Siamese twins often, coming into being at a single birth.  Furthermore, the artist knows that technic is the one quality he can control, every man for himself, every man improving himself as best he can.  His native gift, his temperament,—­this is what it is; and what it is it must be; and no man can better it by any effort.  His character, also, the personality of the artist, that which gives a large meaning to his work,—­how little can any man control this result of heredity and environment?

If an artist has anything to say it will out, sooner or later, however absorbed he may be in finding the best way of saying it.  If he has nothing to say, if he has no message for the heart of man, he may at least give some pleasure to his contemporaries by the sheer dexterity of his craftsmanship.  There would have been no more meaning in Poe’s verse, if there had been less melody, if the poet had less devotedly studied the “book of iambs and pentameters.”  There would have been no larger significance in the painted epigrams of Gerome, if that master of line had cared less for draftsmanship.  There would have been no more solid value in the often amusing plays of Sardou, if he had not delighted in the ingenuity of his dramaturgical devices.  At bottom, Sardou, Gerome, and Poe, had little or nothing to say; that is their misfortune, no doubt; but it is not their fault, for, apparently, each one of them made the best of his native gift.

In his time Milton was the most careful and conscientious of artists in verse-making, and so, in his turn, was Pope, whose ideals were different, but whose skill was no less in its kind.  So, again, was Tennyson untiring in seeking to attain ultimate perfection of phrase, consciously employing every artifice of alliteration, assonance and rime.  But, if Milton’s verse seems to us now noble and lofty, while Pope’s appears to us as rather petty and merely clever, surely this is because Milton himself was noble and his native endowment lofty, and because Pope himself was petty and his gift only cleverness; surely it is not because they were both of them as much interested in the mechanics of their art as was Tennyson after them.

One of the wittiest critics of our modern civilization, the late Clarence King, remarked, some ten years ago, that the trouble with American fiction just then lay in the fact that it had the most elaborate machinery,—­and no boiler.  But the fault of our fiction at that time was to be sought in the absence of steam,—­and not in the machinery itself which stood ready to do its work, to the best advantage and with the utmost economy of effort, just so soon as the power might be applied.

     (1904.)

OLD FRIENDS WITH NEW FACES