The men who deal with manuscripts—­editors, publishers’ readers, and publishers, men not only expert witnesses in regard to the printed literature of the day, but also curiously learned in the story of the book unborn, the vast mass of writing that never arrives at print—­are even more impressed by what one might call the uncanny literary brilliance of the time.  They are also puzzled by the lack of a certain something missing in work which otherwise possesses every nameable quality of literary excellence.  One of these, an editor with an eye as sympathetic as it is keen, told me of an instance to the point, typical of a hundred others.

He had been unusually struck by a story sent in to him by an unknown writer.  It was, he told me, amazing from every purely literary point of view—­plot, characterization, colour, and economy of language.  It had so much that it seemed strange that anything at all should be lacking.  He sent for the writer, and told him just what he thought.

“But,” he ended, after praise such as an editor seldom risks, “there is something the matter with it, after all.  I wonder if you can tell me what it is.”

The writer was, for a writer so flattered, strangely modest.  All he could say, he answered, was that he had done his best.  The editor, agreeing that he certainly seemed to have done that, was all the more curious to find out how it was that a man who could do so well had not been able to add to his achievement the final “something” that was missing.

“What puzzles me,” said the editor finally, “is that, with all the rest, you were not able to add—­humanity.  Your story seems to have been written by a wonderful literary machine, instead of by a man.”

And, no doubt, the young story-writer went away sorrowful, in spite of the acceptance of his story—­which, after all, was only lacking in that quality which you will find lacking in all the writing of the day, save in that by one or two exceptional writers, who, by their isolation, the more forcibly point the moral.

A wonderful literary machine!  The editor’s phrase very nearly hits off the situation.  As we have the linotype to set up the written words with a minimum of human agency, we really seem to be within measurable distance of a similar automaton that will produce the literature to be set up without the intrusion of any flesh-and-blood author.  In this connection I may perhaps be permitted to quote a sentence or two from myself, written a propos a certain chameleonesque writer whose deservedly popular works are among the contemporary books that I most value: