Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/41

 of people here in America are pretty much what the mass of people have always been in every other country in every age, that is to say, rather lazy-minded, pretty immature. We are given to childish pretense, to pretending to be the thing we secretly admire rather than to go to all the trouble of being it. We accept what is given us. For most of us, I suspect, bad hurried cheap work doesn't matter too much. It is the craftsman really who suffers.

Now if you will consider with me what I have just said and will bear in mind that the manufacturer of stories for popular magazines has nothing at all to do with writing, and if you will also bear in mind that the writer is but the workman whose materials are human lives you will get at what I am trying to say and will understand the attitude toward his work that the so-called Modern is trying to take.