s durable record, if anything short of indisputable
and undistilled truth be seen there, we all feel, How shall
our achievements profit us?

The record of the tribe is in its enduring literature. The
magic of literature lies in the words, and not in any man.
Witness, a thousand excellent, strenuous words can leave us
quite cold or put us to sleep, whereas a bare half-hundred
words breathed upon by some man in his agony, or in his
exaltation, or in his idleness, ten generations ago, can
still lead a whole nation into and out of captivity, can
open to us the doors of three worlds, or stir us so
intolerably that we can scarcely abide to look at our own
souls.

It is a miracle--one that happens very seldom. But secretly
each one of the masterless men with the words has hope, or
has had hope, that the miracle may be wrought again through
him.

And why not? If a tinker in Bedford jail, if a
pamphleteering shopkeeper pilloried in London, if a muzzy
Scotsman, if a despised German Jew, or a condemned French
thief, or an English admiralty official with a taste for
letters can be miraculously afflicted with the magic of the
necessary words, why not any man at any time?

Our world, which is only concerned in the perpetuation of
the record, sanctions that hope as kindly and just as
cruelly as nature sanctions love. All it suggests is that
the man with the words shall wait upon the man of
achievement, and step by step with him try to tell the story
to the tribe. All it demands is that the magic of every word
shall be tried out to the very uttermost by every means
fair and foul that the mind of man can suggest.

There is no room, and the world insists that there shall be
no room, for pity, for mercy, for respect, for fear, or even
for loyalty, between man and his fellow man, when the record
of the tribe comes to be written.

That record must satisfy, at all costs to the word and to
the man behind the word. It must satisfy alike the keenest
vanity and the deepest self-knowledge of the present; it
must satisfy also the most shameless curiosity of the
future. When it has done this it is literature of which will
be said in due time that it fitly represents its age.

"MEN AND WOMEN MERELY PLAYERS."

The Man as an Actor and the Actor as
a Man--an Interchangeable D