Twenty-six
Crime is simply a convenient monosyllable which we apply to what happens when the brain and the heart come into conflict and the brain is defeated.
Twenty-seven
Reflect that, as a rule, the people whom you have come to esteem communicated themselves to you gradually, that they did not begin the entertainment with fireworks.
Twenty-eight
To devise the contents of an issue, to plan them, to balance them; to sail with this wind and tack against that; to keep a sensitive, cool finger on the faintly beating pulse of the terrible many-headed patron; to walk in a straight line through a forest black as midnight; to guess the riddle of the circulation-book week by week; to know by instinct why Smiths sent in a repeat order, or why Simpkins’ was ten quires less; to keep one eye on the majestic march of the world, and the other on the vagaries of a bazaar-reporter who has forgotten the law of libel; these things, and seventy-seven others, are the real journalism. It is these things that make editors sardonic, grey, unapproachable.
Twenty-nine
I will be bold enough to say that quite seventy per cent. of ambition is never realised at all, and that ninety per cent. of all realised ambition is fruitless.
Thirty
To comply with the regulations ordained by English Society for the conduct of successful painters, he ought, first, to have taken the elementary precaution of being born in the United States. He ought, after having refused all interviews for months, to have ultimately granted a special one to a newspaper with the largest circulation. He ought to have returned to England, grown a mane and a tufted tail, and become the king of beasts; or at least to have made a speech at a banquet about the noble and purifying mission of art. Assuredly, he ought to have painted the portrait of his father or grandfather as an artisan to prove that he was not a snob.