AS I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am succeeding admirably—and again, what I have written compared to what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility of words when one would express feelings?
I take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius, apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning joy and to bitterest morbidness.
I am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it should be played.
I think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long, elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant, ladylike phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned church organ pouring forth "Goo-Goo Eyes" with ponderous feeling.
When I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author knows things, and whether I could, with the same subject, write a better one myself.
The latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than that—to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene Field and Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles Dickens, among others, have succeeded in doing this. They impress the world with a sense of their courage and realness.
There are people who have written books which did not impress the world in this way, but which nevertheless came out of the feeling and fullness of zealous hearts. Always I think of that pathetic, artless little old-fashioned thing, "Jane Eyre," as a picture shown to a world seeing with distorted vision. Charlotte Bronté meant one thing when she wrote the book, and the world after a time suddenly understood a quite different thing, and heaped praise and applause upon her therefor. When I read the book I was not quite able to see just what the message was that the Bronté intended to send out. But I saw that there was a message—of bravery, perhaps, or of that good which may come out of Nazareth. But the world that praised and applauded and gave her money seems totally to have missed it.
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.