a painter or sculptor is only the gainer by all the school he can
give himself.


XI.

In view of this fact it become again very hard to establish the
author's status in the business world, and at moments I have
grave question whether he belongs there at all, except as a
novelist. There is, of course, no outlay for him in this sort,
any more than in any other sort of literature, but it at least
supposes and exacts some measure of preparation. A young writer
may produce a brilliant and very perfect romance, just as he may
produce a brilliant and very perfect poem, but in the field of
realistic fiction, or in what we used to call the novel of
manners, a writer can only produce an inferior book at the
outset. For this work he needs experience and observation, not
so much of others as of himself, for ultimately his characters
will all come out of himself, and he will need to know motive and
character with such thoroughness and accuracy as he can acquire
only through his own heart. A man remains in a measure strange
to himself as long as he lives, and the very sources of novelty
in his work will be within himself; he can continue to give it
freshness in no other way than by knowing himself better and
better. But a young writer and an untrained writer has not yet
begun to be acquainted even with the lives of other men. The
world around him remains a secret as well as the world within
him, and both unfold themselves simultaneously to that experience
of joy and sorrow that can come only with the lapse of time.
Until he is well on toward forty, he will hardly have assimilated