Countess Erika's Apprenticeship

Transcriber's Note: 1. Page scan source: http://books.google.com/books?id=1hUtAAAAYAAJ
A friend returning from a stroll round the globe brought back an odd volume of my work picked up in San Francisco, translated without my leave, but proving by its very existence that the American reading world take a certain interest in my show and its puppets.
Though in a certain sense these unauthorized editions are a picking of the author's pocket, yet I must confess that I felt rather flattered.
Every one possessing any feeling for modernism must highly prize what American art and American literature have done and are doing for the directness, vividness, and intensity of presentation to our eyes or our imagination either of outward objects or the silent workings of character and inner sensations.
The rapidity and intensity of picturing frequently remind us of an electric shock.
We Old World folk take life, to a certain degree, more at our leisure, but nevertheless every real artist follows the great direction that has seized all our contemporary being.
Directness of truth, vividness and intensity of presentation, exact rendering of impression, are the means by which we seek to produce life; life itself is the object, but I am afraid that to the end the life-giving spark will defy analysis.
Let me hope that the figures whose woes and weal my reader will follow through these pages may be half as alive to him as they have been to me; and let me hope, likewise, that when he closes the volume we may have become fast friends.
I cannot let this opportunity pass without thanking Mrs. Wister most heartily for her faithful and picturesque rendering of my story.
What a rare delight it is to an author to find himself so admirably rendered and so perfectly understood only those can feel that have undergone the acute misery of seeing their every thought mangled, their every sentence massacred, as common translations will mangle and massacre word and thought.