Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole—so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. Millet had done hundreds of sketches of peasants sowing grain, some of them very complicated and interesting, but when he came to paint the spirit of them all into one picture, “The Sower,” the composition is so simple that it seems inevitable. All the discarded sketches that went before made the picture what it finally became, and the process was all the time one of simplifying, of sacrificing many conceptions good in themselves for one that was better and more universal.
Any first rate novel or story must have in it the strength of a dozen fairly good stories that have been sacrificed to it. A good workman can’t be a cheap workman; he can’t be stingy about wasting material, and he cannot compromise. Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. The courage to go on without compromise does not come to a writer all at once—nor, for that matter, does the ability. Both are phases of natural development. In the beginning, the artist, like his public, is wedded to old forms, old ideals, and his vision is blurred by the memory of old delights he would like to recapture.
ASTONISHING PSYCHIC EXPERIENCE
Being a True Account of How Alfred A. Knopf Appeared
in a Vision to Clarence Day, Jr.
I have a friend who, when she hears a strange voice on the telephone, can visualize the person—that is to say, she sometimes can, if it interests her. She half-closes her eyes, tilts her head back, stares away off into space; and then she slowly describes the appearance of whoever is telephoning, almost as well as though he or she were standing before her. It is one of those supernatural gifts that seem to our times so startling.
The reason I mention this is, that though I hadn’t supposed I was that sort of person, I had one of these mysterious psychic visions myself, years ago. It came to me while I was reading Mr. Knopf’s first announcements of books. I had never seen the man, never heard a word of what he was like, yet his image suddenly arose clear as a photograph before my inner eye. There he stood, tall and thin, an elder statesman, with a bushy white beard; round, glowing eyes, ivory skin; an animated savant.
He spoke in his circulars as a man of great taste and authority. I pictured him as a French Academician of American birth.