Letters, easy, clear, to the point, and gorgeously human, flowed from him without let or hindrance.That masterpiece of corresponding, "The German March Through Brussels," was probably written almost as fast as he could talk (next to Phillips Brooks, he was the fastest talker I ever heard), but when it came to fiction he had no facility at all.Perhaps Ishould say that he held in contempt any facility that he may have had.It was owing to his incomparable energy and Joblike patience that he ever gave us any fiction at all.Every phrase in his fiction was, of all the myriad phrases he could think of, the fittest in his relentless judgment to survive.
Phrases, paragraphs, pages, whole stories even, were written over and over again.He worked upon a principle of elimination.If he wished to describe an automobile turning in at a gate, he made first a long and elaborate description from which there was omitted no detail, which the most observant pair of eyes in Christendom had ever noted with reference to just such a turning.Thereupon he would begin a process of omitting one by one those details which he had been at such pains to recall; and after each omission he would ask himself: "Does the picture remain?" If it did not, he restored the detail which he had just omitted, and experimented with the sacrifice of some other, and so on, and so on, until after Herculean labor there remained for the reader one of those swiftly flashed, ice-clear pictures (complete in every detail) with which his tales and romances are so delightfully and continuously adorned.
But it is quarter to eleven, and, this being a time of holiday, R.H.D.emerges from his workroom happy to think that he has placed one hundred and seven words between himself and the wolf who hangs about every writer's door.He isn't satisfied with those hundred and seven words.He never was in the least satisfied with anything that he wrote, but he has searched his mind and his conscience and he believes that under the circumstances they are the very best that he can do.Anyway, they can stand in their present order until--after lunch.
A sign of his youth was the fact that to the day of his death he had denied himself the luxury and slothfulness of habits.
I have never seen him smoke automatically as most men do.He had too much respect for his own powers of enjoyment and for the sensibilities, perhaps, of the best Havana tobacco.At a time of his own deliberate choosing, often after many hours of hankering and renunciation, he smoked his cigar.He smoked it with delight, with a sense of being rewarded, and he used all the smoke there was in it.
He dearly loved the best food, the best champagne, and the best Scotch whiskey.But these things were friends to him, and not enemies.He had toward food and drink the Continental attitude; namely, that quality is far more important than quantity; and he got his exhilaration from the fact that he was drinking champagne and not from the champagne.Perhaps Ishall do well to say that on questions of right and wrong he had a will of iron.All his life he moved resolutely in whichever direction his conscience pointed; and, although that ever present and never obtrusive conscience of his made mistakes of judgment now and then, as must all consciences, Ithink it can never once have tricked him into any action that was impure or unclean.Some critics maintain that the heroes and heroines of his books are impossibly pure and innocent young people.R.H.D.never called upon his characters for any trait of virtue, or renunciation, or self-mastery of which his own life could not furnish examples.
