I'm getting many a good lambasting for my book of essays. Also a sop of honey now and then. It's all the same to me; I don't worry about what my contemporaries think of me. I made 'em think of you—that's glory enough for one. And the squirrels in the public parks think me the finest fellow in the world. They know what I have in every pocket. Critics don't know that—nor nearly so much.
Advice to a young author: Cultivate the good opinion of squirrels.
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
Washington, D. C.,
November 1,
1909.
Dear George,
European criticism of your bête noir, old Leopold, is entitled to attention; American (of him or any other king) is not. It looks as if the wretch may be guilty of indifference.
In condemning as "revolutionary" the two-rhyme sestet, I think I could not have been altogether solemn, for (1) I'm something of a revolutionist myself regarding the sonnet, having frequently expressed the view that its accepted forms—even the number of lines—were purely arbitrary; (2) I find I've written several two-rhyme sestets myself, and (3), like yours, my ear has difficulty in catching the rhyme effect in a-b-c, a-b-c. The rhyme is delayed till the end of the fourth line—as it is in the quatrain (not of the sonnet) with unrhyming first and third lines—a form of which I think all my multitude of verse supplies no example. I confess, though, that I did not know that Petrarch had made so frequent use of the 2-rhyme sestet.
I learn a little all the time; some of my old notions of poetry seem to me now erroneous, even absurd. So I may have been at one time a stickler for the "regular" three-rhymer. Even now it pleases my ear well enow if the three are not so arranged as to elude it. I'm sorry if I misled you. You'd better 'fess up to your young friend, as I do to you—if I really was serious.
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