
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76438 ***





  TEN CENT POCKET SERIES NO. 326
  Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius

  Hints on Writing
  Short Stories

  Charles J. Finger


  HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY
  GIRARD, KANSAS




INTRODUCTION


In this I have not compiled a guide to rhetoric in the conventional
style of the Correspondence Schools. My aim has been to convey to you
a number of ideas. When you have read the book, there should remain,
forever fixed in your mind, this:

_Truth is the final test of merit in literature._


Copyright, 1922, Haldeman-Julius Company




I.

ON CORRESPONDENCE SCHOOLS.


This, let me say, is my third attempt to write this booklet. Two drafts
went into the waste basket. The truth is that I found them too stiff
and formal, and in the doing of that which I wish to do, formality
must be sedulously avoided, for, otherwise, we run on a rock and get
nowhere. It seems to me that the best plan in telling you what I have
to say will be one in which curtness and directness is observed, for
very direct and brief I have always found those to have been who were
instructors and not teachers. Not in long and labored discourses have
I found valuable lessons, but rather in very sudden “Don’ts” and
“Do’s,” in warnings and in checkings. Indeed, something of that would
seem to be the natural way, especially if you consider how wonderfully
children learn from children. Youngsters never lecture one another,
yet they teach their fellows all manner of elaborate games with a few
simple directions. On the other hand, not only teachers, but also
parents, too often flounder in a mist of explanation and so fail to
make anything clear. I know that in my own life almost everything that
I have learned I seem to have acquired suddenly. In the midst of much
struggle, a warning word, a caution shot from someone who knew did
what tons and volumes of theoretical instruction had failed to do.
There was swimming for instance. As a lad I had read books on the art,
diligently going through arm and leg motions at night while balanced
on a stool. I had memorized instructions and had filled my memory with
facts as to swimming contests among the ancient Egyptians. Then, one
day, floundering in a pool with a secret vision of a slow and painful
death burdening me, an older lad shouted, “Push at the water with your
feet--push hard,” and lo! the trick was learned. It was much the same
when I learned to ride a bicycle. I had made sudden swoops and turns,
had borne down on rocks, and holes, and ruts, with strange accuracy.
I had hit all that I tried to avoid. Then my brother yelled at me,
“Don’t bear so heavy on the handle bars,” and a great light dawned,
for I saw that my misdirected energy had been my drawback. Then, too,
when learning to shear sheep in South America. The sheep, the shears,
the fleece, and I seemed to be dangerously mixed, and, while other men
about me did their hundred and seventy ewes a day with ease, I sweated
and groaned over twenty-five. But a wise old Irish shepherd who was
watching me gave me a hint. As he walked away, he growled, “Keep the
shears flat on the hide and take big bites.” And again the curtain was
lifted, so that that day I tallied my hundred and ten.

For these and other reasons I have always been suspicious of elaborate
books of instructions, and also of professors, of correspondence
schools, and of institutes purporting to teach this, that and the
other: how to raise your salary: how to be prosperous: how to be a
society success: how to acquire a mastery of the English language
while shaving: how to develop the qualities of leadership and rule
others: how to write short stories and become a successful author. And,
indeed, talking with other men, I find that each holds that his own
business, profession, or calling, most certainly cannot be taught by
mail, nor acquired in such manner that the reader of a dozen or more
mimeographed letters may hope to make a living by it. On this every man
is emphatic. Nor scanning advertisements, lists of men wanted, do I
see this: “graduates of correspondence schools preferred.” Certainly,
when I was an employer in the railroad business, I never employed a
locomotive engineer on the strength of a diploma dated from Scranton,
Pa. Nor have I met a banker, stone mason, professional hobo, concert
pianist or a farm-hand who, good at his life’s work, had clipped and
mailed a coupon, received a hundred page book, and, from such humble
beginnings achieved mastery of his chosen task. Further, being once
idle and mischievous I made a list of names of several who offer to
teach the Demosthenian art. These, in the course of time, I visited at
“Department 1234,” or at the Cicero Institute in Chicago, or wherever
the office was located, but although I have reached the inner circles
in giant corporations, in government houses, in banking institutions,
I failed to pass the guardian stenographer and so reach the orator
himself. Neither, on further investigation, could I find that Chauncey
Depew, Ingersoll, Billy Sunday, Henry Ward Beecher, Herbert S. Bigelow
or William Jennings Bryan ever took lessons in a correspondence school.
Still pursuing my quest, I also made a list of names of those teaching
the art of short story writing, whether they were hidden in the arcana
of correspondence schools, taught in the marble halls of colleges or
universities, or in the shacks of the Y. M. C. A., to find that those
names did not appear as authors in the table of contents of well-known
magazines, nor anywhere else where one might reasonably suppose that
they would be eager to see their own names as practitioners of the
art they professed to teach. Nor did it transpire that executives
and those who have control of men, captains of industry or those who
weld others to their own desires, college professors or bishops, had,
before gaining their present eminence, risen up one dark morn in a
dull December to make a test of their efficiency by answering for
themselves a list of forty questions as propounded in the advertising
section of some magazine, and, realizing their lack of Personality,
had straightway enrolled themselves for a “correspondence course,” in
the course of time to receive a diploma and become a Gary, a Schwab,
a Wanamaker, a Woodrow Wilson, a Harriman or a Lloyd George. No. No.
Things do not come that way.

From all of which, you can see that I do not believe that much good
can be done in the way of teaching by mail, nor even by book. Nor can
you, I hold, by reading an analysis of a short story or a novel, write
one. You can no more do that than you can, after dissecting a human
corpse, construct a man. True, you may, with some advantage read the
things other men have done, but it does not therefore follow that you
yourself can do them, even though you have the desire and the will. For
instance, I am a very poor mechanic. To handle machinery is a thing
distasteful to me. I might read twenty-four books on the method of
adjusting a timer on an automobile, but, when my own timer gets out of
order I am dumbfounded, nor will all my theoretical knowledge stand me
in stead. My son, on the other hand, who has never read a book on the
mechanism of an automobile, actually rejoices when the car stalls. The
light of joy is in his eye and he leaps from the seat and goes to work
with enthusiasm, pooh-poohing such things as I tell him from my corner
in the car as the result of my reading. He is contemptuous of authority
and is all for independent verification.

Why then, in the face of all this, do I write this booklet? For,
admittedly, I cannot teach you to write a short story although I have
written dozens of them.

Here is the answer. If you have both the ability and the desire to
write, I can tell you of some pitfalls to be avoided and can give you
a hint or two. I can also give you the result of my own experience,
and that is about all. It may result in something, and again it may
not. Certainly during the past year, I have had the pleasure of seeing
three young writers get their work in print as a result of some such
advice as I propose to write here. But I shall not, I promise you, pad
the book, nor copy out stories written by masters in the art, in the
approved way of the correspondence schools and the “institutes.” That
would sadly waste both your time and mine. So, to work.




II.

THE KEY NOTE.


In the first place there must be _Sincerity_. Without that nothing
can be done. Sincere work will be good work, and sincere work will be
original work. With sincerity, you will have honesty and simplicity,
both of which are cardinal virtues in the literary man. Also, with
sincerity there will be courage. You know, as well as I know, that
when you meet an insincere man, you detect him at once. Were you ever
deceived, for instance, by the rounded periods of some political
rhetorician? Perhaps for a moment you may have been carried away
in spite of your better sense, but, certainly, the effect was not
lasting. Examining yourself, you will certainly remember that before
you could persuade others, you had to be thoroughly convinced of the
essential right of the thing itself. In the same fashion then, you must
be persuaded of the truth of that which you wish to be accepted when
writing. I do not speak of controversial matters. I write of fiction.
You must have so thoroughly identified yourself with your characters
that they are as living creatures to you. Then only shall they be
living characters to your readers. If you have read the Pickwick Papers
and have learned to know and love _Samuel Pickwick_, you will know
exactly what I mean. In that character, the young Charles Dickens lost
himself. In creating Mr. Pickwick he was entirely sincere. He watched
the character grow from a somewhat simple-minded old gentleman to a
lovable, jolly fellow to meet whom you would walk half round the world.
Pickwick was real to Dickens, therefore he is real to us. Observe this
too; he had his faults. _Mr. Pickwick_ would not have been considered
a good or a moral character to many of the “unco guid” of today. He
often drank too much. Had there been nation wide prohibition in England
in his day, he would certainly have drunk home brew with _Ben Allen_
and _Bob Sawyer_, exactly as he went to prison for conscience sake.
He and his companions enjoyed the pleasures of the table too well
for latter-day tastes. He was obstinate on occasion, just as I am
obstinate. Had Dickens been insincere, he might have been tempted to
sponge out the bad spots in his character. But then he would have given
us something that was not a man. The truth is that we want something of
the sensuous and the gross in those about us. None of us want to live
with angels and saints. So we reject instinctively as impossible and
unpleasant, those perfect, etherealized creations some times found in
stories--those creatures all compounded of nobility, courage, beauty,
generosity and wisdom which insincere writers try to foist upon us.
They do not ring true. We detect their hollowness just as we detect the
hollowness of the flamboyant boastings of the political orator.

Indeed, to a reading man, the creations of the imagination of sincere
writers are much more real than the famous characters of history. At
least they are so to me. I read of a Washington with all his ugly
spots carefully painted out; of a Napoleon carefully deified; of a
Garfield carefully haloed; and I mentally reject them as impossible.
On the other hand I become acquainted with a _Captain Costigan_, a
_Becky Sharp_, a _Jack Falstaff_, an _Uncle Toby_, a _Tom Jones_, a
_Martin Wade_, a _Peter Whiffle_, an _Ann Veronica_ and they enter
into my life. I know them utterly. I meet their twins in life. This
woman has the green eyes of Becky. That man has his aspirations, leads
a life that he knows to be a wrong way but still leads it, exactly as
did _Tom Jones_. Or I recall a foolish fellow whose interest in life
led him into all sorts of odd corners and am immediately reminded of
_Peter Whiffle_. But I never meet a man who reminds me of Napoleon or
of Washington, because there are no such men. In other words, the sane
fiction writer has been sincere--the historian has been insincere.
In the effort to give a mere man a heritage of honorable fame, the
historian created something infamous, something inhuman.




III.

ON CHARACTER MAKING IN FICTION.


As my own personal character is by no means perfect, or even complete
though imperfect, it follows that I cannot teach you how to draw a
character. Certainly, I have, however sketchily, drawn a few characters
in different stories, but I find that they were all more or less an
aspect of myself. I have never yet committed a murder, but I have hated
some people so fiercely that I have imagined the killing of them. So,
the mood being on me, I once wrote a story called “Ebro” in which the
hero was a murderer. But, in a way, _Ebro_ was myself. Again, once
in the long ago, when I was young and beautiful, I started on a wild
trip in a small sail boat from the Straits of Magellan bound for the
Falkland Islands. We had been in search of hidden treasure, which we
did not find, and, having been in forbidden places, were forced to
flee. Now some two hundred miles from shore we ran into a storm and
there was much to do. During that storm I was terribly afraid. Like any
other coward, I died a hundred deaths. That experience I remembered and
it came to light when I wished to write the story, “My Friend Julio,”
wherein was portrayed a man much terrified by wind and water. So, in my
imagination, one way or another, I have broken each and every one of
the ten commandments. Some, of course, I have broken in reality. The
heroes, or characters I draw then, as I see it, are merely pictures
of myself seen from this angle or that, the same individual in his
varied moods. It is somewhat like the watching of a diamond and seeing
different colored rays as the light from this facet or that is caught.
In every man are many vices as well as many virtues. Each must know
himself, see himself naked and as he is, without idealistic fig leaves.

Still, though I cannot tell you what to do, I can chart a few shoals so
that you shall not run aground too early in your literary voyage.

First of all then, as I have said, there is the prime necessity of
Sincerity. Second, no man can possibly write anything at all worth
while except he see straight. By that I mean that most men do actually
see things in a distorted kind of a way. I do not mean by this the
habit of careless seeing, nor even of blurred seeing. What I do mean
is that habit of not seeing at all for oneself, but seeing through
the eyes of others. Take, for example, the people who have lived in a
small town for a great many years and have heard political orators,
Chautauquan lecturers, candidates for this office and that talk about
the “handsome men and beautiful women, the intelligent children and
public-spirited citizens” in the burg. You will find that many who have
listened to that kind of thing year in and year out, do actually come
to believe that their fellow townsmen and townswomen are thus and so.
They become firmly convinced that theirs is a favored spot in which
beauty abounds. Of course, a glance at any well-filled kodak album will
reveal the fact that in place of a wide-spread beauty, there is an
incredible amount of vulgar and quite healthy ugliness. Or, again, if
you ask a dozen men to describe the average American youth, eleven of
them will conjure up a vision of some long-legged, square-shouldered
fellow unlike anything on earth, or of some square-chinned, bright
salmon-colored lad. Their notions, you will find, are derived, not
from their own observation, but from seeing advertisements put out
by wholesale clothing warehouses and makers of men’s collars. Or
imagining the American girl, they will see not what you may see, girls
flabby, skinny, awkward, sloppy, tall, short, lopsided, sometimes
pimpled, and, very rarely, one now and then really beautiful, but
instead, some baby-faced creature with idiotic simper in the style of
a magazine cover. Or again they will be led into unquestioning belief
when the politician aforementioned who, ringing the changes upon all
the familiar phrases of political oratory, and intoxicated with his
own flamboyant boastings, perhaps whooping things up for war, declares
that military training has made a generation of square-shouldered,
deep-chested lads. People listening to him, who make the sign of the
cross every time The Star Spangled Banner is played, will be quite
oblivious to the fact that a moment’s glance into any street will
reveal the truth that, in spite of three years in the trenches, the
young men of today slouch and stoop, lean and shuffle, and lounge
against corners and posts just as much as ever they did before 1914.
It will never occur to them that the square-shouldered effect of the
khaki-clad lad was entirely due to the odd cut of the coat. So, I add
this then. SEE STRAIGHT.

Here is another law, or commandment, or guide, or whatever you choose
to call it. I give it to you in seven words. SET DOWN THE THING AS IT
IS. Do that and you get somewhere. Fail to do it and you inevitably
get nowhere. That rule, of course, loops back on the one preceding
it, for before the thing can be set down as it is, one must be sure
that it is seen as it is. The trouble is that so much is about us that
tends to distort. Pictorial artists, newspaper men, moving picture
producers are all in league to get a “feature” angle on things, so
it comes about that presently we are in such fix that we actually
mistrust the evidence of our own senses. Not so long ago I attended a
piano recital in which the performer played several compositions which
I know so well that I could tell you every note in every chord. But
the clumsy fellow came a cropper, turning his minor chords here and
there into majors, dropping his octaves and making a great muddle of
things. From force of habit, or convention, the audience applauded and
the player bowed with happy smile, whereupon the audience cheered the
more lustily. The next day the local paper came out with an account of
the affair praising the player in terms which, if applied to a Liszt,
would still be extravagant. After that, you could no more shake the
audience in its admiration of the player as a highly skilled fellow
than you could persuade it that the moon had turned to green cheese.
Ignorance won the day. Hearing the applause, even those who knew
something of music mistrusted their senses. Let a word be dropped in
criticism, and the newspaper report was produced. There it was. What
more was needed? A wrong notion was born because of convention, and
fostered because of wilful or ignorant distortion, with the result that
hundreds of young children for years to come would learn music from an
incompetent fellow. Nor, probably, would those children, with one or
two exceptions, ever learn to play straight.

Again go to a picture theater in which is being shown a reel or two
of Current Events. Roughly speaking, you would imagine, judging from
the scenes displayed, that all that was ugly, hideous, vulgar had
disappeared from the world. And naturally so, because active selection
has been at work. To get a “good” picture, the camera man and his
assistants had seen to it that undesirable sights were avoided or
hidden. In the course of time, seeing hundreds or thousands of such
pictures, the average man arrives at wrong notions as to things about
him. Indeed, it is only when the same man goes far from home to
another country, or to a far away city, that his eye and mind begin to
function. Then new things strike him. He compares them, not with the
things as they are in his own home, but with the things he has seen
portrayed, which is a vastly different matter. As a consequence, he
finds the new to compare very unfavorably with the old as he imagines
the old to be. Then he becomes verbose and a nuisance to those around
him, telling of the glories of things in Tucumcari or wherever he may
have hailed from. He forgets, or never saw, that in his native habitat
there was ugliness, brutality, debauchery, disease and deformities. So
presently, your traveler returns home, tells tales of foreign parts and
deplores the state of things abroad which are, after all, exactly the
same as in his own home town. You see, in the new place his eyes were
opened. He was shocked into seeing. In his own town he saw so often
that he ceased to see, or, being incurious, saw through other eyes.
So I have heard men deplore the poverty in rural districts in other
countries, telling of women and children toiling in the fields under a
hot sun, of families that ate little or no meat or fats from one end of
the week to another, quite oblivious of the fact that in their own land
also, children of tender age are taken from school to the field, and
that in thousands of places throughout this country, sweet potatoes and
beans form the staple diet. The same men will make merry at the expense
of a simple Mexican who crosses himself when the thunder roars, or who
wears a charm to ward off rheumatism, all unconscious of the fact that
there are Americans in plenty who hold that a buckeye carried in the
hip pocket will cure piles, or that the position of the quarter moon
foretells dry or wet weather according to the way in which the horns
are “up” or “down.” Verily, I say unto you, it is the rarest of rare
things to find a man who can see straight, and except he see straight,
how shall he set down things as they are?

To take this important matter from another angle, have you ever looked
at a set of engravings by Hogarth? To be sure there are pictures
by other artists, his contemporaries, but in them it is clear that
there was elimination and distortion. But not so with Hogarth. He
saw things as they were and so set them down. As a result, his work
is as valuable to students of social manners and customs as are the
diaries of Samuel Pepys. Not for him was the false picturization, the
idealistic conception. To be sure the London of his day had its fine
lords and ladies, but it had also its filthy beggars, its distorted
and deformed men and women, its untidy children and haggard workers,
its unfortunates with blotched and pimpled faces. So he gave us what
he saw. Therefore Fame crowned him. First he was sincere, second he
saw straight, and thirdly he set down the thing as it was. Pepys too
did that. So did Holinshed and Fielding. Their names live. Aphra Behn
played the game the other way and is forgotten. Also vanished the names
of “Ouida” and of Charles Brockden Brown.




IV.

PREJUDICE.


Still, let a man set himself deliberately to see straight, to look
at things without either rose-colored or smoke-dimmed glasses, and
even then it is not certain that there is freedom from distortion.
Just as the children studying music, of which I wrote a few pages
back, were all unconsciously heavily handicapped, so are we also
handicapped through no fault of our own. For one thing there has been
grounded into us a certain prejudice called patriotism. It is really a
reflex egoism. Because of it we are predisposed to look upon our own
nation as standing alone on star-crowned heights and to regard all
other nations and peoples as being in the gulf of ignorance, poverty
and despair. So we get a one-sided impression. Blinded by national
self-love, we see all good in our own people and little but evil in
others, except those others be our allies, when we grant them some
modicum of decent behavior and common sense just so long as, and no
longer than, they identify their interests with ours. Nationally, we go
in for the cygnification of geese on a gigantic scale. As may easily
be seen, carried to excess, that kind of thing often results in hate.
Not carried to such lengths, it means the ridiculing, as well as the
misunderstanding of others, and in addition the fooling of ourselves.
Consider the so-called “comic sheets” and the cheap vaudeville stage
where the Frenchmen, Germans, Jews, Irishmen, Mexicans and all South
Americans are used as laughing stocks. The reverse of the situation
is seen in common, cheap literature where the American stands as the
type of all that is admirable. Or, if you keep an attentive ear, you
will not fail to note that the notion permeates in such strange way
that it becomes very generally held, and even accepted to so wide
an extent, that teachers teach their charges that there exist very
strongly-marked national characteristics, as that the Dutch are very
clean, the Mexicans very treacherous, Jews very much given to cheat,
Germans to villainy and rape, Italians to idleness, Afro-Americans to
light-heartedness, the French to immorality, the Irish to wit, the
Scandinavians to pessimism, the Swiss to thrift and so on.

All of which is idle and pernicious clap trap, as a moment’s quiet
reflection will show. For each and every man in his experience has
known among his own countrymen those who were clean and those who were
dirty, those who were honest and those who were dishonest, those who
were gloomy and those who were cheerful, those who were idle and those
who were energetic. Moreover, every man knows that his own mood changes
as the wind and he who is merry a-Monday may be very sad on Saturday,
while he who is in the pink of honesty at 9 a. m. may easily be a thief
at 9:30. Yet, for all the testimony of the daily papers and in spite of
the records of the criminal courts, ninety-nine men out of a hundred
are very thoroughly imbued with the idea that their country and its
people have a practical monopoly of all the virtues. So, as might be
expected, the notion gets into literature, modified it is true, but
nevertheless it gets there.

To show it in its most crude form, I give an instance. It happened
since I commenced this essay. A man called upon me and his eyes were
bright and shining with excitement, for he had what he imagined to be
a good plot for a story, and had cut across lots to tell it to me. It
ran something like this and I quote his words as nearly as possible.

“Here is a good plot for a short story or a moving picture. There’s
a young woman on the train, a Canadian, and she is a stranger to
this here country. On the car she begins to talk with a well dressed
drummer. She is innocent and all that kind of thing. But sitting across
the aisle is a soldier. Well, at the depot this here drummer gets the
girl to go with him to a hotel and just as they are getting into a
taxi, up comes the soldier, and ‘Biff,’ he lands the drummer one that
lays him flat. So the girl’s safe. After a year or so the soldier comes
from the war and finds the girl who is the daughter of a rich man. He’s
poor of course, the soldier. Well they marry and live happy.... Of
course, you can show the American ideals in this tale and also use it
to bring about good relation between the English speaking people.”

I will not insult the intelligence of the reader by pointing out the
utter idiocy of the plot. Still, though the man who told me the story
was intelligent, a lawyer in the government service, and a reader of
the _Saturday Evening Post_, the _American Magazine_, several daily
papers, and voted the straight party ticket every election, he failed
to see the utter banality of the tale he suggested. But, it is a fair
sample of the stuff with a “patriotic” base that many hundreds send to
editors, and, more or less modified, watered, or spiced, you will at
times see something of the kind in moving-picture theaters.

So see this then; there are no characteristic national virtues and
vices. Make your hero a negro, a Chinaman, an Eskimo or a Patagonian.
It does not matter which. Man is man the world over, and it is, despite
the old saying to the contrary, a safe rule to measure other’s corn
with your own bushel. What you must do is to conceive a character, then
show him, not acting in any cut or dried fashion, but in a certain
fashion. I say a certain fashion, but might have said an uncertain
fashion, because your character will be more or less like yourself, a
being with faults, virtues, vices, meannesses, ideals and hopes, and
in him the potential angel will be mixed with a good deal of the ape,
the tiger and the pig. Then, with your creation endowed with all the
virtues and vices inextricably mixed, you have a character compounded
of subtle and profound elements. Thus one sees that an action in a
given case is indeed problematical. A man, witnessing overtures that
may lead to the seduction of a girl, a stranger to him, whether the
man was in uniform or not, would hardly be likely to make an assault
upon the supposed seducer. To make him do that sort of thing is but
to cater to the basest taste which glories in brute force. What a
character would do would depend on many things--on his mood at the
moment, whether he was drunk or sober, his immediate environment,
his early training, what he had had for breakfast, what manner of
rascal his grandfather was, how much money he had in his purse at
the time. Or it might depend on a mixture of many of these. Or again,
the fictional personage might ponder and hesitate, finally taking no
action at all, which, as a sensible man and being familiar with the old
warning, “mind your own business,” would very probably be his course.
But the character might well be supposed to be wavering in a storm of
emotion, perhaps to be swayed by subordinate characters, and, in the
end, some action might be shown which would, as it were, grow out of
the collision of the characters. For, bear in mind, the subordinate
characters must not be made mere silhouettes--they also must have their
prejudices and motives and ambitions, and the very form of their minds,
too, must be made as evident to the reader as if they were in his
presence.

Character drawing, as you see then, is a highly complicated business.
Many, even among apparently sensible men, do not suspect this. For
instance, not so long ago, I heard of a poet who declared that he
could write a dozen good short stories between Tuesday and Saturday.
His notion of fictional characters of course was of the allegorical
order, a ticketed dummy in the form of the Sunday school book or of the
transpontine melodrama, a row of Mr. Goodman’s, Mr. Evil-Livers, Mr.
Close-pennies and so on. It never for a moment occurred to him that the
test of good workmanship lay in the ability of the author to make a
distinct impression on the reader, to make him remember the fictional
personage as vividly as he remembered characters met in real life.

At this point, should you be earnest in your quest, really ambitious to
go further, I recommend to your reading as masterpieces of character
drawing, Conrad’s _Lord Jim_, Thackeray’s _Becky Sharp_, Cunninghame
Graham’s _Minor Prophet_ in his “Brought Forward,” H. G. Dwight’s _Like
Michael_ in his “Emperor of Elam,” _Uncle Toby_ in Sterne’s Tristram
Shandy, and the portrait of _Mrs. Poyser_ in George Eliot’s Adam Bede.
Or, failing these, if you are a very busy man, buy in the present
series, Nos. 41 and 72, and study the character of _Old Scrooge_ in
Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and of _The Scab_ in the Color of
Life.




V.

DANGEROUS ENTHUSIASM.


But there is another dangerous shoal, another literary Goodwin Sands
strewn with the wreckage of ambitious but unskilled voyagers. For of
all people urged to write, those generous souls eager to lend a hand
in the making of a paradise on earth are hardest pressed. The very
fact that a young author hates tyranny and injustice in a thorough and
unhesitating way, results in a kind of distortion. For him the evil
pit of controversiality and partisanship yawns darkly. In his excess
of zeal he paints with pigments too glaringly bright and too muddily
brown. He makes his characters too black or too white, all evil or all
good, according to their position in society. He is afflicted with an
egoism of class, a fault every whit as gross as the reflex egoism
called patriotism. His judgment is warped by class prejudice. Because
he burns with zeal, because he is carried away with enthusiasm, there
is distortion. His heroes are those poor in this world’s goods, his
villains the wealthy, the powerful, the aristocratic. That wealth as
well as poverty may entail hardship and unhappiness, the author with
sociological bent often refuses to see, or seeing, wilfully denies.
That worry and weariness and disappointment is not removed when one
has mounted a little out of the pit, is a fact that escapes him.
That injustices suffered by wage earners would be no less were the
administration of affairs discharged by men taken from their own ranks,
is entirely lost sight of. So there comes about a gross exaggeration
and a painting of types. You may see something of this in George
Bernard Shaw’s “Unsocial Socialist.” Walt Whitman sinned in like manner
in his earlier days of writing. The fictional literature of advanced
movements is full of class consciousness.

That kind of thing, of course, is fundamentally due to a kind of
disguised self-interest once removed. It is really the inordinate
love of self, or of class, as such. Consequently, it is bad art. And
being that, it accomplishes nothing, because the reader sees through
the ulterior motive. Furthermore, to do that kind of thing is to set
down the thing as it is not. For, as you know, there are both rascals
as well as gentlemen among wage-earners, just as there are rascals as
well as gentlemen among capitalists. There are scoundrelly poor people
just as there are scoundrelly rich people. Honesty and dishonesty,
truthfulness and lying, fair dealing and foul dealing are matters
entirely apart from rank and position. Indeed, a story or a novel
based on such insecure foundation, must, of necessity, ring false from
first to last. There will be no health in it. The characters will be
shown with glib phrases rolling off their tongues, talking as no man
ever talks who expects to be taken seriously. The dialogue will be
false and strained, and rich man and poor will talk like fourth-rate
evangelists, camp-meeting hot-gospellers or insane tub thumpers. As a
terrible example, turn to the socialistic speech made in a drawing room
by _Cashel Byron_, the pugilist, in George Bernard Shaw’s novel. The
older, more experienced Shaw makes no such mistake. Contrast _Cashel
Byron_ for instance with his _Major Barbara_.

On the other hand, to see what a master craftsman can do, you must
take “The Dream of John Ball” by William Morris, No. 37 of this
series. If you have read it, you will not have forgotten the good,
earnest priest, a most uncompromising truth-teller who had so profound
a belief in realities and held an equally profound hatred of sham,
cruelty and injustice. Looking back, you will recall in the little
story a peculiar vein of pleasantry and delicate fancy with occasional
touches of tenderness and of pathos that is extremely attractive. I
call your particular attention to that story because it was written by
a man actuated by a passionate sympathy for humanity. For Morris was
a radical to be sure, but his radicalism was tempered by a profound
and logical sense of justice, by devotion to truth and reality and by
intellectual ability and clarity. Perhaps in the whole field of English
literature there is no better instance of pure intellect combined with
enthusiasm for justice. And yet with all this, the aim of the story
was to lead people to an understanding of the cause he had at heart,
which was socialism. Yet withal, any one utterly opposed to that cause
may read the book with keen pleasure, and not only that, but will
inevitably be led to sympathize with the aims of _John Ball_.

Why is this? How does it come that one man burning with zeal for a
cause will repel those he seeks to win to his side, while Morris won
opposing minds to a sympathy with a doctrine they had denounced? If
for a moment you try to imagine a Baptist, we will say, writing a book
in such fashion that Catholics will not only read it with enjoyment
but by its means will become interested in the Baptist creed, the
magnitude of the task Morris accomplished will be manifest. The fact of
the matter is that Morris did his work so well, felt the joys and the
griefs of his characters so keenly, in a word was so sincere, that the
reader lost his prejudices in the ideal life portrayed and was impelled
to identify himself with the creatures of Morris’ fancy in such wise
that what hurt them, also hurt him. Both writer and reader overlooked
the social philosophy by reason of immense delight in the characters
themselves. So also it was with those who read Dickens’ “Nicholas
Nickelby” and “Little Dorrit” and both books had so far-reaching an
influence that the first resulted in the reformation of the private
school system and the second in the abolition of imprisonment for debt.

In this connection I think that you will gain much advantage and
get some good ideas if you will read “The Man of Property,” by
John Galsworthy, “The Growth of the Soil,” by Knut Hamsun, and
by Cunninghame Graham, “Success,” “Brought Forward,” “Faith” and
“Progress.” I find in this series as valuable, “He Renounced the
Faith,” by Jack London and “The Miraculous Revenge” by George Bernard
Shaw.




VI.

MURDER AND VIOLENCE.


A word should be said as to murder, bloodshed, suicide and other cheap
effects. When you come to think of it, there is an appalling amount of
bloodshed in our literature. I can go to my daughter’s book-shelf and
take down novel after novel, turn the pages swiftly with a glance here
and there, to hit upon the murder which I know instinctively is there
with unerring accuracy. Or I can pass to the book-shelf in which the
boys keep their favorites, and find brute force galore. Men are knocked
down, punched, run through, thrown down stairways, kicked and cuffed.
On every other page there is manifest a mighty recklessness.

Now of that kind of thing I am suspicious. Looking back in my own
life, which has been far from a quiet one, many years of which were
spent in uncivilized places, I find that I have seen but few deeds of
violence, as between man and man. I do not refer to riots, wars and
organized bloodshed. I remember seeing one man killed outright, one
duel with knives, one saloon rumpus and perhaps four men knocked down.
My experience has been exceptional. Talking with friends, I find many
who tell me that apart from school-boy days, they have never as much
as seen a man knocked down or a blow struck. That, I believe, is the
common experience. Many may easily go through life without witnessing
a single act of violence. Certainly, the vast majority of men never
dream of striking another. The world is prosaic. There are more _Doctor
Primroses_ in it than there are _Squire Westerns_. Men are more given
to have a fancy for oratorical tirades and philosophical discussions
like _Mr. Shandy_, than for fighting and battering one another about
like _Everett True_. It would seem that since the advent of the
four-reel thriller in the picture shows, murder in literature has
somewhat gone out of fashion. There has, indeed, been a gradual letting
down in the matter of violence since the days of Shakespeare and his
forerunners. Time was when men and women had to be glutted with horrors
and cruelties. Nothing less than blood or death would satisfy them.
They had to be dazzled with the full brightness of evil lusts. Only
tales in which lewdness, cruelty, love of gold, shamelessness or vice
were portrayed met with favor. No character was unmixed with sensuality
in the days of Massinger and Ford. The fact is that the early writers,
in constructing a man, did not dig down deep into the foundations.

Today it is different. There is a genuine attempt to become acquainted
with man in his fullness. Especially is this seen in the work of the
makers of present-day literature such as Conrad, Grahame, Galsworthy,
Hergesheimer, Lawrence. The days are past when, if it became necessary
to portray a man of courage, there was a digging into the depths of
diabolical and unchained nature. Unrestrained will is no longer the
keynote. The newer and higher idea hinges solely on character. The
Berserker has been retired.

Of course, the main idea intended, was to display evidence of courage.
But, any intelligent man may see, with a moment’s thought, that the
mere fact that a man fights, is no evidence at all of courage. He
may fight because he is a coward, and fight to the death, too. For
instance, suppose a man is challenged to fight a duel. The writer
who has not dug into human nature will see bravery in the fellow who
immediately accepts the challenge. To be sure there is a certain
brute courage in the act of fighting. But of two men thus fighting a
duel, one may be much braver than another. A man of imagination, who
foresees pain and death, is obviously braver than another who has no
imagination at all, just as a boy who fears the dark, but yet bottles
up his fear and goes into the dark, is braver than a boy without that
fear. As is easily seen, the second boy is not brave at all. And in the
case of the supposed duel, a man who fears public opinion very much
indeed, will fight rather than be counted a coward, and therefore is
actually a coward. So, as you see, which is what I wish to point out,
there is no _outward_ mark by which we can affirm that a particular
action is courageous or the reverse. But if you sit down and write a
story in which a character is so well portrayed that the reader will
see quite plainly that a man fighting to the death is doing it because
of his cowardice, you will have made a story that will find a publisher
in no time. Handle the theme well, and I promise you that you shall
have no rejection slip. One of the stories that O’Brien listed as among
the best in 1920 was based on this theme, though it pictured a suicide
who coldly and deliberately swam to his death, not that he feared life,
but because his conscience hurt him, he having once failed to kill a
fellow who was a military brute.

Perhaps you have read Stockton’s “Lady or the Tiger,” a tale in
which the reader is left wondering, is given something to think of.
The effect upon the reader is something like the effect left after
seeing Ibsen’s “Doll’s House.” So it would be in a tale such as above
outlined. The reader would ponder deeply, if indeed he would not be
torn between two emotions. Did the fighter fight because he did not
fear death, or did he fight because he feared public opinion more
than death? At first blush, you may say, “It is obvious that he was a
coward.” But, consider a moment. Is the average man given to subtle
distinctions? For instance, during the war, when some went to jail
for their opinions, were not many torn with conflicting ideas? Were
pacifists brave? Were they cowards? Were they actuated by fear of death
or were they courageous enough to defy public opinion and the charge of
cowardice, to give up their own liberty and happiness for conscience
sake?

Take another theme, or rather angle of the same theme. Suppose a
character similar to the average man: somewhat timid, careful to keep
within the bounds of the law, tied to his business hand and foot,
his expenses keeping neck and neck with his income, anxious to avoid
publicity of an unpleasant nature. Yet he is a thoughtful man and a
law-abiding one, and, therefore, opposed to all forms of mob law.
Moreover, like the most of us, he shrinks from physical pain, and
cannot kill a chicken without a beating of the heart. We will also
suppose that he is violently opposed to war. To him comes one day
another, suspected by a lawless mob doing deeds of violence in the name
of “patriotism.” Call it the Ku Klux Klan, the American Legion, a Law
and Order League or what you will. Although trembling, in an agony of
terror, fearing for his own life, yet the character we have in mind
shelters the fugitive.

Here you have the opposition between physical and moral courage. The
searching mob seeing him pale and fearful would know him for an arrant
coward, and he himself would certainly admit himself to be that. Yet,
knowing his motive, we see that he was essentially brave, since his
fear was subordinated by a conscious effort to the end in view.

I believe enough has been said to show why, if you would write a short
story involving the exemplification of courage, it is not at all
necessary to fall back upon brute force.

It is somewhat in this connection that I would lightly sketch a talk I
had with a young writer who had submitted a story in which he outlined
a “brave” feminine character--a woman who had faced a little mob. I had
held that the mere fact of facing a mob, when a woman did it, was no
great sign of courage. But the conversation had not a single beginning.
We had talked of other things, and he had objected to a scene in the
novel “Dust” in which _Martin_ had seemed to hold a light regard for
woman’s comfort in the chapter in which _Rose_ accused him of caring
more for the welfare of a fine-blooded cow than for his own wife.
_Martin_, you may remember, had held that altogether too much fuss was
made by women, and sometimes men, about child-bearing--that it was a
natural function just as is teeth growing. My young friend held that
the whole scene was derogatory to American ideals of “womanhood.” Then
we looped back to his short story.

It seems to me that there is a great deal of what the English call
“tosh” about “womanhood.” When _Martin_ compared the cow with the
women to the detriment of the latter, as far as fuss in the matter
of young-bearing, he was obviously right. On first reading the
passage there came to my mind Whitman’s poem in which he tells of his
admiration for the cattle in the field because they were so “calm and
self-possessed.” Like _Martin_, and Whitman, I hold that both men and
women have much to learn from animals.

To touch on the other, and co-lateral branch of the subject of our
conversation. I held that the act of the woman who stood in front of
a little mob bent on mischief was an act apparently, but not really,
involving danger. The same act performed by a man most certainly would
be courageous, but not in the case of the woman, because she would bank
upon popular opinion as to the weakness of her sex. The opinion was
her protection. She well knew that the rioters would not club her, a
woman, and it was her “womanhood” that she counted on to preserve her.
Hers then was a spurious bravery. So also is the man-killing woman a
fake heroine. A woman may shoot a man, especially in the case of a
so-called seduction, with the chances all in her favor that she will
never be found guilty of murder. Pose as a heroine as she will, yet she
knows perfectly well that she may rely on the support of a clamorous,
sentimental and often hypocritical section of public opinion.




VII.

PLOT AND PROBABILITY.


There seems to be little to be said as to plot. I note that the books
of instruction, weighty affairs some of them, more than a third of
which seems to be badly assimilated from some handbook of grammar,
lay great emphasis on plot. I hold that the first and most important
thing is to create a character. You will naturally create secondary
characters and out of them a situation will grow, and the situation
is the plot. But for the rest of it, I believe that an imaginative
man will find ideas for stories in all kinds of odd and unsuspected
little things. H. G. Wells has told us somewhere how he saw a leaf
floating on a little pool and that leaf suggested a canoe, the canoe
again suggesting a lone man. From that grew the story of Æpyornis
Island. Turning to other of his stories, you can certainly discover for
yourself what may have been the germ of the idea. There is his fine
“Country of the Blind,” which every ambitious writer should read. You
easily see that the tale grew out of a pondering over the saying, “In
the country of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” Again, thousands of
men have watched hens scratching in a yard and to them has come the
thought of wonder as to what would happen were men creatures of but an
inch in stature, with other birds and beasts their present size. But it
was Wells who conceived the notion of making a story out of it, and a
gorgeous story it is, as any one who has read “The Food of the Gods”
will admit.

Then there is R. B. Cunninghame Grahame, king of short story writers,
as I believe. I pick up a book of his tales. It is “Brought Forward.”
More properly they might be called sketches. I turn to the first at
which the book opens. It is “With the North-East Wind,” a brief but
tremendously vivid account of the funeral of Keir Hardie. I wish you
would read it for yourself. Grahame is a wonder. Never did a mind
figure to itself with more exact detail or greater energy all the parts
and tints of a picture. Read this, which is the opening paragraph:

  “A northeast haar had hung the city with a pall of gray. It gave an
  air of hardness to the stone-built houses, blending them with the
  stone-paved streets, till you could scarcely see where the houses
  ended and the street began. A thin gray dust hung in the air. It
  colored everything, and people’s faces all looked pinched with the
  first touch of autumn cold. The wind, boisterous and gusty, whisked
  the soot-grimed city leaves about in the high suburb at the foot of a
  long range of hills, making one think it would be easy to have done
  with life on such an uncongenial day.”

And, while I promised to refrain from long quotations, I cannot but
help giving you this from the same sketch, for it seems to me a
remarkable description of a crowd of men. I call your attention to
Grahame’s way of doing it:

  “John Ferguson was there, the old time Irish leader, the friend of
  Davitt and of Butt. Tall and erect he stood, dressed in his long
  frock coat, his roll of papers in one hand, and with the other
  stuck in his breast, with all the air of being the last Roman left
  alive. Tom Mann, with his black hair, his flashing eyes, and his
  tumultuous speech peppered with expletives. Behind him, Sandy Haddow
  of Parkhead, massive and Doric in his speech, with a gray woolen
  comforter rolled round his neck, and hands like the panel of a door.
  Champion, pale, slight and interesting, still the artillery officer
  in spite of socialism. John Burns; and Small, the miners’ agent, with
  his close brown beard and taste for literature. Smilie stood near,
  he of the seven elections, and then check weigher at a pit. There
  too, was silver-tongued Shaw Maxwell and Chisholm Robertson looking
  out darkly on the world through tinted spectacles; with him Bruce
  Glasier, girt with a red sash and with an aureole of fair curly hair
  around his head, half poet and half revolutionary.”

If you do not see that what I am insisting on is, after all, the main
thing, that is the portrayal of character even in those few light
touches, then my time is wasted writing this essay.

I turn to another page and find the sketch, “A Minor Prophet.” It is
the tale of a man moved to preach his gospel of Love and Fellowship,
and he preaches on, enwrapped in his subject, quite oblivious of the
fact that one by one his little audience leaves, and then:

  “He paused, and, looking round, saw he was all alone. The boys had
  stolen away, and the last workman’s sturdy back could be just seen as
  it was vanishing towards the public house.

  “The speaker sighed, and wiped the perspiration from his forehead
  with a soiled handkerchief.

  “Then, picking up his hat and his umbrella, a far-off look came into
  his blue eyes as he walked homewards almost jauntily, conscious that
  the inner fire had got the better of the fleshly tenement, and that
  his work was done.”

A fine ending to a fine piece of writing, indeed. Yet for “plot” the
story has nothing but a man moved to preach and finding no hearers.
Again, in “The Bathers,” by H. G. Dwight, you have a first class piece
of work, but nothing happens except a brief wrestle. Yet the story is
both stirring and dramatic. A hundred delicate shades of character and
temperament are shown us. But set before the reader is the invisible
world of inward inclinations and dispositions.

As for probability, or, if you will, plausibility, about both of
which the instructors are anxiously concerned, I do not believe that
consideration of either enters into the matter of acceptance by
editors. Tell a good story, and whether it deals with pterodactyls or
fays, devils or angels, it will stand on its own merits as a story. You
have seen Wells bringing the world to an end in many different ways:
you have seen him carving animals into the shapes of men (Island of
Dr. Moreau), or causing angels to be shot (The Wonderful Visit), or
leaping into the Fourth Dimension (The Story of Mr. Davidson’s Eyes),
or travelling into the year 30,000 (Time Machine), but always there is
verisimilitude. We know that it cannot be true, the tale he tells, but
we are willing to believe with him that it is true. For romance is a
legitimate field. If you can imagine a rattling good fairy story, go to
it. Mark Twain wrote a good tale about a microbe and Verne wrote a good
one about a trip on a meteor to the farthest edge of the solar system.
There is plenty of room in between these for you. True, just at this
present moment the pendulum swings toward realism, or, if it has not
swung, at any rate there is a mountain of realistic stuff on hand,
but at any moment a fantastic romance may leap into favor. So close
your ears to the short story professors with their warnings against
improbability and all that kind of thing. Write what you feel you must
write, for if you must write, you must, and if you are not impelled to
writing, not all the reading of books, nor listening to lectures will
aid you one whit.




VIII.

ON SEX.


William Marion Reedy said, “In literature just now it is sex o’ clock.”
He was deploring somewhat the insistence upon sex and sex matters that
seems to be fashionable. We had a good talk on that, and, presently,
that outspoken, clear-minded writer, Frank Putnam, joined in. So there
were three editors, neither of whom had puritanical notions, all pretty
much in accord. We came to a rough kind of conclusion that there
was distortion of a kind when matters of sex occupied too prominent
a place in literature. Understand me, no one of us were other than
gross in part ourselves, but we knew that the part that sex played
in our lives was very small as compared with other things. In some
ill-defined way it seemed that in literature it should bear about
the same proportion that it does in actual life. In life, there are
women who sell themselves, men who seduce, women who attract seducers,
and those who get into all kinds of trouble because of sex, and that
being the case, it is folly to hide it, or to pretend that things are
otherwise. A writer should not be mealy mouthed. But when there is an
over insistence upon sexual appetite, we are forced to believe that it
can be explained only by the aberration of a perverted fancy. There is
a happy medium between monsters of virtue all correct, constrained and
charming, and human billy-goats. To be sure there is an impetuosity of
the senses, an upwelling of the blood, but there is something else.

Unfortunately, nationally, we are given to false modesty. Perhaps it
is the revolt against that which has made for this over insistence
on sex in literature. If so, it will eventually prove to have been a
most excellent thing should it succeed in bringing us to our senses.
For, as matters are, and according to the accepted standard of
“respectability,” we would give welcome to neither a Henry Fielding
with his “Tom Jones,” a Smollett, a Swift, a W. L. George, a Lawrence,
a George Moore nor even a Shakespeare with his Sonnets. Much less could
we have a Balzac, a De Maupassant, a Murger or a Moliere. As it is,
we are debarred from much that is well worth while from the pens of
foreign authors, while there is a very active underground trade, as
every man knows, in stuff that is frankly pornographic.




IX.

SO THEY MARRIED AND--


Just now, I turned to a pile of common novels, the sort that is here
today and gone tomorrow, and opened them at the last page. Somewhere
there I found that “she floated into his arms,” “the strains of the
Wedding March were borne on an afternoon air,” “You are the only one I
have lived for,” or some such sentence.

I also find that of ten short stories submitted for inspection, nine
deal with the problem of getting a wife.

Now, as will be clear to every thinking man, the problems of life do
not end with marriage. Rather do they begin with them. Marriage is
not an ideal state, the end of grief, the solution of all problems.
In fact, under present economic conditions, it is exactly what has
been called an _egosime a deux_. To throw two people together, in
everlasting close proximity, is a dangerous thing to do at any time,
and in any conditions. The only possible amelioration is a community
of intellectual interests between man and wife, which, as we know, is
extremely rare. Lacking that, there must be frequent discontent. The
two parties to the contract are thrown too much together. The feminine
“moods” get on the nerves of the man. The very fact that convention
prevents the man from having other female friends, and the woman from
having male friends, exacerbates the trouble. The two become more or
less isolated and there is revolt--perhaps openly expressed, perhaps
hidden. The first fierce sexual appetite being satisfied, “love” passes
into coldness and by a natural transition, coldness into dislike. Then
come children perhaps, and marriage sinks into a stern, indissolvable
partnership with never ending worry and fret for the man, and unending
petty toil for the woman. Utter boredom is called virtue and morality.
A musty, fusty old pair, yawning in each other’s faces on a front porch
in utter vacuity, are pointed out by the conventional as a model of
contentment. A volume would not exhaust the list of troubles that come
when the marriage state is entered. So, let us in writing, paint things
as they are to the end that the young shall hold no illusions. Paint no
idyllic picture of love in a cottage, nor present something that has
but the remotest reference to life as it is.

Edward Carpenter, in his “Love’s Coming of Age” has much to say on
this subject. The little book is packed full of sound common sense.
Stories on the relations of the sexes that do not touch on the triangle
feature have been written in plenty, and the _Smart Set_ has had many
good pages on the theme. But it has been overlooked by Americans, that
William Makepeace Thackeray, a satirist second only to Swift, brought a
consummate cleverness to bear on the subject. His married couples pass
in review before the reader like a series of warnings. We read with
amusement, to recognize with seriousness, moving among us in life the
very characters he portrays. We know his _Miss Blanche_, acting the
martyr, eyes ever welling with tears, trying to catch a husband who
will sympathize with her sensitive heart. We have seen a _Mrs. O’Dowd_,
pompous and boastful and proud, bent on marrying every bachelor she can
lay her hands on. We know _Amelias_, wildly jealous, leading a husband
a devil of a time. We remember many like _Helen Pendennis_, silly
country prudes of no education, full of the harshness of Puritanism.
We recall decent women like _Lady Castlewood_ married to drunken and
imbecile boors, and by contrast, high-strung fellows tied to women who
have the minds and the education of a kitchen maid. There are families
of _Pontos_ yawning in solitude, men whose acquaintances are too vulgar
for their wives, and wives who scorn their husbands.... Go to Thackeray
if you would write, and, when tempted to dismiss your characters with
the reflection that marriages are made in Heaven, bear in mind that if
such was the case, Heaven was often a bad workman as far as generating
earthly happiness is concerned.




X.

Sample Subject Suggestions.


Whether I was born with a crooked streak, or whether much travel in odd
corners of the world and living with odd people has given me a kind
of twist I do not know. Some times I am very sorry for myself: but I
cannot see things in the way people tell me I should see them. The
worst of it is that this disability of mine places a bar between me and
my fellows more often than not. For instance, I cannot see anything
very noble, elevating or inspiring in the ritual of secret societies.
The “good lessons” that others tell me are to be learned in the hidden
arcana, I never find. I draw the most extravagantly wrong inferences
from the ritual. Whenever I hear public speakers say nice things which
seem to please my neighbors, my mind goes off at a tangent in a kind
of examination as it did the other day when I read a story in which
much stress was laid on southern hospitality. I very much doubted that
there was in the south any more hospitality than in the north, or the
east, or the west. Tramping the roads of the south as I often do, I
find that one autoist out of twenty-five or so will offer to carry me
to the next town. That is about the proportion I found in the north.
Of course, in the south, exactly as in the north, where advantages
are to be gained, or where favors are to be expected, there is a rush
to do honor. If I am known as a writing fellow, I am taken to see the
show places, the local sights, the scenic views. But if I happen along
dressed as a common laborer, I meet no more hospitality in the south
than anywhere else. The watchdog south of the Mason and Dixon line is
as unfriendly as his cousin in Ohio or Minnesota. I tell this, not by
way of persuading you to my viewpoint, but so that you shall examine
at first hand some of the notes which I have made from time to time as
bases for prospective short stories. Given time, I shall make stories
around them myself, but, if you beat me to it, well and good. My mental
attitude in this respect is much like the hen who cackles when she has
laid an egg. She has produced the potential chick, if foster mothers
make it actual, well and good. So, if you make a story of any one of
these, you have my benison.

_First._ I read a lecture by Conan Doyle in the course of which he
assured us that on the other side of the veil we shall meet our soul
mates. Soon after that appeared in print, I had no less than five
manuscripts of stories based on the idea that although lovers were
separated here, there would be a ringing of bells in heaven when they
rushed together, with an eternity before them.

Now it seems to me that some of us who have had experiences, and, in
the course of time have been happily delivered from our affinities,
would not be elated over the prospect that Doyle sets before us.
There’s a story there.

_Second._ A fairly well-written pamphlet foretold a time when Labor,
uprising in its might would put all executives to work with pick and
shovel, hammer and saw, when the day of rejoicing would be at hand.

My note on this would suggest a story to the effect that a couple
of dozen really first-class executives drawn from capitalistic
enterprises, and paid a higher wage than they could hope for in their
old jobs, would marshal the forces of Labor and win for it the victory
it craves. The story would go on to show that Labor is not willing
to undertake the sacrifice that would lead to victory: that it is
mistrustful and too prone to treat its own friends with coldness,
denunciation, ridicule, suspicion; that it is too prone to hot air and
sentimentality. The conclusion would be drawn as a salutary lesson to
Labor, that while Capital measures all things by dollars and cents, it
is not too stingy to pay a good price for what it wants. Consequently
it wins, for money gets the man.

_Third._ An editorial told of the good time coming when Labor and
Capital shall meet face to face.

I do not believe in any such good time, and would do all in my power
to prevent such a meeting. My reasons would be that in the past, Labor
and Capital have met face to face, and the clash of countenances was
like unto that when two rams meet, both of whom are enamoured of the
same ewe. I project a story then setting that forth, with the ultimate
decision arrived at that Capital admits it must get all that it can at
the lowest price, and Labor must get all it can at the least exertion
cost. Under such circumstances, it is idle to hope for agreement, and
my story should show both parties putting aside camouflage and agreeing
on the issue.

_Fourth._ In a secret society, I heard a national official talk for an
hour or more on the elevating influence of lodge work, praising the
members present for their attention to duty.

My story would show that most men attend lodge as a refuge and a hiding
place, to escape the boredom of home, wife and children and that lodge
work was really nothing but solemn play, and neither religion nor a
substitute for it.

_Fifth._ In high wrath, a man wrote a letter to a local paper
denouncing the editor for the stand he had taken. The man then felt
that he had stung the editor, and imagined him squirming under the
blows received.

Write a story showing that under such circumstances a newspaper editor
is highly pleased, for the objecting letter shows him that for once the
bombastic nonsense he has written was read.




XI.

On Style.

On the subject of style, the authors of books telling how to write,
flounder solemnly. They remind me very much of Van Vechten’s tale of
the rather massive female who tried to explain a cubistic production
to an outspoken doubter and coming a cropper in the effort, proved
that she knew nothing about the subject. The said doubter had declared
that “There’s always a lot of talk, but nothing is clear.” And it is
exactly so when self appointed instructors arise to explain “style” in
literature.

Perhaps if you get this into your mind it will serve. To tell a story,
two persons are involved--a writer and a reader. It is the business
of the writer to win, _to persuade the reader_. All the rest follows.
The writer must choose the clearest way, the nearest way, the most
pleasant way. His manner of doing that is his style.

Next, how shall style be attained? Take Thoreau for your teacher in
this. He said: “If you have anything to say it will fall from you
as a stone falls from your hand.” You know that is true. Of course,
different men will have different ways of expressing themselves just
as they have mannerisms in their daily acts. But we must remember that
one man’s style will not fit another man. Imitation is idle. That is
all I can tell you about style. I could wrap what I have said above
into a cloak of ornamental language or cover it layer upon layer with
elaborations as the layers of an onion are about a central core,
but could say nothing else of value. Still, as many books have been
written on the subject by master minds, and as I have those books on
my shelves, I shall give you in the paragraph that follows, some idea
of what stylists have to say, and, that being done, shall copy for you
certain passages from books not very popular and therefore hard to get
at, so that for yourself you may see the extraordinary differences in
style.

Take Schopenhauer’s view. It is to be found in his _Parerga_.

  “Every mediocre writer tries to mask his own natural style.... If
  they would go honestly to work, and say, quite simply, the things
  they have really thought, and just as they have thought them, these
  writers would be readable and, within their own proper sphere, even
  instructive.

  “But instead of this they try to make the reader believe that their
  thoughts have gone much further and deeper than is really the case.
  They say what they have to say in long sentences that wind about in
  a forced and unnatural way; they coin new words and write prolix
  periods which go round and round in the thought and wrap it up in
  a sort of disguise. They tremble between the two separate aims of
  communicating what they want to say and of concealing it. Their
  object is to dress it up so that it may look learned and deep, in
  order to give people the impression that there is very much more than
  for the moment meets the eye.” And again: “The first rule for good
  style is that the author should have something to say.”

The English novelist, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in a lecture delivered
at the University of Cambridge, has this to say: “As technically
manifested in literature it (style) is the power to touch with ease,
grace, precision, any note in the gamut of human thought or emotion.”

Next take the Frenchman, Comte de Buffon. It was he who said: “The
style is the man himself.” I think you will understand and enjoy the
passage that follows:

  “But when he has made a plan, when once he has brought together and
  put in order all the thoughts essential to his subject, he will see
  easily the instant when he ought to take up his pen, he will feel
  with certainty that his mind is ready to bring forth, he will be
  pressed to give birth to his ideas, and will find only pleasure in
  writing; his ideas will succeed each other easily, and the style will
  be natural and ready; the warmth born of this pleasure will diffuse
  itself everywhere and give life to each expression; the animation
  will become higher and higher; the tone will become exalted; objects
  will take on color; and feeling blended with intellect will increase
  the warm glow, will carry it farther, will make it pass from that
  which one says to that which one is about to say, and the style will
  become interesting and luminous.”

I cull this for you from John Ruskin:

  “So long as no words are uttered but in faithfulness, so long the
  art of language goes on exalting itself; but the moment it is shaped
  and chiselled on external principles, it falls into frivolity, and
  perishes.”... “No noble nor right style was ever yet founded but out
  of a sincere heart.”... “No man is worth reading to form your style,
  who does not mean what he says; nor was any great style ever invented
  but by some man who meant what he said.”

Now here Thoreau again:

  “We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which
  hard working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required
  to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the
  ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the
  workshop than in the school.”

Reading that, consider Jack London the virile, Robert Burns the boy on
the stone bruised farm, John Bunyan the tinker, Masefield the sailor
and bartender, W. H. Davies the hobo, Caradoc Evans the boy who was
always hungry and tired. The last named mastered English through the
study of the Bible. The passage below is taken from his book, “My
Neighbors.” Except perhaps Bunyan, no better example could be given of
sheer force and precision of style.

  “Our God is a big man: a tall man much higher than the highest chapel
  in Wales and broader than the broadest chapel. For the promised day
  that He comes to deliver us a sermon, we shall have made a hole in
  the roof and take down a wall. Our God has a long, white beard, and
  he is not unlike the Father Christmas of picture books. Often He lies
  on his stomach on the Heaven’s floor, an eye at one of his myriad of
  peep holes watching that we keep his laws. Our God wears a frock
  coat, a starched linen collar and a black necktie, and a silk hat,
  and on the Sabbath He preaches to the congregation of Heaven.

  “Heaven is a Welsh chapel: but its pulpit is of gold, and its walls,
  pews, floor, roof, harmonium, and its clock--which marks the days of
  the month as well as the hours of the day--are glass. The inhabitants
  are clothed in white shirts in which they were buried and in which
  they arose at the Call: and the language of God and his angels and of
  the Company of the Prophets is Welsh, that being the language spoken
  in the garden of Eden and by Jacob, Moses, Abraham, and Elijah.

  “It is no miracle that we are religious. Our God is just behind the
  preacher, and He is in the semblance of the preacher and we believe
  in Him truly. It is no miracle that we are prayerful. Our God is
  by us in our hagglings and cheatings. Bacca Pehffos prays that the
  dealers’ eyes are closed to the disease of her hen; Shon Porth asks
  the Big Man to destroy his pregnant sister into whose bed Satan
  enticed him; Ianto Tybach says: ‘Give me a nice bit of haymaking
  weather, God bach. Strike my brother Enoch dead or blind and see
  I have his fields without any old bother. A champion am I in the
  religious and there’s gifts I give the preacher. Ask Him. That’s all.”

Now consider a very different style. It is from Charles Lamb who came
nearer achieving perfection than anyone in literature. His art is so
cunningly concealed that it has the appearance of almost careless
discourse.

  “I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the
  kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer’s flesh were not made to
  be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows
  it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in
  higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like
  minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for
  food. C---- holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses
  apple dumplings. I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of
  my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those
  innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust for
  me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle
  thoughts.”

At this point I spent a full half hour trying to hit upon a paragraph
for reproduction here from Stevenson’s “Virginibus Puerisque.” But
without success. You can no more tear a paragraph from that admirable
essay than you can take a jewel from its setting and have the thing as
it was. So you must turn to his essay for yourself. You should also
read his “Travels with a Donkey.” And, while you are about it, do not
forget to read much of De Quincey, and also of Goldsmith.




XII.

A Neglected Field.


There is opportunity in full, a vast field to exploit in the writing
of juveniles, to use the term applied to that branch of literature
which appeals to the young. It is especially the case in stories
appealing to growing girls who, having passed from the excellent _John
Martin’s Book_ stage and into the _St. Nicholas_ age, are unwilling
to leap forthright into Gene Stratton Porter and Harold Bell Wright.
In England, and imported into the eastern states, there used to be a
well edited journal called the _Girls’ Own Paper_, but it is imported
no longer. No one has quite taken the place of Louisa May Alcott, or
Margaret Sidney with her Pepper Series.

Good stories for boys too are comparatively rare, though the _Youth’s
Companion_, leader in this field, pays well, is well edited and widely
read. Lads of a past generation fared far better for reading matter
than those of today. There was a border land as it were, a literature
that interested men as well as boys of spirit. The work of Jules
Verne, so admirably translated, is with us and our publishers, sadly
neglected. His books, together with the stories of adventure by Paul de
Chaillu, led millions of lads to higher reading planes. Then there was
Harrison Ainsworth with his semi-historical fiction, Ballantyne with
his short tales of fire-fighters, sailors, lifeboat men and others in
adventurous callings, and Thomas Hughes and his host of followers with
bright school-boy tales. England has some good work in that direction
today, especially in what is being done by Henry Newbolt who writes of
old warriors and new, of deeds of derring-do and wild adventure, nor
should we omit Frank T. Bullen with his “Cruise of the Cachalot” and
other tales, or Basil Lubbock, fit successor to Dana. I particularly
urge ambitious writers to look into this field of literature. Our lads
today are fed up to nausea with tales of Boy Scouts, square-chinned
lads who, single-handed, routed German regiments, captains of industry
in embryo, amateur detectives and all that sort of thing. What we
need, is, not to try to rob boyhood of its golden days and to thrust
ideas of business success into them, but to offer them food for lively
imaginations. Give them reading for reading’s sake and not for some
ulterior motive. Boys do not want “lessons” in books any more than
they need “lessons” in a ball game. There is where I would take issue
with Franklin K. Matthews of the Boy Scout movement who, not so long
ago at a publishers’ convention, said that there was a great field for
exploitation in the ten million boys hungry for reading matter. So far
so good, but, urging publishers to cultivate this field, he quoted
the wife of a college professor with approval who had expressed her
desire to “do something to keep the boys sensibly occupied on Sunday
afternoons” and had added that “parents do not believe in dare-devil
books which would be of interest to boys.”

Now I hold that if we are to raise a generation of readers, we must do
exactly contrary to that which is here suggested. Consider. If you read
the Matthews’ quotation with care, you catch a faint and fusty flavor
that recalls “best” rooms with cloth-covered round tables bearing books
set at mathematically arranged distances apart, radiating from a center
of imitation fruit, done in wax, covered with a glass shade. You will
also get a sense of a prim lady handing you a copy of Samuel Smiles’
“Self Help,” with the injunction, “Be good, because it’s Sunday.”

With no respect whatever for anyone’s opinion, when Mr. Matthews and
the wife of a college professor, together with the objecting parents
attempt to exercise surveillance over the boy’s reading, and affect the
illimitable conceit that they know what is, and what is not, proper,
they not only stultify themselves, but proclaim themselves the enemies
of boys, and, further, take the first step towards disrupting an
organization that has a power for good--an organization that so far has
not been captured for ulterior motives. Frenzied with the fashionable
fever for prohibition, they rush to join that

    Sect whose chief devotion lies
    In odd, perverse antipathies:
    In falling out with that or this
    And finding somewhat still amiss.

Sturdy of growth though the Boy Scout movement is, be sure that
any reptant Puritanical interference will most assuredly result in
labefaction.

A boy is an unspoilt man, and these are the elements that enter into
his character: enthusiasm, fervor, courage and generosity. A boy is
both unmoral and unreligious. He has a sublime contempt of custom and
of conventionality, and is almost destitute of selfishness. Moreover,
he is assured of his right to his own opinion and the correctness of
his own choice. That he is a chosen instrument for the emancipation of
the human race: that he, once untrammeled, can achieve the triumph of
justice over centuries of oppression; that, once attaining manhood, he
will right all wrongs, he is as certain as he is of his own existence.
His heroes, he insists, shall be endowed with similar qualities.
Further, and this Mr. Matthews and the college professor’s wife, with
objecting parents, should mark well, the average, normal boy has a deep
conviction that parents, preachers and teachers are narrow-minded old
fogies, either eternally shamming or showing off, utterly destitute of
originality, and full of silly prejudice. The boys are not far wrong.
Therefore, the obnoxious officiousness--but what’s the use.

As to dare devil books, can any normal, sensible man, not a _Stiggins_,
a _Pecksniff_, or a _Uriah Heep_, put his finger on any book of that
class, that he read when a lively boy, and say, “If I had not read
this, I would have been a better, wealthier, healthier man; I would
today have been saner, holier, wiser?” Can any reading man who has
lived with those gallant dare-devil creations that he learned to
love and admire before he knew _Becky Sharp_ or _Hester Prynne_, or
_Corporal Trim_, say that he would willingly obliterate the memory of
any one of them? On the other hand, mentally reviewing an imaginary
parade of boyhood heroes, does not one’s heart beat quicker, does there
not come a thrill of joy as the golden days before disillusionment are
recalled?

Picture the procession! It will do you good. No Barnum and Bailey
amalgamation of circuses can match, nor civic pageant pale it. The
great iron gates of the boys’ Valhalla fly open with a clang, and the
lank-jawed, pestiferous prohibitionist flees before the noble throng.
All brave in their Lincoln green, _Robin Hood_ and his merry men lead
the way. You see _Friar Tuck_ and _Little John_, _Will Scarlett_, and
_Alan-a-Dale_. _Jack Shephard_ follows, keen eyed and lithe, a merry
rogue laughing at shackles and handcuffs, to whom Houdini is but a
pale ghost. _Dick Turpin_ too is there astride of his bonny _Black
Bess_, and _Claude Duval_ the gallant, with _Cartouche_, and _Monte
Cristo_ mysterically visible in his sack. Captain Kidd with blood
stained bandage marches with Jesse James and the Younger brothers,
and _Phileas Fogg_ the imperturbable, unsmiling and resolute, touches
elbows with John L. Sullivan and Jake Kilrain. _Quasimodo_ comes, and
George the runner and Beach the oarsman, _Long John Silver_ and old
man _Pew_, _Gagool_ and _Natty Bumpo_, _Gordon Pym_ and the Man in the
Iron Mask, _Allen Quatermain_ and Gaborieu’s detectives. Covered with
yellow dust of New Mexico, glittering with silver and gold, ride the
immortal Scalp Hunters and the plainsmen of Captain Mayne Reid, while
the _Iron Pirate_ and _Jack Harkaway_ go arm in arm. Sailors, fire
fighters, cowboys, whalers, smugglers thicker throng. Spears, banners,
bayonets, lassoes, boledores, battle axes and marlinspikes bristle
above massed heads. Wild, strange oaths fill the air. Steel clashes on
steel. Then comes a crowd of heroes so compact that with difficulty you
pick out one here and there--trim _Midshipman Easy, Harry Lorrequer_,
_Peter Simple_, _Handy Andy_, _Percival Keene_, _Baron Munchausen_,
_Ned Kelley_ the iron clad Australian bush ranger, _Tracy_ the outlaw,
_Valentine Vox_, Peace the burglar, _Athos_, _Porthos_, _Aramis_,
the _Wandering Jew_. Not a woman, not a seducer, not a pestilential
prohibitionist in all that glorious, golden, glittering galaxy. Not
a saint, a statesman or an uplifter there. Not one could you find to
be accused of injustice, of prejudice, of narrow mindedness. Not one
but would leap to quarter-staff, to bow, to mace, to dirk, to pistol
or musket in defense of liberty and freedom. Not a solitary religious
character would you find, except it be Sampson, admitted by reason of
his house-wrecking activities.

By all the gods, if this little book shall result in but one rattling
good short story, one real good tale of adventure, just one good
story for boys that are boys, and not tight fisted men before their
time, the writing of it shall have been well worth the while and
Mr. Haldeman-Julius will have conferred a benefit on his generation
by publishing this. So go to it if you can. Forget “moral lessons,”
“improvement of the juvenile mind” and all that nonsense and give the
best that is in you.


YOUR MARKET.

Use common sense when sending your manuscript. Read the magazines and
mark the kind of story they use. For example, should you have a story
dealing with the _egoism a deux_ called marriage, it would be of no
use to send it to the _Saturday Evening Post_. Similarly, a tale of
business success would find no friendly reception in the office of the
_Dial_.

There are many magazines, especially the younger ventures, exceedingly
hospitable to unknown writers. I name the _Double Dealer_, Vincent
Starret’s _Wave_, the _Reviewer_, and _Broom_.

For established magazines with editors very much on the _qui vive_ for
good work, watch the _Century_, _Smart Set_, _Little Review_, _Freeman_
and _Midland_. There are probably many others, but I’m speaking from my
own experience.

I would advise you to read the editorials and literary criticisms of H.
L. Mencken in the _Smart Set_, Glen Frank in the _Century_, and if you
care for this, my own periodical _All’s Well_.

There follows a very complete list giving the addresses of magazines
using short stories.

  Adventure, Spring and Macdougal Sts., New York City.

  Ainslee’s Magazine, 79 7th Ave., New York City.

  All’s Well, Fayetteville, Ark.

  American Boy, 142 Lafayette Blvd., Detroit, Mich.

  American Magazine, 381 Fourth Ave., New York City.

  Argosy All-Story, 280 Broadway, New York City.

  Asia, 627 Lexington Ave., New York City.

  Atlantic Monthly, 8 Arlington St., Boston, Mass.

  Black Cat, 229 West 28th St., New York City.

  Broom, 3 East 9th St., New York City.

  Catholic World, 120 West 60th St., New York City.

  Century, 353 4th Ave., New York City.

  Collier’s Weekly, 416 West 13th St., New York City.

  Cosmopolitan Magazine, 119 West 40th St., New York City.

  Dial, 152 West 13th St., New York City.

  Double Dealer, 204 Baronne St., New Orleans, La.

  Everybody’s Magazine, Spring and Macdougal Sts., New York City.

  Freeman, 32 West 58th St., New York City.

  Good Housekeeping, 119 West 40th St., New York City.

  Harper’s Bazaar, 119 West 40th St., New York City.

  Harper’s Magazine, Franklin Square, New York City.

  Hearst’s Magazine, 119 West 40th St., New York City.

  Holland’s Magazine, Dallas, Tex.

  Ladies’ Home Journal, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.

  Liberator, 34 Union Square East, New York City.

  Little Review, 24 West 16th St., New York City.

  Little Story Magazine, 714 Drexel Bldg., Philadelphia, Pa.

  Live Stories, 35 West 39th St., New York City.

  McCall’s Magazine, 236 West 37th St., New York City.

  McClure’s Magazine, 76 Fifth Ave., New York City.

  Magnificant, Manchester, N. H.

  Metropolitan, 432 4th Ave., New York City.

  Midland, Glennie, Alcona County, Mich.

  Munsey’s Magazine, 280 Broadway, New York City.

  Outlook, 381 5th Ave., New York City.

  Pagan, 7 East 15th St., New York City.

  Parisienne, 25 West 45th St., New York City.

  People’s Favorite Magazine, 79 7th Ave., New York City.

  Pictorial Review, 216 West 39th St., New York City.

  Popular Magazine, 79 West 39th Ave., New York City.

  Queen’s Work, 626 North Vandeventer Ave., St. Louis, Mo.

  Reviewer, 809¹⁄₂ Floyd Ave., Richmond, Va.

  Saturday Evening Post, Independence Square, Philadelphia, Pa.

  The Red Book Magazine, North American Bldg., Chicago, Ill.

  Scribner’s Magazine, 597 5th Ave., New York City.

  Short Stories, Garden City, Long Island, New York City.

  Smart Set, 25 West 45th St., New York City.

  Snappy Stories, 35 West 39th St., New York City.

  Sunset, 460 Fourth St., San Francisco, Calif.

  Today’s Housewife, Coopertown, N. Y.

  Top-Notch Magazine, 79 West 47th Ave., New York City.

  Toutchstone, 1 West 47th St., New York City.

  The Woman’s Home Companion, 381 4th Ave., New York City.

  Woman’s World, 107 South Clinton St., Chicago, Ill.

A word in conclusion. Keep your ears open as well as your eyes. You
will find it pays to be somewhat of what Shakespeare called a “snapper
up of unconsidered trifles.” On every side of us, good things are being
said, characters are being revealed. It was but last week when saying
something to a lad who was plowing, I being sorry for what I took to be
very hard work, he said:

“Why, I love it--turning up the sod, seeing the different things coming
up all the time, the smell of the earth, hearing the purr of the plow
and the little grunts of the horses--it’s fun.”

If you do not see strength and ecstasy and philosophy in that, you are
hopeless.

At a meeting, I heard a business man say:

“Although there was a talkative crowd there, I ate silently, revolving
plans.”

The five words “I ate silently, revolving plans” presents a picture.
An inexpert writer might waste words in vain putting the idea across
to a reader that a man engrossed in his business withdrew from the
confusion about him. Observe, the conversation of men is not often
clear cut, sharp chiseled. Too often it is a macedoine of tautologies,
contradictions, slang and inaccuracy, but let a man think strongly on
any one thing, and ten to one what he has to say comes out clear cut.
It is the flake of gold in the midst of much gravel that you must learn
to catch.

I find this again in my notebook. Two girls were talking in a
street car and I could not but help overhear. It was poor stuff and
uninteresting, with much of “I says” and “says he to me” and “I says,
says I” but in one place this came like a bright light:

“I did not hear the reply, because of the faint rustle of my own
movements.”

The sentence stands perfect. What it conveys could not be better put.

Once I heard an old sailor telling a tale. He was full of oaths and
obscenities and he wandered in the telling of it. Then this came:

“As the sun sank, a patch of trees on the point stood out against the
light and it seemed that they had come by magic.”

A Texas freighter I heard say of a man:

“He had the gift of friendship.”

This was said by a child of seven years: “She was so proud, that she
became white and tight lipped.”

If you will examine the examples given, you will see that each speaker
had something to express, and expressed it directly. There was no
stuffing, no padding.

As an example of positive flash of insight, I copy this from the story
“Villette” by Currer Bell:

“The cook, in a jacket, a short petticoat, and sabots, brought me
supper, to wit, some meat, nature unknown, served in an odd and acid
but pleasant sauce; some chopped potatoes made savory with I know not
what, vinegar and sugar, I think; a tartarine or slice of bread and
butter and a baked pear. Being hungry, I ate and was grateful.”

The passage that next follows, I find in my scrap book clipped from _T.
P.’s Weekly_. It is the opinion of an old grayheaded man at Rydal Mount
who remembered Wordsworth and who, in spite of the evidence of many
poems, held that the Lake poet had no interest in children.

“He never cared for childer, however; yan may be cartain of that, for
didn’t I have to pass him four times in t’ week, up to the door wi’
meat: and he niver onest said owt. Ye’re well aware if he’d been fond
of children, he ’ud ’a spoke.”

Now watch how Mark Twain does things. His Huckleberry Finn talks as
the boys that you know talk, and, like so many of the unlearned, he
supports his views with a philosophical tag. He is giving his opinion
of the _King_ and the _Duke_, two rapscallions who were parasites on
the lads.

“It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars wasn’t no
kings and dukes at all, but just low down humbugs and frauds. But I
never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself. It’s the best way;
then you don’t have no quarrels and don’t get into no trouble.”

And this, for scenic description in miniature, with a record of
personal impression is hard to beat:

“It was a-kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying
on our backs looking up at the stars; and we didn’t feel like talkin’
loud and it wasn’t often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low
chuckle.”

One more passage I must quote from Huckleberry. Compare it with the
brief remark of the plowboy I copied for you, for Huck might have said
what that lad said, or that lad might have talked as did Huck:

“Not a sound anywheres--perfectly still--just like the whole world
was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-clattering maybe. The
first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull
line--that was the woods on t’other side--you couldn’t make nothing
else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness; spreading
around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn’t black any
more, but gray; you could see little dark spots driftin’ along, ever so
far away--tradin’ scows an’ such things; and long black streaks--rafts;
sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices,
it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see
a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that
there’s a snag there in the swift current which breaks on it and makes
that streak look that way.”

Perhaps, if you have never tried to write a story, you will think
that it is an easy task to put into the words of an unlettered lad a
description such as that. But try. If you can come anything near it you
will do well. If you can do as well as that your future as a writer
is assured. Doubtless, you as a boy loved the still and solemn night,
the creatures in the woods--squirrels, turtles, snakes. Doubtless, you
too looked with indignation upon the things men did around you. If so,
you have the foundation for a story within you. All that remains to be
done then is to set down your own experiences without holding back,
without exaggeration--to set down the things as they were in simple,
plain words; to remember, all the time, that truth is the final test of
literature.

       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber’s note


In the original the roman numerals indicating a new chapter were out
of order. They have been renumbered here.

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
and spelling of proper names have been standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
changes:

  Page 5: “the English langauge”             “the English language”
  Page 7: “order I am dumfounded”            “order I am dumbfounded”
  Page 9: “of the senuous and”               “of the sensuous and”
  Page 10: “those cre tures all”             “those creatures all”
  Page 25: “Contarst _Cashel Byron_”         “Contrast _Cashel Byron_”
  Page 34: “story of Epyornis Island”        “story of Æpyornis Island”



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 76438 ***