It may be accepted as an axiom that the strong are always audacious, and so when we hear of any man in literature who is shocking and rumpling all the susceptibilities of nice, quiet, drowsy people we may be sure that his capital crime is independence of thought and opinion. He is looking at life for himself, instead of through the refracted lenses of old class habit or antiquated religious dogma. And it is a thousand to one he has the criminal audacity to be young; for the vision of youth is clearer and more sure, and more pitying than the old green or crimson goggles of selfish age, that would paint the world as popes and kings and classes and governments, with rewards and honors to give, would have it. All men whose life and work make for the uplifting of human conditions and thought are set in the way of truth before reaching thirty. If a man is timorous before thirty, he will be an unmitigable coward, perhaps knave, for the rest of his days. And today the only profession which demands any active spirit of heroism is the calling of literature, that has become the _Deus ex machina_ of all modern civilized life. [Illustration] Every truly ambitious writer, or for that matter, every manly writer, be he a genius or a mediocrity, has certain large ideal aims to serve in all his literature. It is not enough for a manly man to simply evoke applause. A nude nymph from the gutter of Paris dancing a can-can on a cafe table, also lives by popular suffrage, and wins such popular approbation as is never given to literature--the incoherent cries in which the whole body emits its tingling void of aching, sensuous delight, the deep, whole-hearted greed of the flaming instincts and soul of the race. There are a thousand arts and tricks that gain applause and good pay, and have the world’s countenance (and ours, for we are not such rigid moralists as to try to upset nature); but it is the business of the artist to gain respect, not for himself as an individual, for in that capacity we can allow much to temptation, but for his precious art, which is the voice of all the dumb ones of our kind. Surely, if there is any thing that Almighty God could forbear in tenderness to destroy, of all man’s sad attempts to win a home in this inhospitable world, it is the written pages that hold the highest aspirations of the human soul--some pages that we, in our overweening pride in the glory of our fellows, think hold a beauty and breadth that must partake of Divinity itself. But the wind of deathless Time is rushing even now, and we know that nothing can escape its touch.