_Salomé_ will always remain one of the world’s great symphonies,—a symphony in which the motive of doom rends your soul from the first sound to the last. _Poems in Prose_ will never lose their charm as ivory-carved bits of ideal conversation—the art in which Wilde was supreme, the art that is almost unknown in this country where it is substituted by talk. His other works are doomed to be time’s victims. Not because they are worthless, but for the reason of their adaptability. One must be a prophet, a Nietzsche, who hurls his seeds over many generations, in order to endure. Wilde was aware of this danger, and he wished to be misunderstood, but he lacked the profundity for such a merit. He did not mirror his age; but he had realized the potentialities of his age, had popularized them to such a degree that they have become the possession of the crowd. We are not any longer dazzled by the clever witticisms in his _Plays_; they have become almost commonplace. Even the graceful, radiating _Intentions_ appear to us somewhat obvious. Why?—It is the pathos of proximity! Wilde’s paradoxes, _mots_, theories, have proven so appropriate, adaptable, and digestible for our age, that it took only one decade to absorb them into our blood and marrow. Cleverism for the sake of cleverism has come to be an epidemic in our days; cleverists find Wilde an inexhaustible source for parasitic exploitation. Our Hunekers (and under this appellative I have in mind the legions of our omniscient boulevardiers-critics) don a Wildesque robe, and have little trouble in passing as genuine before the good-natured public. Unfortunately the constitution of the Hunekers is too weak to absorb Wilde’s big truths; they prefer the digestible chaff. Adaptability spells forgetability. Crime and punishment. Solitude DAVID O’NEIL Youth! If there be madness In your soul, Go to the mountain solitudes Where you can grow up To your madness. The Novelist SHERWOOD ANDERSON The novelist is about to begin the writing of a novel. For a year he will be at the task and what a year he will have! He is going to write the story of Virginia Borden, daughter of Fan Borden, a Missouri river raftsman. There in his little room he sits, a small, hunched-up figure with a pencil in his hand. He has never learned to run a type-writer and so he will write the words slowly and painfully, one after another on the white paper.