Anderson came to literary composition slowly, or perhaps we should believe him when he says that he was never out of it. The boy Giotto began to paint while he was still a boy tending his sheep. Sherwood Anderson never ceased to dream and to write his dreams, and he began to do so very early. He had dreamt (and imagined things) for a long while. That, he tells us, was always for him the real, the only way to live. Before writing his books he had enacted, all alone, magnificent and tragic novels in a barn, the favorite “hang-out” of his childhood days. Sprawling among the warm hay, how many times had he given way to dreaming! Listen to the dreamer: To the imaginative man in the modern world something becomes, from the first, sharply defined. Life splits itself into two sections and, no matter how long one may live or where one may live, the two ends continue to dangle, fluttering about in the empty air. To which of the two lives, lived within the one body, are you to give yourself? There is, after all, some little freedom of choice. There is the life of fancy. In it one sometimes moved with an ordered purpose through ordered days, or at least through ordered hours. In the life of fancy there is no such thing as good or bad. There are no Puritans in that life. The dry sisters of Philistia do not come in at the door. They cannot breathe in the life of the fancy. The Puritan, the reformer who scolds at the Puritans, the dry intellectuals, all who desire to uplift, to remake life on some definite plan conceived within the human brain, die of a disease of the lungs. They would do better to stay in the world of fact to spend their energy in catching bootleggers, inventing new machines, helping humanity--the best they can--in its no doubt laudable ambition to hurl bodies through the air at the rate of five hundred miles an hour. In the world of the fancy, life separates itself with slow movements and with many graduations into the ugly and the beautiful. What is alive is opposed to what is dead. Is the air of the room in which we live sweet to the nostrils or is it poisoned with weariness? In the end it must become one thing or the other. All morality then becomes a purely æsthetic matter. What is beautiful must bring æsthetic joy; what is ugly must bring æsthetic sadness and suffering. Or one may become, as so many younger Americans do, a mere smart-aleck, without humbleness before the possibilities of life, one sure of himself--and thus one may remain to the end, blind, deaf and dumb, feeling and seeing nothing. Many of our intellectuals find this is the more comfortable road to travel. In the world of fancy, you must understand, no man is ugly. Man is ugly in fact only. Ah, there is the difficulty![38]