I wish to express my obligations for the wisdom
of his message.
CHAPTER XV
THE ARTIST AT WORK
I was once asked to write of my father's "literary methods," and the
idea struck me as delightfully impossible. I wish I knew just what
those methods were--I might hope to write a romance. But as the bird
on the tree-bough catches here and there a glimpse of what men are
about, although he hardly aspires to plough the field himself, or
benefit by human labor until the harvest comes, so I have observed
some facts and gathered some notions as to how my father thought out
his literary work.
One method of obtaining his end was to devote himself constantly to
writing, whether it brought him money or not. He might not have seemed
to be working all the time, but to be enjoying endless leisure in
walking through the country or the city streets. But even a bird would
have had more penetration than to make such a mistake as to think
this. Another wise provision was to love and pity mankind more than he
scorned them, so that he never created a character which did not
possess a soul--the only puppet he ever contrived of straw,
"Feathertop," having an excellent soul until the end of the story.
Still another method of gaining his success was to write with a noble
respect for his own best effort, on which account he never felt
satisfied with his writing unless he had exerted every muscle of his
faculty; unless every word he had written seemed to his severest
self-criticism absolutely true.
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