ing one's self out or reading one's self in, but
inasmuch as the importance of reading one's self out is more generally
overlooked, it may be well to dwell upon it. Most of the reading
theories of the best people to-day, judging from the prohibitions of
certain books, overlook the importance altogether, in vital and normal
persons--especially the young,--of reading one's self out. It is only as
some people keep themselves read out, and read out regularly, that they
can be kept from bringing evil on the rest of us. If Eve had had a
novel, she would have sat down under the Tree and read about the fruit
instead of eating it. If Adam had had a morning paper, he would hardly
have listened to his wife's suggestion. If the Evil One had come up to
Eve in the middle of _Les Miserables_, or one of Rossetti's sonnets, no
one would ever have heard of him. The main misfortune of Adam and Eve
was that they had no arts to come to the rescue of their religion. If
Eve could have painted the apple, she would not have eaten it. She put
it into her mouth because she could not think of anything else to do
with it, and she had to do something. She had the artistic temperament
(inherited from her mother Sleep, probably, or from being born in a
dream), and the temptation of the artistic temperament is, that it gets
itself expressed or breaks something. She had tried everything--flowers,
birds, clouds, and her shadow in the stream, but she found they were all
inexpressible. She could not express them. She could not even express
herself. Taking walks in Paradise and talking with the one man the place
afforded was not a complete and satisfying self-expression. Adam had his
limitations--like all men. There were things that could not be said.

Standing as we do on the present height of history, with all the
resources of sympathy in the modern world, its countless arts drawing
the sexes together, going about understanding people, communing with
them, and expressing them, making a community for every man, even in his
solitude, it is not hard to see that the comparative failure of the
first marriage was a matter of course. The real trouble was that Adam
and Eve, standing in their brand-new world, could not express themselves
to one another. As there was nothing else to express them, they were
bored. It is to Eve's credit that she was more bored than Adam was, and
that she resented it more; and while a Fall, under the circumstances,
was as painful as it