W. C. Fields : his follies and fortunes (1949)

CHAPTER ELEVEN O ne of Fields' cardinal rules for success was to disregard advice. He had established early that jugglers can outjuggle non-jugglers. He generalized this curious view and clung to it, with one or two lapses, throughout his life. It was his belief, for example, that university economists are not necessarily statesmen, that writers can out-write editors, and that most critics, to be taken seriously, should be able to create as well as criticize. He had become aware, when very young, that for every artist there are several hundred persons with a profounder, and louder, understanding of his artistry than any mere artist could possibly have. He had read of the keen critical rejection of failures such as Wagner's operas, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Walt Whitman's poems, and Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and he was sensibly impressed. Late in life Fields divided critics broadly into two groups : those who were ignorant but pretentious and thrustful, in the interest of making a living, and those whose pronouncements were distorted by prejudice or jealousy, such as Nicholas Rubinstein, whose blistering report on Tschaikovsky's piano concerto, though he himself was a perceptive musician, damned the work as "worthless, impossible to play, clumsy, awkward, poorly composed, and shot through with obvious and shocking thefts." 97