young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could
not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by
the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing
beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul
had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had
been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some
other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur
his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same
time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the
same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the
youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for
perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end
could no more justify bad means in aesthetics than in ethics; in fact,
without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result.
If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high
result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the
results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were
coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the
wrong shop.

Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he
had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the
end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the
business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed
always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There
were times when it changed to some other end or took a different
significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself
that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it
first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events
and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by
all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or
even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more
carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous
without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from
all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more
eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the
preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age
to