you.  Have no fear of the future; I will be at once your 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, Congressmen write for it, peers write for it.  The novel is the common recreation of ladies of rank, and where is the young woman in this country who has not tried her hand at a romance or made a cast at a popular magazine?  The effect of all this upon literature is expansive and joyous.  Superstition about any mystery in the art has nearly disappeared.  It is a common observation that if persons fail in everything else, if they are fit for nothing else, they can at least write.  It is such an easy occupation, and the remuneration is in such disproportion to the expenditure!  Isn’t it indeed the golden era of letters?  If only the letters were gold!