What a masterpiece of creative humor is
my Fatty Taft, statesman, taking himself seriously, even solemnly, and
persuading others to do the same! And this city of Washington, with its
motley population of silurians, parvenoodles and scamps pranking
unashamed in the light of day, and its saving contingent of the forsaken
righteous, their seed begging bread,--did Rabelais' exuberant fancy ever
conceive so--but Rabelais is, perhaps, himself a conception.
Surely he is no common maniac who has wrought out of nothing the
history, the philosophies, sciences, arts, laws, religions, politics and
morals of this imaginary world. Nay, the world itself, tumbling uneasily
through space like a beetle's ball, is no mean achievement, and I am
proud of it. But the mental feat in which I take most satisfaction, and
which I doubt not is most diverting to my keepers, is that of creating
Mr. W.R. Hearst, pointing his eyes toward the White House and endowing
him with a perilous Jacksonian ambition to defile it. The Hearst is
distinctly a treasure.
On the whole, I have done, I think, tolerably well, and when I
contemplate the fertility and originality of my inventions, the queer
unearthliness and grotesque actions of the characters whom I have
evolved, isolated and am cultivating, I cannot help thinking that if
Heaven had not made me a lunatic my peculiar talent might have made me
an entertaining writer.
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