Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/45

 six months. I know one very good modern painter who becomes a house painter when he is broke, and one of America's finest poets works as a reporter on a newspaper. In America, just now, it is not too hard for a man to make a living, particularly if he is discreet enough not to have children.

And then things are slowly getting better. In his "Life on the Mississippi" Mark Twain said something to the effect that the writer in the end always wrote what the public and the editors wanted. "We often write what we think and feel but in the end we scratch all out and give them what they want," he said. I am not quoting exactly. You will find it in the book. The fact is that it was pretty much true in Twain's day and isn't quite so true now.

That the workman is a better and truer man when he is given control of the tools and materials of his craft is being