Perhaps it is, with such
people, a case of arrested development. Boys of sixteen and girls of
fourteen have supplied the poets with their greatest love stories and
direst tragedies. And there are men and women well gone into middle age
who balk and stammer in the presence of the most elementary sensation.
Perhaps at bottom it is simply a question of courage and cowardice.
In any case, being behind the times is a peculiarly unfortunate trait in
a man, who, like myself, is condemned to earn his bread in the sweat of
his fountain-pen. In what other profession must a man be so emphatically
up to the minute as in this scribbling profession of ours? Only
yesterday I walked into an editor's office and suggested a
three-thousand word review of "The Rise of Silas Lapham," which I told
him was one of the greatest novels in any language. He stared at me and
asked if I hadn't some fresher book in mind, and I, somewhat taken
aback, told him that I was just finishing Frank Norris's "McTeague" and
was about to begin on Mrs. Wharton's "House of Mirth." With a brutality
characteristic of editors he asked me whether I didn't care to write a
review of Homer's Iliad and the book of Deuteronomy.
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