Page:The Borzoi 1920.djvu/67

SIDNEY L. NYBURG also the duty of telling some kind of a story which shall not prove unbearably dull to the sensitive and alert reader. If he has no story at all, he is an essayist in an ill-fitting disguise. If he cannot or will not endeavour to interest some portion of the public, he might as well keep a diary and secure it under lock and key; but the writer holds himself and his art too cheaply who makes no demands what ever upon his reader. A fictionist's public has no right to a predigested diet, or to a menu skilfully arranged to give it only what it happens to enjoy.

Unless the author has something actually craving utterance, there is no excuse for his intrusion into a world already well provided with printed matter, and if he feels this impulse for expression he cannot satisfy it if he expresses the conception of his critics, his publishers, or that inarticulate abstraction called the public. If speaking his own thought, the public will not buy his wares, then it must go without them, and he must earn his bread in another fashion. But if this public chooses to traffic with him at all, it must do so upon his terms and at the price of some little effort upon its own part. If the reader will expend no such energy to gain a new idea or a new point of view regarding those ideas, then the thing he attempts to assimulate so easily will, after all, profit him nothing. The author is not the servant of his public. He is a man with something to say. If passers-by choose to listen—good. If they prefer to ignore him, he may not therefore seek some more alluring jingle of words to catch their fancy. If he descends to such devices he is a mere brother of the mountebank. He must paint truth as he sees it even if he realizes that other and better men cannot accept his pictures as truth. It is not his function to reproduce other men's images, whether better or worse than his own. He must be austere to deny himself the luxury of preaching. If his work is what it ought