nted him from writing
"The Wonderful Visit." Artists should feel, and if necessary be
told, that they are on their honour to do their best. That will do.
If they flatter themselves that they are messengers from the Father
of Light whenever they put pen to paper, they are apt to take any
emotional hubble-bubble in themselves as a sign that the Spirit has
been brooding upon the waters, and pour out; though a short time
afterwards they may let loose a spate flowing in a quite different
direction. Sincerity of the moment is not sincerity; those who have
watched England's prime minister know that.

William James helped me to wash the bad taste of Mr. Wells's god out of
my mouth. It seems remarkable that such a distinguished man of
talent--if he were dead, one would be justified in saying a man of
genius--should not have been able to invent a more attractive and potent
Deity. Voltaire, while making no definition, did better than that; but
Voltaire was a much cleverer man than Wells, and he had an education
such as no modern writer has. When Mr. Wells preaches, he becomes a
bore. Who, except the empty-minded, or those who, like the Athenians,
are always seeking new things, can take Mr. Wells's dogmatisms
seriously? Is it not in one of his "Sermones" that Horace tells us that
the merchant wants to be a sailor and the sailor a merchant? Does he not
begin with--_Qui fit, Maecenas?_ But Horace says nothing of the authors
of fiction--Stevenson calls them very lightly "_filles de joie_,"--who
insist on being boldly and brutally theologians and philosophers. Horace
might have invented a better god than Wells; but he had too much good
taste and too much knowledge of man in the world to attempt it.

The more one reads of the very moderns, the more one falls in love with
the ancients. Take the peerless Horatius Flaccus, for instance. Do you
think anybody would read his Odes and Epodes and love him as we do if he
insisted that we should "sit under him" and assumed a pulpit manner?
This is as near as he ever comes to teaching us anything:

_Lenit albescens animos capillus
Litium et rixae cupidos protervae;
Non ego hoc ferrem calidus juventa,
Consule Planco._

Even Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who loved himself very much, showed in
his translations of "The Odes and Epodes" that he could almost love
something as well as himself. It does not become me to recommend
books