I am over here this morning warming up and making ready for dinner.
Hud and his wife and your mother are coming over soon. We are to have a
roast duck and other things and I shall do the roasting and baking here.
I wish you were here too. It is a cloudy day, but still and mild. I keep
pretty well and am working on my Alaska trip--have already written about
ten thousand words. The _Century_ paid me $75 for two poems--three times
as much as Milton got for "Paradise Lost." The third poem I shall weave
into the prose sketch. The N. Y. _World_ sent a man up to see me a
couple of weeks ago to get me to write six or seven hundred words
for their Sunday edition. They wanted me to write on the Thanksgiving
turkey! Offered me $50--they wanted it in two days. Of course I could
not do it off-hand in that way. So I fished out of my drawer an old MS,
that I had rejected and sent that. They used it and sent me $30. It was
in the Sunday _World_ of Nov. 19.
I have sold four lots here for $225. One house will be started this
fall. Wallhead and Millard of P. If I don't look out I will make some
money out of this place yet. Your mother begins to look more kindly upon
it. A N. Y. sculptor has bought the rock beyond the spring for $75.
Van and Allie are ditching and cleaning the swamp of the Italians below
here.
Photography is not an art in the sense that painting or music or
sculpture is an art. It is nearer the mechanical arts. Nothing is an art
that does not involve the imagination and the artistic perceptions.
All the essentials of photography are mechanical--the judgment and the
experience of the man are only secondary. A photograph can never be
really a work of art. You can put those statements in the form of a
syllogism.
I hope you are better of your cold. Some building burned up in Hyde
Park early last night. Robert Gill shot himself in N. Y. the other
day--suicide. We shall be very glad to see you again.
Your loving father,