“I see one of the questions relates to travels. Mine have been about as those of the average citizen, except that one or two were undertaken in search of material. For example, I went to Mexico when writing _Nathan Burke_, as the hero is supposed to take part in the Mexican War. And while at work on _Van Cleve_, a story in which the Spanish-American War makes a kind of fugitive entrance and exit, I went to Cuba, and down to Santiago. I might possibly have ‘faked up’ these stories without the trouble of the journey; it would be as easy to do that as to imagine society and the world fifty or a hundred years ago, which I have also done--that is to say, not easy at all; nothing is easy--but I could have done it. However, I prefer to make some attempt at getting the atmosphere.
“The dates of publication are about as follows: _The Tenants_ (McClure), 1908; _Nathan Burke_ (Macmillan), 1910; _The Legacy_, 1911; _Van Cleve: His Friends and His Family_, published serially in the _Atlantic Monthly_, 1912, in book form by Macmillan, 1913; _The Rise of Jennie Cushing_, 1915; _The Rudder_, 1916; _The Boardman Family_, 1918; also a book called _Three Short Plays_, 1917.
“I cannot let this go without adding a word of protest--whether in your judgment it is fit to make public or not--about the people who in printed criticism, or in private letters and conversations, insist on attributing to me the words I put into the mouths of my characters, and the thoughts I put into their heads. I make a man designedly weak and futile, or idle, or dull, or small-minded; I make him say or do something which precisely exhibits his weakness, or futility, or idleness, or dullness, or meanness; how else shall the reader know this man than by his own mouth, by his own deeds? Is it not so that we know one another? A character in a book must act and speak in his part; he ought never to become even for one instant the mouthpiece of the author; he is, in a sense, as much a stranger to the author, as much a different and distinct personality, as he is to the reader. Then why, when I make a man say: ‘There is no God,’ and moreover, go to work and express this opinion in a dozen ways, by every act and thought of his career, why do people accuse _me_ of being an atheist? At that rate, if I invented a burglar, I’d first have to be a burglar myself! Nobody ever gives me credit for the kind, intelligent, temperate, decent people I create; it’s only the disagreeable ones, apparently, that I am accountable for. What have I got to do with it? I merely imagine a character such as we meet with every day of our lives, put him into a certain environment, or submit him to certain circumstances, and then see what happens. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them,’ and ‘Out of the fullness of the heart the mouth speaketh’ give me the best of authorities for this method; whole pages of description cannot illuminate the reader as much as one unguarded sentence from the lips of a character. But why accuse _me_ of his sentiments? I’m only turning a searchlight on him. The thing is exasperating, not less so because it is a sort of left-handed tribute to the verisimilitude I am always striving after. In the preface to one of his books the late Mr. William de Morgan speaks his mind earnestly about the same kind of injustice; and I am further reminded of a story about Thackeray, who, on being reproached for ‘making So-and-So and Such-a-One act that way,’ retorted: ‘Why, Good Lord, _I_ didn’t do it. They did it themselves!’ So, if I err, at least I err in good company.