ur shield and your backbone. I
take the responsibility of my choice." There are a great many men now,
who have sneaked into their positions by a show of courage, who are
supported one way and another by women. It might be humiliating to know
just how many men live by the labors of their wives. And what would be
the effect upon the character of man if the choice, and the
responsibility of it, and the support implied by it in marriage, were
generally transferred to woman?

FROCKS AND THE STAGE

The condescension to literature and to the stage is one of the notable
characteristics of this agreeable time. We have to admit that literature
is rather the fashion, without the violent presumption that the author
and the writer have the same social position that is conferred by money,
or by the mysterious virtue there is in pedigree. A person does not lose
caste by using the pen, or even by taking the not-needed pay for using
it. To publish a book or to have an article accepted by a magazine may
give a sort of social distinction, either as an exhibition of a certain
unexpected capacity or a social eccentricity. It is hardly too much to
say that it has become the fashion to write, as it used to be to dance
the minuet well, or to use the broadsword, or to stand a gentlemanly mill
with a renowned bruiser. Of course one ought not to do this
professionally exactly, ought not to prepare for doing it by study and
severe discipline, by training for it as for a trade, but simply to toss
it off easily, as one makes a call, or pays a compliment, or drives
four-in-hand. One does not need to have that interior impulse which
drives a poor devil of an author to express himself, that something to
say which torments the poet into extreme irritability unless he can be
rid of it, that noble hunger for fame which comes from a consciousness of
the possession of vital thought and emotion.

The beauty of this condescension to literature of which we speak is that
it has that quality of spontaneity that does not presuppose either a
capacity or a call. There is no mystery about the craft. One resolves to
write a book, as he might to take a journey or to practice on the piano,
and the thing is done. Everybody can write, at least everybody does
write. It is a wonderful time for literature. The Queen of England writes
for it, the Queen of Roumania writes for it, the Shah of Persia writes
for it, Lady Brassey, the yachtswoman, wrote for it, Congressme