e lees, but at the
banquet table where other men took their ease and jested over their
wine, he stood a dark and silent figure, sombre as Poe himself, not
wishing to be understood; and he took his portion in haste, with his
loins girded, and his shoes on his feet, and his staff in his hand,
like one who must depart quickly.

_The Library_, June 23, 1900

_On the Art of Fiction_

One is sometimes asked about the "obstacles" that confront young
writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest
obstacles that writers today have to get over, are the dazzling
journalistic successes of twenty years ago, stories that surprised
and delighted by their sharp photographic detail and that were
really nothing more than lively pieces of reporting. The whole aim
of that school of writing was novelty--never a very important thing
in art. They gave us, altogether, poor standards--taught us to
multiply our ideas instead of to condense them. They tried to make a
story out of every theme that occurred to them and to get returns on
every situation that suggested itself. They got returns, of a kind.
But their work, when one looks back on it, now that the novelty upon
which they counted so much is gone, is journalistic and thin. The
especial merit of a good reportorial story is that it shall be
intensely interesting and pertinent today and shall have lost its
point by tomorrow.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly
the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions
of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the
spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut
away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in
type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants
sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but
when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, "The
Sower," the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All
the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it
finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying,
of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was
better and more universal.

Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a
dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good
workman can't be a cheap workman; he can't be stingy about