would perceive the
essential need of a purification and refinement of method if
they were to hold their audience under anything like the old
spell.

Progress from broad lines approaching buffoonery to
delicacy, from the obvious and the apparent to the elusive,
is observable in all humorists who hold their public. It was
seen in Eugene Field. It is discernible in Mark Twain, whom
Mr. Jerome cites as a survival of the "old American school."
Between "The Innocents Abroad" and "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and
"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" is all the contrast of
the changed taste of a new generation. _Falstaff_ is not now
the fashion.

WOMAN'S REAL PLACE IN LITERARY WORK.

An Unkind Frenchman Says That Her
Limitations Must Always Keep
Her in a Secondary Role.

We have often been told by Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman that woman, as a
type, ranks higher in almost every respect than man; and there are many
people of both sexes who agree with her. Nevertheless, the champions of
feminine superiority may find it hard work to shout down the glorifiers of
masculine achievement.

Here is a Frenchman, Georges Pellisier, a literary critic, who argues that
woman cannot write great literature, because she is intellectually as well
as physically inferior to man. He assigns to her the secondary literary
role of acting as mistress of the literary salon--a position which, he
thinks, has a valuable influence. He expresses his views as follows, in
_La Revue_ (Paris), the translation being that of the _Literary Digest_:

Philosophy, criticism, and history are beyond her mental
scope, and I know of none who has made a lasting impression
in these domains. Philosophy requires a force of abstraction
and a power of application rarely possessed by women, the
power of reflection being, with them, as one of the greatest
of them has admitted, "rather a happy accident than a
peculiar or permanent attribute." Naturally impulsive, they
fail to follow out the logic of their ideas.... In the
domain of criticism woman is too much the slave of first
impressions, or preconceived notions, which must be
admitted, however, to be generally very vivid and often very
just.

Her personal preferences, nevertheless, obscure her views
and misguide her opinions, while she lacks almost wholly the
faculty of weighing her judgments.... A proper study or