My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly
honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or
modesty, or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is
also a help in bringing me to the truth. I am not likely to stand
in my own light; nor to mistake my own wants and whims for the
decrees of the Eternal. At least, if I make the mistake to-day,
I shall see my error to-morrow.
[The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing
unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many
of the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has
attained as a writer. Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness,
of which our author seems unconscious, to his father. To his mother
he has credited most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike
unselfconsciousness which he describes in his father, we are
doubtless largely indebted for the candid self-analysis here given.
But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it
simply and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in
which he was genuinely interested. To be naked and unashamed is
a condition lost by most of us long ago, but retained by a few who
still have many of the traits of the natural man. C.
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