N the matter of art, youth and age often hold fears that have more than a superficial likeness. We find age, for example, betraying apprehensiveness as to birthday prejudices and a slipping attention on the part of its audience. Youth's anxiety is equally associated with the horrible haste of the clock. To youth, nothing looks worthwhile unless it can be induced to happen soon.

When I was nineteen it had become quite clear to me that if I were not famous at twenty five the jig would be up. Naturally I had no suspicion of my triteness. If we knew that we had happened before, our necessary impudence would be crippled. Even a taste of fame cannot appease the newly adult suspicion of the management. Max Beerbohm was having fun with this state of mind when, thirty years ago, he declared, "I shall write no more." Emerson's youthful, "Goodby, proud world, I'm going home", might suggest a rich anthology of sophomoric impatiences. I was not considering the misgivings of better men. I had an anxiety, and it was documented. the names were at hand, a sort of who's who among the early.

All

At twenty five I had a new list, a larger list, of the great whose blaring entrance into the arena had occurred somewhere within a ten year period ending at thirty five. This, I said, to my Unconscious, is your last stand. Win now or crawl into obscurity and pull the hole after you. But at thirty five there had been neither apocalypse nor cataclysm, and I was too busy to

fulfil the pledged abasement. The crawling was postponed. Moreover, new testimony had been introduced. Evidently the imposing triumphs marking the period between thirty five and forty five made most of the earlier records seem if not trivial at least inconclusive. And there came a time when it became imperative to acknowledge that the "curve" of genius rose sharply on the way toward fifty five, while not merely mature masterpieces but initial entrances of the most distinguished order were not to be included unless a still larger curve could be drawn.

It was not until the other day, in one of those intervals so plainly marked for unproductiveness that any maundering or mischief is likely to be invited, that I ventured to look among the records, no longer with an eagerness to be confirmed, nor altogether with a swagger of assurance, but with what seemed to be an amiable curiosity as to the possible insolence of the facts. No need to consider sheer precocity, which so often has an effect described (by George Eliot, for instance) as resembling the predicament of one who gets up too early and is sleepy all the afternoon. On the other hand, it could make no point to show genius still going strong at eighty five or ninety. There are inverted prodigies that upset all orderly calculations. I chose, arbitrarily, to look for the signs not of a first significant expression but of the fully "arrived" creative effort not for the first affairs but for the high moods of authentic gestation. Perhaps I there

by begged the question, for genius has no code for getting itself said. An "Endymion" written at twenty one and a "Way of All Flesh" written at sixty six both represented guilt in obeying that impulse, and each in its way illustrated sustained power. It was the hundred yard dash that I chose to ignore, not because this offered a lesser sign in itself, but because the longer run, if not the marathon, seems more likely to eliminate the element of chance, which art is quite privileged to use, yet which can be no part of its true essence. Mere length is not, then, an art quality, but it can be demonstrative. It has been said of well cleaners in Africa that they must be able to stay submerged (with halted lungs) for four or five minutes, and that men under sixty are found not to have the necessary endurance. There is scarcely a happy parallel in the case of creative effort, though we might find many instances of shortwinded talent to bolster an analogy.

It would be easy, yet quite unscientific, to assume that the time theoretically required to produce a novel makes the novel the severest test of either the scope or the intensity of power. Sustained thinking and feeling and expressing can have no such measure. I found

myself looking up the novels (and romances) as well as certain outstanding plays, with no logic whatever, though I might, if I had felt any obligation, have argued that in a novel a writer has wider latitude for the betrayal of weaknesses than is offered in any other medium. It was impossible to miss the revelation that poets and playwrights are likely to flower earlier than the novelists. Here were "The School for Scandal" at twenty six, "Every Man in His Humor" at twenty five, "The Beaux' Stratagem" at twenty nine, "Vor Sonnenaufgang" at twenty

six, not to speak of Belasco's "May Blossom" at twenty five. Ibsen's "Doll's House" at fifty, or the Philoctetes, produced when Sophocles was well on toward ninety, did not seem to invalidate a theory that the playwright might be as early as the poet.

I

The twenties, I am bound to admit, offered poor pickings, though Kipling and Stephen Crane ("The Red Badge of Courage" was written at twenty five) and many another are to be cited in support of any claim for real youth. have confessed a juvenile theory as to twenty five. A later excursion into figures resulted at one moment in the conviction that thirty six was a noble crisis, for here were Shakespeare with "Hamlet", Flaubert with "Madame Bovary", Irving with "Rip Van Winkle", Boccaccio with the "Decameron", Whitman with "Leaves of Grass", Poe with "The Raven", Stevenson with "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". But in the end all such fantastic hypotheses were toppled.

Let me offer, with any proper apology for casualness, some of my notations, decade by decade. There is every likelihood of inexactness, for it is not always possible to discriminate accurately between writing date and publication date. And there is plenty of room for quarrel as to the choice of genius's "high spot". The entrance of a new personality inevitably attracts more attention than any later gesture. Loose criticism often confuses the furor of surprise with the sound of a real triumph, though first furors are, I suppose, of themselves a triumph. In a matter so elementally a question of opinion I should not and do not bother to consider how closely my choice of any book may match any other choice. Nevertheless, I have not, to my own feeling, chosen with any flagrant peculiarity of preference.

In the thirties: Shakespeare, "Hamlet" (36); Flaubert, "Madame Bovary" (36); Whitman, "Leaves of Grass" (36); Boccaccio, "Decameron" (36); Sue, "The Mysteries of Paris" (39); Stevenson, "Dr. Jekyll" (36); Wilkie Collins, "The Woman in White” (36); Gogol, "Dead Souls" (33); Frank Norris, "The Pit" (32); Kipling, "Kim" (35); Page, "Marse Chan" (34); Oscar Wilde, "Dorian Gray" (35); Eggleston, "The Hoosier Schoolmaster" (34); Garland, "Rose of Dutcher's Coolly" (35); Cable, "Dr. Sevier" (39); Fuller, "The Cliff Dwellers" (36); D'Annunzio, "Francesca da Rimini" (39); Wycherley, "The Plain Dealer" (33); Crawford "Saracinesca" (33); Cabell, "Jurgen" (39); Poole, "The Harbor" (35); Mérimée, "Colomba" (37); Henry Sydnor Harrison, "Queed" (31); Hergesheimer, "Java Head" (38).

(48);

In the forties: Chaucer, "Canterbury Tales" (46); Barrie, "Peter Pan" (43); Balzac, "La Cousine Bette" (46); Tolstoy, "Anna Karenina" (42); Molière, "Le Misanthrope" (44); Scott, "St. Ronan's Well" (43); Dickens, "Great Expectations" (49); Thackeray, "The Newcomes" (43); Jane Austen, "Emma" (40); Dostoyevsky, "Crime and Punishment" (44); Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn" (48); Shaw, "Man and Superman" (47); George Eliot, "Adam Bede" (40); (40); Howells, "Silas Lapham" (47); Anatole France, "Thais" (45); Rabelais, "Pantagruel" (42); Blackmore, "Lorna Doone" (44); Dante, "The Divine Comedy" (41); Sudermann, "Es War" (47); Le Sage, "Gil Blas" (47 to 67); Dumas, "Monte Cristo" (42); Daudet, "Sapho" (44); Fielding, "Tom Jones" (41); George Moore, "Esther Waters" (41); Trollope, "Barchester Towers" (42); George Sand, "La Mare au Diable" (42); Zola, “La

Terre" (48); Hewlett, "The Queen's

Quair"
Quair" (42); Smollett, "Humphrey
Clinker" (49); Stowe, "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" (41); Conrad, "Lord Jim"
(43); Deland, "The Awakening of
Helena Ritchie" (48); Melville, "Moby
Dick" (42); Burnett, "A Lady of
Quality" (46); Dreiser, "The Genius"
(43); Wilson, "Bunker Bean" (45);
Tarkington, "Seventeen" (46); Gals-
worthy, "Fraternity" (42); Hale, "The
Man Without a Country" (41); Willa
Cather, "My Antonia" (41); Edith
Wharton, "The House of Mirth" (42);
James Lane Allen, "The Choir Invisi-
ble" (46); Sherwood Anderson, "Poor
White" (43).

In the fifties: Sterne, "A Sentimental Journey" (55); Goethe, "Faust" (59); Meredith, "The Egoist" (58); Hardy, "Tess" (50); Ibsen, "A Doll's House" (50); Wells, "Mr. Britling" (50); Turgenev, "Virgin Soil" (59); Racine, "Athalie" (51); Milton, "Paradise Lost" (55); Hawthorne, "The Marble Faun" (55); Cervantes, "Don Quixote" (57); Bunyan, "Pilgrim's Progress" (50); Gautier, "Le Capitaine Fracasse" (52); Swift, "Gulliver's Travels" (58); Stockton, “Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine" (52); Wallace, "Ben Hur" (53); Richardson, "Clarissa Harlowe" (58); Rousseau, "La Nouvelle Héloïse" (50); Johnson," Rasselas" (50); Reade, "Griffith Gaunt" (52).

In the sixties: Hugo, "Les Misérables" (60); Butler, "The Way of All Flesh" (66); Voltaire, "Candide" (65); De Morgan, "It Never Can Happen Again" (69); Defoe, "Robinson Crusoe" (60); de Goncourt, "La Faustin (60); James, "The Golden Bowl" (60).

It will be plain that in many instances earlier work by a given artist might be indicated as of equal fame or equal importance, but the debate here would be no better than that over the superior

quality of later work. I skirt the philosophy leading straight to the conclusion that if works of art endured by technique alone, age would have a general advantage. Tradition recognizes increasing skill and diminishing enthusiasm. The artist who holds his high spirits like a Goethe, a Verdi, or a Cervantes is yielded an inevitable ascendancy in art as in life.

My list is too personal and impulsive to merit precise deductions. It would not do, for example, to suggest that forty two, fifty, and sixty seem to be fortunate ages. It might be rash to suggest that in the work of the fifties and sixties appears a fibre stronger than in that of the thirties and forties. To be honest, I believe nothing of the sort. The thing I do believe is that genius as

exhibited in works of imagination has no favorite age, that the brain has no child bearing period whose range it is possible to fix.

The one admonitory conclusion which I venture to derive from this glance at the figures is that youth need not be in a hurry. A joyous impatience, yes, but not a crippling anxiety to demonstrate. No time concessions to all that is outside. The true artist will not be a clock watcher. He may sometimes beat the game, as Dr. Johnson did with "Rasselas" because he needed the money (it is always a shocking discovery that few impulsions have been so provocative to genius as being hard up), but this will not be like feverishly fussing over proof that genius is on the job early - or that earliness is genius.

N eminent British author, when

dislikes in one of those biographical booklets too often presented to literary lights by their admirers, alleged his favorite occupation to be "Serendipity". The novel and tantalizing term immediately caught the attention of those curious in words, and was found to have been coined by Horace Walpole, who used it concerning the adventures of a certain Prince of Serendib.

This oriental potentate, so it is related, conducted a worldwide search for a lost treasure, and although he never found the particular object he desired, he yet came upon so many other valuable things in his travels that he considered his life well spent.

Haec fabula docet: This fable teaches that even a successful author's morning mail, bulky as it may be with bills, advertisements, begging letters, letters seeking the origin of quotations and the verification of statements, queries as to the disposition of manuscripts, pleas for opinions on verse - that this high heaped material may yet contain some rare gem that sparkles among the rubbish, "like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear".

In the pursuit of Serendipity, then, the following gems were discovered by my sister and laid away in a special case for the delight of other connoisseurs. N. A. S.