here to re-echo that far time's old-fangled catchwords,--was, as they said, the "trend" of that era. And even to-day, with the innate conservatism of youth, still do the immature laboriously transcribe the insignificant, in their exposures of the inadequacy of American standards and the loneliness of the budding artist in one or another parish of Philistia. These "trends" we, willy-nilly, must put up with.... § 83 Of course, there is not, and never has been, in any important sense, any trend in literature. One says, in any important sense, because of the so amply attested fact that the only books which ultimately count, for their permitted season, are adequate expressions, not of any ideas just then in the air (to employ that delightfully two-edged phrase), but of the individual being who wrote that particular book. And personality seems a remarkably haphazard affair. You are born, for one inexplicable reason or another, as such and such a person, as a person endowed with private and especial faults and hallucinations. And if your book is ultimately to count, however transiently, you will in your book have managed to expose that person, very much as Mr. Moore came in the end to do, without talking or thinking any nonsense about "trends." You will have contrived, in fine, your own particular "method": and in contriving it you will do well to remember that, just as I pointed out at the beginning, there must always be, to the last digit, precisely as many "methods" as there are novelists. Meanwhile, to be sure, the popular styles in books for the intelligentsia must always be varying, somewhat as every season the styles a little alter in disbeliefs and neckwear, and give room to some other method of irritating the conventional. And all really competent manufacturers of reading-matter, whether as publishers or authors, must always stay upon the alert to cater to the latest hebetude of serious-minded persons sufficiently cultured to assume that whatever they cannot quite understand or read with reasonable pleasure is probably high art. But the philosopher recalls that, somewhat to emend the proverb, every vogue has its day; and that, also, all literary modes must pass, pass very often with a hullabaloo, but always with rapidity.