ly at a venture, but aiming at his effects
deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and
send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight
wildness of aim is easily corrected, and to see the target at all is a
more conspicuous merit than the public imagines. Now Mr. Parker sees
his target steadily; he has a thoroughly good notion of what a short
story ought to be: and more than two or three stories in his book are
as good as can be.

Open Air v. Clubs.

But to me the most pleasing quality in the book is its open-air
flavor. Here is yet another young author, and one of the most
promising, joining the healthy revolt against the workshops. Though
for my sins I have to write criticism now and then, and use the
language of the workshops, I may claim to be one of the rebels, having
chosen to pitch a small tent far from cities and to live out of doors:
and it rejoices me to see the movement growing, as it undoubtedly has
grown during the last few years, and find yet one more of the younger
men refusing, in Mr. Stevenson's words, to cultivate restaurant fat,
to fall in mind "to a thing perhaps as low as many types of
_bourgeois_--the implicit or exclusive artist." London is an alluring
dwelling-place for an author, even for one who desires to write about
the country. He is among the paragraph-writers, and his reputation
swells as a cucumber under glass. Being in sight of the newspaper men,
he is also in their mind. His prices will stand higher than if he go
out into the wilderness. Moreover, he has there the stimulating talk
of the masters in his profession, and will be apt to think that his
intelligence is developing amazingly, whereas in fact he is developing
all on one side; and the end of him is--the Exclusive Artist:--

"_When the flicker of London sun falls faint on the
Club-room's green and gold
The sons of Adam sit them down and scratch with their
pens in the mould--
They scratch with their pens in the mould of their
graves and the ink and the anguish start,
For the Devil mutters behind the leaves: 'It's pretty,
but is it Art?'_"

The spirit of our revolt is indicated clearly enough on that page of
Mr. Stevenson's "Wrecker," from which I have already quoted a
phrase:--

"That was a home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in
letters of gold on the portico of every School of Art: 'What I