Monceau, he rehearsed a page of a new book for hours. Belated coachmen, noting the open windows, hearing an outrageous vocal noise, concluded that a musical soirée was in progress. Gradually the street filled on either side with carriages in search of passengers; but the guests never emerged from the house. In the early morning the lights were extinguished, and the oaths of the disappointed coachmen must have been enjoyed by Flaubert.

He would annotate 300 volumes for a page of facts. His bump of scrupulousness was large. In twenty pages he would sometimes save three or four from destruction. He did not become, however, as captious as Balzac in the handling of proofs. A martyr of style, he was not an enameller in precious stones, not a patient mosaic worker, superimposing here and there a precious verbal . jewel. First the image, and then its appropriate garb; sometimes image and phrase were born simultaneously, as was the case with Richard Wagner. These extraordinary things may happen to men of genius who are neither opium eaters nor lunatics. The idea that Flaubert was ever addicted to drugs beyond the quinine with which in his boyhood his good father dosed him after the fashion of those days - is ridiculous. The gorgeous visions of "Saint Antony " were the results of stupendous preparatory studies, a stupendous power of fantasy and a stupendous concentration. Opium superinduces visions, but not the power and faculty of attention to record them in terms of literature for forty years. George Saintsbury has pronounced "Saint Antony" the most perfect specimen of dream literature extant; and because of its precision in details, its architectonic, its deep-hued waking hallucinations. New York Sun.

Goldsmith. - Oliver Goldsmith was an underpaid man from start to finish. Fifty pounds ($250) for "The Vicar of Wakefield" was bad enough, yet for "The Traveler" he got but £20 ($100), and £5 ($25) for his "English Grammar." For "The Deserted Village," however, his publisher sent him 100 guineas ($500). This he at once returned, with the message: "It is too

much; it is near five shillings a couplet, which is more than any bookseller can afford or, indeed, any modern poetry is worth." So he died with $10,000 worth of debts. "Was ever poet so trusted before?" said Dr. Johnson.

Mendes. It is strange that so prolific a writer he died with some 140 volumes to his credit should have worked with so much difficulty. The machinery of his mental processes worked only after vast persuasions. He approached his task with dread and an almost overwhelming sense of incapacity, an experience that may be not without its comfort to younger writers who are disposed to think that literary ability should be necessarily marked by a perpetual gushing from the founts of inspiration. He said himself that he would lock himself in his study soon after noon. Then he would smoke and idle for an hour, hoping vainly that the ideas would come unforced. But they never did. Then for another hour he would sit at his desk, the words coming with an infinite unwillingness: "It seems as if I can never get to the bottom of the page. Afterward it goes along better. I stop at five or six. And the remarkable thing is that writing becomes harder for me the older I grow and the more I write." - Paris Letter in the Argonaut.

Oppenheim. E. Phillips Oppenheim, who is one of the most prolific writers of the day, has a manner of telling a story that is all his own. Instead of sitting down and writing out chapter after chapter, he dictates his stories to his secretary. The latter goes with the author everywhere, and whenever the mood strikes him, whenever the inspiration comes and the ideas formulate themselves into a situation, he calls his secretary, and as he paces up and down the room talks the story off. Some of his chapters have been written in railway trains, in hotels, at his home anywhere where the mood happened to come to him. This manner of turning out his stories accounts for his easy, forceful, interesting style. Every one who reads his stories remarks that it is as if some one were sitting before him relating the story by word of mouth, and that is

Riley. -James Whitcomb Riley tells of an inquisitive lady who once heard him say something on how poorly paid was the profession of literature. "But, Mr. Riley," said she, "surely you have no cause for complaining. You must be a very rich man. I understand you get a dollar a word for all you write." "Ye-e-es, madam," said Riley, with his slow drawl, "but sometimes I sit all day and can't think of a word—not even a dialect word."

Stevenson.-In "Memories and Portraits," Robert Louis Stevenson tells us of his selfdiscipline in acquiring the art of writing. He says:

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside I would read, or a pencil and a penny version book would be in my hand to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words, and what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished to be an author. . . as that I had vowed that I would learn to write, . . . and I practiced to acquire it. . . . Description was the principal field of my exercise; for there is always something worth describing, and town and country are but one continuous subject. . . . This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I tried sometimes to keep, but always very speedily discarded, finding them a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception.

"There was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret labors at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some force or some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself

to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it, and tried again and again, and was unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction, and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Beaudelaire, and to Obermann. . . . Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book of Snobs.' "That, or like it, is the way to learn to write; whether I have profited or not, that is the way. It was so Keats learned, and there never was a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned to write; and that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded by a cast back to earlier or fresher models.

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Perhaps I hear some one cry out, But this is not the way to be original. It is not; nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor yet, if you are born original, is there anything in this to clip the wings of originality.

Burns is the very type of a prime force in letters he was of all men the most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school. . . . Nor is there anything here that should astonish the considerate. Before he can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words he should long have practiced the literary scales; and it is only after years of such gymnastics that he can sit down at last, legions of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do and . . . able to do it."

Wilde. --Possibly the smallest edition of a book ever published has been issued from the Torch Press of Cedar Rapids, Ia. It is an edition of ten copies of "The Life of Oscar Wilde," by Judge Willis Vickery, of Cleveland, O. Needless to say, the work is not on sale anywhere, nine copies having

been distributed among his friends, the tenth remaining in his possession.

Judge Vickery is a great authority on Wilde and his writings, and he has the finest collection of Wilde's works in America. Not only has he every edition of every work, but he has all the books which Wilde had with him during his confinement in Reading jail.

In "The Life of Oscar Wilde" Vickery makes the prediction that the time will come when Wilde will be regarded as the greatest literary genius since Shakspere. · New York World.

CURRENT LITERARY TOPICS.

Room for Business Fiction. The time seems ripe for a new literature fiction dealing with the problems of business, with the effect of business on life, and of life on business. A good beginning has been made - enough to show the possibilities of the new field. But it is a field of a thousand acres, of which only one acre is under cultivation.

The chief reason offered by literary analysts to explain the predominating popularity of fiction as a form of literature is that the novel gives experience by proxy. On this basis alone the opportunity to interest millions of persons and at the same time serve them is very great. Every one is familiar with the fact that an experienced business man can in an hour's talk give to a young man ideas, impressions, and viewpoints which might otherwise have taken him years to acquire. And yet a good novel can do just that give ideas, impressions, and viewpoints. The eagerness with which all progressive men and women seek to know whatever will help them in their business affords a pre-established interest which no writer could fail to appreciate.

Business is so complicated nowadays-so divided into departments, that it is harder and harder for a person to get a proper impression of his part in true relation to the whole. And yet it is chiefly this impression - this comprehensive conception of things

that distinguishes the big man from the little one. If the novel could in any degree help to give that, it would be a boon, not only to the individual, but to the whole business world. For of many things greatly needed in business, one is more men of larger conception, broader sympathies, and more human interest in the effects of business on life. And the need is not merely for a few men to have these qualities supereminently, but that all men should have them in a larger degree. What a field for the business novel !

But the novel, to be what it should be, needs most of all to involve an interpretation of life. It needs romance. And yet what greater possibilities could be found for romantic situation than in the business world, where millions of men and women meet, under a million varying conditions not to mention the influence of romance in social life upon the ambitions and developments of business life?

One thing, however, is lacking. Men who write novels seldom know very much about actual business life. Their training, experience, and interests have all been, on the whole. in other fields. They often lack the comprehensive view of business themselves, and are in a poor way to impart it to others through the actions and thoughts of literary characters. But the case is not hopeless. The actual situation needs only to be acknowledged. Writers largely gain their material from observing and digesting the experiences of others, and there is no fixed reason why this could not be done in gathering material for business fiction. But it would involve much labor and appreciative insight to make it true to business lifeand only thus could a writer hope to gain the attention of the thinking element of business people. Collier's Weekly.

A Suggestive Literary Coincidence. - Names of characters in fiction are very often the result of unconscious cerebration, and the results are sometimes amusing. Not long ago the name of Horace Hazeltine, author of "The City of Encounters," appeared with that of Campbell MacCulloch, the shortstory writer, side by side in the contents

table of one of the magazines. Shortly after this Mr. Hazeltine, who reads fiction for one of the best known of New York's periodicals, found among the submitted manuscripts a tale by MacCulloch, entitled "The Fourth Dimension," in which the hero, strangely enough, was called Professor Horace Hazeltine. From seeing the name in juxtaposition with his own, Mr. MacCulloch, it seems, had unconsciously retained it. and subsequently had made use of it in the fond belief that the combination was pure invention. — Publishers' Weekly.

Novel Compensations of Novel Writing. writing, I repeat, is an independent, selfrespecting, pleasant business. If life be dull, and outside the snow falls drearily, and the limbs of the trees are wet, and bare, and broken, and people insist on sending in bills, with a scrape of the pencil you can, with your hero, under a strange flag and a burning sky, lead forlorn hopes, rescue imprisoned señoritas, dig for buried treasure, and find it, or place yourself upon a throne. If there is a cause that you think needs your valuable assistance, or a "wrong that needs resistance," you may, in a novel, make your characters proclaim your views, and, whether he likes it or not, the unsuspecting reader must be your audience. Or, if your lady flouts you, you can establish her as your heroine, and pour into her ear all the thrilling words of love to which, in real life, she refuses to listen. She cannot rise disdainfully and walk away, or send down word that she is not at home. And, if you rejoice in an enemy, he is at your mercy. Under a hideous nom de plume, you can, in your novel, pillory him, and to your heart's content ridicule, and torture, and ruin him, financially, socially, physically, and finally lead him to the gallows. In a novel of mine, disguised as the chief villain, there was such an enemy. To him I did everything that my low and vindictive nature could suggest. I made his life a hell, and killed him off in poverty and under circumstances of the most degrading and humiliating nature. It is annoying that in real life I must still watch him steadily flourish and prosper. On Fifth avenue he is always just

missing me with his racing car, and at restaurants, at the table next mine, he gives expensive dinners to those people I should most like to meet. But of the pleasure I derived from punishing him in my novel, as he will be punished in the next world, he cannot rob me.

There is no business in which one is so independent, or of which it may be so truly said that you carry it around with you under your hat. Wherever you go, your entire "plant" moves with you. You pay no rent, no taxes, no insurance. You are tied to no office, to no regular hours, to no fixed address. You fear neither strikes nor lockouts. There is no fellow clerk, who, just as you are packing for your summer holiday, suddenly marries, and takes your vacation time for his honeymoon. Instead, you proclaim your own legal holidays. As a rule, you proclaim too many of them. But your time is your own. If you elect to loaf, no one save yourself suffers. Certainly the reading public is none the poorer.

No matter where you travel, the postoffice will always carry your finished goods to your publisher, and for you he drums up trade and entices customers. When the lawyer, the doctor, or the business man goes on his vacation he loses his customers. Instead of making money, he is spending it. The novel writer can circumnavigate the globe, and at the same time his books still may be making money for him; he may still be at work.

This winter I wrote a novel entirely of South America, of palm trees and the Southern Cross, while I was freezing in London, and looking out upon a yellow fog. And another novel, entirely about a London fog, I finished when I was at sea, off Cuba, and so seasick that, in comparison, a London fog seemed cheerful and attractive. Richard Harding Davis, in Collier's Weekly. The Play and the Novel Contrasted. Rather timidly to venture another generalization one intended to be very sketchy indeed the average novelist writes mainly about what people say to one another: the playwright is primarily concerned with what they do to one another. The playwright