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COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY MERVIN JAMES CURL

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.

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TO
THE STUDENTS IN RHETORIC III
AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
WITH WHOM I HAD PLEASANT ASSOCIATION
FROM 1914 TO 1918

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Since one of the pleasures of life is in being indebted to friends for kindnesses so generously given that the givers were unaware of the indebtedness which they were creating, the author is happy to set forth several acknowledgments of most helpful counsel and aid. To Dr. Emerson G. Sutcliffe, with whom a complete text on the whole subject of rhetoric had been projected, only to be set aside, and to result, for the present, in the text now published, the author wishes to express his thanks for advice, criticism, and general wise help throughout the preparation of this text. Dr. Herbert L. Creek read many sections of the book in manuscript, and made valuable suggestions. At the suggestion of Dr. Jacob Zeitlin the chapter on the "Informal Essay" was rewritten, with much improvement. Helpful advice was given concerning different sections of the book by Dr. Frank W. Scott, Dr. Harold N. Hillebrand, Dr. Clarissa Rinaker, and Miss Ruth Kelso. Dr. Robert C. Whitford and Mr. Bruce Weirick read a part of the book and kindly commented upon it. All these kind friends were members, at the time of giving aid, of the faculty of the University of Illinois.

To Professor Fred L. Pattee, of the Pennsylvania State College, the author feels an especial debt of gratitude for unfailing interest and cheer and much wise counsel.

To Mr. Warner G. Rice, a student in the University of Illinois, the author wishes to make acknowledgment for reading one chapter in manuscript and making valuable suggestions.

So many friends have helped at one time and another that whatever of good the book may contain is doubtless due[Pg vi] largely to them. For its faults the author alone is responsible.

Due credit is made in the proper places to the several publishers who with unfailing kindness and courtesy allowed the use of material drawn from their publications.

Boston, Massachusetts
August 9, 1919

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EXPOSITORY WRITING

"The Anglo-Saxons," Emerson said, "are the hands of the world"—they, more than any other people, turn the wheels of the world, do its work, keep things moving. Without lingering to quarrel with Emerson, or to justify him, we may safely assert that Expository Writing is the hands of literature. In a world which man even as yet only slightly understands, surrounded as he is by his fellows who constantly baffle his intelligence, and shut up within the riddle of himself, Exposition attempts to explain, to make clear, to tear away the clouds of mystery and ignorance.

Exposition attempts to answer the endless curiosity of man. "What is this?" man asks, of things and of ideas. "Who are you?" he addresses to his fellows. "How did this originate, what caused it, where is it going, what will it do, how is it operated?" he repeats from birth to grave. Perhaps the most interesting question in the world is the never-ending "What does this mean to me, how does it affect me, how can I use it?" These are the questions—and there are more of them—which Exposition tries to answer. Obviously, in making the answers the writing will often be garbed in the sack suit of business, will sometimes roll up its sleeves, will pull on the overalls or tie the apron. Then it may explain the workings of a machine, the wonders of a printing press, or may show the mysteries of Congressional action, or the organization of a department store, or even tell how to bake a lemon pie. But it may also appear[Pg 2] in the opulence of evening costume, and criticize the ensemble of an orchestra, discuss the diplomacy of Europe, address us in appreciation of the Arts. It may assume the fine informality of the fireside and give us of its most delightful charms in discussing the joys of living and learning, the whimsicalities of the world. In any case it will be answering the endless curiosity of man.

It would not be rash to say that more expository thinking is done than any other kind of mental activity. The child who dismantles a clock to find its secret is doing expository thinking; the official, of however complicated a business, who ponders ways and means, is trying to satisfy his business curiosity; the artist who studies the effect of balance, of light and shade, of exclusion or inclusion, is thinking in exposition; politicians are ceaselessly active in explaining to themselves how they may, and to their constituents how they did. We cannot escape Exposition. The question then arises, since this form of writing is always with us how can we make it effective and enjoyable?

All writing should be interesting; all really effective writing does interest. It may not be required that every reader be interested in every bit of writing—that would be too much to hope for in a world where sympathies are unfortunately so restricted. To peruse a directory of Bangkok, if one has no possible acquaintance in that city, might become tedious, though one might draw pleasure from the queer names and the suggestions of romance. But if one has a lost friend somewhere in New York, and hopes that the directory will achieve discovery, the bulky and endless volume immediately takes on the greatest interest. Lincoln, driven at length to write a recommendation for a book, to escape the importunities of an agent, wisely, whimsically, wrote, "This is just the right kind of book for any one who desires just this kind of book." Wide though his sympathies were, he recognized that not every one enjoys[Pg 3] everything. The problem of the writer of exposition is to make as wide an appeal as he can.

Interest in reading is of two kinds: satisfaction and stimulation. And each of these may be either intellectual or emotional or both. The interest of satisfaction largely arises when the questions which the reader brings with him to his reading are answered. A reader who desires to know what is done with the by-products in a creamery, where the skim milk goes to, will be satisfied—and interested—when he learns the complete list of uses, among them the fact that skim milk is largely made into the white buttons that make our underclothing habitable. The reader who leaves an article about these by-products with the feeling that he has been only half told is sure to be dissatisfied, and therefore uninterested. In the same way, when a reader picks up an article or a book with the desire to be thrilled with romance or wonder, to be taken for the time away from the business of the world, to be wrenched with pity for suffering or with admiration for achievement—in other words, when a reader brings a hungry emotion to his reading—if he finds satisfaction, he is interested.

The interest of stimulation may include that of satisfaction, but not necessarily. It is the interest that drives a person to further thinking or acting for himself, that loosens his own energies and makes him aware of desire for satisfaction that he did not know he had. A reader may, for example, peruse an editorial in a daily paper and find a complete array of facts, setting forth in detail the subject, and may be satisfied about the subject. He may read another editorial which will not leave him cold, indifferent, but will set his brain to churning with ideas, or may even make him clap on his hat and start forth to change things in the world. The second editorial has given him the interest of stimulation.

Writing that makes the interest of stimulation is the writing[Pg 4] of power: to the mere satisfaction of hunger, such as one can get from eating dry oatmeal, it adds the stimulation, the joy in life that a fragrant cup of coffee would add to the oatmeal. Exposition that satisfies is adequate; that which stimulates is powerful. Obviously, some expository writing would suffer from being filled with the power to rouse the reader. Much legal writing must be addressed to the intellect alone; often the entrance of stimulation, the rousing of the emotions, will destroy the chance for justice. Obviously, again, some subjects can be treated to contain both kinds of interest: an account of the devastation of northern France may be as cold as a ledger in its array of facts which are to be added; it may also be so treated as to rouse a vitriolic hatred for the government that caused such devastation to be made. Each treatment is allowable, and each necessary for a perfectly proper purpose.

Let us admit, without debate, that much expository writing is stupid. Why is it thus? Largely for two reasons: the writer has not made his material mean anything to himself, and he has not made it significant for his reader. In writing exposition there is no place for him who draws his pen along like a quarry slave who is soon to be scourged to his dungeon and does not care for anything. A person who finds no interest in his subject should do one of two things: consult a physician to see if his health is normal so that he may expect reasonably vivid reactions to life and things; or choose a new subject. Interest, in other words, enters at the moment when the writing becomes related vitally to human beings, and not until that moment. Why do students enjoy reading the writings of William James? Simply because the author made his facts relate to himself and to everybody else. If a writer feels like saying, "I don't see anything interesting in this!" and yet he feels duty pointing a stern finger at composition, he should examine the subject more nearly, should see if it does not in some way affect him, does not present a[Pg 5] front that he is really concerned with. Suppose, for example, that the task presents itself of accounting for the use of skim milk, and suppose that the writer thinks skim milk of all things the stupidest. Well, buttons, they say, are made from it—but who cares what buttons are made from; their purpose is to hold clothes together, and that's all! But wait a bit: here are some hundreds of gallons of skim milk, from which thousands of buttons can be made. Without the milk, the buttons will be cut from shells, perhaps, at a much larger cost. Ah, the pocketbook is affected, is it—well, let's have the milk used, then. And when one stops to think of it, is it not remarkable that from a soft thing like milk a hard thing like a button should be made? Isn't man, after all, rather ingenious? Who in the world ever thought of milk buttons? Some such process the mind often passes through in its approach to a subject. At length it finds interest, and then it can write—and not before.

Here is the difference, then, between being a dumb beast of a reporter of facts, and a free agent of an interpreter. Some facts, to be sure, are in themselves so startling that mere report is sufficient. Slight comment is needed to horrify an audience at Turkish atrocities in the war. Perhaps comment would even weaken the effect. The terrible poignancy of such facts so fires the imagination that more is perhaps positively harmful. Many facts are not thus immediately translated into human experience. At first thought the fact that a new hotel will be supplied with indirect lighting seems a mere fact of trade: instead of ordering hanging chandeliers of one kind, the builder will order another kind. But thought of more fully, this fact takes on both the interest of satisfaction and that of stimulation: why did the builder decide to install the indirect system? and what will the effect be? Imagining one's self in that hotel at the end of a long and bewildering journey, with nerves on edge and eyes aflame with dust, will relate the fact of choice at[Pg 6] once to human feelings and needs—and the subject is interesting. A reader can be made to understand the workings of the engine in a super-six automobile, and also to feel the power of it; to understand a cream separator and also to thrill to the economy of time and strength which it brings; to understand a clarinet and also to rouse to the beauty of its voice; to understand an adding machine and also to marvel at the uncanny weirdness of the invention. The writer interprets as soon as he brings his subject into relation with human life and shows its real value.

As already mentioned, care is to be exercised to use the treatment which the subject demands. An explanation, for practical purposes, of a machine lathe will be dangerous if it attempts too much imaginative stimulation: there would lurk too great a danger to material fingers. An essay, on the other hand, such as those of Lamb and Stevenson, depends largely on its imaginative interpretation, on its appeal to the interest of stimulation. For a neutral newspaper account of a football game the following heading was used: "Yesterday's game between the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago resulted in no score for either side." That is a bald report of the facts, for a neutral audience. The interpreting spirit, as it appeared at the two universities, colored the tale: "Fighting Illini tie Maroons 0-0"; and, "Maroons hold Illini to 0-0 score." These two headings, if expanded into complete articles, would color the story with interpretation for a specific audience that is vitally interested. The accounts would probably be more interesting than that of the newspaper, but they would also run the chance of being less fair.

For Webster's New International Dictionary art is defined as follows: "Application of skill and taste to production according to æsthetic principles; an occupation having to do with the theory or practice of taste in the expression of beauty in form, color, sound, speech, or movement." George[Pg 7] Gissing, making a definition of the same subject for his book, The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft, writes as follows:

Of these two definitions obviously the first attempts merely to satisfy the intellectual curiosity of the reader, is a mere report of facts, and the second is interested in making an interpretation, in stimulating the reader. For most readers the words of Gissing would be more interesting; though, since a dictionary is not primarily an amusement, it is a bit unfair to mention the fact.

Interesting our expository writing must be; it must also be truthful. Nothing worse can be imagined than the kind of writing that forgets the facts, that remembers only the desire to please. Under the pleasing phraseology of any bit of expository writing there must be the firm structure of[Pg 8] thought, and the close weave of fact. Expository writing is commonly divided into Definition and Analysis. Definition attempts to set bounds to the subject, to say "thus far and no farther," to tell what the subject is. Analysis regards the subject as composed of parts, mutually related, which together form the whole, and attempts to divide the subject into as many parts as it contains. Analysis is divided into classification and partition. Classification groups individual members according to likeness, as one might classify Americans according to color or birthplace or education or health, in every case placing those who are alike together. Partition divides an organic whole into its parts, as one might divide the United States Government into its three branches of legislative, judicial, and executive, or the character of George Washington into its components. Now definition and analysis often intermingle and help each other, and are often informally treated, but somehow, in every piece of exposition, the underlying thought must have a sound basis of one or the other or both. This will be the nucleus of the thinking; it may then be treated as a bald report or as an interpretation, aiming merely to give information or to rouse the further interest of the reader. The method of treatment will be determined by the nature of the facts and the purpose of the author in writing.

It cannot be too strongly stated that the underlying thought and the interest are really one, after all. As you approach a subject, and learn its character and meaning, you will be at the same time learning whether it is a subject capable of great appeal or only of slight attraction. Interest is not something laid on, but is a development from the nature of the facts themselves. The first question should be, "Is this interesting?" and then the second question may follow, "How shall I bring out the interest?" Remember that interest depends on relation to human beings; the closer the relation, the greater the interest.

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Mr. Henry Labouchere, English statesman and for many years editor of Truth, had an ideal reaction to life, so far as interest is concerned. If, scanning the horizon for interest, he had bethought himself of the rather impolite advice of the Muse to Sir Philip Sidney, "'Fool,' said my Muse to me, 'look in thine heart and write,'" he would have found, upon following the advice, a heart full of eager curiosity and readiness to be attracted to anything. The following account of one of his qualities, as related in his biography, is worth remembering when you feel like saying, "Oh, I don't see anything interesting in that!": "If he had encountered a burglar in his house already loaded with valuables, his first impulse would have been, not to call the police, but to engage the intruder in conversation, and to learn from him something of the habits of burglars, the latest and most scientific methods of burgling, the average profits of the business, and so forth. He would have been delighted to assist his new acquaintance with suggestions for his future guidance in his profession, and to point out to him how he might have avoided the mistake which had on this occasion led to his being caught in the act. In all this he would not by any means have lost sight of his property; on the contrary, the whole force of his intellect would have been surreptitiously occupied with the problem of recovering it with the least amount of inconvenience to his friend and himself. He would have maneuvered to bring off a deal. If by sweet reasonableness he could have persuaded the burglar to give up the 'swag,' he would have been delighted to hand him a sovereign or two, cheer him with refreshment, shake hands, and wish him better luck next time; and he would have related the whole story in the next week's Truth with infinite humor and profound satisfaction."

To make clear, to explain,—that is the task of exposition. Such writing does not have the excitement of the fighting-ring, which we find in argument, nor does it attain the lyric[Pg 10] quality of impassioned description, or the keen wild flight of narrative. It keeps its feet on the earth, tells the truth—but tells it in such a way, with so much of reaction on the writer's part, and with so strong an appeal to the reader's curiosity or imagination or sympathy, that it is interesting, that it is always adequate, and may be powerful.

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All writing—except mere exercise and what the author intends for himself alone—is a problem in strategy. The successful author will always regard his writing as a problem of manipulation of material wisely chosen to accomplish an objective against the enemy. The enemy is the reader. He is armed with two terrible weapons, lack of interest and lack of comprehension. Sometimes one weapon is stronger than the other, but a wise author always has an eye for both. The strategic problem is, then, so to choose material, and so to order and express it, that the reader will be forced to become interested, to comprehend, to arrive, in other words, at the point in his feeling and thinking to which the author wishes to lead him. The author's objective is always an effect in the reader's mind. In so far as the author creates this effect he is successful. And the time to consider the effect, to make sure of its accomplishment, is before the pen touches the paper.

Sometimes the author makes a mistake in his planning, as did the composer Handel when he wrote the oratorio of "The Messiah." He placed the "Hallelujah Chorus" at the end of the oratorio. But when, toward the end of the second section, he saw from his place on the stage that the audience was not so enthusiastic as he had expected it to be at that point, he changed his plan, with practical shrewdness rushed to the front and shifted the famous chorus from the end of the third section to the end of the second, and had the satisfaction of seeing the audience so moved that first the King rose, and then, of course, the audience with him. The chorus[Pg 12] has stood at the end of the second part to this day; that is the place for it—it brings about the effect that Handel desired much better there than if it were saved for the end of the oratorio. The oratorio is, in other words, a greater work than it would have been had not the author kept a keen eye for the audience, for the effect, and a willingness to change his plans whenever the gaining of the effect required a change. Just so the writer should constantly scan the horizon of the reader's mind for signs of interest and for shafts of intelligence.

The effect that the writer desires in the reader's mind may be of different natures. In Baedeker's Guide-Book the aim is largely to satisfy the understanding, to meet the reader's desire for compact information. In some of Poe's tales the effect is of horror. Patrick Henry aimed primarily to rouse to vigorous action. Shakespeare wished to shed light upon the great truths of existence, to satisfy the reader's groping curiosity, and also to thrill the reader with pity and terror or with high good humor or the unrestrained laughter of roaring delight.

In so far as the author accomplishes his purpose, in just so far he is successful. When friends complimented Cicero, telling him that he was the greatest orator, he replied somewhat as follows: "Not so, for when I give an oration in the Forum people say, 'How well he speaks!' but when Demosthenes addressed the people they rose and shouted, 'Come, let us up and fight the Macedonians!'" If Cicero was correct in his estimate, Demosthenes was the greater orator—of that there can be no doubt—for he gained his effect. President Wilson's great war messages had as one of their objects, certainly, the rousing in American hearts of a high thrill to the lofty object for which they fought, the overcoming of might with right. The remarkable success of the messages attests the author's power.

Now the author will accomplish this effect in the reader's[Pg 13] mind only if his writing "takes hold," and it will "take hold" only if it is weighty, that is, only if it bears toward the desired end in every part and in every implication. This is as true in writings that aim at light, frivolous effects as in those that stir the deeper emotions, in writing that aims at the understanding almost alone as in that which strives not only to make clear but to infuse with deathless appeal to the heart. A treatise on the fourth dimension must bear, in every stroke, toward the complete satisfaction of the reader's intellectual curiosity; a comedy must lay down each word in the intention of liberating the silver laughter of humor; a tragedy must leave us in every implication serious, even in its introduction of comical material to heighten the tragic nature of the whole. To make every word bear in the one general direction—that is the writer's task. In no other way can he move the reader's mind and heart as he wishes to.

An author finds, however, that to gain the desired effect requires skillful manipulation on his part. He confronts a mass of refractory material, often full of contradictions, in which any potential effect seems almost as difficult to discover as the proverbial needle in the well-known haystack. For example, when a historian sits down, one hundred years hence, to the task of explaining the Great War, he will be confronted with an amazing welter of endless facts, tendencies, personal, national, and racial ambitions, enmities, competitions in trade, language, customs, indiscretions of diplomats, inscrutable moves of controlling powers, checks and counter checks, assertion and denial, accusation and assurance of innocence, bribery and plots and spy systems, amateur comment in newspaper and magazine, defenses by people who have retained their poise and other defenses by those whose faculties have been unseated by the awful strain of war—and everywhere he will find the endless array of events and detailed facts of organization of civil and military life to mold somehow into a consistent, intelligible whole.[Pg 14] Well may he say that the task is too great for mortal man. Yet somehow the history is to be written, somehow the effect that he wishes is to be gained. Obviously the great prime task is to unify, to bring order out of chaos, to create from formless material a real edifice of thought. Exactly the same task awaits the writer of any kind of literature; in a short theme no less, the first great duty is to find some principle whereby the author can exclude the useless and include what is of value.

The first question to ask is—and it is also the last and the intervening question—"What am I trying to accomplish?" At first thought this question may seem the most obvious, the most elementary, and the least helpful query possible. But upon its being successfully met depends the whole success of the writing, whether of choosing or ordering or proportioning the material, or of expressing the selected ideas. For, since the chief task before the writer is to make his thoughts and his expression drive in one direction, so that the whole composition is simplified in the reader's mind, is unified and given an organic existence, even the choice of words, upon which depends so much of the tone of the composition, is largely settled by the answer to this question of what the author hopes to accomplish.

In Exposition, the explaining the relations among things and ideas, we are commonly told that we must "cover the ground," must "stick to the subject," must "include whatever is valuable and reject the rest." But such directions are insufficient. Until I have some touchstone, some applicable standard, I cannot tell whether material is valuable or not. It is as if one were brought into the presence of multifarious building material,—wood both hard and soft, cement and the other ingredients of concrete, bricks, stucco, and steel beams, and terra cotta tiles,—and then were requested to build a house, using whatever of the material might be of value, and removing the rest. The builder would be nonplussed.[Pg 15] He cannot build, now with wood, now with stone, and again with tile; if he did, the saying would be all too true, "There's no place like home!" He can do nothing reasonable until he has been informed as to the kind of house desired, until he is given a principle of selection. Then, if he has been bidden to make a brick house, he at once knows what his object is, and can then reject whatever does not help him, in the accomplishment. In the same way, if I am asked to write five thousand words about Horticulture, I am at a loss to choose from the history of the science, or the present status, or the still unsolved problems, or the relative advancement in different countries, or the possibility of the pursuit of horticulture as a profession, or the poetic, the imaginative stimulus of working among apple blossoms, or the value to health of working in the open air. Perhaps any one of these divisions of the total subject would require five thousand words; certainly with so limited an amount of material of expression I cannot cover all; and if I choose a bit of each, the result will hopelessly confuse the reader as to the science, for I shall perforce write a series of mere disjuncta membra. I must, then, choose at once some guiding principle of selection that will make clear whether, for instance, the poetic appeal of the science has anything to do with my object. Then, and only then, shall I be able to write an article that will "take hold," that will bear in every part toward some definite goal, that will leave my reader with a well-organized, easily understood piece of writing. Only thus can I escape making a mere enumeration about as sensible as to add potatoes and church steeples and treasurers' reports and feather boas and card parties and library paste in the hope of making an integral whole. This guiding idea, which avoids such selections, may perhaps best be called the "controlling purpose" of the theme or article or book.

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What, then, is the controlling purpose? It is the answer to the question, "What am I trying to accomplish?" It is the intelligent determination on the writer's part to make the material of his writing march straight toward a definite goal which he wishes the reader to perceive. It is the actively operating point of view of the writer, the positive angle of vision that he takes toward the subject. The controlling purpose in Lincoln's mind as he rode up to Gettysburg must have been to bring home to the civilians of the country, with a great humble thrill toward accomplishment, the fact that after the soldiers had done all they could, the civilians must reverently take up the fight for freedom and union. His address is immortal. But suppose, for a moment, that he had ascended the platform with the vague idea of "saying something about America, the war, you know, and the soldiers, and liberty,—oh, yes, Liberty, of course,—and, oh, things in general." Though he had thundered for hours his words would likely have been ineffective. Only an intense realization of the purpose in one's mind, and a consistent bending of one's efforts to gain this end, bring simplicity, weightiness, and the powerful effect in the reader's mind. From the reader's point of view, in fact, we might say that the controlling purpose is the means of making writing interesting, since nothing so holds a reader's mind as to feel that he is getting somewhere, that he is accomplishing something by his efforts. In no other way can he be made so clearly to see his progress, for only thus can he be prevented from undirected wandering.

When we ask how we shall find and choose the controlling purpose, we discover that it is determined by three things;[Pg 17] the subject itself, the personality of the writer, and the character of the reader. Just how these three operate to determine the cast of the writing we shall now attempt to discover.

The first thing for the writer to do is to look at the subject itself and learn what it is, really understand it. He must know its exact nature before he can be allowed to proceed with the development. Now this often requires much honesty, for it is necessary to put aside prejudice and bias of all kinds and to look at the subject just as it is, with a passionate desire to learn its exact nature. For example, if you are to write about the value of a college education, and you are an idealist, you may be tempted to overlook the fact that such a training does actually help a man to earn more money than he otherwise would. You may think that such a consideration is beneath your dignity. But you must put aside your prejudice for the time being and must look the fact honestly in the face. And, if you are a hard-headed, practical person, you must nevertheless admit that a college education is broadening, chastening, in its influence. In either case you will not stop until you have looked at all possible sides of the subject. You will amass such facts, then, as that a college education is broadening, that it increases earning capacity, that it puts a person in touch with the world, that it makes him more able to be a useful citizen. Other facts also will occur to you, but let us suppose that these are the most important. If you carefully examine them you will perhaps come to the conclusion that a college education is valuable in that it helps a person to realize his best possibilities in every way, as a citizen, a friend, a personality. Or, if you are to write about the aeroplane, you will discover that it is heavier than air, that it is propelled by motor-power, that it attains certain speeds, that it has definite lifting power, that it is self-stabilizing to a remarkable degree, that it is made of certain kinds of[Pg 18] material, of certain weight, and that it has one, or two, or even three planes. In addition you will note the qualities of efficiency, of triumphing over winds, of beautiful poise, and smoothness of execution. In both these cases you have been seeking the core of your subject, the real meaning of it, its essence. You must, before you begin to write a word, be able to say what all the noticed facts amount to, to say, "All told, this subject, this machine, or whatever it is, means so-and-so." Perhaps of the aeroplane you would say, "This machine stands for wonderful potential efficiency, not yet completely understood." In the same way we say of people and things, "He is a bore," or "a tyrant," or, "That is a great social menace," or some other such comment. In each case we have tagged the person or thing with what we think it is at its heart, with its total significance. And not until we have done this are we at all ready to begin writing.

The second influence in determining the controlling purpose is the reaction of the writer to the subject. In the following estimate of Lord Morley, the great English statesman, you will notice that, though the treatment seems to be, at first, purely objective, quite impersonal, the author cannot keep himself out: he enters with the fifth word, "thrilling," in which he shows where he stands himself in regard to truth, and he appears more at length in the last two clauses of the selection, where he definitely set the approval of his own heart upon Lord Morley's attitude. The third influence, that of the reader, appears also, for when you consider that the article was written for Englishmen to read, you see the molding for the national temper, different of necessity from that which would have been made for Frenchmen, for example. The author relies upon a knowledge of Morley among his readers, and upon a certain definite attitude among them toward the truth.

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The second consideration, then, is, "What does this subject mean to me?" Of course there are subjects in which this question is of slight importance: in writing a treatise on mathematics, for instance, one might be quite indifferent to any personal reaction, though in even such a piece of writing[Pg 20] there might appear a thrill at the neat marshaling of forces for the inevitable waiting answer to the problem. In general, however, this question is of great importance. Stevenson goes so far as even to say that the author's attitude is more important than the facts themselves. Certainly a writer cannot tell what is the truth for himself unless he expresses his ideas in the light of his own personality. Suppose that in the case of the aeroplane, though you believe the central fact as we expressed it above, you are primarily appealed to by the fact that the motor is of the utmost importance, and that at present it is not so highly developed as it should be for perfect flying. You are, in other words, impressed with the problem that confronts engineers of making the motor more efficient. Your controlling purpose would now be modified, then, and would perhaps read, "The aeroplane is a machine of wonderful potential efficiency not yet completely understood, especially as regards the driving power." In the same way you would modify the purpose of the treatment of college education and might say, "A college education is valuable in that it helps a person to realize his best possibilities in every way, but especially as an heir of all the wisdom of the ages gone."

The relative importance of this second consideration depends on whether the subject is much or little affected by personal interpretation. In the personal essay, as written by Lamb, for example, we may care more for the man than for the facts, or more for the facts as seen by the man than for the mere facts alone. In questions of society, of morality, of taste, in which the answer is not absolute in any case, in all matters that affect the well-being of humanity and in which there is a shifting standard, the attitude of the writer is important. The writer who wishes to have a voice of authority must cling to the fact as to a priceless jewel, but he must also remember that if, for example, he is writing on Feminism, or Socialism, or Church Attendance, or The[Pg 21] Short Ballot, or The New Poetry, or The Value of Social Clubs in the Country, or any such subject, we, the readers, eagerly wait on his words as being primarily an expression of his personal reaction to the matter. And the final value of the treatment will depend on whether the personality is well-poised, largely sympathetic, able to take an elastic view of the subject and to bring it home to the reader as a piece of warmly felt and honestly stated conviction. In exposition, as well as in argument, we must ask the witness,—that is, the writer,—whether he is prejudiced or not. Especially must we do this when we happen to be the author ourselves. Violent condemnation of Capital by a man who has become embittered by mistreatment at the hands of employers must be taken with somewhat of caution, just as sweeping arraignment of Socialism by an arrogant capitalist must be eyed askance.

It might not be amiss to remark here that the writer in a college class who declares that he has no reaction to his subject, that he is quite indifferent to it, should do one of two things, either choose a new subject, or drop from college and go to work at some vitalizing effort with other people which will bring home realities to him in such a way that he cannot fail to react.

In the following brief incident it is interesting to note how the author shows his own personality. Another would have thought of the problem of dietetics involved, or of the absence of coffee or "parritch" or the rasher of bacon, or of the austerity of the meal. To Gissing[4] the incident was significant as showing a national characteristic both admirable and amusing.

At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their breakfast on the question of diet. They agreed that most people ate too much meat, and one of them went so far as to declare that,[Pg 22] for his part, he rather preferred vegetables and fruit. "Why," he said, "will you believe me that I sometimes make a breakfast of apples?" This announcement was received in silence; evidently the two listeners didn't quite know what to think of it. Thereupon the speaker, in rather a blustering tone, cried out, "Yes, I can make a very good breakfast on two or three pounds of apples."

Wasn't it amusing? And wasn't it characteristic? This honest Briton had gone too far in frankness. 'T is all very well to like vegetables and fruit up to a certain point; but to breakfast on apples! His companions' silence proved that they were just a little ashamed of him; his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to right himself in their opinion, nothing better occurred to the man than to protest that he ate apples, yes, but not merely one or two; he ate them largely, by the pound! I laughed at the fellow, but I thoroughly understood him; so would every Englishman; for at the root of our being is a hatred of parsimony. This manifests itself in all manner of ludicrous or contemptible forms, but no less is it the source of our finest qualities. An Englishman desires, above all, to live largely; on that account he not only dreads but hates and despises poverty. His virtues are those of the free-handed and warm-hearted opulent man; his weaknesses come of the sense of inferiority (intensely painful and humiliating) which attaches in his mind to one who cannot spend and give; his vices, for the most part, originate in loss of self-respect due to loss of secure position.

The third consideration is, "Who is my reader, and what are his characteristics?" The counter-question, "What difference does it make who my reader is?" can be summarily answered with the statement that it makes a great deal of difference. As soon as you note what a large part temperament plays in the forming of opinions in politics and religion and social questions, and remember that no two people ever react to any truth in exactly the same way—that what seems to one sensible person monstrous will appear to another equally sensible person as highly[Pg 23] virtuous—you will see that in all writing, where either the understanding or the emotions are involved, this question assumes importance. If we believe the theory with which we set out, that all writing is done to accomplish an object, that is, a certain effect in the reader's mind, and then remember that different readers take different trails to the same objective, and that some must be even coaxed back from one trail into another, we shall see that it is vital that the reader do not select the wrong way, and, like a futile dog, "bark up the wrong tree." A hasty glance at current magazines will at once show how operative this consideration is in practical writing: The Atlantic Monthly uses a different set of subjects and a different style of expression from that of The Scientific American or The Black Cat or The Parisienne. The editors, in other words, are remembering who their readers are and are trying to meet them with gifts, not with weapons of offense. After all, the reader is always the destination of all writing; the place where the effect will be made is the reader's mind.

To apply this third consideration to our two subjects, the value of a college education and the aeroplane, let us see how the treatment should differ according to the differing readers. If, in the treatment of the first subject, we are presenting our statements to a body of educators, even though the facts of college education remain unmoved, and though our personal leaning toward the supreme value in dowering the student with the wisdom of the past is unchanged, we shall yet see that these educators have already thought as we have about the matter, that merely to repeat to them will be futile and wearying; and we shall, if we are wise, change the point of attack and develop the value as enabling the student to apply to practical problems the wisdom of the past. Or, if the readers are to be politicians whom we wish to enlist in sympathy with larger endowments, we shall perhaps treat the subject as being increased political insight[Pg 24] and sympathy with all people. In the treatment of the aeroplane, if we are presenting our words to engineers, we shall probably analyze the present lack of proper engine power and try to suggest means of correction. And we shall make our presentation in language that has not been stripped of its technicalities but has been allowed to stand in engineering terms. But if we address a body of benevolent women who are trying to organize an "Airmen's Relief Fund," and who look upon the machine with horror as a potential destroyer of life, we shall simply show that accidents may be caused through faulty engines which may often result in loss of life. The original controlling purpose will now appear, "The value of a college education lies in its offering the best chance for personal development through showing to the student his heirship to all the wisdom of the ages past, especially as this is applied to present-day problems," or, "The aeroplane is a machine of great potential efficiency not yet completely understood, especially as regards the driving power, through which lack of understanding grave accidents may occur."

Now if we scan these two statements carefully, I believe that we shall be persuaded of their inadequacy. To explain to the benevolent women who are interested in saving lives the fact that we do not yet fully understand the aeroplane, is like attempting to persuade a man from the path of an oncoming thunderous locomotive by telling him of the lack of laws to regulate public safety. In other words, we have forgotten that a wedge makes the easiest entrance, and we have attacked on far too broad a front, have failed to whittle away the chips that are of no value to the reader. Perhaps we need a complete restatement of the controlling purpose, occasioned by the nature of the reader. We may say that the value of a college education is in enabling a student to be of service to the state by applying the wisdom of the past, or that the aeroplane, partly through our ignorance of it,[Pg 25] is causing terrible accidents. These purposes are far different from those with which we started out. All are perfectly true; these are better adapted to our particular readers, are more useful in helping to accomplish our selected aim. The gist of the matter is this: wisdom in writing demands that we discover the special loophole through which our readers regard the subject and then bring our material within the view from that loophole, bearing in mind always the training and the prejudices of the reader, and conforming material to suit the special needs.

One large reason why college themes are liable to dullness is the fact that few students write for any one in particular. They merely put down colorless facts which do not stir a reader in the slightest. They forget that facts exist, really, only as they relate to people, individual people, and that they must be clothed attractively, as is virtue for a child's consumption, or the reader will have none of them. Even the patient writer of themes should regard a specially chosen reader as at the same time his best friend and his potentially worst enemy: friend in the sense of recipient of literary gifts, and enemy in the sense of possible foiler of all the author's good intentions. As enemy the reader must be conquered, must be made to read and understand; as friend he is to be sympathetically met and smiled upon. And if there be no reader determined by the circumstances, the writer should choose some well-known friend and adapt his material to that friend, or should select any ordinarily intelligent being and use the widest appeal that he can.

Now the relative value of these three sources of the controlling purpose is variable. In an article for the encyclopædia the writer's reaction should be subordinated, since the reader comes to the encyclopædia for facts and not for opinion. Likewise the reader, in such an article, will be of minor importance,[Pg 26] for the article is addressed to general ordinary intelligence that desires a straightforward statement. But as we have seen, an article on Feminism must with the greatest care watch the reader and the writer—the reader because the subject rouses both assent and opposition; the writer because the subject is of the kind that depend largely on opinion. So a theme on the problem of the hired man, or Tennyson's attitude toward science, or the reasons for attending one university rather than another, or the value of mechanical stokers, or the application of Mendel's Law to human beings will vary its purpose according to the varying importance of the three sources. Only one great caution needs to be made. Never falsify or mistreat the facts: they are the supreme thing. It is for this fault that the newspapers are most blameable: they consider their readers and their own points of view, but all too often they treat the facts cavalierly. A high reverence for the truth, and an unflinching determination to tell it are prime essentials.

So far we have been concerned with the problem of placing the facts before the reader, of appealing to his intelligence. But writing consists of vastly more than that alone. After the understanding, sometimes before, must be considered the emotions. We have the facts, we know what we think of them, and we are reasonably sure of the reader's attitude. Now we must discover how to set the reader's emotions afire in so far as we desire such an effect. In listening to a great tragedy we perceive the cold analysis of a great truth of life; but that is not all: far out beyond the bounds of understanding our emotions are profoundly stirred and we feel pity and terror. So in the account of a tremendous battle, of a fire, of anything that touches human life at all nearly and with power, our emotions are called into play. Now different pieces of writing, just like different subjects, call[Pg 27] for different degrees of emotional reaction. Drama always rouses us, lyric poems depend upon their emotional quality, the informal essay has much emotional appeal, fiction of any sort stirs our feelings, and the more powerful the writing is, the more sure the appeal.

At first thought most expository writing might be considered to make slight appeal, if any, to emotions. That is not necessarily true; the more effective the exposition, the more real is usually the call to feeling. Often this call is subtle, usually it is subordinate to the appeal to the understanding, but in most effective expository writing it will be found. In an explanation of the Panama Canal certainly there would be roused the reader's admiration and wonder at the magnitude of the operation. The mere analysis of the facts in a criminal trial often settles the case, so great is the emotional appeal. In didactic writing the call to emotion is less strong, though such a writer as Jonathan Edwards could explain the writhing of man like a spider before the Almighty in a profoundly moving way. In axiomatic mathematical propositions we find perhaps the least strong appeal: that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles might seem to be divorced from all excitement. But in most exposition when emotional appeal is overlooked the writing suffers.

In an account of the American Civil War, for example, the writer might set out to show that the conflict was the culmination of the struggle between yeoman and cavalier begun long since in England. But the war meant more than that. The author will then see the emotional significance of the fight and will add to his purpose the intention to thrill the reader at the magnificent exhibition, on both sides, of devotion to an idea. So Emerson, in his essay on "Fate" in The Conduct of Life, fills the reader with gloom for page after page, detailing how thoroughly the individual is bound down by conditions of birth, sex, breeding, wealth—and then in[Pg 28] two wonderful sentences he turns the whole course of thought and emotion by saying, "Intellect annuls fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free," and the reader is stirred as with a trumpet call to renewed courage, which, to use Emerson's words, "neither brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor poetry, nor genius" can overcome. And the historian Greene, in his well-known account of Queen Elizabeth, states his controlling purpose in the words, "Elizabeth was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne Boleyn." But these words are not the whole of his purpose; he intends, besides the intellectual grasping of the Queen's character, an intense admiration and wonder at the resourcefulness, the shrewd judgment, and a reaction of amusement to the strange outbreaks of unwomanly freaks or of feminine wiles.

The controlling purpose, then, is almost always of a dual nature; it aims at both the understanding and the emotions. Whenever there is any real possibility of making it thus double the writer should so express it to himself.

In the following magazine article such a double purpose obviously exists. First of all there are the facts of the marching of American troops through London. These facts are unchangeable. Baldly stated, the significance of the fact is that the New World is coming to the help of the Old World against the monster of unrestrained militarism. To a person who regards life coldly, as the mere interplay of calculable forces, one whose emotions are not concerned, this would be a sufficient statement of the whole truth, of the total significance. But such writing would miss the chance of power, would be forever less valuable than it ought to be, for a great warming of the heart answers those footfalls in London streets. In other words, just as we have seen that there are two kinds of exposition—mere noting of facts and interpreting of facts—so we now see that interpretation can be either lifeless, or moving, charged with power. It is[Pg 29] the old difference between the drama and a sermon: the play thrills and the sermon convinces. Either may add the other quality—a fine drama or a well-made sermon does. In this account of American soldiers in London the truth is made clear, but far more than that it is made alive, pulsating with emotion of national pride, of racial solidarity, of high moral purpose. In so far as the writer succeeds in stirring us, in just so far he is more likely to make the truth take hold upon us and bind us firmly in its grasp. It is the writing that both convinces and moves us that is lasting, that is really powerful.

Despite whatever of good has been said here about the controlling purpose, there may lurk the suspicion that it is,[Pg 34] after all, dangerous, that perhaps it gives to a piece of writing a tendency toward bias, partial interpretation, even unfairness, and that it makes toward incompleteness. In the first place, in answering this charge, we must remember that facts as related to people are eternally subject to different interpretations according to shifting significance, which is determined largely by the individual to whom the facts are related. In the second place we have to remind ourselves that seldom does a writer try to say all that can be said about his subject. Much is always either implied or left to another piece of writing. And finally, even when an author attempts perfect completeness and objectivity, he usually addresses his work to some one in particular, even though the "some one" is as vague as the general reading public; and that some one has a particular attitude that must be borne in mind.

In "Solemn-Looking Blokes" not everything about the subject is said. From one point of view the tramp of American feet in London streets signified that the United States had emerged from its traditional aloofness and had joined the main current of the world; from another, that a tremendous military preparation was going on in America, the first fruits of which were those solemn ringing steps; from another, that however Europe had professed to despise American power, she was now willing, eager, to accept American aid; from another, that the old enmity between England and America has been forgotten in the common bond of like ideals and racial traditions. Each of these possible meanings—and there are more not listed here—is implied in the treatment actually given to the subject. No one of them is really developed. Instead, we have flowering before us the idea that the world is to be made safe for democracy. No one would presume to declare that the total possibilities of the subject are here met and explained; yet no one can rightly say that the chosen treatment is unfair. Considering the[Pg 35] facts, the author, and the people who would read the article, and their emotional connection with the facts, we see that the author chose the purpose that seemed most useful—to make American hearts warm to the fact that their country was helping to make the world safer for all men everywhere. In other words, facts are useful only in so far as they accomplish some definite end, which, in writing, is to make the reader see the truth as the author thinks that he should try to make the reader see it.

Now, of course, if the writer makes an unfair analysis, if he blindly or willfully falsifies in seeing or expressing his subject, his writing is not only useless but actually vicious. The analysis must be correct. Every subject has its center of truth, which can be discovered by patient clear thinking; if the thinking be either unclear or impatient, the interpretation will be false. If the author of "Solemn-Looking Blokes" has made an incorrect estimate, his writing is futile. There is no more challenging quest than the search for the real truth at the core of a chosen subject. Perhaps the very difficulty of attaining success is what has stayed many minds in floundering, timid, fogginess.

As to the charge that infusion of emotional quality into the writing produces bias, first of all it must be said that if the subject contains no emotion, none should be attempted in the writing. In a report, for example, of the relative value of different woods for shingles, an author will hardly try to infuse emotion, for the reader wishes to learn, quickly and easily, just what kind of wood is the best. But most subjects are not thus aloof; even the report about shingles becomes of vast significance to the owner of extensive timber lands which are suddenly found to be of high value. All subjects which concern the prosperity and happiness of humanity are charged with emotion; the nearer to the great facts of life, such as birth, marriage, death, food, shelter, love, hatred, the keener the emotion. Who shall write of problems[Pg 36] of heredity and leave us unstirred? Who shall treat of our vast irrigation projects, which turn the deserts into fair gardens and give food to millions of people, without firing the imagination? The writer's task is to look so clearly at his subject that he discovers its true value to both brain and heart.

As a matter of fact, in writing of such subjects a writer finds that words will be emotional, whether he will have them so or not, that they take sides, are charged with tendency and fly toward or away from an emotional quality with all the power of electricity. Now, this emotional quality, when it is uncontrolled, is dangerous. Words that show tendency must be guided with the firm hand lest they lead the reader into wrong impressions and into the confusion that comes from counter emotions, the strong impression of disunion. It is only by relating these cross-tendencies to a guiding idea that they can be made to serve the author's purpose. To choose wisely a controlling purpose that recognizes and handles the inherent emotions of words is merely to organize inescapable material. In the following selection from Emerson's "Fate" we find the emotional quality both high and well-organized. Such a paragraph might easily be made to confuse a reader hopelessly, but Emerson drives the chargers of his thought straight to his goal, intellectual and emotional, and holds tight his reins:

Now this controlling purpose, including both the appeal to the understanding and that to the emotions, should be stated, clearly, before the author begins his actual writing, in one sentence. The value of this is at once apparent: our minds tend all too much to wander from subject to subject, browsing here and there, without any really directed feeding. Now such procedure, though difficult to avoid, is nevertheless harmful to our writing. The edge of the writing is never so keen, the telling of the message, whatever it[Pg 38] may be, is never so well done, until we thoroughly organize and direct all that we are to say. In phrasing the controlling purpose in one sentence, we make just such an organization. And we have one which is most easily handled, most easily remembered, least likely to allow us to escape into empty wandering. Even in a long work this should be done, this unifying knot should be tied in the writer's mind. Those readers who rise from the last pages of a long historical work, covering several volumes and hundreds or thousands of pages, with a clear central conception of the whole work are profoundly grateful to the author. It is safe to say that such a conception could not have been given to the reader had not the writer, before he wrote a word, formulated in a few words the goal, the aim of his writing. This sentence should include the emotional appeal either as stated in a separate clause or phrase, or as expressed in the choice of words to present the facts.

The amount of machinery that seems to be required for using the controlling purpose may appear too much for practical purposes in one short lifetime. The truth is that the actual finding of the purpose will require much less time, often, than the explanation of the process here has needed. In a short theme you will often be able to scan the subject itself, to estimate your own reaction to the subject, and to determine upon your reader with remarkable quickness. More frequently you will find difficulty in determining the emotional quality of the material and your desires. But a little practice will enable you to do the preliminary thinking with rapidity and comfort. But if your subject is difficult, and if the effect is of great importance, by no means allow yourself to be swerved from determination to find the real object which you are seeking, but even at the expense of time and trouble state the center of your intentions as related to the subject, yourself, and your reader.

[Pg 39]

We have yet to answer the practical question: when I sit down to write, of just what value will the controlling purpose be to me in the actual task of expressing my ideas? How can it really serve me in my writing? The answer is clear: the controlling purpose is of the utmost strategic value in helping to select and arrange material for attack upon the objective, which is the effect to be created in the reader's mind. Now the best strategy always combines the line of greatest advantage to the writer, the line of least resistance from the reader, and the necessities of the subject. In other words, what point can I attack easiest, where is my opponent weakest, what demands of the ground—gullies, hills, swamps, etc.—must I allow for? Sometimes these three are more or less mutually antagonistic; sometimes they unite with the greatest helpfulness, as we shall see.

The first question is, What, and how many, forces shall I choose for the attack? Remember, we do not now merely attack in general, wherever we find an enemy. Instead, we decide that our objective is, perhaps, a hill ten miles across the enemy's frontier. The taking of that hill is our controlling purpose. It would be easiest for us to use several regiments of fresh young troops. But the terrain is strewn with gullies and hillocks, with boulders and tangled timber. So we shall use two regiments of veteran troops who are accustomed to rough country, and follow these with some fresh youngsters who are endowed with sense and a desire to outdo the veterans. Since the enemy has a strong battery, we shall use heavy artillery. And since the enemy lacks machine guns, we shall use many of them and catch him where he is weak and may be terrified. We could easily send thirty[Pg 40] camp kitchens to the fighting lines, but strategy demands that they be kept back.

In exactly the same way Mr. Burroughs plans the essay which follows this discussion. His controlling purpose is obviously to make the reader understand the process of bee-hunting in such a way as to be attracted to it as a delightful sport. The nature of the subject demands that the several steps in the process be explained. Well, that suits Mr. Burroughs, because he knows these steps. The easiest method for him is to narrate his own experiences. Of course he could investigate the authorities on bee-hunting, and write a treatise, but that would be more difficult, and moreover, it would not meet the line of least resistance from the reader. To be successful, the essay must overcome the reader's inertia and make him feel that he is actually sharing in things that he enjoys. The selection is thus determined. From his personal experience, as giving the writer the greatest advantage, Mr. Burroughs chooses. He selects details about the beauty of nature because a reader would prefer to have fine surroundings. He mentions traits of the bee that are interesting or necessary to know. He narrates two special experiences of his own for added attractiveness. And all the while, lest inertia raise its head, he lures the reader with the glimpses of pails full of rich golden honey. In other words, keeping his eye for his controlling purpose, Mr. Burroughs can easily select the things that will accomplish that purpose to his own greatest advantage, the reader's greatest ease, and according to the demands of the subject.

You do not find in the essay a discussion of the lucrative value of bees, nor of the complicated life of the hive, nor of the present standing of the science of bee-keeping. These topics, however interesting, are not useful to the controlling purpose. The standard is, not connection, but usefulness. "Any road," says Carlyle, "this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the world," and if you follow mere[Pg 41] connection with your subjects, you will find yourself at the end of the world. The practical helpfulness of the controlling purpose is seen when you ask yourself the question, "Does the matter that I am putting in this paragraph, this sentence, actually advance my reader in thought or emotion or both, nearer the point to which I wish to lead him?" Thus the question of selection is answered.

If we could have our own sweet will in attacking the hill ten miles beyond the border, we should ask the enemy to stack his arms, and then, with trumpet and drum and flag we should sweep in and take possession. But our sweet will must give way to necessity. Since unscalable crags lie ahead, we shall have to go round to the rear of the hill. Since we must cross a swamp, engineers must precede and build a road. Though we should like to crawl up a wide valley on the other side, we must choose a smaller one, because the enemy could wither us away in the larger one. And, to trick the enemy, we shall perhaps open fire far off on the left, while we are stealing out to the right, and thus we may take him off his guard. Our purpose of securing that hill makes these things necessary.

Similarly, in writing, we may sometimes employ the order of greatest advantage, but more often we must modify this order to meet the requirements of the subject and to rouse the least resistance from the reader. In Stevenson's essay, "Pulvis et Umbra," part of which follows the essay by Mr. Burroughs, the author used the method of greatest advantage. His object is to thrill the reader at the thought that mankind constantly strives in spite of all his failures. Several orders are possible: he could treat of the striving alone, neglecting the failure; he could treat the striving first and then the failure, or vice versa, and so on. He saw that he would gain his purpose best if he treated failure first, until he had[Pg 42] fairly overwhelmed the reader, and then suddenly shifted and showed that in spite of all this failure man still strives. He had to run the risk of offending the reader at the beginning by his insistence upon failure, and thus rousing the reader's possible great resistance. For we do not like to read unpleasant things. But he took the chance, knowing that if, by skillful use of words he could persuade the reader through the first part, he could easily thrill him with the reaction. For it makes a great difference whether we say, "In spite of striving, man always fails," or "In spite of failure, man always strives." The selection from the essay which appears here is taken from the middle. It is interesting to note that the first two sentences of the essay read: "We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun." And the words of the final sentence of the essay are: "Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: surely not all in vain."

In the essay by Mr. Burroughs the author's advantage and the reader's acquiescence largely coincide, so that the author can at once begin with remarks about the attractiveness of the hunt, the delights of its successful conclusion. To discuss at once the possibility of being stung would have been unwise, because unpleasant, and the controlling purpose of the essay is to attract. Later, this topic can safely be tucked in.

Mr. Wilson's war messages showed a combination of the lines of greatest advantage and of least resistance with the nature of the historical events. These messages began with a series of facts which, obviously true, would rouse no resistance and would at the same time insert some resentment against Germany, the very thing that the author wished to[Pg 43] do. Then they followed the strict chronological order, as if the author were pursuing a course already mapped for him—which, of course, he was not doing. With the controlling purpose of showing that America's entrance into the war was occasioned entirely by Germany's actions, he then proceeded to base the proposals of the messages upon the very facts that the readers had already accepted in accordance with his ultimate point of view. Such skillful manipulation deserved the success that the messages met.

All three of these examples gain their point, their objective. They do this largely because the authors knew exactly what they wished to do, what their controlling purposes were, and then marshaled their material so as to accomplish this end. Some of the topics that are subordinated, such, for example, as the possibility of being stung, are as important as others which are magnified, such as the beauty of nature—that is, they are as important in an impersonal way. As soon as the controlling purpose is known, however, they immediately become dangerous unless so placed as to bring the reader nearer the goal and not to push him from it. The point is that knowing the controlling purpose, that is, having thought out beforehand exactly what you wish to do with subject and reader, you are at once aware of both helps and obstacles, and can make use of the one, avoid the other.

Thus you will consider both the reader's ease and his prejudices. If you are to write of abstruse matters, of some question in philosophy or ethics or religion, in order to carry your reader with you you will begin with things that he can understand, and thus pave a highway into the misty lands where you desire to take him. Failure of some eminent philosophers to receive recognition has been due to their lack of a comprehensive controlling purpose, to their restricting attention to the subject alone regardless of the reader. In setting forth the principle of the machinery that digs tunnels under rivers Mr. Brooks in The Web-foot Engineer first[Pg 44] shows how a boy digs a tunnel into a sand bank, and then proceeds, with the reader's understanding assured, to the more complex but still similar operation under the river. In explaining inductive reasoning, with the controlling purpose of making it seem both frequent and natural, Huxley showed first how we reason practically about the nature of apples in a basket at the grocer's. The reader's resistance is thus avoided and the writer's advantage is increased.

A shrewd controlling purpose also makes allowance for the reader's prejudices. You ought to take as much care to cajole your reader into following you as the cook does to make us happy to the final morsel. After ices and cakes and coffee a roast or a soup is positively offensive; the cook wisely wins the battle of the spit and the dripping pan while the epicure is still receptive. So, if you are to explain democracy in a state where the recall of judges is practiced to an aristocrat who distrusts the "common herd" and is easily ruffled, you will do well to preface discussion of this recall with words about the general excellence of life in the state and then, when your reader is in a mood of acceptance, pass to the possibly offensive topic. Without knowing just what you wish to accomplish, you are likely to write in what may seem a dogged, defiant mood that intends to strike right and left, hoping to wallow through to victory.

If between us and the enemy's fort is a stream which needs pontoons for crossing, and we blindly start out marching up toward victory with no pontoons, we shall perhaps sail away to sea, but shall also probably not win the fort. If we insist upon keeping our platoon as rigidly straight, even while we climb hills through the woods, as ever a line was kept at West Point, we shall come to grief. So, if the logic of the subject has imperious demands, the controlling purpose must make count of them. William James in his essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," saw that before a reader could[Pg 45] understand how civic work could be a moral equivalent, he must see what the morality of war is. The subject demands this. In an account of the United States Government it might be logically necessary to state and explain first the theory of checks and balances before the relations of executive, legislative, and judicial branches could be properly estimated. Wisely chosen, the controlling purpose of such an account would make this fact at once evident.

Constantly keeping in mind, in planning and composing an article, what the objective is, makes even the individual paragraphs and sentences more successful. If you will examine the paragraphs in "Pulvis et Umbra," you will observe, pretty uniformly, at the beginning and end of each, a strong statement of the message of the paragraph, sentences of high emotional value. Each paragraph definitely advances the cause of the controlling purpose. Even the sentences—an example of a sentence uncontrolled occurs in Mr. Hamlin Garland's book, A Son of the Middle Border: "It stood on the bank of a wide river and had all the value of a seaport to me, for in summer-time great hoarsely bellowing steam-boats came and went from its quay, and all about it rose high wooded hills." The final item about the hills is in no way necessary, does not even help to give the feeling of a seaport, which more often than not lacks high hills. A sentence from Stevenson is in contrast: "The sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I stooped forward and plunged into the sea." In this sentence facts, rhythm, even the sound of the words drive in one direction.

Without being too dogmatic—for every problem in writing is new and not infrequently a law to itself—you may be sure that if you have a definite controlling purpose, and know well what it is, you will be more likely to attain success with subject and with reader when you come to the ordering of your material.

Finally, since strategy suggests that we attack the weakest[Pg 46] places in the enemy's defense, we shall do well, unless the logic of the subject or the reader's prejudice demand otherwise, to make our strongest blows when the enemy, the reader, is least prepared, that is, at the beginning and the end. Success in writing depends so much upon the freshness of the reader's mind, that an attaque brusque at first to insert important things, and a strong reinforcement at the end, when the reader is pricking up his ears at the coming final period, form a wise strategy. If, in order to understand one point, another is necessary, or to avoid irritation, a roundabout method is advisable, the path is plain. When these accidents do not obtain, the reader's understanding will be most easily won at the beginning and the end. At these points you must see to it that the reader is guided, with the first word, toward the emotional tone that your controlling purpose demands, and toward some important idea that bolsters this purpose, even if, as we have seen Stevenson do, you seem to be at first flying away from the purpose which we later discover. Thus Mr. Taft, in an article entitled "Present Relations of the Learned Professions to Political Government," places the ministry at the beginning and the law at the end. His controlling purpose is to make the reader believe that every profession offers large chance for the conscientious man to be of use to the political government. Consequently he chooses the two that he thinks most important, and of these places the less important at the beginning and the more important at the end. In this way he succeeds at once in turning the reader as he wishes, and leaves him also with the strongest possible bias toward belief. And since these two professions offer the greatest chance for victory for his controlling purpose, he gives them much more space than to the others, almost three times as much to law, for instance, as to teaching.

Moreover, since the emotions are affected in much writing, the skilled strategist will instantly bear in mind just what[Pg 47] emotion he wishes to rouse, and will see that the ideas of greater moving value receive larger development. Mr. Burroughs gives much more space to the sections that deal with the excitement and the joy of bee-hunting than to those that deal with the less pleasant side. To the difficulty of detecting the flight of a bee he gives the single sentence: "Sometimes one's head will swim following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the sun." To the interesting actions of the bee when it is caught he gives at least ten times as much space. In this way he guides the reader's emotions in the way he wishes them to go—and makes successful writing.

The chief strategic problem in exposition, then, is that of so choosing and arranging the material that the point of the writing is made with the proper emphasis. For the accomplishment of this purpose the writer must be able to answer the question, "What do I wish to do in this piece of writing?" Then he must bring all the material and its expression to bear upon the reader's mind so that the desired end may be inevitable. To determine what his purpose is the writer must consult the subject itself, his own personality, and the reader. He must also bear in mind the reader's intellect and his emotions. And he must unify the approach to both intellect and emotions. The firmly held conception of what his purpose is will determine what material he is to choose—what is useful and what is not—and also how to arrange this material and how to proportion the space that different sections shall have. He will arrange the material for the greatest advantage to himself and the least resistance from the reader. In other words, to make his writing successful in the sense of accomplishing its end, the writer must, before he sets down a single word, decide upon what his controlling purpose is to be and just how he intends to make material and expression—even in the individual sentence—unite to drive in the one direction of that controlling purpose.

[Pg 48]

John Burroughs

Robert Louis Stevenson

It has been thought that the old Scotchman who said, "A man's years are three score and ten, or maybe by good hap he'll get ten more, but it's a weary wrastle all the way through!" came to his final words as the result of writing outlines. If this be true, surely it is unfortunate, for the writing of outlines brings exceeding great reward. An outline is not an ancient form of blind discipline, but rather a helping hand across the bogland of facts and ideas. It is a most useful instrument toward good writing; its justification is its practical usefulness. This usefulness, helpfulness, is double in its value—to the writer and to the instructor, when there is one.

As to the value of an outline for the writer—without an outline you face in your writing a complicated problem, more complicated, in fact, than is justifiable. At one and the same[Pg 58] time you must make your thinking logical and your expression adequate—distinguished if possible. Either of these tasks is sufficient to demand all your powers; together, they offer a really overwhelming problem. Stevenson, to whom style was of the greatest importance, as bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the writing, wrote to a friend, "Problems of style are (as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative—to get this stuff joined and moving." It was only after he had fitted his material together that he felt able to devote himself to making the beautiful prose that is so much admired. A noted Frenchman is quoted as exclaiming, when first he beheld the famous Brooklyn Bridge, "How beautiful it is!", then, "How well made it is!" and finally, after a moment's reflection, "How well planned it is!" A good piece of writing should have the same comments made; but they cannot be made, usually, without the carefully planned outline.

You face the problem, without an outline, of answering the two questions about every detail that presents itself for treatment: first, shall I include or exclude this detail; and secondly, how shall I make this detail help the general flow of my writing, and how shall I express it so that it shall contribute to the proper tone of the work? And while you thus judge each small detail, you must also keep your critical faculties active to estimate your total course, whether you are cleaving your way clearly, steadily, and with sufficient directness to your goal, whether the work as a whole is answering your desires.

Now to ask the unaided brain, unless it has had long years of training, to perform all this critical work during the actual process of expression, is nothing short of cruel—and almost sure of failure. For in any writing which enlists from you even a spark of interest the fervor of creative work, the stimulating effect of seeing the work grow under your pen, tends often to unseat the critical powers, to destroy perspective,[Pg 59] to make a detail seem more valuable or less valuable than it should, on the whim of the momentary interest or repulsion. Thus the logic of the writing is impaired, for details are included which should not enter, and others are excluded which ought to be welcomed, and proportions are bad. And the expression is so liable to unevenness as to be less worthy than it should be. Bad logic and uneven expression beget failure.

The outline helps to overcome these difficulties. In the first place, it is not final, can be changed at will, and makes no extraordinary demands on the powers of expression. In the second place, as regards logic, the outline shows the relation of ideas to each other and to the whole subject; you can estimate rather easily whether a detail is of sufficient value to warrant inclusion, and, if so, how much space it deserves. For in the outline you have the bare fact, succinctly expressed, which enables you to focus your attention upon the thought. But since logic is more than mere inclusion and order and spacing, and deals also with the logic of attitude, the outline is again of service. For it shows what should be the tone of the complete piece of writing, and how this tone should be modified by the individual section of the writing. Suppose that you are to write of the attitude of a politician toward party principles. If a heading in your outline reads, "He never feared to modify principles to meet inevitable conditions," the attitude which you take in writing will be radically different from that which you would assume if the heading read, "He never hesitated to warp principles to outwit unfavorable conditions." Both the logic of structure and that of attitude, then, are aided by the use of an outline. And, at any point in the actual completed writing, you can easily determine by referring to the outline, whether you are gaining the effect that you desire and what progress you have made. And in the third place, as regards expression, the outline relieves you of the[Pg 60] necessity of doing the constructive thinking of the subject, and enables you to apply all your powers to the actual saying of your message. Shakespeare might have written, instead of "the multitudinous seas incarnadine," "make all the ocean, that's full of fishes,[9] look red"—but he did not. Had he done so, where would now have been the power and the charm? Expression is of utmost value, and you can ill afford to slight it. For this reason, and especially since distinguished expression is so difficult to form, to be released from the attendant worry of constructive thinking is of the greatest help to the writer. Both logic and expression, then, are dependent on the outline: with it they are more sure.

Instead, then, of feeling that dim dread of failure, which ever dogs the writer's steps, with a well-constructed outline you can feel comparative safety in the possession of a safe guide in case of perplexity. You will be initiated, will know the secrets of your subject, will have a "grip" with your facts and ideas, and can apply your powers to putting the intangible thoughts into tangible words.

As for being of value to the instructor, often he too can estimate more surely and easily the worth of the writing if he has the skeleton to examine. For there the structural defects are more apparent, are not concealed by the pleasant flow of words, just as the structure of a skyscraper is more apparent before the wall-tiles or bricks are laid on to conceal the girders. The instructor can therefore often point out insufficiencies in the thought, or wrong relations, which might otherwise stand as defects in the finished work.

Shall an outline be written in words and phrases or in complete sentences? In the first place, so far as any reader except the author is concerned, complete sentences are necessary[Pg 61] for understanding. Often they are necessary for the writer himself. In an outline of a theme explaining gas engines the isolated heading Speed means nothing definite to any one but the author, if indeed to him. A reader cannot tell from such a word whether speed is important or insignificant, or whether the author intends to give to gas engines credit for comparative excellence in this property. If, however, the heading reads, "In the important property of Speed gas engines are the equal of steam engines," the reader knows at once what is meant, whether he may agree with the statement or not. He can definitely tell from an outline of complete sentences what the course of thought is to be and what will be the tone of the theme. The reader, then, needs complete sentences. The writer, on the other hand, might seem to be sufficiently helped by mere words or phrases, since he naturally knows what he means. But does he know? The chances are that when an author puts down such a heading as Speed he has only a large general notion of what he means, without being sure of the immediate connection and application, and with perhaps no idea at all of the tone which he intends to catch. If the author will write the sentence quoted above, he will complete his thought, make it really definite, and be pretty sure to know what he is talking about, what he intends to do. Furthermore, even though he know, when he sets down a phrase, what he means by it, the chance is strong that when he arrives at the expansion of the phrase he will have forgotten some of the implications and may give the heading a cast that he did not intend. Whether he knows definitely what he means or not, the writer is more safe if he uses complete sentences, and for any other reader of the outline complete sentences are quite necessary.

Outlines are of three kinds: those that show the topic relations by division into indented headings; those that show the sequence of paragraphs by statement of the topic sentence;[Pg 62] and those that combine these two forms. The primary object of the first form, which is illustrated by the first outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee" which follows, is to aid in the thinking, to plot out the ground and to group the material. In this first outline a glance at the five main headings makes the plan of the essay at once apparent—first a statement of the effect of bees upon us; then an account of a hunt; then some specific examples to drive things home; then some special directions that might be overlooked, and finally a tribute to the joy of the hunting. The benefit of this kind of outline is that the general relationships among topics are made clear, the large divisions of thought appear, and the writer can with comparative ease tell whether he has covered the subject, and whether he has chosen the best order of thought. It avoids the invertebrate flow of thought that is unaware of structure. In other words, it is of value chiefly to the thinking. It does not show which topics shall be grouped into paragraphs together, and it does not, of course, phrase the topic sentences, usually. In such an outline care should be taken to make each heading a complete sentence, and to make headings that are of the same rank fairly parallel in structure of expression unless this interferes with the tone of the heading. For example, A, B, and C under III are made similar in structure since they bear the same general relation to III.

The second type of outline, that in which a list of the topic sentences is given, and which is illustrated by the second outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee" which follows, is of value, especially if used with an outline of the first type, in that it shows just how much of the thought should go into the various paragraphs, and thereby establishes the divisions of expression. Comparison of the two outlines of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee" will show that paragraph 5 in the second outline includes all the material in the four headings, 2, a, 1´, and b, under II in the first outline. Now[Pg 63] for the writer to know beforehand how he intends to divide his material into paragraphs is of great value; otherwise he might be giving to some comparatively minor point—which for the moment assumes interest for him—a separate paragraph, as if, for example, Mr. Burroughs had dwelt at length on the interesting location of trees on ledges. In other words, this second kind of outline is valuable chiefly in its arrangement and placing of material. Its service in making the original choice is not so immediately apparent. It has also the advantage that it indicates pretty well what kind of expression is to be used in the expanded form.

The third type of outline, which many writers prefer to either of the others, indicates both the topics to be treated and the division into paragraphs. It may be constructed in either of two ways: first, the topic sentences may be stated in their regular order, with the subdivisions of the thought as they appear in the indented outline grouped under the topic sentences; or in the indented outline the paragraphs may be indicated by the regular sign for the paragraph at any point where a new division is to be made. That is, in the first of the two outlines that follow, the first paragraph might be indicated in the first outline as including I and I, A; the second as including II and II, A; the third as including II, B, 1, a, b, etc. Or, in the second outline the subheadings of the first might be indicated under the various topic sentences. The value of this type of outline is obviously that it both shows the logic of the thought and the divisional arrangement for presentation in paragraphs. With such an outline the chances that you could go wrong, in even a long theme on a difficult subject, are slight.

Do not fail, therefore, when your theme is to be of any considerable length, or when the subject is at all difficult, to make an outline. There is no greater pleasure in the world than that of creative effort when the creator knows what he is about. But when the ideas are hazy, when the[Pg 64] writer does not know exactly what he wishes to do and what impression he wishes to make—then the process of creation is anything but pleasant. And since the outline presents a pattern of your work, since with it you cannot fail to see what your intentions are and what the requirements of your subject, regard it as your best writing friend—and make use of the rights of friendship and require service.

[Pg 73]

Definition is the process of explaining a subject by setting bounds to it, enclosing it within its limits, showing its extent. The ocean is properly defined by the shore; a continent or island is defined by its coastline: shores set limits to the ocean; coastlines bound the island or continent. So, when a child asks, "What is Switzerland?" you show on the map the pink or yellow or green space that is included within certain definite boundaries. These boundaries set a limit to the extent of that country; in other words, they define it. As soon as a traveler steps beyond the limit of that country, he is at once in another realm, has become identified with a quite different set of conditions and circumstances—he is, in fact, in a country that has a different definition from that of Switzerland. In the same way, when some one asks what truth is, or nickel steel, or a grand piano, or humanism, or art, or rotation of crops, or a rocking chair, or the forward pass, you attempt, in your reply, to set bounds to the thing in question, to restrict it, to fence it off, to state the line beyond which if it goes it ceases to be one thing and becomes another. It is by no means always an easy task to find this line. Many a child has come to grief in his attempts to keep safely within the limits of truth and yet be close up to the realm of desirable falsehood. Likewise many witnesses in court have been beguiled or browbeaten into crossing the line without knowing that they were getting into the country of the enemy. But though the quest for the line may be difficult, a true definition must set off the thing being defined from other things, must set bounds to it, enclose it within its limits, show its extent.

[Pg 74]

The logical process of defining consists of two steps: first, stating the class or group to which the object of definition belongs, as to say that Switzerland is a country, the forward pass is a strategic device in football, humanism is a philosophy of personal development; and second, pointing out the difference between the object of definition and other members of the class, showing how it is distinguished from them. Since the purpose of definition is to limit the thing defined, the practical value of the first step is at once apparent. If, in total ignorance, a resident of India asks you, "What is ragtime?" the most helpful thing in the world that you can do for him is to cleave away with one stroke everything else in the world but music—absolute exclusion of all other human interests—and place ragtime in that comparatively narrow field. That is the first thing of great help. However many qualities you may attribute to ragtime,—whether you call it inspiring, invigorating, pleasing, detestable, or what not,—you are making at best only slow progress toward defining, really limiting ragtime. The number of pleasing things, for example, is so endless, and the things are so diverse in character that your listener is almost as ignorant after such a quality has been attributed as he was before. But the moment that you limit ragtime to music you scatter untold clouds of doubt and place the inquirer in the comfortable position of having a fairly large working knowledge. What is left for the inquirer to do is merely to distinguish ragtime from other kinds of music—after all, a rather simple task. Likewise in any definition, such as that of rotation of crops, the first necessity is to place the subject in its proper field, in this case agriculture; the grand piano in the class of musical instruments; the rocking chair in the class of furniture.

Now sometimes the task of discovering to what class your[Pg 75] subject belongs is difficult. Is a believer in Unitarianism a Christian? He follows the ethical teachings of Jesus but denies him any special divinity. In this case obviously the question of classification will depend on the definition that we make of Christianity. Is a man who serves the state in legislative or judicial capacity and at the same time writes novels to be called a statesman or a man of letters? Governments have fallen into difficulty with each other over such things as contraband of war, there being great doubt at times whether a particular thing is properly contraband or not. The question is sometimes doubtful—you will be inclined to say, "I don't know what to call this," but in making a definition call it you must. The United States Government, facing the problem of discovering the proper class for frogs' legs, in determining customs duties after much perturbation placed them under the heading "poultry." Ordinarily you will find slight difficulty in determining the class; but in every case you must patiently search until you have found some class into which your subject naturally fits. Until you have done this you obviously cannot set it apart from other members, because you will not really know what the other members are, you will be forced to run through the total list of human ideas and things. Until you know that oligarchy is one form of political society you cannot know whether to set it off from democracy and monarchy or from Christianity and Buddhism. First, then, however difficult, discover the class to which your subject belongs. In the following definition of a clearing-house, you will find that in the course of time the class to which the subject belongs has changed, has come to include more space, needs a larger fence to surround it, and therefore the definition has been changed.

The second step in the logical process of definition is to show how the subject for definition differs from other members of its class. Once I am told that the piano is a musical instrument I must next learn wherein it differs from the violin, the kettle-drum, and the English horn. The surname Tomlinson partly defines a person as a member of the Tomlinson family, but the definition is not complete until the name is modified and the person is distinguished by George or Charles or whatever name may belong to him. A skillful shepherd knows not only his flocks but also the characteristics of the different members of the flocks, so that he can say, "This sheep is the one in X flock that is always getting into the clover." Here "X flock" is the class, and the quality of abusing the clover is the distinguishing individual tag. Since the desire in this part of the process of defining is to set individuals apart, no mention will be made of qualities[Pg 77] that are shared in common but only of those that are peculiar to the individual. These qualities that distinguish individual members of classes from each other are called the differentia, just as the class is commonly called the genus.

For convenience in keeping the list of differentia reasonably small, to avoid unwieldiness of definition, care must be exercised in choosing the class. When a class which itself contains other possible classes is chosen, a long list of differentia will be necessary. It is well, therefore, to choose a relatively small class to begin with. For example, if I put the piano into the large class of musical instruments, I shall then be under the necessity of amassing sufficient differentia to set it apart from wind instruments whether of brass or wood, from instruments of percussion, and from other stringed instruments that do not use metal strings. If I restrict the class to stringed instruments, I thereby exclude the differentia of both wind instruments and instruments of percussion. If I further restrict the class, at the beginning, to instruments with metal strings, I need then to employ only such differentia as will set it off, perhaps, from instruments that do not have a sounding board for their metal strings. Such restriction of the class is advisable chiefly for purposes of economy of effort in discovering the differentia, and is usually accomplished, in expression, by preceding the class name with a limiting adjective or by using a limiting phrase. This adjective or this phrase is likely to be the expression of differentia among smaller classes, the differentia among individual members being stated more at length later in the definition.

The process of definition will be complete, then, when the subject of definition has been assigned to a class, which for convenience should be relatively small, and the qualities that distinguish the subject from other members of the class have been found.

[Pg 78]

Two main classes of definition exist: first, the rigidly logical, scientific kind such as is found in dictionaries, textbooks, and other such writings which are not concerned with emotional values; and second, the less rigid, more expanded, more informal kind which aims to please as well as to instruct, and which is found in essays and all forms of writing with a strong human appeal. The two kinds are alike in the presence of both genus and differentia; they differ chiefly in the presence, in the less formal, of the qualities of pleasingness and stimulation as opposed to the quality, in the formal, of scientific impersonality, cold intellectuality. For example, the Standard Dictionary defines a correspondent as "one who communicates by means of letters; specifically one who sends regular communications from a distant place to a newspaper or a business house." The author of the volume entitled Famous War Correspondents[14] defines, with much the same fundamental ideas, if not indeed exactly the same, a war correspondent as follows:

Of the two kinds of definition—formal and informal—you will more often have occasion to write the second. You must guard against the danger, in such writing, of allowing[Pg 80] the interest to cloud the truth, of being led into inaccurate partial statements by your desire to please. At the root of every good definition is still the accurate statement of genus and differentia. It is chiefly of the second kind that we shall treat here. If you can write a definition that is pleasing and stimulating and also accurate, you can always boil it down into the more bald formal statement such as the dictionary offers. Whatever powers of grace or neatness in expression you possess, whatever powers of saying things in a pleasing manner, it is your privilege to employ in the writing of definitions.

For the sake of clearness and general effectiveness a few cautions need to be made. In the first place, be sure to exclude everything from your definition that does not properly belong in it. For example, if you define the aeroplane as a machine that journeys through the air under its own power, you include dirigible balloons, which are not aeroplanes. You must introduce both the characteristics of being heavier than air and of having a plane or planes before your definition can stand. You will make this exclusion by choosing both class and differentia with the greatest care.

In the second place, include everything that does properly belong in the definition. If you define a bridge as a roadway over a stream, either resting on piers or hanging on cables strung over towers, you exclude pontoon bridges certainly, and all bridges across dry chasms, if not other kinds. Not until you include all varieties of things crossed and all the methods of support and the various materials used will your definition be sound and complete. This does not mean that you will have to make an endless list of all possible forms, but that you will make a comprehensive statement which will allow of being distributed over all the different forms and kinds of bridges.

[Pg 81]

In the third place, use simple and familiar diction. Since the first purpose of a definition is to explain, one that is obscure or difficult makes confusion worse confounded. The famous—or notorious—definition which Dr. Johnson made of so simple a thing as network, "anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between the intersections," is worse than useless because it positively throws dust upon a comparatively easy matter to perceive—unless the reader take time out for meditation. Remember that the Gettysburg Address and many of Shakespeare's sonnets are largely in words of one syllable. And then do not be afraid that you will be understood; the fire is always presumably somewhat more uncomfortable than the frying-pan.

In the fourth place, do not use the term that you are defining, or any derivative of it. When college freshmen, in mortal combat with a quiz question, define a description as something that describes, they use words that profit them nothing. That a cow is a cow is fairly obvious. The temptation to make this mistake, which, in the intellectual world, occupies the relative space of the saucy old advice, "Chase yourself round the block!" occurs usually when a long definition is being written, in which the writer forgets to keep the horizon clear, and finally falls into the formula x is x. To avoid yielding to such temptation, you will do well, after a definition is complete, to phrase it in a single sentence which shall include both differentia and genus, and in which you can easily discover the evil formula x is x. Bardolph, in Shakespeare's King Henry IV, yields to the temptation—for which we are glad as to humor but not made wise as to meaning—when Shallow puts him to the test:

In the fifth place, be sure that you define, and do not merely "talk about" the subject. Any amount of however interesting comment that fails to accomplish the two necessities of definition, statement of the genus and the differentia, is futile; it is not definition. This temptation, like the former one, will be overcome if you take the trouble to phrase the actual material of your definition in one sentence that really includes both genus and differentia. As a minor suggestion, do not begin your definition with the words, "X is when" or "X is where," unless you are defining either a unit of time or a place—and even then you will do well to avoid these too frequently used phrases.

Finally, do not make your definition too mechanical, too much lacking in real life. Thinking of how you must deal with genus and differentia, you are liable to be overwhelmed with the grim duty of being logical, and to forget that you should also be human, that people read definitions, as other kinds of writing, in the double hope of information and pleasure. No real antagonism exists between logic of the strictest kind and pleasurable presentation, as is proved by the examples quoted during the course of this chapter and at the end. While you remember your subject, remember also your reader; then you will be unlikely to make a dull definition.

You may use various methods of defining. Sometimes you will choose only one, and sometimes you will combine.[Pg 83] There is no special virtue in one method more than another except as sometimes one happens to be more useful for a given case, as we shall see. In selecting your method, then, select on the basis of practical workability for the effect that you desire to create, adhering to one or using several as seems most effective.

One of the most useful, natural, and easy methods is that of giving an example or illustration of the thing that is being defined. The great usefulness of this method lies in the stimulating quality that the concrete example always has. If you wish to define an abstract quality, for example, such as patriotism, or honor, or generosity, you will often find advantage, for the first, in calling up the figure of Washington, of Lincoln, of Cromwell; in citing, for the second, the case of some man who, after bankruptcy, has set himself to pay all his former debts, or of Regulus who, though he had the chance not to keep his promise to return to Carthage as prisoner, yet bade Rome farewell and returned to unspeakable torture; in presenting, for the third, a specific set of conditions, such as possession of only one dime, which is then shared with another person who is even less fortunate, or showing a known person, like Sir Philip Sidney, who, though at death's door on the field of battle, urged that the exquisite joy of cold water be given to a comrade who was even more terribly in need. In every one of these cases the quality under definition is presented in an easily grasped, concrete form that has the great advantage of human interest, of stimulating the reader's thought. That using such a method is natural is apparent as soon as we remember that we think largely in concrete forms, specific cases. That it is rather easy is obvious, because so many instances are always at hand to be used.

The danger in this method is that the example chosen will[Pg 84] not be entirely fair. Such lack of fairness may occur if the example covers too little ground of the definition or if it too highly accentuates one phase of the subject of definition. If, for instance, you cite the example of the man who gave away his only pair of shoes, as an example of generosity, you may run the risk of making the reader think that nothing but an extreme act has the real stamp of the generous giver, or that generosity is expressed only in material ways, forgetting that it is generous to acknowledge a fault or to overlook unintended affront. To avoid this danger be sure that your example is fair and sufficiently comprehensive, and if it is not, choose other examples to add to it until you are convinced of the all-round fitness of your definition. In the following examples you may feel that Gissing does not wholly define poverty, whereas Shaw is more complete in his approach to defining ability that gives value for money, and Mr. Morman by taking a typical example and working it out arrives at complete understanding with perhaps less of piquant interest.

If, then, you have a subject that is abstract and perhaps difficult to understand in abstract explanation; if you wish, to stimulate your readers and make their reading pleasant; if, for any reason, you wish to write informally, then you may well decide to employ the useful, natural, and easy method of definition by illustration.

A second method, closely akin to that by illustration, is the method of defining by comparison or contrast. The[Pg 87] value of this method lies in its liveliness and the ease with which it makes an idea comprehended. The liveliness derives largely from the usual presence of specific facts or things with which the subject of definition is compared or to which it is contrasted, and from the imaginative stimulus that perception of similarity in function creates. The implied definition of leader in politics in Lincoln's famous remark about changing political parties in war time, "Don't swap horses while crossing a stream," is not only true, but more, it is interesting. The ease of comprehension is due largely to employing the method of proceeding from the known to the unknown in that comparison is usually made to things already familiar. If contrast is used, there is the added interest of dramatic presentation found especially in oratorical definitions. Liveliness and ease in comprehension make this method a valuable one in addressing a popular or an unlearned body of readers; it presents the truth and it enlists interest. In the following examples you will not be aware of dramatic quality in the first but you will find picturesque qualities in both.

For complete truth you need to present both resemblance and difference. This necessity is apparent as soon as we remember that the differentia are of vital importance, that we understand the subject only when we see how it differs from other members of the same class. When these differences are obvious, of course they need no mention. But in defining wit and humor, for example, or immorality and unconventionality, we must know not only the parallelisms but also the divergencies. The best method of procedure is to discover in each of the subjects compared the vital things, the heart without which it could not exist, and then to observe how these work out in the particulars of the subject. In defining State and Nation in the following selection Mr. Russell takes care to show both resemblances and differences.

A third method, often used, and similar in its general form to analysis, divides the subject into its various headings, the sum of which must equal the whole. This method differs from analysis, perhaps, in that it treats the subject throughout as a unit rather than as a congregation of parts. This method may be used to define a subject like mathematics, in stating that it is the pure science which includes arithmetic, algebra, geometry, etc., or to define a quality like patriotism, by enumerating the qualities that patriotism has. These qualities may be, also, the uses to which the subject can be put, as in defining a tool or a machine. The[Pg 91] method consists in establishing the genus and then, from a mental map of the subject, selecting the various parts that constitute the whole, whether these parts be of physical extent, as in defining the United States by giving the various sections of the country, or of spiritual significance, as in defining an honest man by stating the qualities that he should possess.

One danger from this method is lack of completeness; great practical value attaches here to the caution to be sure that the definition includes all that properly belongs under it. Another danger is in the temptation to "talk about" the subject without actually defining it, merely saying some pleasant things and then ceasing. The caution against this danger in general must be remembered. Properly used, this method, though it is sometimes rather formal, should result in great clearness through completeness of definition. The following celebrated definition of a "classic" is a good example of compact definition by this method, and the definition of "moral atmosphere" of a more leisurely, informal breaking-up.

A fourth method, which may be used in connection with any other, consists in repeating the definition over and over in different words, from different points of view, driving home by accumulated emphasis. The value of this method lies in its feeling of absolute sureness in the reader's mind: once completed, the definition seems quite settled, quite tamped down, quite clinched. It is a difficult method to employ, for the writer is in great danger of saying exactly the same thing again and again, forgetting to assume different points of view. From such a definition tediousness is of course the result. The subjects treated by this method are likely to be abstract matters upon which light is shed from various angles, as if one poured spot lights from all sides upon some object which remains the same but which delivers up all its phases. Emerson often used this method, as in the following example where both the method of repetition and that of comparison are used:

Two methods, which are perhaps less frequently found, but which are none the less useful, remain to be mentioned. The first is the method of elimination, that is, the method of defining a thing by telling what it is not, by eliminating all things with which it might become confused. This method is of great value in defining an idea which is often considered to mean what it actually does not. By shutting out the erroneous interpretations, one by one, the errors are finally disposed of. This method is most effective when not only are the wrong interpretations excluded, but the correct idea, interpretation, is positively stated at some point. If this is not done there lingers in the reader's mind a taint of suspicion that either the author did not know exactly the correct meaning, or that the subject is really too difficult to bear real definition. And with a reader who does not think clearly in original ways a positive statement is almost essential lest he be unable to tell what the subject really is, after all, being unable to supply the residue after the process of elimination has been completed. Following this method Mr. Cross defines Socialism by showing that it is not anarchy, is not single tax, is not communism, and is not other systems with which it is often confused. The result is to leave socialism standing out by itself with clearness. In the following definition of college spirit the author has followed the method of elimination to clear away the haze that in many minds surrounds the subject:

The other of these two methods is that of defining by showing the origin or causes of the subject or by showing its effects. If we can be made to see what forces went to the making of anything, or what has resulted from it, we shall have a fairly clear idea of the nature of the thing. Thus we may perhaps best understand the nature of cabinet government by showing how the system came into being, what need it filled, what forces produced it. The same method might make clear primitive Greek drama, the Hanseatic League, fertilization of land, the Federal Reserve System of Banking, the modern orchestra. And by showing the effects we might define such matters as the Montessori method of education, the Feudal System, anarchy, militarism. The writer of a definition after this method needs to take care that when he has shown the various causes or effects, he surely binds them somehow together and vitally to the subject of definition. There must be no dim feeling in the mind of the reader that, after all, the subject is not yet clearly limned, not yet set off from other things. The definition which follows makes clear the origin of the mechanical engineer, and by showing what he does, what need there was for him, what lack he fills, makes clear what he is.

[Pg 98]

Emerson makes a definition of the civilization of America in the following selection wherein he describes the effect of American society and life upon the individual.

These, then, are the various methods that are in common use. The list might be extended, but perhaps enough varieties have been discussed to be of practical value. The choice of method will depend on the result that the writer wishes to accomplish; at times he will wish to please the reader's fancy with an illustration, and again he may wish to contrast the subject to something else. If at any time more methods than one are useful, there is not the slightest objection to combining; in fact, most definitions of any length will be found to have more than one method employed. Remember that the methods were made for you, not you for the methods. And so long as you make your subject clear, so long as you set it off by itself in a class, distinct from other members of the class, you can be sure of the value of your definition.

[Pg 113]

Suppose that the president of a railroad asked you to report on the feasibility of a proposed line through a range of hills; or that you found it necessary to prove to an over-conservative farmer that he should erect a hollow-tile silo at once; or that your duty as chairman of the town playground committee led you to examine an empty lot for its possibilities; or that, as an expert in finance, you were trying to learn the cause of the deficit in a country club's accounts. In the first case you would examine the proposed route for its practicability, would estimate the grades to be reduced, would look into the question of drainage, would consider the possibility of landslides, would survey the quality of the road-bed: all with a view to making a complete report on the practicability of the route proposed. In the other cases you would determine the conditions in general that you confronted, would answer the questions: what is the value of a hollow-tile silo? why is this site suitable for a playground? what is wrong with the finances of this club? Such tasks as these occur in life all the time; in college they confront one whenever an inconsiderate instructor asks for a term paper on, say, "Conditions in New York that Made the Tweed Ring Possible," or "The Influence of the Great War on Dyestuffs," or "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," or some other subject. In every one of these cases the writer who attempts to answer the questions involved is writing analysis, for Analysis is the breaking up of a subject into its component parts, seeing of what it is composed.

In every such case you would wish, first of all, to tell the[Pg 114] truth. Of what use would your analysis be if you incorrectly estimated the drainage of the proposed railway route and the company had to expend thousands of dollars in fighting improper seepage? Unless the analysis was accurate, it would be useless or worse. But suppose that you told the truth about the site for the playground, its central position, its wealth of shade, its proper soil conditions, and yet forgot to take into account the sluggish, noisome stream that flowed on one side of the plot and bred disease? Your report would be valueless because it would be, in a vital point, quite lacking. In other words, it would be incomplete. For practical purposes it would therefore, of course, be untrue.

If you wish to write an analysis, then, your path is straight, and it leads between the two virtues of truth and thoroughness. Your catechism should be: Have I hugged my fact close and told the truth about it?, and, Have I really covered the ground?

The question of truth enters into every analysis; none may falsify. Completeness, on the other hand, is a more relative matter. In the report of a tariff commission it is essential; all the ground must be covered. In a thorough survey of Beethoven's music no sonata or quartette may be omitted. In determining the causes of an epidemic no clue is to be left unexamined until all possibilities have been exhausted. In the case of the term paper mentioned above, on the other hand, "Tennyson's Early Training as an Influence on his Poetry," not everything in his early life can be considered in anything short of a volume. In such a case you may well be puzzled what to do until you are suddenly cheered by the thought that your task is primarily one of interpretation, that what you are seeking is the spirit of the training. There would seem, therefore, to be various degrees of completeness in analysis. On the basis of completeness, then, we may divide analysis into the two classes of the Formal and the Informal.

[Pg 115]

Formal analysis is sometimes called logical analysis—that is, complete, as in the report of a tariff commission—because it continues its splitting into subheadings until the demands of the thought are entirely satisfied. Such thorough meeting of all demands might well occur in an analysis of trades-unions, or methods of heating houses, or such subjects. Informal analysis, on the other hand, which is sometimes called literary analysis, does not attempt to be so thorough, but aims rather at giving the core of the subject, at making the spirit of it clear to the reader. For example, Mr. P. E. More in an essay on Tennyson, which is primarily an informal analysis, makes one main point, that "Tennyson was the Victorian Age." This he divides into three headings: (1) Tennyson was humanly loved by the great Victorians; (2) Tennyson was the poet of compromise; (3) Tennyson was the poet of insight. Now in these three points Mr. More has not said all that he could say, in fact he has omitted many things that from some angle would be important, but he has said those things truthfully that are needed for a proper interpretation of the subject, for a sufficient illumination of it, for showing its spirit. It is, therefore, a piece of informal analysis.

The two examples which follow illustrate formal and informal analysis, the first one classifying rock drills thoroughly, and the second very informally discussing some odds against Shakespeare.

Analyses are to be divided also upon the basis of whether the subject is an individual or a group of individuals, that is, whether the subject is, for example, the quality of patriotism, which is to be analyzed into its components, or, in the second place, shade trees, which are to be grouped into the classes which together constitute such trees. Of these two kinds of analysis we call the first Partition and the second Classification. The logical process is the same in the two cases, in that it divides the subject; the difference lies in the fact that in the first case the subject is always single,[Pg 118] though it may of course be complicated, and in the second it is always plural, and may contain a very large number of individuals, as for example the human race—all the billions of all the ages gone and yet to come.

In this treatment of analysis you will find the main divisions made on the basis of formality and the matter of single or plural subject treated under each of the other headings.

Formal analysis, which requires completeness of division,—which is not well done until every individual case is accounted for, or, in Partition, every quality or factor or part,—is found in reports to corporations, in estimates of conditions for some society, in government documents, in textbooks, and in other kinds of writing where detailed and complete information is necessary for judgment. A report to the city of Chicago on the subject of the smoke nuisance will be valuable largely as it entirely covers the ground, discovers all the conditions that the city has to face. Such a report will be primarily a partition of the question, though it may employ classification of various like situations or conditions. Likewise an account of the game birds of North America will be a formal analysis only if every kind of game bird is given a place in the account. The object of formal classification and partition is to give information, to array facts completely. The following classification of oriental rugs, which in its course also employs definition, or a close approach to it, will be finally sufficient only if no rug can be found which is not included within the classes named. The partition of the character of Queen Elizabeth will be of lasting value as formal partition only if it really accounts for the total character of the subject. That it makes only two main divisions is in no way indicative of its completeness; the question is merely, are all the qualities included under those two headings?

[Pg 119]

The formal analyses are in general far less frequent than the informal, which are found constantly in the weekly and monthly magazines and in the editorials of our daily papers. These analyses aim at giving the core of the subject, the gist of the matter, with sufficient important facts or points as background. Thus you will read an account of our relations with Mexico during the revolution in that country. Not everything is said; only the vital things. A study of the character of Mr. Roosevelt or of Mr. Wilson, an article explaining the problems that had to be faced in the building of the Keokuk or the Shoshone dams, a treatment of the question of conscription in England—these and thousands of others flood upon us with the object of illuminating our approach to the subject, of interpreting for us the heart of the matter. Mr. More, in the essay already mentioned, says little about Tennyson's verse form, about his zeal for the tale of Arthur, about the influence upon him of the classics of Greece and Rome. Into a complete treatise these would of course enter; here Mr. More's object is not all-inclusiveness, as one should examine the Pyramids for not only their plan and size but also for their minute finish, their varying materials, their methods of jointure, and the thousand other details; rather he estimates what his subject is, as one should journey round the Pyramids, view them in general, find their significance, and discover the few essentials that make them not cathedrals, not Roman circuses,[Pg 124] but Pyramids. In other words, interpretation is the object rather than completeness of fact.

Obviously an informal analysis must be complete as far as it goes, must be complete for its author's purpose, is not good writing if it gives only a partial interpretation which gets nowhere. It is at once apparent, then, that the controlling purpose which has been discussed at length in an earlier chapter is in informal analysis of the utmost importance. Only as it is clearly held in mind will the author know when to stop, what to choose. In formal analysis, where his object is to say all that there is to say, he chooses and ceases to choose by the standard of completeness of fact; in informal analysis he must choose and cease to choose by the standard of whether he has accomplished the desired effect, made the desired interpretation. His analysis, therefore, is valuable only when he has chosen the proper interpretation and has made it effective and clear. If he wishes to analyze a period of history for the purpose of showing the romance of the period, he will choose and cease to choose largely in so far as his material helps to establish the romance, and he will not hesitate to neglect many a fact that would be otherwise important. In the following selection from George Eliot's Mill on the Floss you will find an analysis of the effect of the Rhone scenery on the author written purposely with the intention of driving home the dreariness of the subject, and therefore with material chosen for that end:

Informal analysis is not only less complete, but also less strict in adherence to pure analysis alone. It employs whatever is of value, believing that the material, the message, is greater than the form. Outside really formal analysis, which is likely to be fairly dull to all except those who are eager for the particular information given, most[Pg 126] analytical articles make free use of definition whenever it will serve well to aid the reader's understanding or to move his emotions toward a desired goal; of description if it, like definition, proves of value; even of anecdote and argument if these forms are the fittest instruments for the fight. Thus Hawthorne, analyzing English weather, does not hesitate to dress out his analysis in the charms of personal experience and anecdote and description, which in no way obscure the facts of the weather, but merely take away the baldness of a formal statement and add the relish of actual life.

An extension of this willingness to make grist of whatever comes to the writer's mill lies in the close approach, at times, that analysis makes to the informal essay. Of course the line is difficult to draw—and perhaps not necessarily drawn—and most informal essays are to some extent, at least, analytical. The more you desire your analysis to become interesting, the more you wish to take hold of your reader, the more you will make use of the close approach unless your subject and its facts are of a kind to repel such intimacy. An analysis of the nebular hypothesis deals with facts of so august a nature, on so nearly an unimaginable plane, that intimacy seems out of place, impudent, like levity in cathedrals. But if you have such a subject as George Gissing[42] chose in the following analysis of the sportswoman's attitude and character, you may well, as he did, throw aside the formalities of expression and at once make truce of intimacy with your reader. So long as you do not obscure the facts of the analysis, make it unclear or blurred, so long you are safe.

Informal analysis may appear in various forms, not all of which are at once apparent as analysis until we disabuse our minds of thinking that analysis must be, always, complete in facts. For example, informal analysis often appears in the form of enumeration, in which the author "has some things to say"—always for a definite purpose—and says them in some reasonable order. Thus Mr. Herbert Croly, in his article "Lincoln as More than American," analyzes Lincoln's character as related to the characters of other Americans through the qualities of intellectuality, humanness, magnanimity, and humility. More might be said; the[Pg 130] analysis is not complete in fact, but it serves the purpose of the author. It is distinctly in the enumerative order, the progression being determined by the controlling purpose of delineating Lincoln as worthy of not only respect but even true awe, the awe that we give only to those great souls who, in spite of all their mental supremacy, are yet beautifully humble.

Informal analysis often appears in the form of equation: the subject of analysis is stated as equal to something else—a quality, an instrument from another field of human knowledge, the same thing in other more common or well-known words. For example, William James, in his essay "The Social Value of the College Bred," first states that the value of a college education is "to help you to know a good man when you see him," and then explains what he means by this phrase. This form of analysis, then, is usually in the nature of a double equation: x is equal to y, which, in turn, can be split up into a, b, c. The method really consists in arriving at an easily comprehended statement of the significance of the subject through the medium of a more immediately workable or attractive or simple synonymous statement. It is an application of the old formula of going from the known to the unknown, except that in this case we proceed from the unknown to the known and then return to the unknown with increased light.

A third form of informal analysis is the showing of the significance of the subject, its root meaning. In this case the writer attempts not so much to break the subject into its obvious parts as to set before the reader the meaning of it as a whole, in so short a compass, often, that it will not need further explanation, or if it does, that it may be then[Pg 131] divided after the statement in easier form has been made. The following explanation of the philosophy of Nietzsche illustrates this form of analysis:

A fourth class of informal analytical writing is the showing the relationship that exists between two ideas or things, as cause and effect, as source and termination, as contrary forces, or as any relation that has real existence. Under[Pg 132] this heading will be found the large group of articles that answer the question why?, as for example, "Why the Quebec Bridge Collapsed," "Causes of the Strike among the Garment Workers," "Popular Opinion as Affecting Government Action," and other such subjects. In the following analysis of the relation existing between human action as result, and impulse and desire as causes, you will find such an informal presentation of material.

[Pg 136]

A fifth form in which analysis often appears is as a statement of a problem. An engineer who is asked by a city to investigate the conditions that confront the municipality as regards water supply will have such a problem to state. The statement will presumably consist of several divisions. First of all, of course—and this will be essential in all such statements—will be an analysis of the conditions themselves. In this particular case he will find out how much water is needed, how great the present supply is, what sources are available for increased supply, what the character of the water in these other sources is, and anything else that may be of value to the city. If any former attempts at solution have been made, he may mention them. If he is asked to recommend a plan of procedure, he will make an analysis of the details of this plan and will present them.

Now obviously the nature of the audience will determine somewhat the manner of approach to the conditions. If, for example, the problem is to be stated to the financial committee of the city, the angle of approach will be that of cost; if to a prospective constructing engineer, from that of difficulties of construction of reservoirs or from that of availability of sources. If you are to state the problem of lessening the illiteracy in a given neighborhood, you will approach the subject for the school committee from the angle, perhaps, of the establishment of night schools, or from that of the necessary welding of nationalities; for the charitable societies from that of the poverty that compels child labor in the community. And in the recommendations for meeting the conditions, if such recommendations are made, attention must be paid to the particular people who will read the analysis. Of course if you make an abstract, complete survey, you will cover the ground in whatever way seems most suitable.

[Pg 137]

Such an analysis, when it is in the nature of a report, will presumably be in brief, tabulated form. If, on the other hand, it is not a report, the subject may be treated more informally, made more pleasing. The following statement of the problem of the development of power machinery is made rather formally from the angle of the constructive engineer with an eye also to the financial conditions.

[Pg 138]

The problem that confronts you, then, in either kind of analysis, however formal or informal it may be, is, How shall I go to work? The first necessity is the choosing of a basis for division of the subject, whether it be in classification or partition. The necessity for this arises from the demand of the human mind for logical consistency. Life seems often wildly inconsistent, but we demand that explanation of it or any phase of it be arranged according to what seems to us some logical law of progression, some consistent point of view. And in truth without some such law or basis the mind soon becomes hopelessly enmeshed and bewildered. I cannot expect my reader to understand my treatise on locomotive engines, my classification of them, if I regard them now as engines of speed, now as means of conveyance, now as potential destroyers of life, and now as instruments whereby capitalists become rich and workmen become poor. As often as I change my point of view, so often I shall be under the necessity of making a new arrangement of the engines, a new alignment. It is like skimming past a cornfield with the platoons of green spears constantly shifting their number, their direction, and their general appearance. If I station myself at one point, I can soon make reasonable estimates, but so long as I whirl from point to point my estimate must whirl likewise and I shall be confused rather than helped. If, then, you are to analyze, say, our present-day domestic architecture, it is not enough to heap together everything that occurs to you about houses: their size, material, color, arrangement, finish, beauty, convenience, situation as regards sidewalks, their heating and upkeep. To prevent your reader from becoming hopelessly muddled, from seeming to deal with the valley of the unorganized dry bones of fact, you must have some guiding principle, some basis, some point of view. Suppose that you take beauty[Pg 139] as your basis. Then at once you have a standard by which you can judge all houses, to which you can relate questions of position, arrangement, convenience, lighting, heating, etc. Each of these questions is now significant as affecting the cause of beauty. You could, of course, choose convenience as your basis, to which, then, beauty would be subordinate as contributing or opposing. Asked to analyze the architecture of a railroad terminal, you will not do well to plant dynamite under it and make an architectural rummage sale of its parts; rather you will choose, perhaps, serviceability as your basis, and will then examine tracks, offices, waiting rooms, etc. to see what the whole is. No part will thereby be overlooked; each will be significant, and the whole will be unified by your single point of view. An analysis of MacDowell's music might be based on emotional power; of the currency problem on that of general distribution; of universities on that of proportion of cultural to so-called practical courses. Notice, also, that the choosing of a basis of division is just as necessary in one kind of analysis as in another, that formality and informality do not affect the logic of the situation in the least, that whatever the subject or the proposed method of treatment, you must be consistent in your point of view, must make a pivot round which the whole can turn.

Sometimes more than one principle will be necessary, in a complicated analysis, as in judging a route for a railway we saw the necessity for considering grades, drainage, landslides, etc., as we might interweave the bases of cost, beauty, convenience, etc., but—like the reins of the ten-span circus horses—all will be found to run back finally to the single driver—in the case of the railway, practicability. In classifying dredges, for example, we may use as basis the action of the machine upon the bottom of the body of water, that is, whether the action is continuous or intermittent; in this case we shall find four types of continuous dredges: the[Pg 140] ladder, the hydraulic, the stirring, and the pneumatic; and we shall find two classes of intermittent: the dipper and the grapple dredges. Or we may divide all dredges on the basis of whether they are self-propelling or non-propelling. Finally, we may take as basis for the classification the manner of disposing of the excavated materials, in which case we shall find several groups. In the following example we have two bases used for classifying clearing-houses. The use of more than one basis will depend on whether we can by such use make more easily clear to a reader the nature of the subject and on whether different readers will need different angles of approach.

Sometimes, also, the minor sections may have a different basis from the main one, a different principle of classification. For example, a general basis for an analysis of the Mexican situation during Mr. Wilson's administration might[Pg 141] be general world progress. This might cover our immediate relations with Mexico, our less close relations with South America, and our rather more remote relations with Europe. The first division might then possibly choose for its principle fundamental causes for inter-irritation; the second, our trade relations with South America; and the third, the possibility of trouble through the Monroe Doctrine. All would unite under the one heading of general progress, and so long as they were kept distinct would be serviceable. For the uniting into one main principle is the important thing. It is by this, and this only, that the reader will easily receive a clear understanding of the subject.

Having selected this unifying basis, you must then be careful lest your subdivisions be only the subject restated in other words. If you are analyzing a railroad route for practicability, do not name one division general serviceability, for you will merely have made a revolution of 360 degrees and be facing exactly as you faced before. In analyzing Scott's works for humor do not name one division ability to see the funny side of life, for again you will have said only that two equals two. Each section must be less than the whole.

Even more caution is required to keep the divisions from overlapping. The man who wrote an enthusiastic account of the acting of Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson with subheadings as follows: (1) emotional power, (2) effect on audience, (3) intellect, (4) appealing qualities, saw that his divisions—like a family of young kittens—overlapped and sprawled generally. When he had selected moving power as his main principle, and had then divided the treatment into the following headings: (1) appearance, (2) voice, (3) general handling of the situation, (4) effect at the time, and (5) memories of the performance, he found that his kittens had become well-mannered little beasties and sat each in his place. The overlapping of subdivisions is likely[Pg 142] to occur because of one or both of two causes: lack of clear thinking, and lack of clear expression. Be sure, then, first to cut neatly between parts in dividing your apple, and then to label each part carefully so that the reader will not say, "Why, three is just like two!"

Finally, be sure that the sum of your divisions equals the whole. This means that in logical analysis you must continue the process of dividing until nothing is left. You must follow the old advice: "Cut into as small pieces as possible, and then cut each piece several times smaller!" Such would be the process in analyzing and classifying types of cathedral architecture; your work will not be complete until you have included all possible forms. The same would hold true in a thorough analysis of bridges; all forms would demand entrance. When you write informal or literary analysis, on the other hand, since here the object is illumination rather than exhaustion, almost suggestiveness rather than completeness, choose the significant vital divisions and let the rest go. This does not mean that in informal analysis you may be careless; "any old thing" is far from being the motto; strict thinking and shrewd selection are quite as necessary as in formal analysis. The point is that the divisions will be fewer in number, as in an article on the subject of the failure of freshmen in the first semester your object, in informal analysis, would be to group the causes, for the convenience of the reader, into a few general divisions which should give him a clear idea of the subject without necessitating long and painful reading. In literary analysis especially it is often well to express in one sentence the gist of your thought, as Mr. More says, "Tennyson was the Victorian Age." It is always well to be able to express this sentence. Of course care must be exercised not to make the structure of the article too evident by the presence of such a sentence, but its judicious use will help to unify the thought for the reader. For most minds analysis is[Pg 143] difficult. Whatever you can do, therefore, to make it easy will be worth while in gaining success.

[Pg 157]

The problem of giving directions for making or doing something, or of explaining the working of an organization, is not always easy to solve. Most difficulties, however, occur through lack of considering just what the problem involves, and through lack of sufficiently simplifying the material. Thus, when you ask an old man in a strange city where the post-office is, he is likely to reply somewhat as follows: "You keep on just as you are going for a little ways, and then turn down a narrow street on the right and go along for four blocks, and then turn to your left and go until you come to a square, and then go across it and down a side street and through an office building, and then it's the stone building on the corner of the second street to your right." You stroke your chin, meditate a bit, and, if you are polite, thank your informant for his kind intentions. Then you ask the next person whom you meet to tell you where the post-office is. The old man meant well, of course, but he failed to simplify. So did the author of the little book that Johnny received for Christmas mean well when he explained how to make a beautiful chemical effect. But Johnny, who was a fairly impetuous youth, did not stop to read the footnote at the end which warned against working near a fire. When he was seraphically pouring his chemicals together near the old oil lamp in the "shop" there came a flash, a deafening roar—and little Johnny had no time either to examine footnotes or, after the smoke had cleared, for post-mortem complaints. The trouble lay in the fact that the author did not give Johnny the necessary information at the essential time.

[Pg 158]

It seems that neither piety nor wit will suffice to locate post-offices or direct experiments or explain machines. Better than either of these is the ability to make the mechanism, the process, the organization transparently clear, with each bit of information given at exactly the proper moment. For, since the object of such explanation as attempts to make clear is primarily information, the main quality of the writing should be clearness. Everything that stands in the way of this quality should be made to surrender to explanation. If the subject is itself interesting or remarkable, the facts may speak for themselves, as in an account of the nebular hypothesis; if the subject is merely common, as for example the force pump, the primary aim should be clearness. Pleasing presentation, however desirable, is secondary. No amount of pleasant reading on the subject of making photographs, the working of periscopes, the organization of literary societies will be of value if at the end the reader has not a well-ordered idea of how to go to work or of how the thing of which you treat is operated.

For these reasons certain principles of caution can be laid down. The first caution is, do not take too much for granted on the reader's part. First of all take stock of your reader and his knowledge of the subject and then write in accordance with your discoveries. If, in explaining the bicycle to a Fiji Islander, you fail to note that the two wheels are placed tandem rather than parallel, he may form a thoroughly queer notion of the machine. And your protest, "Why, I supposed he would know that!" is in vain. This caution does not mean that you must adopt a tone of condescension, must say, "Now children," and patter on, but that you will not omit any important part of the explanation unless you are sure that your reader is acquainted with it. The second caution, which is corollary with the first, is[Pg 159] that you do not substitute for the gaps in the written information the silent knowledge that is in your own mind. The danger here lies in the fact that, knowing your subject well, you will write part of it and think the rest. Having for a long time practiced the high hurdles, for example, when you come to explain them you will run the paradoxical risk of being so thoroughly acquainted with the subject that you will actually omit much vital information and thus make your treatment thin. And the third caution is, avoid being over technical. An expert can always understand plain English; a layman, on the other hand, can soon become hopelessly bewildered in a sea of technicalities. Treatment of technicalities demands sense, therefore; when a term is reasonably common its presence can do no harm, but when a term is known only to the few, substitute for it, when writing for the many, plain English, or define your terms.

Perhaps the greatest lack in expositions of this type is centralization. A reader rises from the account of a cream separator or a suspension bridge or the feudal system with the feeling that many cogs and wires and wheels and spouts and lords and vassals are involved, but without a clear correlation of all these elements into a clear and simple whole. Now a suspension bridge is much more organic than a scrap heap, and the feudal system than a city directory. It is for you as the writer to make this clear, to show that all the things are related, that they affect each other and interact. For this purpose you will find the greatest help in the device of ascertaining what the root principle is, the fundamental notion or purpose of the subject that you are explaining. For example, to make your reader see the relation of the various parts of the tachometer you should discover and present the fact that the machine relies primarily on the principle of centrifugal force as affecting the mercury that[Pg 160] whirls as the automobile moves. Once this principle is grasped by the reader, the various parts of the mechanism assume their proper places and relations and become clear. Now obviously this root principle is to be sought in the subject itself; here is no place for an author to let his fancy roam where it will without keeping an eye steadily upon the machine or process. You are trying to explain the machine, not some vague or fanciful idea of what the machine might be if it were like what your fancy says; therefore, in the words of the good old advice, which comes handy in most writing, "keep your eye on the object," which in this case will be the machine or the process or the organization. And the more complicated the mechanism or process, the more necessary will be the discovery of the root principle—a printing machine, for instance, with its amazing complexity, will be helped wonderfully by such a device, and the reader will welcome the device even more than he would in an explanation of how, for example, a fountain pen works—though he will be glad for it in any case.

This root principle, nucleus, core, kernel can often be stated in one sentence. You can say, for instance, in speaking of bridges like those across the East River, "A suspension bridge consists of a roadway hung by wires from huge cables which are anchored at the ends and are looped up over one or more high supports in the stream." This sentence may not be immediately and entirely clear, but it serves to show quickly what relations parts have to each other, and to it the reader may refer in his mind when detailed treatment of the maze of wires and bolts becomes bewildering. Often this sentence need not be expressed alone; it should always be thought out in the writer's mind.

If it is expressed, such a sentence may stand at the beginning as a sort of quick picture, or it may come at the end as a collecting statement of what has preceded, or at any point where it seems to be of the most value to the reader. It may[Pg 161] take various forms as, for example, it may state in essence how the machine or process works, is operated, or what it is for, or of what it consists. If it occurs at the end as a summary, it may be a summary of facts in which the points made or the parts described are enumerated, or it may be a summary of essence, in which the significance or the principle of the thing is stated. In the following examples the sentence will be found near the beginning in both cases, and in the nature of a statement of the principle of operation.

The development of this kind of exposition will vary somewhat according to the nature of the subject. If you are explaining a process—how to make a campfire, or how to find the width of an unbridged river, or how to make bread—you will naturally follow the chronological order and tell what to do first, what second, and so on. If several materials are to be used in the process, you may enumerate them all at the beginning, for collection, or state them piece by piece as they are needed. For example, you may say, "In making a kite you will need so many pieces of such wood of such and such sizes, with paper or cloth, strong twine, glue, nails, etc." You may cast the whole process into a personal mood by telling how some one, perhaps yourself, did it on a previous occasion. This method, if it is judiciously used, adds interest. You must take care not to seem to encumber[Pg 163] obviously simple directions, however, with the machinery of personal narrative so that the whole account is longer than it should be. In case you are treating some process in which mistakes are easily made, you can often help the reader by showing how some one—preferably yourself—did it wrongly and thereby came to grief. Or you can state concisely what not to do if there is chance for mistake. In developing films, for example, you may warn the reader not to mix any of the Hypo with the Fixing Bath; in picking his apples not to break the twigs of the tree; in paddling a canoe through rapids not to become excited. Note how, in the account which follows of how to handle a punt, the author makes the material quite human and personal—to the reader's pleasure.

If you are explaining a mechanism, you may follow different orders. You may explain chronologically, showing what happens first, what next, and so on, as in the printing press you would show what happens first to the paper, and then what processes follow. Here you must be careful not to give a long list at the beginning of all the different parts of the machine. Such a list bewilders and is rarely of any real value. Instead of saying, for example, that a reaper and binder consists of a reel, a knife, a canvas platform and belt, etc., you will do well to simplify at the beginning, and say, perhaps, that from the front the machine looks like a dash with an inverted V at one end: thus: ____Λ and then go on to relate the various parts to this simple scheme. The[Pg 165] brief paragraph which follows illustrates the principle in a slight space.

If you prefer, you can use, instead of the chronological order, the device of showing what the need was for the machine and how it fills the need, or what the object of the machine is and how it accomplishes that object. An explanation of the cotton gin might present the woeful waste of time before the gin was invented and then show how the invention annuls that waste. One of the periscope might state the object of invisible observation and then show how, by tubes and mirrors, this object is accomplished. Or finally, as a third general method, you may state the root principle and then expand in detail. With this scheme you might state that the piano is an instrument in which felt hammers strike metal strings that are stretched across a sounding board, and then go on to show the significance, as related to this notion, of keys, pedals, music rest, and other details. Often this method is the most helpful for a reader, since it gives him at once a nucleus of theory round which he can group the details with immediate or rapid understanding of their relations and significance. In so simple a machine as the ice cream freezer to introduce names like "dasher" without previous warning may result in momentary confusion,[Pg 166] whereas if the principle is stated at the beginning, and the reader knows that the object is to bring the cream into contact with the coldest possible surface so as to produce speed in freezing, the "dasher," when mentioned, is at once significant. The description and explanation of a track-layer, which follows, is so made as to be both clear and interesting.

If you are explaining an organization you may again use the chronological order and show how the organization came about as it is, how for example the Federal Reserve Board was appointed for certain reasons each of which has its correspondent in the constitution of the board. Such a method is useful in explaining the feudal system, the college fraternity,[Pg 169] the national convention of a political party. Or, finally, you can state the root idea, sometimes appearing as purpose or significance, and then expand it. A labor union, thus treated, is a body of men who individually have slight power of resisting organized capital, but can collectively obtain their rights and demands.

Clearness then, through centralization, is the all-important necessity of expositions of this type. To aid in gaining this quality you will do well to avoid technical terms, as has already been mentioned. You can make use of graphic charts when they will be useful, so long as they are not merely a lazy device for escaping the task of writing clearly. Some machines, such as the printing press or the rock drill, defy explanation without charts and plates. Textbooks often wisely make use of this device. You can also use familiar illustrations, as the one here used of the reaper and binder or the one likening Brooklyn Bridge to a letter H with the sides far apart, the cross piece extended beyond the sides, and a cable looped over the tops of the sides. Such illustrations at the beginning of the whole or sections are useful in helping the reader to visualize. Another important aid to clearness is to take care that nothing is mentioned for which the way has not been prepared. Just as in a play we insist that the action of a character be consistent, that a good man do not suddenly commit wanton murder, and that the villain do not suddenly appear saintly, so we rightly demand that we be not suddenly confronted with a crank, wheel, office, or step in a process which bewilders us. You ought to write so that your reader will never pucker his brow and say, "What is this?" And when a detail has some special bearing, introduce it at the significant point. To have told little Johnny in the beginning that he must keep his chemicals away from flame would have avoided explosion[Pg 170] and death; to declaim loudly after the explosion is of no value. And finally, from a purely rhetorical standpoint, make careful transition from section to section so that the reader will know exactly where divisions occur, and make liberal use of summaries whenever they may be useful without being too cumbersome.

Notice how, in the following paragraph, the writer has given the gist of the machines so that, if he wishes to expand and make a full treatment, he will still have a nucleus which will considerably facilitate the reader's understanding.

Notice also the care with which the author of the paragraph which follows and explains the phonopticon states early in his treatment the scientific basis for the operation of the machine, without knowing which a reader would be hopelessly confused to understand how the machine could possibly do what the author says it does.

[Pg 171]

If mere clearness alone were the only quality to strive for, this kind of writing might remain, however useful, eternally dull except to one who is vitally interested in the facts, however they are treated. But for this there is no need; no reason exists why you should not make this kind of writing attractive. For you can, in addition to making a machine clear, endow it with life; in addition to enumerating the steps in a process, make it a fascinating adventure. Suppose that you are explaining how to learn to swim—is not the thought of waving one's arms and legs in dreamy or frantic rhythm as he lies prone across the piano bench humorous? Why, then, exclude the humor? And is not the person who is trying to learn much alive, with the pit of his stomach nervously aware of the hardness of the bench? Why, then, make him a wooden automaton, or worse, a dead agent? So long as you do not obscure the point that the reader should note, all the life, all the humor of which you and the process are capable should be introduced. Just so with a machine. You can explain the engine of an airship so that the reader will[Pg 173] exclaim, "I see"; what you ought to do is so to explain the engine that he will say, "I see, and bless you, I'd like to see one go!" You ought to make the beautiful efficiency, the exquisite humming life of the thing, its poise, its athletic trimness so take hold of the reader that his imagination will be fired, his interest thoroughly aroused.

Now this you cannot do by thrusting in extraneous matter to leaven the lump. Webster in the Senate did not introduce vaudeville to enliven his Reply to Hayne, but he found in the subject itself the interest. First of all, then, study your machine, your process, your organization, until you see what its quality is, its spirit, until you are yourself aware of its life, and then make this live for your reader. A railroad locomotive should be made thrilling with its pomp and power, a military movement should be made an exquisitely quick piece of living constructive work, a submarine should have all the craft and the romance of a haunting redskin, the roasting of a goose should be made a process to rouse the joys of gluttony forevermore. Now to do this will require exercise of the imagination, and if you find yours weak your first duty is to develop it. If it is strong and active, on the other hand, allow it free play, only watching lest it may obscure the subject—for clearness is always first. There need, however, be no discrepancy between the two qualities. The following extract from an essay by Mr. Dallas Lore Sharp illustrates the possibilities of both interest and truth.

Any Child Can Use It

Besides the devices that have been mentioned you can use that of making the agents in the action definite, real persons,[Pg 175] and you can make a process seem to be actually going on before the eyes of the reader. You can suffuse the whole theme with a human spirit, for everything has a human significance if only you will find it.

Finally, use tact in approaching your reader. Do not "talk down" to him, and do not over-compliment his intelligence or wheedle him. Rather regard him as a person desirous of knowing, your subject as a thing capable of interest, and yourself as a really enthusiastic devotee. Take this attitude, and as long as you make clear, so long your chances for success will be good.

[Pg 190]

Few of us pass a day without answering such questions as, "What do you think of the Hudson car?" or, "How did Kreisler's playing strike you?" or, "What is your opinion of the work of Thackeray or Alice Brown or Booth Tarkington?" or, "Do you like the X disc harrow?" When we are among intimate friends we give our opinions, based on our personal reaction to the subject of inquiry or on our impartial estimate of it as an automobile, a musical performance, a collection of books, or an agricultural machine. Many of us give a large space in our conversation to such estimates on all conceivable subjects. And, for purposes of insignificant conversation, there is no reason why we should not. Accused of making "Criticism" in the formal sense, however, many of us should recoil with terrified denial. But that is exactly what we are doing, whether we praise or blame, accept or reject, so long as we base our opinion on sincere personal or sound principles, we criticize. For criticism is the attempt to estimate the worth of something—object or idea—either abstractly on a basis of principles and relations, or personally on the basis of our reactions to the subject of criticism. That is, we may, for example, criticize the roads of New York State on the basis of what a road is for and how well these roads serve their purpose, or we may take as basis the inspiration, the keen ecstasy that we feel as we skim over the smooth boulevard. So long as our notions of good roads are sound, so long as we react sensibly, with balance, to the smooth rounding way, we make good criticism, we judge the worth of the subject of criticism and find it either good or bad.

It is to be noted that this criticism is something more than[Pg 191] mere comment, than mere off-hand remarks. The old saying is, "Anybody can say something about anything!" An off-hand utterance may tell the truth; we cannot be sure that it will. Only when we have a well-considered basis of either principle or personal feeling can we be at all certain of our opinions.

Now the range in which our opinions, our criticisms, may be expressed, is as wide as human thought and accomplishment. We sometimes think of criticism as being confined to literature and art, and speak of literary criticism, musical criticism, dramatic criticism, and art criticism, as if these were all. The term criticism has actually been so restricted in common practice that unless otherwise noted it is taken for granted as applying to these subjects. But criticism is much more comprehensive than such restriction indicates: any object or subject is capable of criticism. Just as we might arrive at the conclusion that Booth Tarkington's stories about Penrod are either good or bad, so we might say that a make of piano, a type of bridle, a new kind of fertilizer, a method of bookkeeping, a recipe for angel cake is good or is sufficient or is valueless. We might have—in fact we do have—Engineering Criticism, Carpenter Criticism, Needlework Criticism, Poultry Criticism, and as many kinds as there are classes of subjects. In this treatment we shall use the term in this broad sense and include all subjects in our scope. Of course we are to remember that the criticism becomes of more value as the subject of criticism is of more moment: criticism of the drama is nobler, perhaps, than criticism of egg beaters and picture hooks. We must also remember that the less high orders of criticism are neither useless nor undesirable but often most helpful.

Since, then, the brand of the critic is on us all, since we practice the habit, consciously or not, most of the time, and[Pg 192] since the range is so wide, no reason exists why we should be terrified at the thought of writing criticism, of making formal estimate. Certain requirements are demanded, to be sure; not every one can dive into the sea of criticism without making an awkward splash and receiving a reddening smart. But these requirements are in no way beyond the possibility of acquiring by any one who will set himself to the task.

In the first place, a critic must have the power to analyze. We have seen that analysis consists in breaking a subject into its components, in discovering of what it is made. This is the first great necessity in criticizing. You wish, for example, to make a criticism of a new rifle for your friends. It is not enough that you should with gusto enunciate, "It's just great!" "Oh, it's fine, fine and dandy!" "Golly but it's a good one!" Your friends are likely to ask "Why?" or to say, "The gentleman doth protest too much!" If, on the other hand, you remark that the rifle is admirable because of its sights, its general accuracy, its cartridge chamber, its comparative freedom from recoil, then you will be giving your friends definite and useful criticism, for you will have analyzed the virtue of the object into its components. Now this necessity for analysis exists in criticism of literature and art just as in criticism of rifles. Before you can properly estimate the value of a novel or a play you must divide the impression it makes into the various heads, such as emotional power, convincingness in the message of the book or play, truth to life, and whatever heading you may think necessary. Until you do this your impressions, your judgments will of necessity be vague and dim in their outlines, and though they may seem to be comprehensive, will be found actually to be insufficient to give your reader or listener a firm notion of the subject—he will have no nucleus of thought round which his total estimate will[Pg 193] center. As soon, however, as you analyze, and make definite, so soon he will receive real enlightenment. In the following account of the work of James Russell Lowell at the Court of Saint James we find at once this careful breaking of the subject into parts which can be treated definitely. Had the writer merely uttered general impressions of the diplomacy of our ambassador we who read should have been comparatively unhelped.

Besides the ability to analyze the critic must have some knowledge of the general field in which the subject lies. For a man who has never thought about musical form to attempt criticism of a sonata is foolish—he can at best merely comment. It is this fact that vitiates much of the cracker-barrel criticism of the country store—subjects are estimated about which the critic is largely ignorant. When an uneducated person makes shrewd comment, as he often does, on a play, he will usually be found to have criticized a character such as he has known or the outcome of a situation the like of which he is familiar with rather than the play as a whole. Now perfect criticism would demand perfect knowledge, but since that is impossible, a good working knowledge will suffice, the wider the better. Knowledge of the general principles of piano playing will enable a critic[Pg 195] to estimate, in the large, the work of a performer; he cannot criticize minutely until he has added more detailed knowledge to his mental equipment.

However much knowledge and ability to analyze a critic may have, he is a will-o'-the-wisp unless he have common sense and balance. Since a critic is in many ways a guide, he must guard as sacred his ability to see the straight road and to refuse the appeal of by-paths, however attractive. As critic, you must not be overawed by a name, be it of artist or manufacturer, nor allow much crying of wares in the street to swerve you from your fixed determination to judge and estimate only on the worth of the subject as you find it. This is far from meaning that the critic should give no weight to the opinions of others; you should always do that; but, having examined the subject, and knowing your opinions, you should then speak the truth as you see it. Your one final desire should be to go to the heart of the matter accurately, and then to state this clearly. And just as you do not blindly accept a great name, so do not be wheedled by gloss and appearance, but keep a steady aim for the truth.

Finally, this balance, this passion for the truth, will lead the critic to strive always for open-mindedness. "I would rather be a man of disinterested taste and liberal feeling," wrote Hazlitt, "to see and acknowledge truth and beauty wherever I found it, than a man of greater and more original genius, to hate, envy, and deny all excellence but my own...." And he was right when he said it: the willingness to accept a new idea or object if it is worthy, whether it go against the critic's personal desires or not, is one of the great qualities that he will find indispensable. "I never heard[Pg 196] of such a thing!" is not a sufficient remark to condemn the thing. In fact, almost a sufficient answer to such an exclamation would be, "Well, what of it?" or, "'T is time you did."

Armed with open-mindedness, then, with balance and common sense, with knowledge of the field, and with ability to analyze, you are ready to begin. What method shall you pursue? Though no absolutely sharp line can be drawn between kinds of criticism, we may treat of three that are fairly distinct: the historical method, the method by standards, and the appreciative. In most criticism we are likely to find more than one method employed, often all three. You need not confine yourself to one any more than a carpenter need refuse to use any but one tool, but for purposes of comprehension and presentation we shall keep the three here fairly distinct. We shall examine the three now, briefly, in the order named.

Suppose that you are asked to criticize one of Cooper's novels, say The Last of the Mohicans. You find in it red men idealized out of the actual, red men such as presumably never existed. You may, then, in disgust throw the book down and damn it with the remark, "The man does not tell the truth!" But you will not thereby have disposed of Cooper. Much better it would be to ask, How came this man to write thus? When did he write? For whom? How did men at that time regard the Indian? In answering these questions you will relate Cooper's novel to the time in which it was written, you will see that before that time the Indian was regarded with unmixed fear, as too often since with contempt, and that at only that time could he have been idealized as Cooper treats him. You would relate the[Pg 197] novel to the whole movement of Sentimentalism, which thought that it believed the savage more noble than civilized man, and you would then, and only then, get a proper perspective. Your original judgment, that Cooper's Indians are not accurate portraits of their kind, would not be modified; for the whole work, however, you would have a new attitude.

In the same way, asked for an opinion of the old-style bicycle with enormous front wheel and tiny trailer, you would not summarily reply, "I prefer a chainless model of my own day," but would discover the place that the old style occupied in the total development of the bicycle, would look at it as related to the preceding absence of any bicycle, and would see that, though it may to-day be useless, in its time it was remarkable. Likewise you will discover that the old three-legged milking stool has been in immemorial use in rude byres and stables, since three points—the ends of the legs—always make a firm plane, which four points do not necessarily do. And one hundred years hence, when a critic comes to judge the nature faking of the early twentieth century, he will relate this sentimental movement to the times in which it appeared, and, though he may well finally be disgusted, he will understand what the thing was and meant, how it came about, what causes produced it.

Illustration of the value of this method is found in the following historical account of the American business man. To a European this man sometimes is inexplicable—until he reads some illuminating setting forth of the facts as here.

In criticizing literature and art this method is often difficult, for we must take into account race, geography, and other conditions. We must see that only in New England, of all the sections of the United States, could Hawthorne have written, that Tolstoi could not have written in Illinois as he did in Russia, that Norse Sagas could not have appeared among tropical peoples, that among the French alone, perhaps, could Racine have come to literary power as he did. And in examining the work of two writers who treat the same subject in general, as Miss Jewett and Mrs. Freeman treat New England life, we shall find the influence of ancestry and environment and training largely determining, on the one hand the quaint fine sunshine, on the other hand the stern hard Puritanism. We shall also have to learn what incidents in an author's life have helped to determine his point of view, how early poverty, or sorrow, or a great experience of protracted agony or joy have made him sympathetic, or how aristocratic breeding and the early introduction into exclusive circles have made him naturally unresponsive to some of the squalor, the sadness of lowly life. We shall perceive that the early removal of Scott to the[Pg 200] country began his intense love for Scottish scenery and history, that the bitter laughter of Byron's mother turned part of the poet's nature to gall. In other words, when we are dealing with the exquisitely fine products of impassioned thought we have a difficult task because so many influences mold these thoughts, so many lines of procedure are determined by conditions outside the particular author or artist, all of which must be considered if we wish our work to be really of value. The following illustration shows in brief space the attempt to link a movement in literature to the times in which it appeared, to show that it is naturally a product of the general feeling of the times.

This method seeks, then, to place a work, whether of art or science or industry, in its place in the whole course of development of such ideas. It examines causes such as commercial demands, general prosperity, war, and only after this examination gives the work its estimate of value.

Now this method may seem uninteresting, dry, dull. Not always does it escape this blame. For it is inevitably impersonal, it looks at the thing perhaps coldly—at least without passion. But in so doing, and in considering the precedents and surroundings of the object of criticism, it largely escapes the superficiality of personal whim, and it avoids silly reaction to unaccustomed things. Much of our empty criticism of customs in dress and manners of architecture such as that of Southern California, of other religions such as those of the Chinese and the Hindoos, would be either done away or somewhat modified if we used this method. One reason, perhaps, why the Goths destroyed the beautiful art works of Rome was the fact that they had not the critical spirit, did not relate these works to their development and race. Of course there were other reasons. By linking the object of criticism to the race as a whole, by seeing how and why it became created, the critic is largely[Pg 202] broadened and the reader is kept from superficiality. Moreover, when this method is not too abstractly pursued, it gives to things, after all, a human meaning, for it links them to humanity. That it may be misleading in literature and art is obvious, for a creation may be accounted for in an attractive way as the result of certain forces that had their beginnings in sense and wisdom, and so be made to seem admirable, whereas it really has little worth on a basis of lasting usefulness and significance. But, properly and thoroughly used, this method, even though it gives us an account of a work rather than finally settling its value, scatters away the vague mists of superficial generalization and drives deeply into causes and results.

As the historical method is generally impersonal, objective, so is the method of criticizing by standards. In using this method we try to determine whether the object of criticism fulfills the demands of its type, whether its quality is high or low. For example, we thus judge a tennis court as to its firm footing, its softness, its retention of court lines, its position as regards the sun. In all these qualities an ideal tennis court would be satisfactory; the question is, is this one. So a headache powder should relieve pain without injuring with evil drugs; if this one does, we shall not condemn it. If the rocks in a landscape painting look like those which the heroic tenor in grand opera hurls aside as so much "puffed wheat," we must condemn the artist, for rocks should look solid. An evangelist should have certain qualities of piety and reverence, and should accomplish certain lasting results; we shall judge Billy Sunday, for example, according to whether he does or does not fulfill these demands. Likewise a lyric poem should have certain qualities of freshness, grace, passion, by which we rate any given lyric.

In fact, we ask, in any given case, does this work do what[Pg 203] such a thing is supposed to do, does it have the qualities that such a thing is supposed to have? And on our answer will depend our judgment. This is the kind of criticism that business men use constantly; they rate a cash system or a form of order blank or an arrangement of counters in a store on the basis of the presence or absence of the qualities that distinguish an ideal system, blank, arrangement. In the following example we have a combination of the historical and the standards methods, finally accounting for and judging the value of the common kinds of cargo steamers.

In the following paragraphs Professor Thomas R. Lounsbury of Yale University criticizes the use of final e in English words. You will note that he uses a combination of the historical method and the method by standards.

Now it is evident that unless the critic's standards are fair and sensible, unless they are known to be sound and essential, his criticism is likely to be valueless. If my ideas of the qualities of ideal tennis courts are erratic or queer, my judgment of the individual court will be untrustworthy. Your first duty as critic, then, is to look at your standards. In judging such things as ice cream freezers, motorcycles, filing systems, fertilizers, rapid-firing guns, and other useful devices, you will find no great difficulty in choosing your standards. When you come to literature and the arts, however, you find a difficult task. For who shall say exactly what a lyric poem shall do? Or who shall bound the field of landscape painting? No sooner does Reynolds begin painting, after he has formulated the laws of his art and stated them with decision, than he violates them all. No sooner did musicians settle just what a sonata must be than a greater musician appeared who transcended the narrower form. Moreover, in the field of literature and the arts we often find great difficulty in surmounting the cast of our individual minds; we like certain types and are unconsciously led to condemn all others. The great critic rises superior to his peculiar likes and prejudices, but most of us are hindered by them. One great benefit to be derived from writing this particular kind of criticism is in gaining humility—humility at the greatness of some of the works of the past, before which, when we really look at them, we are moved to stand uncovered, and humility at the lack of real analysis that we have made before we attempt the criticism, and finally humility at the tremendous effort we must make to write criticism at all worthy of the subjects. But the difficulty of writing such criticism well should make you exert yourself to the utmost to acquire skill before you attempt this form.

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This method, like the historical, makes against superficiality, for it necessitates real knowledge of the class to which the object of criticism belongs, the purposes of the class, its bearings, and then a sure survey of the individual itself. And in forcing the critic to examine his standards to determine their fairness and soundness it makes against hasty judgment. Properly used, this method should result in something like finality of judgment.

There come occasions when you are not primarily interested in the historical significance of the subject of criticism, and when you are indifferent to objective standards, when, in fact, you are almost wholly interested in the individual before you, in what it is or in the effect it has on you. You rather feel toward it than care to make a cold analysis of it; you are moved by it, are conscious of a personal reaction to it. In such cases you will make use of what is called appreciative criticism. This method consists in interpreting, often for one who does not know the work, the value of the work, the good things in it, either as they appear to one who studies or as they affect the critic. After reading a new book, for example, or attending a concert, or driving a wonderfully smooth running automobile, or watching the team work in a football game, you are primarily interested in the phenomena shown as they are in their picturesque individuality or in your own emotional reaction to them. In the following example George Gissing makes an appreciative criticism of English cooking, not by coldly tracing the historical influences that have made this cooking what it is, nor by subjecting it to certain fixed standards to which admirable cooking should attain, but rather by telling us what English cooking is and by giving us the flavor of his own emotional delight in it.

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Appreciative criticism may on the one hand approach criticism by standards, since, for example, to praise a pianist for melting his tones one into another implies that such melting is a standard. It may, again, consist largely in telling what the thing is, as to say that the Progressive Party was one that looked forward rather than backward, planned reforms for the people, insisted on clean politics, etc. It may, in the third place, consist in giving a transcript of the writer's feelings as he is in the presence of the subject of criticism, as one might picture the reaction of inspiration to a view from a mountain peak, or express his elation in listening to a famous singer, or show his wild enthusiasm as he watches his team slowly fight its way over the goal line. In all three of these cases the criticism answers the question, "What does this work seem to be, what do I find in it, and wherein do I think it is good?" That is appreciative criticism.

Now since you can adequately estimate in this way only when you are aware of the qualities of the subject, the first requirement for success in this kind of criticism is keen and intelligent sympathy with the work, an open-minded, sensible hospitality to ideas and things. If I am quite unmoved by music, I cannot make reliable appreciative criticism of it.[Pg 212] If I have no reaction to the beauty of a big pumping station, when asked for criticism of it, I shall perforce be silent. If my mind is closed to new ideas, I can never "appreciate" a new theory in science, in sociology, in art or in religion.

In the next place, I must refrain from morbid personal effusion. Certain of our sentimental magazines have published, at odd times, extremely personal rhapsodies about symphonies and poems. The listener has been "wafted away," has heard the birdies sing, the brooks come purling over their stones, has seen the moon come swimming through the clouds—but the reader of such criticism need not be too harshly censured if he mildly wonders whether the critic ought not to consult a physician.

Sometimes this fault occurs through the endeavor to make the criticism attractive, one of the strong demands of the appreciative kind. Since the personal note exists throughout, and since you wish to make your reader attracted to the object that you criticize, your writing should be as pleasing as is legitimately possible. Allow yourself full rein to express the beauties of your subject with all the large personal warmth of which you are capable, with as neatly turned expression as you can make, always remembering to keep your balance, to avoid morbidness in any form.

It is in this way that you will give to your criticism one of its most valued qualities, appealing humanness. Less final, perhaps, in some ways, than the historical method or the method by standards, the appreciative is likely to be of more immediate value in re-creating the work for your reader, in giving him a real interpretation of it. And this method, like the other two, fights against superficiality. Such a silly saying—silly in criticism—as "I like it but I don't know why" can have no place here. One may well remember the answer attributed to the artist Whistler, when the gushing woman remarked, "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like!" "So, Madam, does a cow!" If you[Pg 213] guard against the morbid or sentimental effusive style, and really tell, honestly and attractively, what you find good in the subject, your criticism is likely to be of value. Note that in the selection which follows, though the author feels strongly toward his subject, he does not fall, at any time, into gushing remarks that make a reader feel sheepish, but rather keeps a really wholesome tone throughout.

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We have said that criticism of literature and art seems to be more difficult than criticism of machines and buildings and commercial systems. It is. Literature and art, as being the expression of the high thought of the human heart about the world, man, and his relations to the world, demand in a critic who attempts to estimate them at least some underlying philosophy of life, at least some insight into the affairs of the human soul. And such philosophy, such insight, does not come without being eagerly sought or without much thinking. I can soon tell whether a force pump is efficient; I may for some time pause before I estimate a picture or a lyric poem. For the field of the pump is small and definite, its relations are simple, whereas the lyric is intimately bound up with the whole of life.

But we need not, therefore, despair of writing criticism of literature and art. The more sensible thing is to simplify our task. This we can do, in large measure, by asking the famous three questions of Coleridge: First, What did the author intend to do? second, How did he accomplish his purpose, well or ill? third, Was the purpose worth striving for? These three questions, sensibly considered and properly answered, will make a by no means paltry criticism.

Still the problem remains, how shall I write this criticism, whatever method I may be pursuing. Certain points of advice may be of use. In the first place, be sure of your attitude, that it is fair and sincere, that it is honest and as unprejudiced as possible. Then do not browbeat your reader into accepting this attitude. Allow him the right to make final decision, and, moreover, credit him with the right to some brains—he will be thus much happier. In the second place, be sure that you know what you are talking about, that you are sure of the facts, whether you treat literature or machinery or government or rotation of crops. Without[Pg 216] proper facts you can never reach a sound conclusion. And "keep your eye on the object." In no kind of writing is there a greater tendency to fritter off into related subjects which are still not exactly the one in hand. Be sure that you write about the subject, then, and not about some other. In the next place, since many remarks apply equally well to a host of subjects, as, for instance, that it is "efficient" or "inspiring," aim first of all, before you write a word, to find the one characteristic that your subject possesses that distinguishes it from others. Ask yourself wherein it is itself, wherein it differs from other like things, what it is without which this particular subject would not be itself. And having determined this point, be sure to make your reader see it. Whatever else you do, prize that characteristic as the jewel of your criticism's soul, and so sharply define, limit, characterize that your reader's impression will be not the slightest blurred. A student whose theme in criticism received from the instructor the verdict that it was not distinguishing, that it might apply as well to another poet, replied that the theme had originally been written about another, and in the press of circumstance had been copied with only a change in the title. The point is that the criticism had not been a good estimate of the original subject. It was worthless in both cases, because it was not distinguishing.

Finally, when you come to the expression, be sure that what you say means something, and that you know what it means. Ask yourself, "What does this mean that I have written?" and, if you have to admit that you do not know, in all conscience suppress it. Avoid the stock phrases that are colorless. You can fling "interesting" at almost any book, or its opposite, "stupid," just as you can apply "true to life," "good style," "suggestive," "gripping," "vital," "red-blooded," "imaginative," and hosts of other words and phrases equally well to scores of subjects. The reviewer[Pg 217] through whose mind a constant stream of subjects passes, is forced to fall into this cant unless he be a genius, but you have no business to do so. The trouble here, again, is in not knowing exactly what you wish to say and are saying, lack of thorough knowledge of your subject, for you do not know it until you have reached its heart. The result of half-knowledge is always flabbiness and ineffectiveness. Be careful, moreover, in making the structure of your total criticism, especially in criticism by standards, that you do not make the form of your work seem mechanical and wooden. Do not, for example, except in a report, give a dry list of the qualities which the subject should possess, and then one by one apply them to see if it will pass muster. Such writing may be true, but it is awkward. The form of critical writing should be as neat as that of any other kind of writing.

And in all your attitude and expression try to treat the subject as far as possible in its relation to humanity, to keep it from being a mere abstraction, to make it seem of real significance to the lives of men, if possible to the life of your reader.

The value of writing criticism should by this time be apparent. It forces our minds out of the fogginess of vague thinking, it makes us see things sharply, it guides us away from the taint of superficiality, it makes a solid base for our opinions. Through criticism we discover why we are interested, and then naturally we desire more interest, and by feeding grow to a larger appreciation and conception of the realm in which our minds are at work. We thus do away with the mere chance whim of like and dislike, and understand why we like what we do. In other words, criticism increases our intelligent reaction to life.

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It is a fine thing to be serious, to draw one's self up to a formal task of explaining a machine or analyzing an idea or criticizing a novel; and it is just as fine, and often more pleasurable, to banish the grim seriousness of business and take on pliancy, smile at Life—even though there be tears—and chuckle at Care. Life is more than mere toil; there are the days of high feast and carnival, the days of excursion, and then the calm quiet days of peaceful meditation, sometimes even the days of gray sadness shot through with the crimson thread of sacrifice and sorrow. Often in the least noisy days we see most clearly, with most balance, and with the keenest humor, the finest courage. Like an athlete who cannot be forever in the life of stern rigor but must stray at times into the ways of the drawing-room and the library, so we at times take our ways into the realm of whim and sparkle and laughter, of brooding contemplation, of warm peace of soul. "I want a little breathing-space to muse on indifferent matters," says Hazlitt, and, "Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours' march to dinner—and then to thinking!" In such moods we look for a good friend to talk with, and when the friend is not at hand—why, we may write informal essays to make record of our thoughts and feelings. For the Informal Essay is the transcript of a personal reaction to some phase or fact of life, personal because the author does not regard life with the cold eye of the scientific thinker, and because he does not, on the other hand, insist, as does the reformer, that others than himself accept the views he sets forth. He will[Pg 232] not force his belief upon others, will not even hold it too feverishly himself, but, if we cannot accept, will even smile urbanely—though he may think we are quite wrong—and bow, and go his own way.

The greatest charm of the informal essay is its personal nature. There is little, if indeed anything, personal about the analysis of problems or situations, slight revelation of the author in a treatise on dietetics or party politics or bridge building. This kind of writing is essentially the writing of our business. "But what need of ceremony among friends?" Lamb asks, and hits the heart of the informal essay. We are with friends, and with them, if the mood is on us, we chat about the delights of munching apples on snappy October mornings, or the humor of the scramble for public office, or the romance of spanning a stream in the hills, or, at times, the mysteries of life and death. And then the chat is thoroughly personal, we feel no grim duty, but only the quiet pleasure of uttering whatever we may think or feel, about things in which we find our personal interests aroused. It is as the counterpart in literature of such talk in living that the informal essay reveals the personal note, is really the lyric of prose. For the informal essay does not affirm, "This must be done!" or, "I will defend this with my life!" or, "This is undeniable truth!" Rather it says, "This is how I feel about things to-day," and if the essayist be aware that he has not always felt thus, that he may even feel differently again, he is unabashed. He will make you his confidant, will tell you what he thinks and how he feels, will banish the cold front of business, and will not be secretive and niggardly of himself, but only duly reticent.

As soon as we turn to informal essays we find this personal note. Here is Cowley's essay "Of Myself," frankly telling of his life. Our eye falls upon Hazlitt's words, "I never was in a better place or humor than I am at present for writing on this subject. I have a partridge getting ready for my supper,[Pg 233] my fire is blazing on the hearth, the air is mild for the season of the year, I have had but a slight fit of indigestion to-day (the only thing that makes me abhor myself), I have three hours good before me, and therefore I will attempt it." Such intimacy, such personal contact is to be found only in the informal essay. Only in a form of writing that we frankly acknowledge as familiar would Samuel Johnson write "The Scholar's Complaint of His Own Bashfulness." And once in the writing, the author cannot keep himself out. Steele, not Addison, wrote the words, "He is said to be the first that made Love by squeezing the Hand"—honest, jovial, garrulous Dick Steele, thinking, perhaps, of his "Darling Prue."

If, then, you have some random ideas that interest you, if the memory of your kite-flying days comes strong upon you, or of your early ambitions to be a sailor or a prima donna, if you can see the humor of rushing for trains or eluding taxes, or reciting without study, if you feel keenly the joy of climbing mountains, or canoeing, or gardening, or fussing with engines, or making things with hammer and nails or flour and sugar, if you see the beauty in powerful machinery or in the deep woods and streams and flowers, or the patient heroism—modest heroism—of the men in "Information" booths at railway stations, if you find pathos in the world, or humor, or any personal significance, and are able to understand without being oppressed with seriousness or poignant reality, even of humor,—if you remember or see or feel such things, and wish to talk quite openly about them as they appeal to you, write an informal essay.

Now you can write a personal essay that will be enjoyable only if your personality is attractive. And you cannot draw a reader to you unless you have a keen reaction to the facts of life. Writing informal essays is impossible for the man whose life is neutral, who goes unseeing, unhearing through the world; it is most natural to the man who touches life at[Pg 234] many points and touches with pleasure. Those magic initials, R. L. S., which the world, especially the young world, loves, mean to us a personality that reveled in playing with lead soldiers, in hacking a way through the tropical forests of Samoa, in pursuing streams to their sources, in cleaning "crystal," in talking with all living men, in reading all living books, in whiling the hours with his flageolet. "I have," says Lamb, "an almost feminine partiality for old china." We think, perhaps, of Bacon as a cold austere figure, until we know him, but is he cold when, writing of wild thyme and water mints he says, "Therefore you are to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when you walk or tread" of sniffing their sweet fragrance? And is a man uninterested who writes, "I grant there is one subject on which it is pleasant to talk on a journey; and that is what one shall have for supper when we get to our inn at night"? When we consider the loves of that bright flower of English young manhood, Rupert Brooke, we can the more keenly feel the loss that the essay, as well as poetry, had in his untimely death.

Lamb's young Bo-bo was in the right of it, the right frame of mind, when he cried, "O, father, the pig, the pig, do come and taste how nice the burnt pig eats!" The true writer of informal essays can see that Card Catalogues are humorous, that The Feel of Leather Covered Books is sufficiently interesting to deserve treatment, that Shaving, and Going to Bed Last, and Wondering if the Other Man Knows More, and Manners, and Politeness, and The Effect of Office-holding upon Personality, and Intellectual Deviltry, and The Humility of Sinners, and The Arrogance of Saints, and The Joys of Calling Names, and City Chimney-pots, and The "Woman's Page," and Keeping Up, and The Pleasures of Having a Besetting Sin, and The Absurdities of Education, and When Shakespeare Nods, and thousands of other subjects are all waiting to have their essays. Can there be any possible interest in a carpet layer? Mr. Dallas Lore Sharp, as we have seen,[83] finds it quite wonderful. Is he not to be[Pg 236] envied that his reaction was too keen to leave the tool lifeless? An informal essayist would even, we think, find taste in the white of an egg. And without this delight in life his essays will not be read, for they will not present a pleasing personality, and the life of the essay is its personal note.

A personality that is quite alive and thoroughly interested in all sorts of things almost necessarily sees the concrete. Most informal essays are full of individual instances, of anecdotes and scraps from life. The author of "The Privileges of Age" in the Atlantic Monthly does not vaguely talk about age in general. She begins, "I have always longed for the privileges of age—since the days when it seemed to me that the elderly people ate all the hearts out of the watermelons," and she continues with the misfortunes of being young, "In coaching, our place was always between the two fattest! O Isabella is thin! She can sit there!" In sheer delight at the memory Hazlitt writes, "It was on the tenth of April, 1798, that I sat down to a volume of the New Eloise, at the inn of Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." So Addison, when he will tell us of Sir Roger de Coverley, confides to us his habit of standing up in church service, even in prayer time, to look round him and see if all his tenants are there, or shows him calling out lustily to John Matthews, "to mind what he was about and not disturb the congregation" when John was kicking his heels for diversion. Concrete again, is Sir Roger's remark at the theater, "And let me tell you ... though he speaks but little, I like the old Fellow in Whiskers as well as any of them." All such detailed bits of life the essayist relishes, and in turn they enrich his personality and make him able to give the personal note that is the heart of the informal essay.

This mood of human interest is illustrated, of course, by other writers than the informal essayists. The historian Parkman filled his volumes with the intimate details of personal experience that keep them warm and forever alive.[Pg 237] As distinct from the dry-as-dust chroniclers, who eschew all of the throbbing incidents of life, he was eager to include whenever inclusion would help the reader's true imagination, such details as that, back in colonial times, the thunderous praying of a member of the General Court of Massachusetts, who had retired to his room for Heavenly counsel, revealed the secret of the proposed attack upon the fortress of Louisbourg to a landlady—and hence to all the world. Nor does he fail to mention that when the Grand Battery at Louisbourg was captured, William Tufts, of Medford, a lad of eighteen, climbed the flagstaff with his red coat in his teeth and made it fast to the pole for a flag. As we read Parkman's words, we can feel his heart glow with the joy of the climbing lad, we know that in the historian there was beating the throb of human love such as would have made him an admirable essayist had he turned his hand to the form.

If, then, you feel like confidential writing, what may your subjects be? Essayists have written about three main classes of subjects: first always, people, their glory, their pathos, their sadness, and their whims; second, nature as it appeals to the writers in a personal way, reflecting their joys and sorrows, or contributing to their sense of pleasure, beauty, and companionship in the world; and third, matters of science, industry, art, literature, as the essayists think these affect the emotions of humanity. If you are in wonderment and desire to speak of the bravery of men fighting the battle of life, you may write with Stevenson the somber but inspiring "Pulvis et Umbra." If you are tempted to smile at the tendency of people to announce beliefs militantly, you may write with Mr. Crothers "On Being a Doctrinaire." If man's ceaseless quest of the perfect appeals, you may write with Mr. Sharp "The Dustless Duster." The interesting old custom of having an awesome "spare chamber," the hurly-burly and humor of moving, the fascinating process of shaving that Grandfather performs on[Pg 238] Sunday, the ways in which some people make themselves lovable, others hateful, others pitiful, and still others ridiculous—these are your rightful field if you but care to use them. The informal essayist loves humanity not blindly but wisely. "There is something about a boy that I like," Charles Dudley Warner wrote, and thereby proved himself worthy to write such essays. Lamb, thinking of chimney-sweeps, cries out, "I have a kindly yearning toward these dim specks—poor blots—innocent blacknesses." Nor is the essayist restricted to the lives of others; the true informal essayist never forgets his own boyhood. The swimming and fishing larks, the tramp for the early chestnuts, the machines that you built at ten years, the tricks you played on friends and enemies, human and four-footed—these await your essay. Especially your grown-up self offers a fertile meadowland of essays. What are your hobbies—and have you any follies? If you can but poke fun at yourself, we will listen. Finally, if you have an interesting acquaintance, a rosy corner grocer, or a maiden aunt of the old school, or a benignant grandfather, or a quaint laundress, or "hired man," or anybody who is worth the words—and who is not?—and who really interests you, you may make a character sketch. Thus Stevenson in "A Scotch Gardener," Leigh Hunt in "The Old Lady," "The Old Gentleman," "The Maidservant," and John Brown in "Jeems the Doorkeeper." Remember only one thing—you must, for some reason, see attractiveness in the character, even the paradoxical attractiveness of repulsion. Remember that Hazlitt wrote an essay on "The Pleasures of Hating."

When people do not offer subjects, turn to nature, as Mr. Burroughs and Mr. Sharp and John Muir have turned in our day, and as others have turned at times ever since there was an essay. Do you admire the cool deep woods, the songs of the thrushes, the clouds that roll into queer shapes, the endlessly talking brooks, the bugs that strive and fight and[Pg 239] achieve, the queer hunted live things that you see everywhere? There is your essay. Mr. Warner wrote a delightful series about gardening in which he makes fun—partly of himself, partly of nature. Richard Jefferies found a subject in "July Grass." Mr. Belloc gives the spirit of the primeval currents of air that bore the ships of our forefathers in his essay, "On a Great Wind." California sequoias, red-eyed vireos, the pig in his pen, the silly hens in their yard, friendly dogs, a group of willows, a view from a mountain-top, trees that rush past as you skim the road in your car, there's hardly a phase of nature that does not offer an essay, have you but the eyes to see and the heart to warm. One caution must be given. This kind of essay will try to lure you into words that seem poetic but really lie; beware that you tell the truth, for a sunset, glorious though it is, is still a sunset. For the higher imaginative flights we reserve our verse. On the other hand, scientific analysis is not for the essay; it is too impersonal. Nature, as seen in the informal essay, is the nature of emotion that keeps its balance through humor and sanity. Do not, then, write an essay about nature unless you are sure of your balance, unless you are sure that you can tell the truth.

But the essayist does not stop with the creations in nature; he goes on to the works of man. He sees the exquisite beauty of a deftly guided mathematical problem, the answer marshaled to its post in order, he feels the exultation of a majestic pumping station, he knows the wonder of the inspiration of artists. As you pass the steel skeleton of the skyscraper, or see the liner gliding up the harbor, or thrill to the locomotive that paws off across the miles, or stand in awe and watch the uncanny linotype machine at its weird mysteries, you may find your subject all ready for the expression. Mr. Joseph Husband finds the romance of these.[84] Books, too, chats with your favorite authors, trips through[Pg 240] art galleries, listening to concerts, finding the wonders of the surgeon,—all these, as they appeal to you, as you react to them, as they disclose a meaning, are fit subjects for your essay. Thus Mr. Crothers writes in "The Hundred Worst Books."

Men, nature, things, all are at your beck if you but keenly feel their appeal, if you have an honest thought about them. As you treat them do not hesitate to use the word "I"; in the essay we expect the word, we look for it, we miss it when it eludes us, for the great charm of the informal essay is its personal note, its revelation of the heart of the writer.

Since the essay is urbanely personal, it does not take itself too seriously. Our definition declared that the essayist will not try to force his views upon his reader nor hold them too feverishly himself. If you are militant about a subject, you should write, not an informal essay, but a treatise or an argument in which full play will be given to your cudgels. If you violently believe in woman-suffrage—as you well may—so that you can be only dead-serious about it, do not write an informal essay. For the essay aims at the spirit as well as the intellect, hopes to create a glow in the reader as well as to convince him of a truth. You should write an informal essay when you are in the mood of Sir Roger de Coverley as he remarked, "There is much to be said on both sides." This does not mean that you should write spinelessly—not in the least; it means only that you should be an artist rather than a blind reformer. Sometimes the mind wishes to go upon excursion, to give play to the "wanton heed and giddy cunning" that are in the heart. The essay, says Richard Middleton, "should have the apparent aimlessness of life, and, like life, its secret purpose." It may be mere "exuberant capering round a discovered truth," to borrow Mr. Chesterton's phrase. Again, it may feel the length of the shadows, the cold breath of the mists of the still, unpierced places. The essay does not deny the shadows; it rather believes[Pg 241] in riding up to the guns with a smile and the gesture of courtesy. It sees the truth always, but it also prefers not to be a pest in declaring the truth disagreeably. "Therefore we choose to dally with visions." Many an informal essay has been written on "Death," but not in the mood of the theologian. The essay has about it the exquisite flavor of personality such as we find in the cavalier lads who rode to feasting or to death with equal grace and charm. The real essay ought not to leave its reader uncomfortable; it leaves to the militant writers to work such mischief.

Do not, therefore, ever allow your essay to become a sermon, for to the sermon there is only one side. And do not try to wrench a moral from everything. If you do, the moral will be anæmic and thin. Do not, after watching brooks, be seized with a desire to have your reader "content as they are." Nor, after the locomotive has melted into the distance shall you buttonhole your reader and bid him, like the engine, be up and doing! Better is it to play pranks with respectability and logic. Stevenson's ability to write charming essays came partly from the fact that, as Barrie has said of him, "He was the spirit of boyhood tugging at the skirts of this old world of ours and compelling it to come back and play." Mr. Chesterton often inspires us to do some really new thinking by his ridiculous contentions. Where but in the essay could a man uphold the belief that Faith is Nonsense and perhaps Nonsense is Faith?

In fact, humor is always present in the informal essay. It may be grave or even sad, it is never really boisterous, it is best subtle and quiet, but of whatever kind it should be present. Meredith said "humor is the ability to detect ridicule of those we love without loving them the less." Note, in the light of these words, John Brown's description of his friend Jeems: "Jeems's face was so extensive, and met you so formidably and at once, that it mainly composed his whole; and such a face! Sydney Smith used to say of a certain[Pg 242] quarrelsome man, 'His very face is a breach of the peace.' Had he seen our friend's he would have said that he was the imperative mood on two (very small) legs, out on business in a blue greatcoat." Lamb had the gentle humor in exquisite degree, kindly and shrewd. When the little chimney-sweep laughed at him for falling in the street Lamb thought, "there he stood ... with such a maximum of glee and minimum of mischief, in his mirth—for the grin of a genuine sweep hath absolutely no malice in it—that I could have been content, if the honor of a gentleman might endure it, to have remained his butt and mockery till midnight." The humor is often ironic, frequently dry and lurking, but kindly still, for the essayist loves his fellow man.

Since the essay is not super-serious, it need not be too conscientiously thorough and exhaustive. It must, to be sure, have some point, some core of thought, must meditate, but it need not reach a final conclusion. It often believes, with Stevenson, that "to travel hopefully is better than to arrive," and it spends its time on the pleasant way. It takes conclusions about as seriously as we take them when we sit with pipe and slippers by the fireside and chat. Its view of the subject is limited also. It is not a piece of research, it need not cover the whole ground with all the minutiæ. The essayist, first of all, will admit that he does not say all that might be said. Very likely he will declare that he is merely making suggestions rather than giving a treatment. Think how endless a real treatise on old china would be, and then how brief and sketchy Lamb's essay is. The beauty of writing an informal essay is that you can stop when you please, you do not feel the dread command of the subject.

Just as the conclusion may be dodged, so the strict laws of rhetoric may be winked at. De Quincey remarks, "Here I pause for a moment to exhort the reader ... etc.," and for a whole page talks about a different subject! But we do not[Pg 243] mind, for, as has been said of him—and the remark is equally true of many essayists—he is like a good sheep dog, he makes many detours, may even disappear behind a knoll, but finally he will come eagerly and bravely back with his flock and guide the sheep home. Digressions are allowable, so long as safe return is made. The formlessness of the essay is to be held by an invisible web that is none the less binding, like the bonds of the Fenris wolf. We may go round the subject or stand off and gaze at it, may introduce anecdotes, bits of conversation, illustrations of various sorts, may even cast the essay largely in narrative form, so long as at the heart of it there is our idea. "You may tack and drift, only so you tack and drift round the buoy." Hazlitt, in "On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen," uses much conversation. Thackeray, in "Tunbridge Toys," clings to the narrative medium.

Mr. Richard Burton, in the foreword to his Little Essays in Literature and Life, sums up the informal essay thus:

And so we return to our definition: the essay is the transcript of personal reaction to some phase or fact of life, not weighted with an over-solemn feeling of responsibility, charged with never-failing balance and humor and liberty to wander without necessarily arriving, frankly individual in its treatment of life, life as it seems to the writer, whether the essay be about people or things or nature.

Of the length of the essay we may not be too definite. It may be only a page in duration; it may cover fifty. When the writer has said what he wishes to say, he blithely ceases, and leaves the work to the reader. In style all the graces, all the lightness, the daintiness, the neatness that he can command the author uses. He loves words for their sound, their suggestiveness, their color. And since he is frequently expressing a mood, he will, so far as he can, adapt the style to the mood. So Lamb, in the exquisite reverie, "Dream Children," casts his vision into the dreamy cadence that lures us into his very mood. So, finally, Mr. Belloc, describing the wind, says:

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Biography is of three kinds. First there is the purely dramatic, such as we find in the plays of Shakespeare, Barrie, and others, and often in novels of the more dramatic kind, which sets the subject to marching up and down before our eyes, with the gestures and the speech of life. Such biography sometimes covers a whole life, more often only a fraction from which we are to judge of the whole. From this kind of biography we draw our own conclusions of the hero; the producer sweeps aside the curtain, displays his people, bows, and leaves us to our comment. This is a most stimulating form of writing. The reader vicariously treads the Roman Forum, or fights under the banner of the great Alfred, or perhaps jostles in the surge of politics, or dreams an artist's dream, or even performs the humble chores of a lonely farmhouse. The personalities may never have lived except in the writer's brain, yet who that has read of Colonel Newcome ever lets fade from his list of friends that delightful gentleman? Who that has once met Falstaff forgets the roaring, jolly old knave? Stevenson gave witness that almost more than from any one else his courage and good cheer in dark days had caught fire from the personality of Shakespeare's heroine Rosalind. If these persons of the imagination can stimulate, how much more ought the subjects of the other two forms of biography to fire the brain, for they are usually taken from real life, are people who have faced the actual problems such as the reader is meeting, people who have perhaps flamed in a glorious career from birth to death or perhaps have gone quietly all their days. The second form of biography is purely analytical. It watches its subject, follows[Pg 258] him through life, and only after this study sets down its words, which aim to state for the reader the meaning of the life. Such biography is illustrated in the brief analyses of Mr. Balfour and Mr. Hardy on page 148. Here the author is the logical thinker who draws the conclusions of careful meditation and says: such was the significance of this man, this woman. The third kind of biography, the expository, the kind with which we are here concerned, attempts to combine the other two, hopes to present the pageant of life which the hero lived, and especially to make an estimate of its importance, its significance. Some novels approach this form when the author stops, as Thackeray often does, to comment on the meaning of his people and their deeds. This kind of biography attempts to accomplish what Carlyle thought should be attempted, the ability to say, "There is my hero, there is the physiognomy and meaning of his appearance and transit on this earth; such was he by nature, so did the world act on him, so he on the world, with such result and significance for himself and us."

The primary object of expository biography is so to build up before the reader's eyes the figure of the hero, so to cast against the background of life the warm personality, so to recreate the lineaments and so to give perspective to the whole that the reader will know the hero, will be able to grasp his hand as a fellow human being with the game of life to play, and will be aware of the significance of the personality to his times and to the reader himself. To paint the man is the pleasurable adventure before the writer. Sir Christopher Wren bade us, if we wished a memorial of him, to "look around" upon the arches and the high dim places of his cathedral. So the writer of expository biography must plant himself in the deeds and desires of his hero, must gaze steadily[Pg 259] into his eyes until he discovers the center of his being, and must then set down the words, which, if well enough chosen, wisely enough fitted, will outlast the toughest stone. It is in lack of true comprehension of the hero's life that so many expository biographies fail to inspire the reader, in the failure to remember that the writer is not merely "silently expressing old mortality, the ruins of forgotten times," but is trying to catch and record a living force, to live as long as men understand it and are moved by it.

The chief duty of the biographer, then, is to discover the life-problem of his hero, to understand it, to learn how the hero came by it, how he tried to solve it, and what its significance is. Now this is much more easily accomplished with the personalities who have closed their span of existence than with those whom we know still living, with their answer to their problem yet incomplete. Few of us have what Mary Lamb said she possessed, "a knack I know I have of looking into peoples' real character and never expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would in the same case." All the facts of personality, the hints and gleams and shadows, bewilder us at times with our friends, and we regret the lack of perspective that reveals the central life-problem. But when we turn to Julius Cæsar, to Jeanne d'Arc, to George Washington, or to some humble dweller of past days, we can see the life whole, can discover the heredity, the natural endowment, the surroundings, the changing deeds and the shifting acquaintances and friends that determined for the hero what the life-problem should be. With the truly remarkable advantage, then, of this central conception, we can fall into cadence with the stride of our hero marching against his problem and can picture forth the struggle and its significance.

In every biography there is this problem. Your hero is at "that game of consequences to which we all sit down, the hanger-back not least," as Stevenson called life, and the[Pg 260] manner in which the hero perceives the "imperious desires and staggering consequences" will determine the flavor of his life. To turn to Stevenson himself we find a white-hot flame of romance cased in a feeble wraith of a body, the heart of the man daring all things, romping through life a deathless youth before the problem of adjustment between body and spirit. Or take the compounding of that tremendous figure, George Washington—adamant integrity, the zeal which, if unchecked, would often have brought the house tumbling about his ears, the endless capacity for indignation, and with these the patience that left men well-nigh dazed and the self-control that made him god-like. Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered, illuminated, and made significant.

The same result follows searching to the heart of any hero, high or low, and failure thus to reach the heart causes the pallid uninteresting heaping of details that mean nothing to the reader. No architect can glorify the horizon with the silhouette of a cathedral, nor can he even give a meaning to his accumulation of stone and mosaic and mortar, if he heaps here a pile and there a pile, rears here a chapel, somewhere else as fancy directs lays out an aisle, with no central problem of relationship. Nor can you dignify your hero's nature with a mere basket collection of the flying chips of life—a deed here, a word there, a desire at another time. First, then, discover the problem that your hero faced in the relation of his character to itself and to its times.

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To discover the problem, really to understand it, requires as your chief tool imaginative sympathy. Without this your writing will leave your hero as flat and shiny as any conscientiously laundered piece of linen. You are to picture him in relief, in the round, to make him live again, step down from his pedestal, and put his shoulder alongside ours and speak to us. We read in a history that faces the necessity of condensation how William the Conqueror "consolidated his domains"—and it means nothing at all to us of stimulating individual value. We do not think of the recalcitrant underlings whose necks he had to force to bow, of the weary eyes that gladly closed at the end of a terrible day's work, of the frequent desire, which at times must be suppressed, perhaps at times gratified, to run a sword through an opposing subject. We forget, in other words, that William was a man, a personality, a bundle of nervous reactions and desires. But the writing fails, as biography, unless we do remember these things. It is in the discovery and understanding of these details and in combining them into a personality that our sympathy is required. No one should set pen to paper in the service of biography who has not a lively personal interest in his hero, who has not an open, loving feeling for him—saint or villain whichever he may be—and desires to make his reader, in turn, feel the hero's personality. The ideal biographer is he who can peep out through the eyes of his hero at the sights which he saw, can feel the surge of ambition, of love, of hate, the quickening of the heart at success, and the cold pallor of defeat. We have seen a grown person watch with cold eyes a child who wrestles with a problem of digging a ditch or building a dam or making a harness for the dog, gradually lose the coldness of indifference, forget the gulf of years, kindle to the problem, and finally with delight catch up spade or leather and give assistance.[Pg 262] Until you feel a similar thrill of sharing experience with your hero, do not write about him.

Most of us really have this interest but we browbeat ourselves into a belief that a biography, especially an expository biography, must be dull. And, sad though we may be to admit it, most such biographies written for courses in literature or history, are—well, plain stupid. The lives are, to use Samuel Johnson's words, "begun with a pedigree and ended with a funeral," and the dull stretch between is a mere series of events which find unity only in that they all happen to the same person. Such writing is, truly, inexcusable; it is like the railway journey of the unfortunate soul who sees nothing but the clambering aboard and then the folding of the hands for a long dull jouncing until lethargy can be thrown off and it is time to clamber down again. Had the traveler but the insight, or the inclination, he would perceive that his journey is a high adventure spiced with a delicious flavor of challenge and reply. Just so you may find that the writing of expository biography has the charm of life itself. The patient clerk bends over his record sheet and attests the arrival, the departure, of lifeless baggage tossed from hand to hand, from car to car, piled up, taken down and set finally to rest at its destination. But you deal not with lifeless baggage but with the fascinating compound of flesh and blood, of desire and of will, that changes the face of the world. No mere matter-of-fact attitude here, but the perpetual wonder and joy at the turns and flashes of human personality. Rather than be a matter-of-fact man Lamb wisely preferred being a "matter-of-lie" man; the writer of expository biography finds that his material is of such a nature as to be more interesting even than lies. As Sir Thomas Browne said of his not remarkable life, "which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry and would sound to common ears a fable."

Most of us find that the most fascinating study for man is[Pg 263] Man. Not only do we believe that "man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave," but that while alive he is more alluring than anything else. We might conceivably even argue that Socrates advised "Know thyself" out of fear lest our curiosity about our fellows absorb all our effort. But so great is our fear of the formality of biography that we often belie our sympathy and think that only the large dim figures of the past, kings and potentates, who stride through mighty events, are possible for treatment. Our fear is false. Stevenson was again correct in saying, "The man who lost his life against a hen roost is in the same pickle with the man who lost his life against a fortified place of the first order." No life ever existed—absolutely not one—that was not capable of an absorbing expository biography. The true biographer never takes the point of view of the philosopher who said, "Most men and women are merely one couple more." Rather he knows that, however slight in the sweeping cycle of time a stick of striped candy may be, to the child who drops it into the gutter it is of more weight than a royal scepter. He knows, too, that the ordinary, respectable citizen, one of the "common people," though he never is subject to scandal like a villain and never molds kingdoms like the great figures of history, is nevertheless, in his quiet sphere, a fit hero for biography. He sees that to such a person the gaining, through patient years of toil, of a little homestead, is as great a victory as for an emperor to conquer a country, that to be elected moderator of the town meeting or president of the "literary club" is a large adventure. Barrie had the imagination to see that the day when the six haircloth chairs entered his mother's parlor as the culmination of a long campaign, was a day to her of thrilling adventure, of conquest, of triumph. And yet we are afraid that biography ought to be dull!

Fear of the formality of writing is often the cause of our making expository biography a mere combination of the succession[Pg 264] of events which history shows and a few dull comments about the subject, instead of a real interpretation illuminated with the magic of sympathetic understanding. With this fear upon us we write as awkwardly, as lifelessly, as we deport ourselves at a reception where we forget the pulse of humanity and are clutched by the fear of—we know not what. Such a fear would palsy the hand of him who should attempt to weave even the treasury of facts in the following statement with an estimate of their significance. Writing of General Judah P. Benjamin, of the American Civil War, Mr. Gamaliel Bradford says:

But with fear thrown off, with enthusiastic desire really to understand sympathetically, we find no lack of interest. To any one the terrible storm in the harbor of Apia, when ships were wrecked like straws and lives were spilled out by scores, would offer material because of the horror of the events. But only with imaginative sympathy could we write an expository biography of a humble "Jackie" on a United States boat in the harbor. With such sympathy, as we read that after the gruelling agony of long fruitless fighting against the storm the sailors of the United States Steamship Trenton, which was pounding its wooden hull to splinters on the reef, climbed into the rigging and cheered while the more lucky British boat Calliope steamed past on her way to safety in the open sea, we are thrilled with the fact[Pg 265] that of those gallant seamen every one is worthy of record. Some quiet lad from perhaps a white farmhouse tucked into a little valley, who was honestly doing his duty and hoping for the glory of the time when he should be a petty officer, now while the teeth of death are already bared gloriously lifts up his young voice in gallant recognition of his more successful fellows of the Calliope! And yet the official record of the event would imply no possibility of finding romance in this humble individual life.

The "meanest flower that blows" moved the poet's heart; we need not be poets, but only sympathetic human beings, with the great gift of comradeship, to be moved by even the lowliest man or woman. And the objection that rises unbidden and declares us unfit to write expository biography because we have not ourselves known great men is false. Quite truly Carlyle demolishes such objection: "What make ye of Parson White of Selborne? He had not only no great men to look on, but not even men; merely sparrows and cockchafers; yet has he left us a Biography of these; which, under its title Natural History of Selborne, still remains valuable to us; which has copied a little sentence or two faithfully from the Inspired Volume of Nature, and is itself not without inspiration. Go ye and do likewise." Certainly if you face the setting forth of the life of some large figure of the past you have a fascinating pageant to unriddle, to centralize. And just as surely if you turn to the familiar figures of your home town, of your family history, and really lay your spirit alongside, you will find deep significance for yourself and for your reader. For every human being has its Waterloo. Sometimes we play Wellington, sometimes Bonaparte, but whether winning or losing we all tread the same way, and the fight is as significant to each as ever the victory or defeat of Waterloo was to Wellington or Napoleon.

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With this great requisite of imaginative sympathy that sees value in all human beings, then, we set out on our chief task, to find the life-problem of our particular hero. This necessitates definition and analysis. Somehow we must find the sphere in which our hero moved, the group to which he belonged, and must then discover the qualities that he showed in the group which made him a real individual. Such definition and analysis will appear when we examine the character of the hero and the events in his life.

In placing the subject of biography in a group we must take care to unify the character and at the same time to escape making him merely typical. A biography is a portrait, and if it omits the peculiar lineaments that distinguish the hero from all others, if it overlooks the little details of personality, it is valueless, and certainly uninteresting. The names of characters in old dramas, such as Justice Clement, Justice Shallow, Fastidious Brisk, Sir Politick Would-be, and of some of Scott's characters such as Poundtext, Rev. Gabriel Kettledrummle, Mr. Holdenough, indicate the central point of view of the characters but do not individualize them. Before we are really interested in these people we must see the personal traits that give charm. The unifying and centralizing of the character will be accomplished through discovering the fundamental nature. When Cavour wrote, "I am a son of Liberty, and it is to her that I owe all that I am," he classified himself at once through revealing the inner heart of his being. Mr. George Whibley gives both outward action and inward attitude when he writes, "George Buchanan was the type and exemplar of the wandering Scot." So a writer in the New York Nation[91] classifies William James by finding[Pg 267] the controlling motives of his life. "He was a force of expansion, not a force of concentration. He 'opens doors and windows,' shakes out a mind that has long lain in the creases of prejudice. He is the most vital and gifted exemplar of intellectual sympathy." Again, Mr. Bradford, in characterizing General Sherman, writes, "Sherman is like one of our clear blue January days, with a fresh north wind. It stimulates you. It inspires you. But crisp, vivid, intoxicating as it is, it seems to me that too prolonged enjoyment of such weather would dry my soul till the vague fragrance of immortality was all gone out of it." And when some one asked Goldsmith, referring to Boswell, "Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson's heels?" Goldsmith replied, "He is not a cur, he is only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking." Each of these characterizations classifies the subject; no one of them makes him a distinct personality, for thousands have been wandering Scots, forces of expansion, burs. The typifying is of great value in establishing the central point of view of the subject, but it cannot be left to stand alone in a real portrait.

It is necessary that we define our hero by determining the class to which he belongs, but such definition brings a great danger, the danger of making a warped interpretation. At once we must take care, when we discover the type of a man, not to overwork the type qualities, not to make everything conform to this inner core, whether the detail properly fits or not. For example, once we have called a man a liberal we shall need to guard against denying the conservative acts which are in themselves contradictory of the general nature though in the large they fuse with it. Such a tag is likely, if not guarded against, to make the writer the victim of a kind of color-blindness in character, so that he can see only the crimson of liberal, the lavender of conservative. In a sentence like the following there lurks the possibility of overworking a point of view, of riding rough-shod over details[Pg 268] that do not immediately swing into line. Speaking of General Hooker, "General Walker observes shrewdly, 'He was handsome and picturesque in the extreme, but with a fatally weak chin' ... Bear it in mind in our further study." Spontaneity of reaction to the hero is in possible danger of extinction when the biographer has solidly set down the class name. The same danger is at hand when we find and state the controlling motive of the hero's life, as when we say that he was primarily ambitious, or exhibited above everything else courage. We need be careful lest trivial matters be made to appear ambitious, thrillingly courageous, and lest we deny what seems contradictory. In the following characterization of the historian Green by his friend the Rev. Mr. Haweis we find no such cramping effect, but a welling forth of creative impression that makes Green live before our eyes.

But when we have inveighed as much as we need against the dangers of classification, we must swing round to the first statement that for unifying the character and giving it fundamental significance such classification is of great importance.

Merely to find the type to which a character belongs is not sufficient; such a process leaves the character stamped, to be sure, but without interest. We care for living people not chiefly because of their type but because of their individuality, the little traits that set them apart from their fellows. The next step, therefore, is to discover and reveal the individuality. The type to which a character belongs is shown by the large sweep of his whole life; his individuality is revealed often most clearly in the slight incidents by the way. For this reason the personal anecdote assumes importance as adding both interest and completeness that consists in filling in the broad expanses of the portrait with the lines of individual expression. This does not mean that all anecdotes are of value for expository biography; only those which are truly in the stream of personality, which help to establish either the type or the individual. The whimsical nature of the little incident which Mr. George Whibley[93] relates of the "scoundrel" Tom Austin is of value not because it makes a picturesque note at a hanging, but because it really helps to establish the full picture of the man: "When Tom Austin was being haltered for hanging, the Chaplain asked him had he anything to say. 'Only, there's a woman yonder with some curds and whey, and I wish I could have a pennyworth of them before I am hanged, because I don't know when I shall see any again.'" It is easily said that Lincoln was a great democratic soul and a great humorist. These are two[Pg 270] useful tags. But when we know that to the Englishman who remarked, "In England, you know, no gentleman blacks his own shoes," he replied, "Whose does he black, then?" we feel the peculiar tang of the Lincoln personality along with the type qualities of democrat and humorist. After we have classified Washington as an austere, cold, unemotional being, we find both corrective for a too narrow classification, and insight into the peculiar qualities of the man when we read how he swore "like an angel from Heaven" on the famous occasion of the encounter with Lee. For the anecdote is, we see, really in the main flow of Washington's nature. General Wolfe is tagged as a romantic young warrior but takes on both interest and personality when we read of his repeating Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" as his men silently rowed him to the battle on the Heights of Abraham. The personality of Madame de Staël's father is largely illuminated when we learn that though the little daughter sat primly at table as long as her mother remained in the room, as soon as she retired, with a cry of delight the child flung her napkin at her father's head. Anecdote is highly useful so long as we remember that it is not for adornment but for revelation, not primarily for interest—though that is an important function—but rather for proving in dramatic particular the quality which we claim for our hero. Properly chosen anecdotes should be the high lights in the proof of qualities which the writer's exposition establishes in more sober manner. And of course they also serve to show the differentia which make the character an individual, and thus help to complete the definition.

When once we have defined the character, have found its class and to some extent its differentia, we can by analysis[Pg 271] add to our comprehension of it and to the distinguishing personal traits. We must break up the character and see its manifestations and the results of the influences that molded it. Heredity at once demands recognition. It is not insignificant that Emerson was the descendant of a long line of New England clergymen. The bravery of Stevenson is accounted for partly by the doughty old builder of lighthouses, his grandfather Robert Stevenson. Descent holds often, apparently, a guiding rein in directing a character into its life-problem. Emerson's problem was comparatively simplified, so far as personal integrity concerned him, for he was by nature good. Lowell testified that it was perfectly natural for himself to turn to literature, since in his childhood he had become so accustomed to the smell of Russia leather in the bindings of his father's books. The following sentence[94] shows the grip of descent through the centuries which is not disguised by the man's name: "The Mr. Balfour of those days has been altogether outgrown by the Admiralty First Lord of the existing coalition, a Balfour in name only, in breadth of shoulders, thickness of frame, heaviness of jaw, and proportions of forehead a Cecil marvelously recalling, not only his illustrious uncle, but that relative's Elizabethan ancestors." "Men are what their mothers made them," says Emerson. "You may as well ask a loom which weaves huckabuck why it does not make cashmere, as expect poetry from this engineer, or a chemical discovery from that jobber." Partly, at least, the life-problem is determined by the heredity; to each there is but one future, "and that is already determined in his lobes and described in that little fatty face, pig-eye, and squat form," to quote Emerson again even though he lays undue stress, perhaps, upon the power of descent. In the paragraph which follows you will find an interesting account of the ancestry of O. W. Holmes, with a statement also of the essential quiet of his life, which[Pg 272] is nevertheless so often thought of as worthy of biographical treatment.

Then when your hero grows up, what are his interests? To what profession or kind of work does he turn? Where does he find the satisfaction for his energy that searches an outlet? Does he, like Thomas Carlyle, try one and another profession only to fail and be driven, finally, into the one work in which he could find the answer to the life-problem that his personality presents? When his profession is chosen, what are his interests? Does he work out his problem in a[Pg 273] narrowly restricted field, or does he call in the powers of a wide range of significant pursuits? No expository biography of Leonardo da Vinci can overlook the astounding breadth of the man's activity, especially as shown in the remarkable document which he presented to Ludovico Sforza arranging his attainments under nine different headings in military engineering and adding a tenth for civil engineering and architecture,—and finally throwing in, as a suggestion, his worth as painter and sculptor! There were the compounds of a life-problem sufficiently complex to satisfy the most captious. Or if the hero never moves from a tiny hamlet, treads only one path—as Pericles is said to have done between house and office during the great days of his power—the fact is significant. The grasp of ideas within whatever field the hero may choose is also important. The distinction between the personality that is merely efficient in handling facts, and the personality that dominates the facts and drives them at his bidding, that shows real power, has direct bearing on the nature and the solution of the life-problem.

Nor can you overlook the hero's beliefs, whether in ethics or religion, in politics, in the laws of society. In the analysis of Mr. Balfour, on page 148, at once is apparent the large influence on his answer that is caused by his sophistication. The bravery of the Stoic, the voluptuous sentimentality of many religious people of modern times, vitally affect the nature of the character which possesses them. If your hero is by nature an aristocrat, if his sympathies are limited to the few choice people of the world, his life-problem is radically different from that of the natural democrat like Abraham Lincoln. Finally, whatever ideas he may hold about the relation in society of man to man, of man to woman, will inevitably influence his solution of his particular question,[Pg 274] just as his beliefs are themselves partly determined by his physical being.

Closely allied with his beliefs will be his choice of friends. Has he the gift of familiarity, or does he struggle in vain to break through the bars of personality, or is he terrified at the gulf between himself and another? Does he regard friends as useful instruments, as pleasant companions, or as objects of devoted affection? And how do his friends react to him? It is worth remembering that the boy Tennyson wrote, in grief, "Byron is dead!"—not only the boy but the older poet is illuminated by the words. Stephen A. Douglas holding Lincoln's hat beside the platform while the Gettysburg Address was being delivered showed not only the mellowness of his own nature but the commanding power of friendship that Lincoln possessed. The number of friends and the range of their activity—whether selected from all sections of human activity or from the hero's own more limited field—are important.

Finally, the deeds of the hero are of the greatest significance in indicating how he met his life-problem. Did he "greet the unknown with a cheer" or did he like a doubtful bather shrink back from plunging into the stream of activity? Were his deeds actuated by generous motives, or by petty? "If," says Stevenson, "it is for fame that men do brave actions, they are only silly fellows after all." Macbeth strode through large events, as did Robert E. Lee, yet the dominating motives were quite different, and these motives throw the utmost light on the fundamentals of character.

Before you write, then, first define your hero, find his type and his individuality, and then analyze his character to determine[Pg 275] his descent, his intellectual interests, his beliefs, his friends, and his deeds. And remember that these are not in water-tight compartments, separated from each other, but that they fuse together to make the personality, to create the life-problem, and to answer it.

Dramatic biography is almost wholly the moving events of life. The evil of cheap fiction is partly that it will be nothing but events, that only dust will be raised, no meaning found. Expository biography may err in the opposite direction and exclude the "moving show," become only abstract analysis and definition. You must guard against this, because absence of events both complicates the writer's task and makes his success with the reader more problematic. Moreover, since so largely the positive personality of the hero will express itself in action, since largely through events we shall discover what the life-problem is and especially how it is met, to omit the flow of events is to lame the interpretation. All readers, it is well to remember, have the child's desire for more than mere information about the machine; they wish to "see it go." The vitality of fiction is always increased by dramatic presentation. Since you have a real character to make vital, bring to your writing the devices that make characters real. Carlyle[96] well characterizes the denatured style of treating living beings:

The question at once arises, what events shall the writer select? The total course is mapped for you: there is the pedigree, there the birth, and finally there the funeral. These are inescapable. Just so, for most heroes, marriage. But to choose only those facts that are common to all, to make your hero do only the conventionally unavoidable things, will leave him without personality. The question is, what did he do that was peculiar to himself, what reaction to life did he alone, of all the myriads, make? It is true that most men and women spend their time at their profession or appointed task, whatever it may be, but what the reader cries for is how did they spend their time and energy? It is not sufficient that you tell your reader that Robert Franz labored at his profession of music. What you must do is to show how, in poverty, which, but for the inexhaustible kindness of Liszt, would have been unrelieved, with total deafness upon him, with his musician's-fingers twisted and useless with paralysis, and with only slight recognition from the world for his efforts, he quite beautifully subordinated his own personality for the sake of his art and for years labored in unremunerative love at the unwritten harmonies of Bach and Handel that the public might have complete realization of the otherwise crippled productions. When you tell that, your reader will understand Robert Franz, not merely a somebody. Choose, then, the events that all share in common if they are of value in giving a framework for your narrative[Pg 277] presentation, but especially choose those events that in their nature illuminate the personality and complement your analysis.

We think of events as being public. There is also the hero's private life. Often, especially with the more humble heroes, the home life is more important than the public deeds, brings out more clearly the real man than any amount of marching in the market place or discussing in the public square. The incident related of Robert E. Lee when he was President of Washington College is more revealing, almost, of his greatness of heart than a far more important deed of the great General. When a sophomore to whom Lee had recommended more intense application to work, with the warning of possible failure, remarked, "But, General, you failed," Lee quietly replied, "I hope that you may be more fortunate than I." To neglect either public or private life makes the biography less valuable; light upon the personality from whatever honest source is to be eagerly sought.

With your choice made, you yet face the difficulty of uniting events and personality. It is not that you have parallel lines, one of action and one of character; the two lines join and become one. You have the choice of observing the personality through the medium of events, or events through the medium of personality. Of the two, the latter is to be preferred. To understand the personality we heed to know whether it controls and directs events, or merely receives them. Into every life a large measure of chance enters. Does the personality merely receive the events, or does it master chance? Suppose that the following analysis[97] of two widely different characters is correct, just:

Now we know that Mozart's attitude toward patrons was sweetly deferential and graceful, whereas Beethoven rushed into the courtyard of his patron Prince Lobkowitz, shouting, "Lobkowitz donkey! Lobkowitz donkey!!" and when, in the company of Goethe, he once met an archduke, though Goethe made a profound bow with bared head, Beethoven reached up, jammed his hat down tighter upon his head, and, rigidly erect, stalked by without recognition of rank. These actions of Beethoven are emotionally tempestuous. We have our choice of interpreting them as resulting from his personality or of determining his personality as revealed by the deeds. In general it is better to view deeds and events in the light of personality.

Events happen to more than the hero alone; he is a member of society. It is necessary, therefore, to link the events of his life to the current of his times, to fit him into the background against which his life was played. How was he affected, what influence did he exert, what offices or positions of trust did he hold? Often, of course, estimate of the personality will be considerably determined by his relations with his contemporaries. You need to bear two cautions in mind: first, not to misjudge a man because moral or social[Pg 279] standards have shifted since his times; and second, not to introduce so much matter about his relationships as to obscure the outlines of his personality or as to relegate him to less than the chief position. Imaginative sympathy will be sufficient to prevent the first. If you really look through your hero's eyes at the life that he saw, with his standards in mind, though you may have to condemn his attitude from a more modern point of view, you will be able to see that his deeds are quite comprehensible, that perhaps, had you been in his place, you would have acted likewise. We no longer decorate important bridges with the heads of criminals set on pikes, as our ancestors did, nor do we burn supposed witches. But though we condemn Edward the First of England for the one and the Salem Puritans for the other, we can still love both Edward and the Puritans—if we have imaginative sympathy. The second caution requires simply that you make your hero dominate the scene. Now this is not an easy task when you are reviewing, in many pages, the gorgeous pageant of an age. We can easily imagine that if Parr had written the Life of Johnson which he said would have been so much superior to that by Boswell, and had included the threatened "view of the literature of Europe," the poor old hero would have been roughly jostled away behind the furniture. Mr. Barrett Wendell paid Carlyle a tribute of the highest kind in writing of his Frederick the Great:

Make your hero stand near the footlights, then, and take care that he be not in the shadows of the wings.

From a purely rhetorical point of view the inclusion of the events in the hero's life is important because it offers a useful structural scheme for the writing, the chronological order. The exact succession of events need not be followed, surely; sometimes the intended effect will demand a reversal of actual order, but the relation in time will be found valuable for showing the growth of personality, of intellectual grasp, of influence upon the world. Do not, then, neglect the active life of your hero. By presenting it you will find the task of composition lightened, you will help to establish the personality, and you will give to the writing the dramatic vitality that is so much desired by the reader.

However imaginatively sympathetic you may be in interpreting your hero, however carefully you may try to find his life-problem, and however well you may attempt to define and analyze his personality, you will be confronted with one almost insuperable problem—how to tell the truth. In no form of exposition is this problem more difficult. For we are more moved by human personality than by anything else, more "drawn to" a person than to a machine, more affected by the comparatively parallel problem of another human being than by the inanimate existence of wood and steel. Long observation and study of our heroes seems often to make us even less fitted to estimate their worth, for we reach[Pg 281] the state of companionship with them where we resent any fact that does not tally with our formed judgment, and are tempted to exclude it. Mr. Gamaliel Bradford divides biographers into "those who think they are impartial and those who know they are not." Partiality operates, of course, both for and against personalities. To quote Mr. Bradford again, "Gardiner, for all his fairness, obviously praises the Puritans because they were Puritans, the Cavaliers although they were Cavaliers." Adulation and damnation are the logical extremes which result from a too operative blind spot on the retina of judgment. You must remember and cling to the fact that no man is perfect and no man wholly bad. Much as Boswell loved Johnson he had the good sense to write, of his biography, "And he will be seen as he really was, for I profess to write, not his panegyric, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect." George Washington has terribly suffered in the estimates of later times because of the desire to make him perfect. The true expository biographer will conceal nothing that is significant, whether he wishes, in spite of himself, perhaps, that it did not exist.

The best cure for the errors of falsity from over-love or over-condemnation is still sane imaginative sympathy. Stevenson made perhaps the greatest personal triumph in his portraiture when he drew Weir of Hermiston, the dour old "hanging judge" who so outraged by his life all the author's feelings and is yet so presented that the reader loves him despite his inhumanity, really perceives that an honest, even if tough, heart beat in his breast. Another safeguard is absence of desire to make rhetorical effect. An aureole is picturesque, horns and hoofs add piquancy; the hand itches to deck the hero as saint or to fit him out as devil. But you must subordinate any such cheap desire, must write with the restraint that comes from seeing your hero steady[Pg 282] and seeing him whole. Balance is the golden word. "This thing is true," wrote Emerson, "but that is also true." The vulgarity of the superlatives of political campaigns has no place in your pages.

This imaginatively sympathetic attitude must not rely on itself alone, but must employ the other safeguard against untruth, must passionately pursue facts, and facts, and still facts to make the conception of the hero complete and to give the writing that so much desired quality of fullness. The very greatest care is necessary to determine what facts are true and what are fallacious. You are largely at the mercy of your second or third or tenth-hand sources when you write of historical characters. When your hero is a living person you must challenge the report of your own senses and general experience lest you admit what is false or omit what is significant.

And when you have assembled all your facts, and have determined upon your interpretation of the hero, take the greatest caution that you do not try to make the life a "lesson." Presumably a child never more earnestly desires to commit murder than when some little Willie or Susie has been held up as a model. If Willie and Susie escape with only kicked shins, they may count luck benevolent. Your duty is to understand and love, not to preach about the character. You are to give us an estimate of the great adventure of this person through life, and leave to us to make the moral, if any is to be made. If the life has a message, the reader will catch it; if it has not, silence is virtuous.

Finally, the rhetorical problem of forming your material presents itself. First of all do not forget that all the charms[Pg 283] of style of which you are capable should be summoned to your aid. Since you deal with the fascinating subject of human personality your writing should not be dull. All too many biographical essays begin stupidly. When a first sentence reads, "Augustine was born at Tagaste, near Carthage (about forty miles south of it), North Africa, November 13, A.D. 354, seven years after the birth of Chrysostom," a reader hardly finds a warmly inviting gleam in the writer's eye; he continues to read only if he brought determination with him. But when Mr. Charles Whibley begins, of Captain Hind, "James Hind, the Master Thief of England, the fearless Captain of the Highway, was born at Chipping Norton in 1618"; or of Haggart, "David Haggart was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright than thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity"; or of Sir Thomas Overbury, "Thomas Overbury, whose haggard ghost still walks in the secret places of the Tower, was born a squire's son, in 1581,"—when he uses such sentences to introduce the hero to the reader, the ejaculatory "Eh?" takes voice and the reader canters down the new delightful lane where a finger beckons. Whether you use anecdote, or quotation, or important fact, or statement of birth, or description, let your beginning invite and not dismay.

The chief structural problem is, without doubt, to fuse the analyzed elements of deeds and friends and interests and others into one organic whole. If you use the chronological sequence of events, which has already been discussed, showing how each event or group of events indicates the character, you will have an easily followed plan. Such a plan, or that of treating the whole life from the point of view of the central, controlling motive, is the ideal method. If you choose to unify the whole by showing how events, friends, interests of various kinds, and the other manifestations of the hero's life all establish the central motive, you will have a more difficult, though more elastic form. With this plan[Pg 284] you can distribute the details in the points where they will be of most value, can, for example, indicate a change in the hero's nature by approaching through an event, a friendship, a turning of tastes in reading or in general interests. The difficulty here lies in the tendency toward such dispersion of details as to destroy unity even though to gain this is the chief intention. In the face of this difficulty you may use a third method, which is likely to be less pleasing, less artistic, but more easily applied. You can divide your material under the headings "events," "friends," "heredity," "interests," and then can treat each group, by itself, from the central point of view. This is a useful method, and in complicated lives it is sometimes the only method that is reasonably easy to handle. Closely similar to this method is that of dividing your material under the headings of the ways in which your hero affected his times, the ways in which he was known. Thus you might treat of the reputation as converser, as organizer, as literary man, as public servant, as friend of the poor, or whatever heading your hero's life affords.

Whatever method you may employ, you should remember that a human life does not appear in separate, distinct phases, that a man does not seem to be now this, now that, but rather all details, of whatever nature, mingle and fuse into a unit, however complicated it may be. You should attempt, then, to make one main thread, of however many colors it may be woven, rather than a series of parallel threads. Note how Thackeray neatly unites various phases and forms of interest in Goldsmith's life,[99] so neatly that as you casually read you are not aware of the diversity of material—though it is there—but think rather of the total effect.

If, then, you assume the attitude of imaginative sympathy, and study your hero until you know what his particular life-problem was, what his type and what his individuality, and[Pg 285] with love and yet restraint make your estimate, aiming at truth to character and to facts of his life, you will produce writing that will be more than a mere scholar's document, writing that will warm the heart of your reader to a new personality and will be a friend of a winter evening fireside.

In these charming lines of Béranger,[101] one may fancy described the career, the suffering, the genius, the gentle nature of Goldsmith, and the esteem in which we hold him. Who of the millions whom he has amused doesn't love him? To be the most beloved of English writers, what a title that is for a man! A wild youth, wayward, but full of tenderness and affection, quits the country village where his boyhood has been passed in happy musing, in idle shelter, in fond longing to see the great world out of doors, and achieve fame and fortune; and after years of dire struggle and neglect and poverty, his heart turning back as fondly to his native place as it had longed eagerly for change when sheltered there, he writes a book and a poem, full of the recollections and feelings of home; he paints the friends and scenes of his youth, and peoples Auburn and Wakefield with remembrances of Lissoy. Wander he must, but he carries away a home-relic with him, and dies with it on his breast. His nature is truant; in repose it longs for change,—as on the[Pg 286] journey it looks back for friends and quiet. He passes to-day in building an air-castle for to-morrow, or in writing yesterday's elegy; and he would fly away this hour, but that a cage and necessity keep him. What is the charm of his verse, of his style and humor?—his sweet regrets, his delicate compassion, his soft smile, his tremulous sympathy, the weakness which he owns? Your love for him is half pity. You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tents or the soldiers round the fire, or the women and children in the villages, at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty. With that sweet story of "The Vicar of Wakefield" he has found entry into every castle and hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him, and undergone the charm of his delightful music.

Goldsmith's father was no doubt the good Doctor Primrose, whom we all of us know. Swift was yet alive, when the little Oliver was born at Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in Ireland. In 1730, two years after the child's birth, Charles Goldsmith removed his family to Lissoy, in the county Westmeath, that sweet "Auburn" which every person who hears me has seen in fancy. Here the kind parson brought up his eight children; and loving all the world, as his son says, fancied all the world loved him. He had a crowd of poor dependants besides those hungry children. He kept an open table, round which sat flatterers and poor friends, who laughed at the honest rector's many jokes, and ate the produce of his seventy acres of farm. Those who have seen an Irish house in the present day can fancy that one at Lissoy. The old beggar still has his allotted corner by the kitchen turf; the maimed old soldier still gets his potatoes and buttermilk; the poor cottier still asks his honor's charity and prays God bless his reverence for the sixpence; the ragged pensioner still takes his place by right of sufferance. There's still a crowd in the kitchen, and a crowd round the parlor table; profusion, confusion, kindness, poverty. If an Irishman comes to London to make his fortune,[Pg 287] he has a half-dozen of Irish dependants who take a percentage of his earnings. The good Charles Goldsmith left but little provision for his hungry race when death summoned him; and one of his daughters being engaged to a Squire of rather superior dignity, Charles Goldsmith impoverished the rest of his family to provide the girl with a dowry.

The small-pox, which scourged all Europe at that time, and ravaged the roses off the cheeks of half the world, fell foul of poor little Oliver's face when the child was eight years old, and left him scarred and disfigured for his life. An old woman in his father's village taught him his letters, and pronounced him a dunce. Paddy Byrne, the hedge-schoolmaster, then took him in hand; and from Paddy Byrne he was transmitted to a clergyman at Elphin. When a child was sent to school, in those days, the classic phrase was that he was placed under Mr. So-and-So's ferule. Poor little ancestors! it is hard to think how ruthlessly you were birched, and how much of needless whipping and tears our small forefathers had to undergo! A relative—kind Uncle Contarine—took the main charge of little Noll; who went through his school-days righteously doing as little work as he could, robbing orchards, playing at ball, and making his pocket-money fly about whenever fortune sent it to him. Everybody knows the story of that famous "Mistake of a Night," when the young schoolboy, provided with a guinea and a nag, rode up to the "best house" in Ardagh, called for the landlord's company over a bottle of wine at supper, and for a hot cake for breakfast in the morning,—and found, when he asked for the bill, that the best house was Squire Featherstone's, and not the inn for which he mistook it. Who does not know every story about Goldsmith? That is a delightful and fantastic picture of the child dancing and capering about in the kitchen at home, when the old fiddler gibed at him for his ugliness, and called him Æsop; and little Noll made his repartee of:—

One can fancy a queer, pitiful look of humor and appeal upon that little scarred face, the funny little dancing figure, the funny little brogue. In his life and writings, which are the honest expression[Pg 288] of it, he is constantly bewailing that homely face and person; anon he surveys them in the glass ruefully, and presently assumes the most comical dignity. He likes to deck out his little person in splendor and fine colors. He presented himself to be examined for ordination in a pair of scarlet breeches, and said honestly that he did not like to go into the Church because he was fond of colored clothes. When he tried to practise as a doctor, he got by hook or by crook a black velvet suit, and looked as big and as grand as he could, and kept his hat over a patch on the old coat. In better days he bloomed out in plum-color, in blue silk, and in new velvet. For some of those splendors the heirs and assignees of Mr. Filby, the tailor, have never been paid to this day; perhaps the kind tailor and his creditor have met and settled their little account in Hades.

They showed until lately a window at Trinity College, Dublin, on which the name of O. Goldsmith was engraved with a diamond. Whose diamond was it? Not the young sizar's, who made but a poor figure in that place of learning. He was idle, penniless, and fond of pleasure; he learned his way early to the pawn-broker's shop. He wrote ballads, they say, for the street-singers, who paid him a crown for his poem; and his pleasure was to steal out at night and hear the verses sung. He was chastised by his tutor for giving a dance in his rooms, and took the box on the ear so much to heart that he packed up his all, pawned his books and little property, and disappeared from college and family. He said he intended to go to America; but when his money was spent, the young prodigal came home ruefully, and the good folks there killed their calf (it was but a lean one) and welcomed him back.

After college he hung about his mother's house, and lived for some years the life of a buckeen,—passed a month with this relation and that, a year with one patron, and a great deal of time at the public-house. Tired of this life, it was resolved that he should go to London, and study at the Temple; but he got no farther on the road to London and the woolsack than Dublin, where he gambled away the fifty pounds given him for his outfit, and whence he returned to the indefatigable forgiveness of home. Then he determined to be a doctor, and Uncle Contarine helped him to a couple of years at Edinburgh. Then from Edinburgh he felt that he ought to hear the famous professors of Leyden and Paris, and wrote most amusing[Pg 289] pompous letters to his uncle about the great Farheim, Du Petit, and Duhamel du Monceau, whose lectures he proposed to follow. If Uncle Contarine believed those letters; if Oliver's mother believed that story which the youth related, of his going to Cork with the purpose of embarking for America, of his having paid his passenger money and having sent his kit on board, of the anonymous captain sailing away with Oliver's valuable luggage in a nameless ship, never to return,—if Uncle Contarine and the mother at Ballymahon believed his stories, they must have been a very simple pair, as it was a very simple rogue indeed who cheated them. When the lad, after failing in his clerical examinations, after failing in his plan for studying the law, took leave of these projects and of his parents and set out for Edinburgh, he saw mother and uncle, and lazy Ballymahon, and green native turf and sparkling river for the last time. He was never to look on Old Ireland more, and only in fancy revisit her.

I spoke in a former lecture of that high courage which enabled Fielding, in spite of disease, remorse, and poverty, always to retain a cheerful spirit and to keep his manly benevolence and love of truth intact,—as if these treasures had been confided to him for the public benefit, and he was accountable to posterity for their honorable employ; and a constancy equally happy and admirable I think was shown by Goldsmith, whose sweet and friendly nature bloomed kindly always in the midst of a life's storm and rain and bitter weather. The poor fellow was never so friendless but he could befriend some one; never so pinched and wretched but he could give of his crust, and speak his word of compassion. If he had but his flute left, he could give that, and make the children happy in the dreary London court. He could give the coals in that queer coal-scuttle we read of to his neighbor; he could give away his[Pg 290] blankets in college to the poor widow, and warm himself as he best might in the feathers; he could pawn his coat, to save his landlord from jail. When he was a school-usher he spent his earnings in treats for the boys, and the good-natured schoolmaster's wife said justly that she ought to keep Mr. Goldsmith's money as well as the young gentlemen's. When he met his pupils in later life, nothing would satisfy the Doctor but he must treat them still. "Have you seen the print of me after Sir Joshua Reynolds?" he asked of one of his old pupils. "Not seen it! Not bought it! Sure, Jack, if your picture had been published, I'd not have been without it half-an-hour." His purse and his heart were everybody's, and his friend's as much as his own. When he was at the height of his reputation, and the Earl of Northumberland, going as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland, asked if he could be of any service to Doctor Goldsmith, Goldsmith recommended his brother and not himself to the great man. "My patrons," he gallantly said, "are the booksellers, and I want no others." Hard patrons they were, and hard work he did; but he did not complain much. If in his early writings some bitter words escaped him, some allusions to neglect and poverty, he withdrew these expressions when his Works were republished, and better days seemed to open for him; and he did not dare to complain that printer and publisher had overlooked his merit or left him poor. The Court's face was turned from honest Oliver; the Court patronized Beattie. The fashion did not shine on him; fashion adored Sterne; fashion pronounced Kelly to be the great writer of comedy of his day. A little—not ill-humor—but plaintiveness—a little betrayal of wounded pride which he showed renders him not the less amiable. The author of the Vicar of Wakefield had a right to protest when Newbery kept back the manuscript for two years; had a right to be a little peevish with Sterne,—a little angry when Colman's actors declined their parts in his delightful comedy, when the manager refused to have a scene painted for it and pronounced its damnation before hearing. He had not the great public with him; but he had the noble Johnson and the admirable Reynolds and the great Gibbon and the great Burke and the great Fox,—friends and admirers illustrious indeed, as famous as those who, fifty years before, sat round Pope's table.

Nobody knows, and I dare say Goldsmith's buoyant temper kept[Pg 291] no account of, all the pains which he endured during the early period of his literary career. Should any man of letters in our day have to bear up against such, Heaven grant he may come out of the period of misfortune with such a pure, kind heart as that which Goldsmith obstinately bore in his breast! The insults to which he had to submit were shocking to read of,—slander, contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity, perverting his commonest motives and actions. He had his share of these; and one's anger is roused at reading of them, as it is at seeing a woman insulted or a child assaulted, at the notion that a creature so very gentle and weak, and full of love, should have to suffer so. And he had worse than insult to undergo,—to own to fault, and deprecate the anger of ruffians. There is a letter of his extant to one Griffiths, a bookseller, in which poor Goldsmith is forced to confess that certain books sent by Griffiths are in the hands of a friend from whom Goldsmith had been forced to borrow money. "He was wild, sir," Johnson said, speaking of Goldsmith to Boswell, with his great, wise benevolence and noble mercifulness of heart,—"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is no more." Ah! if we pity the good and weak man who suffers undeservedly, let us deal very gently with him from whom misery extorts not only tears but shame; let us think humbly and charitably of the human nature that suffers so sadly and falls so low. Whose turn may it be to-morrow? What weak heart, confident before trial, may not succumb under temptation invincible? Cover the good man who has been vanquished,—cover his face and pass on.

For the last half-dozen years of his life Goldsmith was far removed from the pressure of any ignoble necessity, and in the receipt, indeed, of a pretty large income from the booksellers, his patrons. Had he lived but a few years more, his public fame would have been as great as his private reputation, and he might have enjoyed alive part of that esteem which his country has ever since paid to the vivid and versatile genius who has touched on almost every subject of literature, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Except in rare instances, a man is known in our profession and esteemed as a skilful workman years before the lucky hit which trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular author. In the strength of his age and the dawn of his reputation, having for backers and[Pg 292] friends the most illustrious literary men of his time, fame and prosperity might have been in store for Goldsmith had fate so willed it, and at forty-six had not sudden disease taken him off. I say prosperity rather than competence; for it is probable that no sum could have put order into his affairs, or sufficed for his irreclaimable habits of dissipation. It must be remembered that he owed £2000 when he died. "Was ever poet," Johnson asked, "so trusted before?" As has been the case with many another good fellow of his nation, his life was tracked and his substance wasted by crowds of hungry beggars and lazy dependents. If they came at a lucky time (and be sure they knew his affairs better than he did himself, and watched his pay-day), he gave them of his money; if they begged on empty-purse day, he gave them his promissory bills, or he treated them to a tavern where he had credit, or he obliged them with an order upon honest Mr. Filby for coats,—for which he paid as long as he could earn, and until the shears of Filby were to cut for him no more. Staggering under a load of debt and labor; tracked by bailiffs and reproachful creditors; running from a hundred poor dependents, whose appealing looks were perhaps the hardest of all pains for him to bear; devising fevered plans for the morrow, new histories, new comedies, all sorts of new literary schemes; flying from all these into seclusion, and out of seclusion into pleasure,—at last, at five-and-forty death seized him and closed his career.

The younger Colman has left a touching reminiscence of him:

"I was only five years old," he says, "when Goldsmith took me on his knee one evening whilst he was drinking coffee with my father, and began to play with me,—which amiable act I returned, with the ingratitude of a peevish brat, by giving him a very smart slap on the face: it must have been a tingler, for it left the marks of my spiteful paw on his check. This infantile outrage was followed by summary justice, and I was locked up by my indignant father in an adjoining room to undergo solitary imprisonment in the dark. Here I began to howl and scream most abominably, which was no bad step toward my liberation, since those who were not inclined to pity me might be likely to set me free for the purpose of abating a nuisance.

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"At length a generous friend appeared to extricate me from jeopardy; and that generous friend was no other than the man I had so wantonly molested by assault and battery. It was the tender-hearted Doctor himself, with a lighted candle in his hand and a smile upon his countenance, which was still partially red from the effects of my petulance. I sulked and sobbed as he fondled and soothed, till I began to brighten. Goldsmith seized the propitious moment of returning good-humor, when he put down the candle and began to conjure. He placed three hats, which happened to be in the room, and a shilling under each: the shillings, he told me, were England, France, and Spain. 'Hey, presto cockalorum!' cried the Doctor; and lo, on uncovering the shillings, which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat, they were all found congregated under one! I was no politician at five years old, and therefore might not have wondered at the sudden revolution which brought England, France, and Spain all under one crown; but as also I was no conjuror, it amazed me beyond measure.... From that time, whenever the Doctor came to visit my father, 'I plucked his gown to share the good man's smile; a game at romps constantly ensued, and we were always cordial friends and merry playfellows. Our unequal companionship varied somewhat as to sports as I grew older; but it did not last long: my senior playmate died in his forty-fifth year, when I had attained my eleventh.... In all the numerous accounts of his virtues and foibles, his genius and absurdities, his knowledge of nature and ignorance of the world, his 'compassion for another's woes' was always predominant; and my trivial story of his humoring a forward child weighs but as a feather in the recorded scale of his benevolence."

Think of him reckless, thriftless, vain, if you like,—but merciful, gentle, generous, full of love and pity. He passes out of our life, and goes to render his account beyond it. Think of the poor pensioners weeping at his grave; think of the noble spirits that admired and deplored him; think of the righteous pen that wrote his epitaph, and of the wonderful and unanimous response of affection with which the world has paid back the love he gave it. His humor delighting us still, his song fresh and beautiful as when he first charmed with it, his words in all our mouths, his very weaknesses[Pg 294] beloved and familiar,—his benevolent spirit seems still to smile upon us, to do gentle kindnesses, to succor with sweet charity; to soothe, caress, and forgive; to plead with the fortunate for the unhappy and the poor.

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Two main sources exist from which you can get the material for expository themes: books, including magazines and papers; and lectures or interviews of any kind. Libraries differ greatly in the degree of convenience, and some lecturers are much more readily intelligible than others, and their lectures much more easily codified in notes. Even the most conveniently arranged library, with the most accommodating librarian, is rather formidable unless one knows the method of approach. And until one has thought out the problem of taking notes from lectures, even the most intelligible speaker presents great difficulties. Perhaps a few words here will be of some use in unriddling the mysteries.

First of all a word needs to be said about the greatest slavery of modern times—slavery to the printed word. "I read it in a book!" is still for many people sufficient reason for believing anything, however untrue, illogical, impossible it may be. It is well to remember that nearly everybody writes books and yet very few of us are wise. Obviously, not everything can be authoritative, especially when it is contradicted in the next book. A reader without a good steadying sense of balance, a shrewd determination to weigh what he reads and judge of its value for himself is as helpless as a man in a whirlpool. You need not be too stiff-necked toward a book, need not deny for the mere sake of denial, but you do need to stand off and regard every book with reasonable caution. Sometimes you can see for yourself that what is said is not true. Sometimes you can at once feel that the spirit of the book is unsafe, wild, unthinking. Sometimes you will detect at once a blinding prejudice.[Pg 298] Then be cautious. If the subject is unknown to you, so that you have no safe basis for judgment about it, you are, to look the matter squarely in the face, at the mercy of the book. But shrewd inquiries as to the author's reputation, his opportunities for knowledge of the subject, and an ever-watchful eye for reasonableness and good judgment, will save you from many mistakes. And always remember that the mere fact of a statement's being in print does not make it more true than it was when merely oral. Don't, then, believe a printed statement which you would hotly deny if you heard it from the lips of some one. It is a matter of intellectual self-respect to read and judge, not to read and blindly swallow.

Whether you read or listen, you will need to make notes. It would be delightful if our flattering feeling that we can remember whatever we read or hear were true—the trouble is, it is not. It is better to play safe and have the record in notes, than to be too independent and find a blank in your mind when time to write arrives.

The chief virtue in note-taking is economy. Economy saves time, space, effort. The three interweave and are inextricable, in the total, but may be somewhat distinguished. As to time: there is no virtue whatever in slaving for hours over notes that need only a few minutes. Notes are tools: their object is temporary, to be of service for composition or future reference; they are not an object in themselves. Do not worship them. On the other hand, since dull tools will not cut, don't slight them. No greater pity can exist than for the pale student who wrinkles her brow—it usually is her brow—and attempts to make of notes a complete transcription of a lecture or a book, with each comma and every letter in proper sequence joined—only to pack the notes away in a box in the attic—or perhaps burn them! A builder who should have too meticulous care for his scaffolding is in danger of never seeing his building completed.[Pg 299] Notes seek essentials, and therefore time should not be wasted on non-essentials. But, since slovenly, ill-assorted, illegible notes require extraordinary time for deciphering and arranging, it is of the greatest importance that you conserve your future minutes by making your notes neat, ordered, legible. Any abbreviations that you can surely remember are most useful. A complete sentence—which really has no special need for completeness—that you cannot read is worthless, but a few words that indicate the gist of the thought, and are immediately legible, are most valuable. Moreover, if you take time enough for every word, you are in danger of becoming so engrossed in penmanship as to lose the broad sweep of the lecture or book. Notes must drive toward unity and away from chaos. Your first principle, then, should be to set down neatly what will be of real service, and let the rest go.

As to space—any one who has made manuscripts from notes has learned how irritating, how bewildering a huge mass of material can be. Some subjects require such a mass, and in such a case the note-taker will use as much space as he needs. But economy, which is the cardinal virtue, will require as little diffusion, as great concentration as possible. If you can succeed in including everything of value on one sheet, instead of scattering it over several, you are to be congratulated. Only, be sure that you do not neglect something of real value. You can often save much space and effort and the use of stores of connecting words and phrases if you will indent and subordinate sub-topics so that the eye will show the relation at once. Such practice is admirable mental training, also, for it teaches the listener or reader to keep his brain detached for seeing relationships, for grasping the parts in relation to the whole and to each other. If interesting remarks which do not bear directly upon the main subject attract with sufficient intensity to make record worth while, set them down in brackets, to indicate their nature.[Pg 300] Remembering, then, that a concentrated barrage is of more value in attack than scattered fire, use as little space as may suffice for the essentials. That is the second principle.

As to effort, remember that the old sea-captain whose boat was so leaky that he declared he had pumped the whole Atlantic through it on one voyage would have entered port more easily with a better boat. If you do not take time and pains for grouping and ordering as you make your notes, be sure that you will have much pumping to do when the article is to be made. Grouping and ordering require concentration in reading or listening—but there is no harm in that. You ought to be able to write one thing and listen to another at the same time. Watch especially for any indication in a lecture of change in topic. And don't be bothered by the demands of formal rhetoric: if a complete sentence stands in your way, set your foot on it and "get the stuff." And, of course, avoid a feverish desire to set down every word that may be uttered; any one who has seen the notebooks of students in which reports of lectures begin with such records as "This morning, in pursuance of our plan, we shall consider the topic mentioned last time, namely,—etc." become aware of the enormous waste of energy that college students show. Essentials, set down in athletic leanness—that is the ideal.

In taking notes from books, people differ greatly. Some use a separate slip for each note, and much can be said in commendation of this system. Some are able to heap everything together and then divine where each topic is. In any case, strive for economy, catch the "high spots," and as far as possible keep like with like, notes on the same topic together. It is always well, often imperative, to jot down the source of each note, so that you can either verify or later judge of the value in the light of the worth of the source.

Note-taking, in other words, is a matter of brains and common sense: brains to see what is important, and sense[Pg 301] to see that neatness and order are essential to true economy, the great virtue of notes.

With the best of intentions, then, you enter the library. Since each library is arranged on a somewhat individual scheme, and different collections have different materials, you will need to examine the individual library. A wise student will inquire at the desk for any pamphlet that may help to unriddle the special system. Librarians are benevolent people, do not wish to choke you, and are glad to answer any reasonable question. If your questions are formless, if you really do not know what you want, sit down on the steps and think it over until you do, and then enter boldly and politely ask for information. Don't, if you wish to learn about ship subsidies, for example, stroll in and inquire for "Some'n 'bout boats?" The complimentarily implied power of reading your mind is not especially welcome to even a librarian who is subject to vanity—and incidentally he may think that you are irresponsible. Any one who has been connected with a college library knows that the notorious questions such as "Have you Homer's Eyelid?" are not uncommon—and seldom bring desired results.

Since you have entered for information, summon all your resourcefulness to try every possibility before you agree that there is no help for you there. You can use the Card Catalogue, the Reference Books, the Indexes, Year-Books and Magazine Guides, and finally, if every other source fails, can lay your troubles before the librarian—but not until you have fought bravely. Too many students are faint-hearted: if they wish for information about, let us say, employers' liability, and do not at once find a package of information ready-wrapped, they sigh, and then smile, and then brightly inform the instructor, "The library hasn't a single word about that subject!" The Card Catalogue does not list employers' liability, let us say, and you do not know any authors who have written on the subject. Do not[Pg 302] despair; look up insurance, workmen, accidents, social legislation, government help, and other such titles until your brain can think of nothing more. Only then resort to outside help.

The Card Catalogue will contain a card for each book in the library: if you know the title, look for it. If you know the author but not the title, look for the "author card." If you know neither author nor title, look for the general subject heading. For each book will usually have the three cards of subject, author, and title. If the subject is a broad one, such, for example, as Engineering, do not set yourself the task of looking through every card, but, if you wish for a treatise on the history of engineering, look for the word History, in the engineering cards, and then examine what books may be collected under that heading. If you find cross references, that is, a recommendation to "see" other individual cards, or other subject headings, do not overlook the chance to gain added information.

Most of us too often forget the encyclopædias. If the catalogue has been exhausted, then see what the encyclopædias may contain. Look in the volume that contains the index, first, for often a part of an article will tell you exactly what you wish, but the article as a whole will not be listed under the subject that you are seeking. The Encyclopædia Britannica, the New International, the Nelson's Loose Leaf will be of service on general topics. For agriculture consult Bailey's Encyclopædia. For religion see the Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (Scribner), the Jewish Encyclopædia, the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopædia of Religious Knowledge (Funk and Wagnalls), the Catholic Encyclopædia (Robert Appleton).

For dictionaries you will find the Murray's New English Dictionary, often called the Oxford Dictionary, The Standard Dictionary, The Century, Webster's New International, Black's Law Dictionary and others.

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Often you will wish to find contemporary, immediate material. The magazines are regularly catalogued in the Reader's Guide, month by month, with a combined quarterly and yearly and then occasional catalogue, with the articles listed under the subject and the title or author. Use your resourcefulness here, as you did in the card catalogue, and do not give up. Poole's Index will also help.

Many annuals are of value. The World Almanac has a bewildering mass of information, as does the Eagle Almanac for New York City and Long Island especially. The Canadian Annual Review, the Statesman's Year-Book, Heaton's Annual (Canadian), the New International Year Book, which is "a compendium of the world's progress for the year," the Annual Register (English), the Navy League Annual (English, but inclusive), and the American Year-Book, among others, will be of service. Often these books will give you the odd bit of information that you have hunted for in vain elsewhere. For engineering, the Engineering Index (monthly and collected) is useful.

For biography you will find Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography useful, and Lamb's Biographical Dictionary of the United States. Do not forget the Who's Who, the Who's Who in America, and the corresponding foreign books for brief information about current people of note.

For what may be called scattered information you can go to the American Library Association Index to general literature, The Information Quarterly (Bowker), The Book Review Digest (Wilson), The United States Catalog (with its annual Cumulative Book Index), and the (annual) English Catalogue of Books.

In using a book, employ the Table of Contents and the Index to save time. For example, you will thus be referred to page 157 for what you want. If instead you begin to hunt page by page, you will find that after you have patiently run your eyes back and forth over the first 156 pages, your[Pg 304] brain will be less responsive than you would wish when you finally arrive at page 157. Moreover, there is all that time lost!

Often individual libraries have compiled lists of their own books on various subjects. If you can find such lists, use them.

In other words, the search for material and the taking of notes is a matter of strategy: it requires that the seeker use his wits, plan his campaign, find what is available, and in the briefest time compatible with thoroughness assimilate whatever of it is of value. Caution and indefatigable zeal and resourcefulness—these are almost sure to win the day.