can't see is why you should want to do nothing else.' The dull
man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his
immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be
sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than half of
him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will
be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration and
the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of
gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in
almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and
natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint
excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing
that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's
destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted.
Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the
vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The eternal life
of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort,
lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning."

A few weeks ago our novelists were discussing the reasons why they
were novelists and not playwrights. The discussion was sterile enough,
in all conscience: but one contributor--it was "Lucas Malet"--managed
to make it clear that English fiction has a character to lose. "If
there is one thing," she said, "which as a nation we understand, it is
_out-of-doors_ by land and sea." Heaven forbid that, with only one
Atlantic between me and Mr. W.D. Howells, I should enlarge upon any
merit of the English novel: but I do suggest that this open-air
quality is a characteristic worth preserving, and that nothing is so
likely to efface it as the talk of workshops. It is worth preserving
because it tends to keep us in sight of the elemental facts of human
nature. After all, men and women depend for existence on the earth and
on the sky that makes earth fertile; and man's last act will be, as it
was his first, to till the soil. All empires, cities, tumults, civil
and religious wars, are transitory in comparison. The slow toil of
the farm-laborer, the endurance of the seaman, outlast them all.

Open Air in Criticism.

That studio-talk tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just
as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of
Nature. I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic