Crane, Stephen, 1871-1900 / 2008-09-24 00:00:00

"Well--you must understand--I started my career--my career, you
understand--with a determination to be a prophet, and, although I have
ended in being an acrobat, a trained bear of the magazines, and a
juggler of comic paragraphs, there was once carved upon my lips a smile
which made many people detest me, for it hung before them like a banshee
whenever they tried to be satisfied with themselves. I was informed from
time to time that I was making no great holes in the universal plan, and
I came to know that one person in every two thousand of the people I saw
had heard of me, and that four out of five of these had forgotten it.
And then one in every two of those who remembered that they had heard of
me regarded the fact that I wrote as a great impertinence. I admitted
these things, and in defence merely builded a maxim that stated that
each wise man in this world is concealed amid some twenty thousand
fools. If you have eyes for mathematics, this conclusion should interest
you. Meanwhile I created a gigantic dignity, and when men saw this
dignity and heard that I was a literary man they respected me. I
concluded that the simple campaign of existence for me was to delude
the populace, or as much of it as would look at me.
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