Few, in fact, want flower of author.  Moreover, it is a quality that may well be looked for where it does not exist.  To say that the finality which Art requires is merely an enwrapping mood, or flower of author, is not by any means to say that any robust fellow, slamming his notions down in ink, can give us these.  Indeed, no!  So long as we see the author’s proper person in his work, we do not see the flower of him.  Let him retreat himself, if he pretend to be an artist.  There is no less of subtle skill, no less impersonality, in the “Bergeret” volumes than in “Le Lys Rouge.”  No less labour and mental torturing went to their making, page by page, in order that they might exhale their perfume of mysterious finality, their withdrawn but implicit judgment.  Flower of author is not quite so common as the buttercup, the Californian poppy, or the gay Texan gaillardia, and for that very reason the finality it gives off will never be robust enough for a mankind at large that would have things cut and dried, and labelled in thick letters.  For, consider—­to take one phase alone of this demand for factual finality—­how continual and insistent is the cry for characters that can be worshipped; how intense and persistent the desire to be told that Charles was a real hero; and how bitter the regret that Mary was no better than she should be!  Mankind at large wants heroes that are heroes, and heroines that are heroines—­and nothing so inappropriate to them as unhappy endings.

Travelling away, I remember, from that Grand Canyon of Arizona were a young man and a young woman, evidently in love.  He was sitting very close to her, and reading aloud for her pleasure, from a paper-covered novel, heroically oblivious of us all: 

“‘Sir Robert,’ she murmured, lifting her beauteous eyes, ’I may not tempt you, for you are too dear to me!’ Sir Robert held her lovely face between his two strong hands.  ‘Farewell!’ he said, and went out into the night.  But something told them both that, when he had fulfilled his duty, Sir Robert would return . . . .”  He had not returned before we reached the Junction, but there was finality about that baronet, and we well knew that he ultimately would.  And, long after the sound of that young man’s faithful reading had died out of our ears, we meditated on Sir Robert, and compared him with the famous characters of fiction, slowly perceiving that they were none of them so final in their heroism as he.  No, none of them reached that apex.  For Hamlet was a most unfinished fellow, and Lear extremely violent.  Pickwick addicted to punch, and Sam Weller to lying; Bazarof actually a Nihilist, and Irina——!  Levin and Anna, Pierre and Natasha, all of them stormy and unsatisfactory at times.  “Un Coeur Simple” nothing but a servant, and an old maid at that; “Saint Julien l’Hospitalier” a sheer fanatic.  Colonel Newcome too irritable and too simple altogether.  Don Quixote certified insane.  Hilda Wangel, Nora,