At bottom Americans are kind. They are good natured. So anxious are we as a people for men of talent that it takes but the merest show of talent to get recognition among us. Why, any man or woman who wants to be respected has but to set himself up as a poet. He does not need to write poetry. Let him write a few verses. We will all invite him to dine with us, we will put up with his idiosyncracies and small vanities, we will nurse and feed him like a very babe.
And if he is a musician or a young painter we will, as likely as not, shell out our money and send him off to Paris to become as commonplace and unreal and successful as an artist as the very people we have been talking about here today.
But my preaching on this subject had better come to an end. It is a subject on which books might be written. When your young man or woman has made the sacrifices for the sake of a craft that I have spoken of as necessary—and they are not really sacrifices at all—the struggle has but begun. There remains the question of talent and if you have talent that doesn’t settle the matter.
There is no agreement among artists as to the ends they are seeking, no absolute standards. “A. E.”, the famous Irish publicist, painter and poet once said that a literary movement consisted of several men of talent living at the same time and cordially hating each other.
That is the truth and yet it is not quite true. What it really means is that when men are devoted to their work there will still remain a wide difference of opinion as to methods, treatments of the subject, the baffling question of form achieved or not achieved—the question of when a craftsman’s work becomes also a work of art. These are old questions about which all craftsmen have always struggled among themselves. It is all a queer and fascinating game just as life itself is queer and fascinating.
The real reward I fancy lies just in the work itself, nowhere else. If you cannot get it there, you will not get it at all.
And speaking for my craft I can say that it is tremendously worth while. You are undertaking a task that can never be finished. You are starting on a road that has no end. The longest life will be too short to ever really get you anywhere near what you want. And that I should say is the best part of the story.
One thousand copies
of this book have been printed
for The Lantern Press, San Francisco,
(Gelber, Lilienthal, Inc.)
by Edwin & Robert Grabhorn.
Nine hundred & fifty copies are on
B. R. Book Paper,
numbered from 51 to 1000,
and fifty on Japan Vellum, numbered
from 1 to 50.
This is copy number
185