friends enough to make it pay him to write books for them."

As to the unknown people who write letters to authors, he once said to me that they were a tiresome lot, as a whole, and rarely helpful.

"If they were to read books with any sort of understanding, their comments might inspire one, but they do not, and for that reason I dread to open my mail. They seem to think that a writer has a world of time in which to answer fool questions. I gave up trying to reply to them early in the game.'

Some of our American writers, generally the lesser ones, feign to be bored by many uninvited visitors, believing that such statements lend them an air and help their fame. As a matter of fact the tendency among the "followers" of authors to visit the man or woman they have been reading is a mythical one. Few writers, even among the most celebrated, are besieged by uninvited visitors. From what can be learned of this phase of literary life Mr. John Burroughs and Mr. Edwin Markham are among those who are visited most frequently by persons unknown. to them. It used to be a fad of naturelovers to visit "Slabsides" and have a talk with the author of "Wake Robin," but it is said that pilgrims to that shrine are not so well encouraged as formerly, owing to Mr. Burroughs's revised ideas as to the advisability of such intrenchments upon his time and his serenity of thought. On the other hand, Mr. Markham keeps open house. They flock in to Westerleigh from the far-off Pacific Coast, from the North and from the South. During the past few years he has had many visitors from Europe, among them a genuine Princess who wanted to paint his portrait. Even in the promiscuity of such attentions the author of The Man With the Hoe is gentle and gracious to all. One day, however, I found him in despair.

"A man is coming here this afternoon," he said, "from way up in New England to read me a whole volume of his unpublished verse and to ask my opinion of it. What shall I do? What shall I do?" And he ran his hand through his long, frosted locks with the gesture of a Richelieu.

But afterward he spoke of his visitor in a most tolerant vein.

"The poetry was pretty bad, but the man was sincere," he said impressively, "and I listened to it. You must listen to a man who is sincere."

This keeping of open house, as Mr. Markham does, for his unknown admirers, is a part of our American democracy, and I believe it is creditable. When one recalls how ferociously Tennyson sometimes met his admirers and how insolently Carlyle used to treat the visitors to Cheyne Row one views an aspect of literary Toryism that is not only discreditable but fairly shouts affectation. American literary lions, from Emerson and Hawthorne down, have always been noted for their pleasant manners in the presence of the pilgrim.

To be sure Mark Twain, who was always on good terms with his public, save the Christian Science element of it, latterly made few appointments with people who sought him out. He received scores of letters from his readers, but rarely replied to any of them. Yet he had an eye for publicity, as was shown by his manner of dress, particularly his famous white suit. His theory was that people looked for some individuality of style in an author's make-up and were disappointed if they did not find it. In his case he had something to back up his oddities of dress and manner. But there are plenty of writers who have not. Musicians understand the Mark Twain theory and many of them practise it. Given a violinist with ample locks and another of equal merit but with short hair and you will find that the shorthaired man will not be considered as good a musician by the general public and that he will not command as high a salary. Paderewski's hair is worth almost as much to him as his fingers, and his muff is another good "ad."

These things explain why the nearwriter, who has somehow managed to get a few stories published, will become more intent upon living the life of a celebrated literary personage than he will upon studying to write something that will make a name for him. His flowing black artist's tie and his long careless hair impress the people with whom he comes in

contact, and he is pointed out as a person of distinction. It is useless to tell him that such writers as Mr. Rudyard Kipling, Mr. Thomas Hardy and Mr. William Dean Howells dress in citizen's clothes and pay frequent visits to the barber. If there is a little "ad" to be gotten out of any disguise or mannerism that he can affect, the little author is out for it.

Mr. Howells does not shun publicity, and he gets his share of it. He says he used formerly greatly to enjoy favourable press notices of his books and owns to having carried them about like loveletters. Having once been a newspaper man he has a soft place in his heart for the reporter. A journalist who sought an interview with him not long ago received this reply:

"What there is left of me to be interviewed is at your service."

Discriminating readers who have felt the charm of 4 Modern Instance and have sympathised with the mute yearnings of Silas Lapham, enjoy reading a newspaper page in which Mr. Howells talks of his work, and they see nothing immodest in it. It is not easy to understand why so many modern writers so obviously affect to ignore their own work and refrain from speaking about it, for nearly all writers are proud of their literary performances and of whatever distinction they may have gained.

Stevenson had no timidities of this sort. "I know what pleasure is," he says frankly, "for I have done good work." He was a proud man, but not a vain one. The silly statement made by W. E. Henley that Stevenson could not pass a mirror without looking into it proceeded from a heart full of the jealousy of art. Stevenson was not a much photographed man, but I have seen an album of pictures of him taken amid various scenes, and in none of them was there anything like pose. In many of the photographs his head is modestly lowered and his eyes are on the ground or otherwise averted. Where he appears in a group you would the photographer most wished to present.

Mr. Jack London is a believer in Mark Twain's theory that the public looks for

individuality in an author, and should nor be disappointed. Mr. London is brave enough to wear a negligée shirt and no waistcoat while on the lecture platform or at a banquet. His friends, however, say that a desire to pose has nothing to do with this idea of careless attire, and that it is merely the result of an artistic indifference to the conventions.

How Mr. Joaquin Miller descended upon London in his characteristic "Western dress," and made the English think that was the way they all did it out there, are matters of literary history, as are also his living in a log cabin near the national capital and his travelling about the country in a red Turkish fez, a khaki suit and top boots. To his other acts of eccentricity Joaquin added the building of his famous funeral pyre. This pyre is upon a pile of rocks near his home on the Heights and is kept in readiness to be lit on the day of his passing. You may be sure that the Sunday papers seized upon this novel subject and made the most of it. To this day the correspondents love it and frequently give it and Mr. Miller a column or so when news is light.

Gertrude Atherton receives as much publicity as any other writer of her sex in this country. Newspaper men like a famous woman who can evolve a picturesque theory and is willing to make some startling statement about it, and this Mrs. Atherton is generally ready to do, although she is neither a faddist nor a freak, but has some advanced and often admirable views upon many things. When her Patience Sparhawk was sent away from the libraries, bearing the mark "unclean," both author and publisher profited by the advertisement, as it increased the sale of the book. This, however, was not a new experience for Mrs. Atherton. Because of the same scruples on the part of the librarians her Hermia Suydam had been barred from libraries years before, and the comment upon this fact had helped the book and made the clipping bureaus earn their five-dollar fees. But at the present moment, in view of the wholesale library acceptance of novels that are the result of what Mr. Howells calls "the modern debauch," one doubts if the story of the Suydam woman, even with all the newspaper talk about a

real heroine of that name, or the Sparhawk novel would be barred from the average public book depository.

The

But although publicity is craved by writers, and particularly by those who are not very well known, there is publicity and publicity, and an author can sometimes be given the wrong kind. writer who forged the posthumous Cleveland epistle as well as a cheque or two, and followed this up by a spectacular divorce and the kidnapping of his own child, ascertained this fact quite definitely. He expected to reap a great reward because of his notoriety, but the editors simply wouldn't have him.

It remains to be seen what advantage a certain New York novelist will gain by the pages and pages the papers have devoted to the discussion of his peculiar domestic affairs. I doubt if this great mass of publicity will do him any more good than that which he derived by sending a letter to a New York coroner signed by the name of the hero of his first novel, saying that he might look for that unhappy man's body in the Hudson

River. This widely published letter and the mystery surrounding it for a time did not make the novel a best seller, but rather reacted upon the novelist.

To be sure, it sometimes pays an author to be given a noteworthy "knock," particularly if he can get a big enough paper or a big enough man to do it. For example, there is hardly a writer in the country who did not envy Mr. Poultney Bigelow when President Roosevelt, on reading what Poultney had written about. the new German rifle, which was so complicated that when it was taken apart the soldiers couldn't remember just how to put it together again, made his jocular declaration: "I wish somebody would take Poultney Bigelow apart and forget how to put him together again." For, although this was a pretty hard shot, it was gorgeous publicity, and the average. author as well as publisher would rather you reviled what he had written and published than to say nothing about it. And if the reviling happens to come from a conspicuous source, so much the better.

HEN windows become glad with holly wreaths and scarlet patches on every street corner betray the presence of some mock Kris Kringle, gathing coins to cheer the holiday for the needy; when highways teem with parcel-laden throngs in which every man guards jealously the contents of his mysterious packet and the most crotchety spinster merely beams goodhumouredly as the hurrying thousands bump her unceremoniously from side to side; when wide-eyed, gleeful youngsters swarm on all sides to glory in the wonders the shops have everywhere arrayed for their delectation; when smiling, ruddy-faced butchers hang out well-fatted game; when the wind bears the whetted sting of maturing winter and from a sil

ver sky the first soft snow-flakes straggle like feathery petals; when "Merry Christmas" becomes the universal greeting and every man fans the latent spark of good within him into a glowing flame of exuberant virtue-then the eyes of the world turn toward the slums. Yuletide is the annual season of good cheer and good doing, when the spirit of uplift and fellowship is in the air, and it is meet that the slums, the abode of misery, should be gladdened at such times. But in the riotous passion of giving, do any pause to query how the slums have survived since the previous brief era of comradeship called a lagging attention to them?

Cities have their characters and dispositions, their moods and caprices, as truly as do people. The reflection of these is mirrored in their externals even

as the soul of a man is delineated by his profile. Athens clings still to the remnants of her culture and her temples and the beauty instinct of which both were expressions. Rome has yet her ruins and the memory of all that once they meant. Paris has her graceful arts-exquisite and fragile as scarlet roses played upon by some honeyed breeze-together with her fashion and her inimitable cafés, which in subtle manner seem to blend all three. Nowhere can be duplicated the inns of London, her minsters, or her storied bridge and tower. New York proclaims her amazing, insatiate modernity in unconquerable sky-scrapers and impatient, throbbing tumults of machinery. Variously they vie with one another, chanting of their own excellencies in a thousand keys, and no two are alike. Kipling has said it in his rugged, stimulating music:

The cities are full of pride,
Challenging each to each-
This from her mountainside,

That from her burthened beach.

Cities, however, like men, flaunt only their glories to the world. But deep down beneath runs a levelling bond of sorrow and pain which flimsily, almost imperceptibly, unites the grandest and the lowliest. Men have their sins; cities their slums. Athens is Athens, Rome could never be other than Rome, Paris will be forever Paris, London is London, New York has a personality completely her own, and each one is individual, distinct but the slums are universal. They are simply the slums. The pattern of civilisation which society has so laboriously wrought for itself falls short there and the loose, tattered skeins dangle forlornly. Just now the world is striving to gather up these skeins and weave them, piece by piece, into the prevailing pattern. Sociologists are busying themselves with the problem as never before. But sociologists approach the subject coldly, with merciless logic, and a profusion of theories. There is another class, however, taking intimate heed of the slums: The artists. They approach this little understood aspect of life quite differently. They go with a sympathy eager to be transmuted into that comprehension

which can render average art great and great art sublime. Wherefore, their proletarian impressions become distinctly important, if only for their disinterested

ness.

At one time or another the appeal of the proletariat has touched almost every modern painter who aspires to create things which shall be vital and lasting. And here and there among the number can be found those who, for one reason or another, stand out. There can be no argument that into this category falls George Luks. George Luks knows the slums, and his canvases are vibrant with that knowledge. They possess, every one, that rare, intangible something which we term atmosphere, and beneath his uncompromising brush the mute, haggard creatures of what polite society is pleased to dub "low life" quicken into coherent being.

"To the average person," he says, "the slums represent filth, squalour, and uncleanliness; to the philosopher they represent simply a refuge. In the sense which strives to make of them a thing apartof a different order-there are no such things. Life in the slums is precisely what it is 'up-town,' save that 'up-town' it has the advantage of a protecting mantle of prosperity, or at least the semblance of prosperity, whereas in the slums it is bared to the nudity of abject poverty. That is the slums' only real distinguishing trait: Poverty. Filth and dirt are quite unessential and incidental. There are plenty of fashionable women who, returning from some ball, throw their evening clothes over a chair for a maid to pick up whose homes would be quite as dirty as the worst of the sort they deplore were their sphere of life suddenly changed. Humanity is essentially the same. The same types will be found in every walk of life, only when they are desperately poor they will more explicitly and unmistakably demonstrate their true selves. The proof of this, if any proof is needed, lies in the fact that the upper classes are constantly filling their ranks from the people of the slums, while simultaneously the slums are recruiting their denizens from the upper classes. That's one of the most significant facts about the whole thing: The