Story of the Latin Quarter." Yet it was by these stories that these writers lifted themselves above the unknown millions and established their reputation. This may at first sight seem like the vicious logic known as reasoning in a circle. But in truth it is not so.
In no line of human work and endeavor is it more difficult to distinguish the professional from the amateur than in literature. In law, for instance, a student reads certain books with an attorney, passes an examination before a board of examiners, and receives a diploma which certifies that he is a member of the legal profession. In medicine, the student takes a prescribed course of study in a college, graduates, and is privileged to style himself a doctor. There are schools for artists, for actors, even for farmers; there are no schools for literary men. There is not only no school, there is no obvious curriculum which they can pursue. The mental training which produces the professional man of letters (professional as distinguished from amateur) is a purely subjective one, and it may make no sign until a poem, a story, an essay, proves that the man has not mistaken his vocation. This is true of the greatest artists, as well as of the humblest of those whom St. Inier calls "literary hacks." A man cannot learn how to put the best that is in him in a form that will be recognizable to the reader without long years of secret travail, of delight amounting to pain in the works of some great writer or writers, of despairing attempts at emulation.
Even a poet is made, not born, but he is made by such subtile and unconscious processes that they seem to date all the way back to his birth.
It is possibly on account of this difficulty in differentiating the amateur from the professional, on account of the want of some external sign for deciding his own status, that the young aspirant is so innocently, so delightfully vain. A young doctor does not say, "I can assure you without vanity that I would manage your case better than Dr. Weir Mitchell or Dr. Hammond." Nor does a young lawyer claim to be the superior of Evarts or Brewster. But a youth or a maiden making a first essay in literature sees nothing incongruous in assuring an editor or a publisher that, whatever its faults, the work is superior "to the dismal trash which Henry James is foisting upon the public," or "to the platitudes of Howells."
Goethe has an opportune anecdote in his autobiography. In early youth he had joined a party of boys who used to meet and compare verses of their own composition. "Here occurred something strange, which long troubled me. I could not help regarding my own poems, be they what they might, as the best. But I soon observed that my competitors, who produced very poor things, were in the same case and thought no less of themselves." He began, therefore, to doubt the soundness of his self-estimate, until the verses were all submitted to competent judges and his declared the best. This recognition of the general law of self-deception and its application to his own ease is characteristic of Goethe, and it marks one great difference between the "born" author and the amateur.
St. Inier's criticisms, as criticisms, the Editor will not attempt to discuss. They are expressions of individual opinions, and nothing would be gained by asserting that the Editor's opinions are different. But when, on the strength of his own criticisms, the saint accuses the Editor of practising "the basest of false pretences," it is just as well to point out where he is wrong. St. Inier does not like "A Foregone Conclusion." Many people think it the best thing that Howells ever did. St. Inier does not like "At Anchor." The news companies will tell him that they have had unusual difficulty in supplying orders for the magazine
