eved art only when they have stood naked in the market-place. But men
in general are not withheld by a similar hesitance from saying what they
feel most deeply. No woman could have written Mr. Barrie's biography of his
mother; but for a man like him there is a sort of sacredness in revealing
emotion so private as to be expressible only in the purest speech. Mr.
Barrie was apparently born into the world of men to tell us what our
mothers and our wives would have told us if they could,--what in deep
moments they have tried to tell us, trembling exquisitely upon the verge of
the words. The theme of his best work has always been "what every woman
knows." In expressing this, he has added to the permanent recorded
knowledge of humanity; and he has thereby lifted his plays above the level
of theatric journalism to the level of true dramatic literature.

IX

THE INTENTION OF PERMANENCE

At Coney Island and Atlantic City and many other seaside resorts whither
the multitude drifts to drink oblivion of a day, an artist may be watched
at work modeling images in the sand. These he fashions deftly, to entice
the immediate pennies of the crowd; but when his wage is earned, he leaves
his statues to be washed away by the next high surging of the tide. The
sand-man is often a good artist; let us suppose he were a better one. Let
us imagine him endowed with a brain and a hand on a par with those of
Praxiteles. None the less we should set his seashore images upon a lower
plane of art than the monuments Praxiteles himself hewed out of marble.
This we should do instinctively, with no recourse to critical theory; and
that man in the multitude who knew the least about art would express this
judgment most emphatically. The simple reason would be that the art of the
sand-man is lacking in the Intention of Permanence.

The Intention of Permanence, whether it be conscious or subconscious with
the artist, is a necessary factor of the noblest art. Many of us remember
the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition, at Chicago fifteen
years ago. The sculpture was good and the architecture better. In
chasteness and symmetry of general design, in spaciousness fittingly
restrained, in simplicity more decorative than deliberate decoration, those
white buildings blooming into gold and mirrored in a calm lagoon, dazzled
the eye and delighted the aesthetic sense. And yet, merely because they
lacked the Intention of Permanence, they failed t