Discount Louis Vuitton Meanwhile my first article had appeared in the “Century

Meanwhile my first article had appeared in the “Century,” illustrated by a number of photographs, and by one of Maxfield Parrish’s brilliant idealisations of the Italian scene. Thanks to the latter, the article attracted much attention, but a note of warning soon came to me in the form of a distracted letter from the editor of the “Century,” Richard Watson Gilder, an old friend and a country neighbour in the Berkshires. It appeared that in the editorial offices of the “Century” Mr. Parrish’s fairy-tale pictures were justly admired, but it was agreed that the accompanying text was too dry and technical. Would I not, Mr. Gilder pleaded, introduce into the next number a few anecdotes, and a touch of human interest?
I am afraid my answer was curt. I had prepared for my task conscientiously; I knew that, at least in English, there was no serious work on Italian villa and garden architecture, and I meant, as far as I was able, to fill the want. I wrote back that if the “Century” wanted a series of sentimental and anecdotic commentaries on Mr. Parrish’s illustrations, I was surprised that one of the authors of “The Decoration of Houses” should have been commissioned to write them. But I added that if, on reflection, my articles were thought unsuitable to the illustrations (as they certainly were!) I was quite willing to annul my contract. This was not accepted, and the articles continued to appear, my only punishment being that the Century Company refused (when the volume came out) to publish the plans of certain little-known but important gardens, such as those of the Villas Muti at Frascati and Gori at Siena, which I had taken great pains to procure, because, according to the publishers, the public “did not care for plans.” I mention this because, when “Italian Villas” became, as it soon did, a working manual for architectural students and landscape gardeners, I was often reproached for not having provided the book with plans. In a sense, of course, the editors of the “Century” were right. My articles were quite out of keeping with the Parrish pictures, which should have been used to illustrate some fanciful tale of Lamotte-Fouque, Or Andersen’s “Improvisatore”; but I knew that, even had I had an architectural draughtsman as illustrator, the editorial scruples would not have been allayed, for what really roused them was not the lack of harmony between text and pictures but the fear their readers would be bored by the serious technical treatment of a subject associated with moonlight and nightingales. Therefore, having been given the opportunity to do a book that needed doing, I resolutely took it; and I hope the success of “Italian Villas,” which still has a steady sale, has made the publishers forgive me.
Again and again in my literary life I have encountered the same kind of editorial timidity. I think it was Edwin Godkin, then the masterly editor of the New York “Evening Post,” who said that the choice of articles published in American magazines was entirely determined by the fear of scandalizing a non-existent clergyman in the Mississippi Valley; and I made up my mind from the first that I would never sacrifice my literary conscience to this ghostly censor. Not being obliged to live solely by my pen I thought I owed it to less lucky colleagues to fight for the independence they might not always be in a position to assert. A higher standard of taste in letters can be achieved only if authors will refuse to write down to the particular Mississippi Valley level of the day (for there is always a censorship of the same sort, though it is now at the other end of the moral register), and the greatest service a writer can render to letters is to follow his conscience.