"From the author of Unleavened Bread we once had a right to expect much. But The High Priestess chiefly makes me regret that he didn't have to write novels or starve; by its virtues of construction, which are many and admirable, and by its utter lack of power to communicate any emotion whatsoever, which is conspicuous and lamentable. He seems to have written his novel with an adding-machine, and instinctively I blame that 'other business' of his, in which he seems to have forgotten—for he did know it once—that a novelist may or may not think straight, but he must feel.
"Perhaps he wasn't a real novelist, after all. I suspect a real novelist would starve in any other business."
I told Mr. Wilson that a prominent American humorist writer had classed Mark Twain with Artemus Ward and Philander Doesticks, and said that these men were not genuine humorists, but "the Charlie Chaplins of their time."
Mr. Wilson smiled. "Isn't this rather high praise for Charlie Chaplin?" he asked. "How far is this idolatry of the movie actor to go, anyway? True, Mr. Chaplin is a skilled comedian, pre-eminent in his curious new profession, but to my thinking he lacks repose at those supreme moments when he is battering the faces of his fellow-histrions with the wet mop or the stuffed club, or walking on their stomachs; but I may be prejudiced. I know I shouldn't have ranked him with Mark Twain, arch-humanist and satirist and one of the few literary artists who have attained the world stature—so that we must go back and back to Cervantes to find his like."
THE PASSING OF THE SNOB
EDWARD S. MARTIN
If William Makepeace Thackeray were alive to-day he would not write a Book of Snobs. He might write a Book of Reformers.