It takes centuries of tears and piety and mourning to move this world a tiny bit.
But still it will give you praise and applause and money if you will prostitute your sensibilities and emotions for the gratification of it.
I have no message to hide in a book and send out. I am writing a Portrayal.
But a Portrayal is also a thing that may be misunderstood.
[January 30.]
AN IDLE brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the idle brains that cumber the earth. But, after all, the Devil is so clever that he could produce unexcelled workmanship with even the poorest tools.
My brain is one kind of devil’s workshop, and it is as incessantly hard-worked and always-busy a one as you could imagine.
It is a devil’s workshop, indeed, only I do the work myself. But there is a mental telegraphy between the Devil and me, which accounts for the fact that many of my ideas are so wonderfully groomed and perfumed and colored. I take no credit to myself for this, though, as I say, I do the work myself.
I try always to give the Devil his due—and particularly in this Portrayal.