it too long,
you know: give it a rest." (This when you have not written a line for a
week!) And so on. We knew them all, these specious lures to idleness,
and strangled them with a firm hand each morning after breakfast. Well
we knew that on a dark dismal rainy day we would hear the Tempter
saying, "Who could work on a day like this? Leave it until the sun
shines in the window. Try that interesting novel you brought home. After
all, you know, you must read to see how the accepted masters do it. Read
for technique ..."

By nine o'clock we would all be at work.

So it was on this bright morning in October. I remember being rather
struck with the excellence of the work of the preceding evening. It was
not great work, you may say, not by any means in the category of
immortal classics. It was not even signed, being an appreciation of a
certain proprietary article in common use and extensively advertised.
There was to me a quite indescribable humour in the fact that this essay
in admiration was eventually published in French, German, Swedish and
Polish, running into a six-figure issue, while my last novel, a sincere
piece of literature, hung fire, so to speak, and never got beyond the
publisher's preliminary forecast of a thousand copies. Was I not angry?
Far from it. I was no puling undergraduate with a thin broad-margined
book of verse to sell. The public was at perfect liberty to buy what it
pleased. If they wanted my work, the work I loved and toiled to make as
perfect as possible, they would get it, all in good time. For the
present I was content to wait and do the thing which could be translated
into Swedish and Polish, into dollars cash. It is customary, I know, to
rail at the American public, to accuse them of a material mania. An
artist is better employed, in my humble view, in trying to understand
them, for believe me, they are not so vile as the precious
_litterateurs_ and others would have us believe. Bitterness is no
preparation for sympathetic study. And without sympathy our works,
however clever and lovely, are but Dead Sea apples, crumbling to ashes
at the touch of a human finger.

It must not be supposed that we had arrived at this way of thinking by a
sudden leap. Again, far from it! My friend and I had been
undergraduates, and very proud of ourselves into the bargain, long ago
in England. But we had travelled since then, in more senses than one. We
had known comfort and we had known the mute impressive