Musing along in this way we are suddenly pulled up by the reflection that it is impossible to make an unqualified statement that is wholly true about anything.  What chance have I, anyway? inquires the young man who thinks sometimes and occasionally wants to read.  What sort of leading-strings are these that I am getting into?  Look at the drift of things.  Is the feminization of the world a desirable thing for a vigorous future?  Are the women, or are they not, taking all the virility out of literature?  Answer me that.  All the novels are written by, for, or about women—­brought to their standard.  Even Henry James, who studies the sex untiringly, speaks about the “feminization of literature.”  They write most of the newspaper correspondence—­and write it for women.  They are even trying to feminize the colleges.  Granted that woman is the superior being; all the more, what chance is there for man if this sort of thing goes on?  Are you going to make a race of men on feminine fodder?  And here is the still more perplexing part of it.  Unless all analysis of the female heart is a delusion, and all history false, what women like most of all things in this world is a Man, virile, forceful, compelling, a solid rock of dependence, a substantial unfeminine being, whom it is some satisfaction and glory and interest to govern and rule in the right way, and twist round the feminine finger.  If women should succeed in reducing or raising—­of course raising—­men to the feminine standard, by feminizing society, literature, the colleges, and all that, would they not turn on their creations—­for even the Bible intimates that women are uncertain and go in search of a Man?  It is this sort of blind instinct of the young man for preserving himself in the world that makes him so inaccessible to the good he might get from the prevailing culture of the leisure class.

THE ADVENT OF CANDOR

Those who are anxious about the fate of Christmas, whether it is not becoming too worldly and too expensive a holiday to be indulged in except by the very poor, mark with pleasure any indications that the true spirit of the day—­brotherhood and self-abnegation and charity—­is infusing itself into modern society.  The sentimental Christmas of thirty years ago could not last; in time the manufactured jollity got to be more tedious and a greater strain on the feelings than any misfortune happening to one’s neighbor.  Even for a day it was very difficult to buzz about in the cheery manner prescribed, and the reaction put human nature in a bad light.  Nor was it much better when gradually the day became one of Great Expectations, and the sweet spirit of it was quenched in worry or soured in disappointment.  It began to take on the aspect of a great lottery, in which one class expected to draw in reverse proportion to what it put in, and another class knew that it would only reap as it had sowed.  The day, blessed