Faces
The plant labors all the year, green and growing and undistinguished. At last, in its season, it blooms, and all the folk remark on the beauty of the flower. Yet that bloom is only the product of the plant. It is wrong to see the flower as the only important thing, for it is the plant that makes it—yet it is the aspect of the plant designed to receive attention, and should be judged as such.
Similarly the writer labors to produce his narrative, and if it is wrong to treat that narrative as if it had no genesis, still it is the aspect the writer chooses to be represented by. Judge the writer by his narrative rather than his picture—but do not scorn the picture any more than the green foliage of the plant, for these may be alternative avenues to comprehension of the whole.