somewhere else. Tolstoi shows this chatter world to us in one of its aspects, Thackeray in another, de Goncourt in another; and all of the moralists who have described it make you feel that this tavern of criticism and bibeloterie is a little wart or excrescence which grows on the body of Art. It is a parasite-perhaps a necessary parasite— which all healthy art supports without evil consequences.

Now the Inner Templar from America gets into this tavern of criticism and thinks he is seeing life. He finds (at first almost to his surprise) that he is holding up his end with the rest; no one resents him; he is encouraged; no one knows that he is different from the others; he does not know it himself. But the truth is that, unlike the others, he has no home, but must sit up all night when the rest have gone to their families. He has no customs, no habits, no unconscious support from a world of his own. The things he eats are not his. His very toothpick is of a foreign model, and he speaks to his valet in French. After he has talked his proper chatter about Art, he may go to a hired room to work over Art.

V

THE CREATIVE WORK OF ALIENS

A MAN who writes is like a spider who draws a web out of his stomach: the thread of his own life is revealed in the process. Art is the most personal matter in the world; and nevertheless the artist is-as we shall see in a moment-a mere embryo enclosed in society as the frog's egg is held in its place on the surface of a pond,-protected, fed, and controlled by those vital forces with which it is most immediately in contact.

As we all know, it is the early years of life that most deeply impress all men, and most seriously influence the poet and the novelist. An artist is forever telling about his earliest impressions; and the whole power of his art, which increases with age and practice, is put to illustrating the thoughts and passions of his earliest years.

Let us now recall the problems which normally occupy the minds of Americans who reside abroad. And note here that we are drifting towards the universal in these speculations, which concern themselves as

much with London as with Paris. The dear old maids from Baltimore, New York, and Boston who founded the American Colonies in Europe, -the Forty-niners, -were always interested in cheap pensions. You paid six francs at one place, but they would not black the shoes there; the coffee was best at No. 47, but you have quarrelled with No. 47 and regretted having done so. In the course of time, when Art, and the self-consciousness of Art, began to creep into the American Colonies in Europe, this Art was coloured by the triviality of the life. The Art dealt with things that might be seen by a fly, stale things, spots and externals, the soul-problems of the lodging-hunter and of the tuft-hunter. There was no vigour, no passion, no big interest in this life, or in the reflection of this life in its works of art.

It is not merely that the literary members of these colonies write about unimportant things. It is that all these colonists have nothing important to think about, and hence, when they write, they write chiffons. Their bards sing, not of arms and the man, but of petty miseries, pimples on the face of society, mean ambitions, empty hearts. The little blights and lichens of social life are put under a microscope and enlarged into

hideous ugliness. And all this epidermic school of letters (which, by the way, is a peculiarly American product; no one else ever wrote in this manner before) is conducted with appalling seriousness and in pretended imitation of Balzac, and Flaubert, and I know not of whom.

Here, then, comes the revelation of the great gulf that lies between the Inner Temple and any normal intellectual life: the Inner Temple has no outer temple. It is a core without an apple. Your American novelist in London or Paris is shut into his studio with his dreams,-and he dreams of Americans abroad. And when he runs short of Americans abroad he is obliged to return to 1872 and to give pictures of Kentucky before the war. He cannot throb with the healthy emotionalism of European life; nor can he draw upon the contemporary life of his own people. His relation towards his own people has become hostile and querulous. His brain is starving for support from his fellow-men.

The great djinn who does the work for the artist, the slave who draws the water for the hero while he sleeps, who mows the ten acres of corn in a night,-this mysterious friend is the Unconscious. And this Uncon

scious is somehow a thing which other people share. It is the block out of which we are hewn, and the pit out of which we are digged. The Unconscious is the great umbilical cord that holds a man in touch with the universe and permits the power of the universe to reverberate through him. How explain this phenomenon? How make a man believe in the importance of a force which must in its very essence always remain unconscious?

These floating Americans, whose cultivation represents the wart without the body, have detached themselves from the great dynamo of life. If one could see what was happening in the souls of these people, one would long to cut them down like suicides. What the reasons may be for this loss of power in expatriated persons we do not know. Apparently nature speaks only through a crowd. There must be a great many individuals who all feel alike before any one of them can say a word that is true. There is ingenuousness at the bottom of all power; a real belief that your way of thinking must prevail, because you know that everyone at bottom is like yourself,—this belief is what makes your words count.

Consider Walter Scott's way of writing,