As Talked in the Sanctum, Part V [pp. 447-450]

Overland Monthly
VOL. XXV. (Second Series.)-May, i895.-No. I49.
AS TALKED IN THE
SANCTUM.A
sI~~~~~~ H E E DI TOA
BURNT up a batch of my old
~'xix~> II B manuscripts last night. I
only wonder that I have kept
them so long. They represent my first designs on litera ture. One I had rewritten eleven times, most of them from
three to five, and all had been rejected more times than they
had been rewritten. I committed them to the flames without a
pang. They were the apple of my eye not so very many years
ago. I remember one day when the chimney took fire,"burnt out," I believe the term is,- I rushed to my room and rescued those precious
manuscripts before I paused to see if it were possible to save the house.
There may be a few born geniuses who have never been ashamed of anything they
have ever written, but I am constrained to think that none have been born in this century.
The common school system has given the death blow to the ready made genius,- it turns
out scores of graduates that might have posed as geniuses in their own circles fifty or a
hundred years ago. Robert Louis Stevenson a few months before he died disclaimed the
proud title of "a genius," and yet he admitted modestly, " I have done fairly well by hard
work with my very meager talents."
There is one among my now defunct manuscripts, the one I rewrote eleven times,
that under other circumstances and in other times might have brought me fame. It took
me five or six years to find out why it was so often found "unavailable" by magazines and
newspapers. "The Golden Hope" was not a bad story. I will confess that now. I had
it typewritten the other day, signed it with a fictious name, and sent to the OVERLAND. I
was deathly afraid that the Reader would accept it, but he did not, although I heard him
remark to the Artist that the story made such an impression that it worried him.
The Contributor. "The Reader must be easily worried."
The Reader. "I was worried because of a certain pathetic undertone that seemed
to run through it- an appeal for acceptance. I read so many manuscripts that I get to
believe that I feel the author's thoughts as he wrote."
(Copyright, I895, by OVERLAND MONTHLY PUBLISHING Co.) All rights reserved.
Commercial Publishing Company, S. F.