or models,
or studio rent as the painter or the sculptor has, and his income, such
as it is, is immediate. If he strikes the fancy of the editor with the
first thing he offers, as he very well may, it is as well with him as
with other men after long years of apprenticeship. Although he will
always be the better for an apprenticeship, and the longer
apprenticeship the better, he may practically need none at all. Such
are the strange conditions of his acceptance with the public, that he
may please better without it than with it. An author's first book is
too often not only his luckiest, but really his best; it has a
brightness that dies out under the school he puts himself to, but a
painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can give
himself.

XI.

In view of this fact it become again very hard to establish the
author's status in the business world, and at moments I have grave
question whether he belongs there at all, except as a novelist. There
is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort, any more than in any
other sort of literature, but it at least supposes and exacts some
measure of preparation. A young writer may produce a brilliant and
very perfect romance, just as he may produce a brilliant and very
perfect poem, but in the field of realistic fiction, or in what we used
to call the novel of manners, a writer can only produce an inferior
book at the outset. For this work he needs experience and observation,
not so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters will
all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and character
with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire only through his
own heart. A man remains in a measure strange to himself as long as he
lives, and the very sources of novelty in his work will be within
himself; he can continue to give it freshness in no other way than by
knowing himself better and better. But a young writer and an untrained
writer has not yet begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other
men. The world around him remains a secret as well as the world within
him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience of
joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time. Until he is
well on toward forty, he will hardly have assimilated the materials of
a great novel, although he may have accumulated them. The novelist,
then, is a man of letters who is like a man of business in the
necessity of pr