But how unwilling would the average American of his day have been, stuffed as he was and still is with book and picture drivel about artists and art, to accept L——­ as anything more than a raw, callow yokel, presuming to assail the outer portals of the temple with his muddy feet!  A romping, stamping, irritable soul, with more the air of a young railroad brakeman or “hand,” than an artist, and with so much coarse language at times and such brutality of thought as to bar him completely, one might say, from having anything to do with great fiction, great artistic conceptions, or the temple of art.  What, sit with the mighty!—­that coarse youth, with darkish-brown hair parted at one side and combed over one ear, in the manner of a grandiose barber; with those thick-soled and none too shapely brown shoes, that none too well-made store suit of clothes, that little round brown hat, more often a cap, pulled rather savagely and vulgarly, even insultingly, over one eye; that coarse frieze overcoat, still worn on cold spring days, its “corners” back and front turned up by the damp and from being indifferently sat on; that brash corn-cob pipe and bag of cheap tobacco, extracted and lit at odd moments; what, that youth with the aggressive, irritating vibrant manner—­almost the young tough with a chip on his shoulder looking for one to even so much as indicate that he is not all he should be!  Positively, there was something brutal and yet cosmic (not comic) about him, his intellectual and art pretensions considered.  At times his waspishness and bravado palled even on me.  He was too aggressive, too forceful, too intolerant, I said.  He should be softer.  At other times I felt that he needed to be all that and more to “get by,” as he would have said.  I wanted to modify him a little—­and yet I didn’t—­and I remained drawn to him in spite of many irritating little circumstances, all but infuriating at times, and actually calculated, it seemed, with a kind of savage skill to reduce what he conceived to be my lofty superiority.  At times I thought he ought to be killed—­like a father meditating on an unruly son—­but the mood soon passed and his literary ability made amends for everything.

In so far as the magazine was concerned, once it began to grow and attract attention he was for me its most important asset; not that he did so much directly as that he provided a definite standard toward which we all had to work.  Not incuriously, he was swiftly recognized for what he was by all who came in touch with the magazine.  In the first place, interested in his progress, I had seen to it that he was properly introduced wherever that was possible and of benefit to him, and later on, by sheer force of his mental capacity and integrity, his dreams and his critical skill, he managed to center about him an entire band of seeking young writers, artists, poets, playwrights, aspiring musicians; an amusing and as interesting a group as I have ever seen.  Their points of