Your “Push-Face” is precisely to the point. Its weakest part is your satire on clothes and appearance. To seize upon the merely external, to ridicule a woman because of her age, is the easiest and therefore the most journalistic form of humor. I am certain that in time we shall come into a form of wit so potent that it will deal with character as you deal with double-chins and tunics. You yourself attain this penetrating force of satire when you throw up against the Red-Cross activity the activity of the police in pushing back the little children from the slums beyond the Square. [You seem to me to be a bit confused in your criticism of my “Push-Face” article. “Its weakest part is your satire on clothes and appearance”—and later you are certain that we shall come into a form of wit so potent that it will deal with character as I dealt with double-chins and tunics (appearance and clothes). But I feel certain that we shall never come into a time when the reader will be penetrating enough to recognize psychology from a mere dealing with “externals”. The part you criticise was an attempt to strike through externals to suggest a psychology of anatomy,—a psychology founded on a theory that the definitive lines of the body take their intention from something more fundamental than will power. I have not read Dr. Adler’s theory of the “fictitious goal”. But I have learned from my study of the human body, in drawing from it, and from that eternal observation of it which becomes a tireless and almost unconscious preoccupation of the painter,—I have learned that it is possible for even the slightly intelligent to stamp his body with all the movement, bearing, and spirit of some cherished ideal or some protective colouring of himself which he wishes to present to the world. In great stress or in crises where the entire will power is overthrown or engaged elsewhere the body, like the mind, assumes its true lines and presence. On the stage this is a very simple way of unmasking a character,—you will say, an obvious way. Then why may not the fictitious role be obvious to the painter,—not a matter of “mere externals” but a legitimate thing to seize upon as a subject for satire or what you choose? This class of people—those of the fictitious role—are really the richest material for Art. It is only in cases where there is creative power back of the fictitious role that the thing itself becomes an art: in poets, musicians, painters, etc., when the fictitious becomes a thing created, where with mind and body they have created a wholly new, unshakable, well-designed character from themselves. Byron, the unwanted, spiritless, club-footed child who created from this material a brilliant symbol of romantic manly beauty, “flashing a flaming heart across Europe”. But all this is too interesting and immense to deal with in a paragraph. Sometime perhaps I will go into it at length.—_jh._]