As to the pig of a public, its indifference to a diet of pearls—our pearls—was not unknown to me, and truly it does not trouble me anywhere except in the pocket. That pig, too, is not much beholden to me, who have pounded the snout of it all my life. Why should it assist in the rite? Its indifference to your work constitutes a new provocation and calls for added whacks, but not its indifference to mine.
The Ashton Stevens interview was charming. His finding you and Scheff together seems too idyllic to be true—I thought it a fake. He put in quite enough—too much—about me. As to Joaquin's hack at me—why, that was magnanimity itself in one who, like most of us, does not offset blame against praise, subtract the latter from the former and find matter for thanks in the remainder. You know "what fools we mortals be"; criticism that is not all honey is all vinegar. Nobody has more delighted than I in pointing out the greatness of Joaquin's great work; but nobody than I has more austerely condemned * * *, his vanity and the general humbugery that makes his prose so insupportable. Joaquin is a good fellow, all the same, and you should not demand of him impossible virtues and a reach of reasonableness that is alien to him.
* * *
I have the books you kindly sent and have planted two or three in what I think fertile soil which I hope will produce a small crop of appreciation.
* * *
And the poem![7] I hardly know how to speak of it. No poem in English of equal length has so bewildering a wealth of imagination. Not Spenser himself has flung such a profusion of jewels into so small a casket. Why, man, it takes away the breath! I've read and reread—read it for the expression and read it for the thought (always when I speak of the "thought" in your work I mean the meaning—which is another thing) and I shall read it many times more. And pretty soon I'll get at it with my red ink and see if I can suggest anything worth your attention. I fear not.
* * *
Sincerely yours, Ambrose Bierce.
[7] "A Wine of Wizardry."
