There are still thousands of us who are so obscure and unfortunate as to be untroubled by the interviewers, and, to make matters worse, are often tabooed by the critics. But since the calling of letters is no more restricted to the “deserving” and the “good” than any other, these also desire that publicity which helps to solve the problem of bread and butter. And so I predict that the pressure of competition in the Literary Show, and the exigencies of critical writing, often colored, if not inspired, by counting-house interests, will soon bring into current literature what I have here termed the critical autobiography. In this way we may get much good literature, for the dullest man is at his best when writing about himself. A man can then be perfectly independent, and still be heralded in print as one of the potent forces and geniuses of his day. The plan has some advantages over log-rolling, which sometimes involves unavoidable and ludicrous derogatory offices, that embarrass one’s reputation as a wit and a critic of discernment. It is also really time that the writers of books learned to take something of the same vulgar view of them which those who make their living in dealing in them do, and that is to regard them when finally out of the brain and put into material shape merely as _merchandise_. It is this looking upon them as “children” that has made the poets the spoil of cunning men, and kept them daft and poor. The writer’s problem is to reach his fellows, his generation. He is not, under modern conditions, concerned with posterity any more than the lawyer or the merchant. As for that, probably few books of this era will be known by name a hundred years hence; but every man should have a fair chance of getting a hearing in his own generation. As things are at present constituted, a thousand obstacles are placed in the way by other writers in the holy name of morality, style, literary ideals, and every other ingenious trick one writer can devise as a critic and literary tipstaff to keep others from dimming the effulgence of his golden beams. But, pouf! all this anxiety is unnecessary. At least one-half of our contemporary literature, though it is “boomed” and bought at impressive figures, is only passable journalism, and, perhaps, will be thrown aside and forgotten as unreliable data when the journals of today (such as not being printed on wood pulp paper may perchance survive) are treasured as the mirror of our semi-barbaric times. [Illustration]