Therefore, I think that a young writer’s upward course should be slow and beset with many obstacles, even hardships.  Not that I believe in hardships as having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard them in that way; but they oftener bring out the virtues inherent in the sufferer from them than what I may call the ‘softships’; and at least they stop him, and give him time to think.

This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward rapidly, we have no time for anything but prospering forward rapidly.  We have no time for art, even the art by which we prosper.

I would have the young contributor above all things realize that success is not his concern.  Good work, true work, beautiful work is his affair, and nothing else.  If he does this, success will take care of itself.

He has no business to think of the thing that will take.  It is the editor’s business to think of that, and it is the contributor’s business to think of the thing that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasure that comes from the sense of worth in the thing done.  Let him do the best he can, and trust the editor to decide whether it will take.

It will take far oftener than anything he attempts perfunctorily; and even if the editor thinks it will not take, and feels obliged to return it for that reason, he will return it with a real regret, with the honor and affection which we cannot help feeling for any one who has done a piece of good work, and with the will and the hope to get something from him that will take the next time, or the next, or the next.

PG EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS: 

    An artistic atmosphere does not create artists
    Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery
    Put aside all anxiety about style
    Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity
    Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind
    Work would be twice as good if it were done twice

LITERATURE AND LIFE—­Last Days in a Dutch Hotel

by William Dean Howells

LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL

(1897)

When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already; and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for a whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumn leaves.  We were but a poor hundred at most where five hundred would not have been a crowd; and, when we sat down at the long tables d’hote in the great dining-room, we had to warm our hands with our plates before we could hold our spoons.  From time to time the weather varied, as it does in Europe (American weather is of an exemplary constancy in comparison), and three or four times a day it rained, and three or four times it cleared; but through all the wind blew cold and colder.  We were promised, however, that the hotel would not close till October, and we made shift, with a warm chimney in one room and three gas-burners in another, if not to keep warm quite, yet certainly to get used to the cold.