By the novelist who is more tradesman than artist, and who is guided by ideals rather than selfishness, this truth is not recognised: and he often commits the deadly error of succumbing to praiseworthy motives. He, as a rule, indeed, wrong-headedly begins by considering his public's real virtues and aspirations; he endeavors to strengthen these by finding for them vicarious exercise: and he thus allows himself to be misled into evanescence through philanthropy. Now it is the privilege of the public (which, to be sure, has an alternative) to consider the artist: but the artist who for one half second during his hours of play with ink and paper considers anybody except himself is contriving a suicide without dignity. For the one really ponderable sort of writer--the writer who communicates to us something of his own delight and interest in his playing, and who thus in the end contributes to our general human happiness,--has been influenced while about this playing by none save selfish considerations. He has written wholly to divert himself: he has for that moment been inclavated to pleasure-seeking with somewhat the ruthlessness of a Nero and all the tenacity of a débutante: and if I seem unduly to emphasise this obvious fact, it is merely because the man afterward so often lies about it. Some tale-tellers find themselves most readily bedrugged by yearning toward loveliness unknown and unobtainable: these are, we say, our romanticists. To them are, technically, opposed such Pollyannas among fiction writers as Mr. Theodore Dreiser and Mr. Sinclair Lewis, who can derive a species of obscure æsthetic comfort from considering persons even less pleasantly situated than themselves,--somewhat as a cabin passenger on a sinking ship might consider the poor devils in the steerage,--and so turn rhyparographer, and write "realism." The process is not unnatural, and has been more or less profitable since at least the time of Piræicus. But, either way, the inspiring principle remains unchanged: you think of that which is above or below you in order to avoid thinking of what is about you. So it really does not greatly matter whether you travel with Marco Polo to Cathay or with the Kennicotts to Gopher Prairie. The excursion may be for the purpose of looking at beautiful things wistfully or at ugly things contemptuously: the point is that it is an excursion from the place where you regard over-familiar things with a yawn.