"Exploits, however splendidly achieved, come, by length of time, to be less known to fame, or even forgotten among posterity. In this manner the renown of many kings has faded, and their deeds have sunk with them into the grave where their bodies lie buried,--deeds that had been performed with great magnificence when unanimous applause set them up as models before the people. The ancient Greeks, aware of this, were wise enough to use the pen as a remedy against oblivion." _10._ _Flaws in the Spur_ § 88 The literary artist plays, I had said, not merely in such fashions as I had enumerated. He plays, even over and above all this, with the notion that his self-diversions are altruistic and for the large benefit of posterity. This idea is, to the considerate, inexplicable: but nobody need seriously question its potency. "Fame is the spur," as Milton some while since observed, that very often rowels the artist into doing rather objectionably painstaking work. For custom assumes that time deals very carefully with reading-matter, omnisciently discarding the trash, and preserving to outlast a kingdom or two that which is finest. And probably the notion of this posthumous atonement for the current era's stupidity has heartened, in every era, the creative writer who viewed with a shared seriousness his craft and his income. One may permissibly wonder, none the less, if time does right all unfailingly, in quite this taken-for-granted fashion. The present generation is the utmost that has thus far been produced in the way of posterity. It seems, at least, remarkable that we who have made the Saturday Evening Post a literary success second only to the Telephone Book should be the clear-eyed cognoscenti to whom dead poets appealed; and that it was in our standards of criticism they invested their life's labor and confidence. For _Les Contes Drolatiques_ were, really, written for the beguilement of Dr. Brander Matthews[11] and it was with an eye upon Mr. H.L. Mencken that à Kempis compiled the _Imitation of Christ_. § 89