This habit of the reader of wanting each author to give only what he has given before exercises the same subtly suggestive influence as all other popular demands. It is one of the most insidious temptations to the young artist to go on doing what he already knows how to do, and knows he will be praised for doing. But the mere fact that so many people want him to write in a certain way ought to fill him with distrust of that way. It would be a good thing for letters if the perilous appeal of popularity were oftener met in the spirit of the New England shop-keeper who, finding a certain penknife in great demand, did not stock that kind the following year because, as he said, too many people came bothering him about it.

VIII

GOETHE declared that only the Tree of Life was green, and that all theories were gray; and he also congratulated himself on never "having thought about thinking." But if he never thought about thinking he did think a great deal about his art, and some of the axioms he laid down for its practice go deeper than those of the professed philosophers.

The art of fiction, as now practised, is a recent one, and the arts in their earliest stages are seldom theorized on by those engaged in creating them; but as soon as they begin to take shape their practitioners, or at least those of the number who happen to think as well as to create, perforce begin to ask themselves questions. Some may not have Goethe's gift for formulating the answers, even to themselves; but these answers will eventually be discoverable in an added firmness of construction and appropriateness of expression. Other writers do consciously lay down rules, and in the search for new forms and more complex effects may even become the slaves of their toofascinating theories. These are the true pioneers, who are never destined to see their own work fulfilled, but build intellectual houses for the next generation to live in.

Henry James was of this small minority. As he became more and more preoccupied with the architecture of the novel he unconsciously subordinated all else to his ever-fresh complexities of de

sign, so that his last books are magnificent projects for future masterpieces rather than living creations. Such an admission may seem to reinforce the argument against theorizing about one's art; but there are few Jameses and fewer Goethes in any generation, nor is there ever much danger in urging mankind to follow a counsel of perfection. In the case of most novelists, such thought as they spare to the art, its range and limitations, far from sterilizing their talent will stimulate it by giving them a surer command of their means, and will perhaps temper their eagerness for popular recognition by showing them that the only reward worth having is in the quality of the work done.

The foregoing considerations on the writing of fiction may seem to some dry and dogmatic, to others needlessly complicated; still others may feel that in the quest for an intelligible working theory the gist of the matter has been missed. No doubt there is some truth in all these objections; there would be, even had the subject been far more fully and adequately treated. It would appear that in the course of such enquiries the gist of the matter always does escape. Just as one thinks to cast a net over it, a clap of the wings, and it is laughing down on one from the topmost bough of the Tree of Life!

Is all seeking vain, then? Is it useless to try for a clear view of the meaning and method of one's art? Surely not. If no art can be quite pent-up in the rules deduced from it, neither can it fully realize itself unless those who practice it attempt to take its measure and reason out its processes. It is true that the gist of the matter always escapes, since it nests, the elusive bright-winged thing, in that mysterious fourth-dimensional world which is the artist's inmost sanctuary and on the threshold of which enquiry perforce must halt; but though that world is inaccessible, the creations emanating from it reveal something of its laws and processes.

Here another parenthesis must be opened to point out once more that, though this world the artist builds about him in the act of creation reaches us and moves us through its resemblance to the life we know, yet in the artist's consciousness its essence, the core of it, is other. All

worthless fiction and inefficient reviewing are based on the forgetting of this fact. To the artist his world is as solidly real as the world of experience, or even more so, but in a way entirely different; it is a world to and from which he passes without any sense of effort, but always with an uninterrupted awareness of the passing. In this world are begotten and born the creatures of his imagination, more living to him than his own flesh-and-blood, but whom he never thinks of as living, in the reader's simplifying sense. Unless he keeps his hold on this dual character of their being, visionary to him, and to the reader real, he will be the slave of his characters and not their master. When I say their master, I do not mean that they are his marionettes and dangle from his strings. Once projected by his fancy they are living beings who live their own lives; but their world is the one consciously imposed on them by their creator. Only by means of this objectivity of the

artist can his characters live in art. I have never been much moved by the story of the tears Dickens is supposed to have shed over the death of Little Nell; that is, if they were real material tears, and not distilled from the milk of Paradise. The business of the artist is to make weep, and not to weep, to make laugh, and not to laugh; and unless tears and laughter, and flesh-and-blood, are transmuted by him. into the substance that art works in, they are nothing to his purpose, or to ours.

Yet to say this, though it seems the last word, is not all. The novelist to whom this magic world is not open has not even touched the borders of the art, and to its familiars the power of expression may seem innate. But it is not so. The creatures of that fourth-dimensional world are born as helpless as the human animal; and each time the artist passes from dream to execution he will need to find the rules and formulas on the threshold.

J

I

OHN

MARKLIN woke early and lay without stirring. He did not want to disturb the strangeness that quivered in the March morning. Over the pine woods on the hill south of the house drifted the cawing of a crow. The sound trailed across the still air like an echo of itself. In the room the light was erasing the last shadows which huddled in the corners, yet when they had dissolved, the dressingtable and chairs retained a pale and unreal appearance in the diffused light. Marklin stirred uneasily. He was trying to shake off the sense of being a hunted

animal, which oppressed him on waking. This peace in the atmosphere was false, but he could not explain to himself why. For years he had known these few moments each day when bitterness and lassitude flooded him. Usually a cold shower and the trip to the office set his mind in the proper grooves for the day's work. He raised his hands over his head and looked out through the window toward the dark splotch of the pine woods which he could see in the distance. The world was moist and fresh. The crow was now so distant that a mere ribbon of sound floated behind it. John's consciousness was still vague; details of yesterday flickered through it like fireflies in early dusk. He remembered he had asked Miss Platt to remind him of something. There had been a telegram which had come late, and

on new shingles." The doctor snapped his whip again, this time out of impatience at the stupidity of men, a phehomenon to which he had never grown reconciled. The dun started into a quicker pace for a half dozen steps, and then dropped back into his former jog. "Temperature of a hundred and two and a half again," went on the doctor. "The old man thinks his body is like that surrey he drives; as long as it doesn't fall apart in the middle of the road, it's all right." The doctor's eyes were indignant under the black felt hat which he wore in all seasons. They were dark, voracious eyes like his son's, but John had inherited his slender face from his mother, who had died at his birth. The doctor's face was broad, and stamped with a lusty, arched

nose.

They were passing Mr. Blessing's apple orchard, and John drank in the winy fragrance from the trees. He had early acquired the habit of pretending to listen to his father's speeches while his thoughts swam in the warm-blooded activities of their neighbors. He loved to accompany his father on his visits in order to go into one of the dim barns that smelled of hay and leather, where he was allowed to help fill the mangers. It thrilled him to plant his narrow brown hand on the sweaty croup of a horse and urge him over in the stall while he raked it out. The mingled odor of horse and fresh manure was good. From other stalls came the restless clumping of hoofs on the barn floor. As darkness came and the loft swelled in the shadows, tired men entered to throw tools in the corner with a clank. John loved them because they were tired and because they had been working in the soil. In the winter his father taught him history and gave him books to read. With the spring each year came a revival of his deepest passion, the fruit-trees. They could hardly be called orchards here, for few people in this part of the State raised fruit seriously. When he had been ten years old, he had spent a summer with his uncle in the western end of New York State, and since that time he had not swerved from his intention of some day raising fruit; preferably apples. The spirally fluted trunks of apple-trees were the most beautiful objects he knew. He resented the indifference most of his neighbors

showed toward their trees. A few apples were raised for home use, but they were marked with fruit pit, and the trees were allowed to degenerate under the attacks of canker. John learned that there were colleges of agriculture, and determined to study at one of them. At the age of fifteen he announced to a neighbor that when he grew up he was going to specialize in Chenangos and red Astrachans.

"Be you?" was the answer. "And why, now?"

"Because Grandfather Blessing says they're the best apples for this valley."

Grandfather Blessing, as he was known to every one in that part of the country, was the only person he knew who showed respect for his apples. With him the boy spent many afternoons discussing the problems of raising apples. The old man's wisdom was the result of his own experience, and consisted of prejudices and rules of thumb. His most ardent prejudice was against hairy vetch as a cover crop, and his chief advice was to stick to clover. In return for this instruction John felt a responsibility for Grandfather Blessing's trees. In damp, windy weather he worried because the orchard was exposed to the east. In May, when the trees blossomed, he walked among them, watching the pink buds swell and the woolly stalks elongate. During the weeks that followed, when the petals lost their pink and dropped, revealing the erect brush of stamens, he knew the ecstasy of one on the brink of life. And when the summer opened, he lay on his back under the trees for hours until he saw the cinnamon streak of the yellow-billed cuckoo among the leaves. Then his responsibility was lightened; the orchard was being protected from the inroads of caterpillars.

The fall after his decision concerning red Astrachans, John's father sent him to board with friends in Albany and go to school. In the old brick house, where Mr. and Mrs. Banks, middle-aged and childless, lived, he was given a room on the top floor, overlooking a sloping backyard surrounded by a wooden fence. A single peach-tree, at the foot of the yard, pressed its lower branches against the fence. At school he studied with ardor. A desire for knowledge was beginning to stir within him, and he imagined that at the agricultural college the experts would

be scientists, like Sir Isaac Newton in the engraving on the wall of his father's study. Sir Isaac was the only scientist he knew by sight.

In the summers Mr. Banks gave him a job in his leather store, where the creaking of saddles and the smell of well-oiled leather reminded him of hours spent in barns while his father sat by a bedside in the adjoining house. The smell in the store, however, was raw, unlike the smell of leather which has been handled in the task of living. In the evenings he read in his room at the top of the house.

The third year he spent in the city his father died. John came home, one gray day in January, for the service. A dozen of the doctor's friends, who still remained, and a fringe of others, who were idle at that season, gathered in the small parlor. Their faces were red and drawn with the wind through which they had driven. No one talked. John noticed for the first time that the brown carpet was worn through between the door and the centre of the room, where a table had stood during his boyhood. In his father's study he sat silently at the tall desk, where empty pill-bottles rattled in the drawers, and papers protruded from the upright row of cubby-holes in the rear, like a bird ruffling its breast. At this desk his father had sat each day for thirty years. John shivered; the chill of the room was creeping up his spine, and Sir Isaac Newton's regard from the wall was more steely than ever. The young man knew that the silence of the people in the parlor was less from grief than from the shrivelling cold.

After that John left school. The house and furniture and the small library the doctor left barely repaid the money he had borrowed the last years of his life. The surplus which remained, after the expenses of the death had been met, was put in the bank to help pay John's way through the agricultural college. By day he worked in the leather store. In the evenings he sat alone in his room, under the gas-jet, which hummed like a mosquito.

It was the spring after his father's death that he met Marian, whose father was one of Mr. Banks's friends. The tall, straight girl, with shining hair, came sometimes with her parents to dinner. She was not gawky, like the girls he had known in

school, and her voice was clear. Looking at her across the table he found the sureness of her movements intolerably beautiful, like the upward thrust of wheat in a field. At the same time he resented her. She was only his age, but she met life with a poise which humiliated him. Her opinions were flung off with arrogance. In him a slow boiling of the emotions preceded each idea. A favorite subject of controversy between them, after they had known each other a couple of months, became his desire to go back to the country.

"Why do you read so much," she demanded of him once, "if you are only going to plant beans all your life?" She had been trying to persuade him to learn to dance and was annoyed by his indifference.

"I am not going to plant beans," he retorted. "I'm going to raise apples."

"What's the difference? Why don't you do something that takes brains, like Albert?" Her brother Albert was studying to become an engineer.

"I'm going to college," persisted John. "Do you have to go to college to learn how to grow apples?" she asked. "Apples grow any way. You just pick them up and put them in baskets. But to build a bridge you have to study for years."

66

"They don't just grow," John continued. Apparently you never heard of cion grafting, did you? Or bud grafting?" He raged within himself, knowing that this was not the real issue of the conversation, but unable to tell what was.

Marian was smoothing out a lemoncolored sash at her waist.

"Do you like this dress?" she asked. It was one her mother had made for her, which dropped softly against her, emphasizing the smoothness of her movements. About the throat it curled in frosty lace.

"Obviously you never did," he continued. "You probably think that if you plant the seed of an Alexander apple, you get an Alexander tree.'

"I never heard of an Alexander apple," she answered, "but I know what it means to build a bridge. I should think you'd have some ambition."

John writhed.

"I've as much as Albert," he muttered. His tone startled her. Why did he insist on taking the matter emotionally?

"You're a nice boy," she said unexpectedly. "Tell me the truth, do you think this dress looks too plain?"

John looked into her candid blue eyes and thought her, next to the trunk of an apple-tree, the most moving thing in the world. It hurt him to look at her.

"With that frilly stuff around your neck," he said chokingly, "you look like a girl of ten."

Marian slapped him across the face, and he saw that her eyes were filled with

There was a pause.

"Let's go for a walk," he suggested. "It's hot in here."

As they went down the steps of the front porch, the warmth of a summer evening fell on their faces, heavy with the scent of honeysuckle, which grew on the railing. Even the city, John thought, was beautiful, since it lay in the valley of the Hudson and was inhabited by Marian.

They walked together frequently that summer, though they quarrelled in August when she refused to go with him any more until he had polished his shoes.

"You look like a tramp," she declared. "What will everybody say?"

John resentfully polished his shoes. He hated her for caring what other people would say, and he loved her for caring at all, since he was the object of her concern. The street where they walked most often was lined on each side with a row of soft maples. The thick foliage spread across the street until it nearly met above the cobblestones. The houses were set back from the sidewalk, protected by

short lawns, and on one of these usually lay a Boston bull, sniffing the evening. John always spoke to the dog when they passed, to the embarrassment of Marian. The gleam of the street lamps threw a blackish lustre on the leaves, as though they had been cut from metal and hung in place. Under this canopy they walked frequently without talking, or John listened while Marian recounted the details of dances. He had promised to learn to dance the following winter. At intervals they emerged from the shadow to cross a patch of light under the street lamp, and plunge into the tunnel of the next block. At such times her face shone, and her perfect features stirred an ache in his spirit. When this feeling possessed him, he talked to her of his childhood, describing the dusty roads and twisted apple-trees where he had played.

Marian listened with a slight repulsion to the details of this meagre life on farms. John could not guess that it sounded sordid to her and that, as she was growing more tender toward him, she was glad for his sake that he had left it.

"I would never be a farmer's wife," she declared once.

"Why not?" asked John.

"It's so grubby. When I marry, I'm going to find a husband who will be somebody in the world."

That autumn, when the leaves crackled under their feet and the trees stood naked, the sight of the sere earth brought a contraction in John's breast, as it did each year. But this time his emotion was inseparable from the thought of Marian, and one evening as they walked, he asked her to marry him.

III

JOHN closed the frosted-glass door in the partition which walled off his office from the larger room where a dozen typewriters clicked. On the outside of his door was printed "Sales Manager. Macfarlane, in charge of the complaint department, who occupied the adjoining office, was already at work on his morning's mail. His voice, in the slightly strained pitch at which one talks into a dictaphone, came over the top of the flimsy partition. This partition stopped two-thirds of the way to the ceiling, and