Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 by Various
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Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862
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19 THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. IX.--APRIL, 1862.--NO. LIV.
LETTER TO A YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR.
My dear young gentleman or young lady,--for many are the Cecil Dreemes
of literature who superscribe their offered manuscripts with very
masculine names in very feminine handwriting,--it seems wrong not to
meet your accumulated and urgent epistles with one comprehensive reply,
thus condensing many private letters into a printed one. And so large a
proportion of "Atlantic" readers either might, would, could, or should
be "Atlantic" contributors also, that this epistle will be sure of
perusal, though Mrs. Stowe remain uncut and the Autocrat go for an hour
without readers.
Far from me be the wild expectation that every author will not
habitually measure the merits of a periodical by its appreciation of
his or her last manuscript. I should as soon ask a young lady not to
estimate the management of a ball by her own private luck in respect
to partners. But it is worth while at least to point out that in the
treatment of every contribution the real interests of editor and writer
are absolutely the same, and any antagonism is merely traditional, like
the supposed hostility between France and England, or between England
and Slavery. No editor can ever afford the rejection of a good thing,
and no author the publication of a bad one. The only difficulty lies in
drawing the line. Were all offered manuscripts unequivocally good or
bad, there would be no great trouble; it is the vast range of mediocrity
which perplexes: the majority are too bad for blessing and too good for
banning; so that no conceivable reason can be given for either fate,
save that upon the destiny of any single one may hang that of a hundred
others just like it. But whatever be the standard fixed, it is equally
for the interest of all concerned that it be enforced without flinching.
Nor is there the slightest foundation for the supposed editorial
prejudice against new or obscure contributors. On the contrary, every
editor is always hungering and thirsting after novelties. To take the
lead in bringing forward a new genius is as fascinating a privilege as
that of the physician who boasted to Sir Henry Halford of having been
the first man to discover the Asiatic cholera and to communicate it to
the public. It is only stern necessity which compels the magazine to
fall back so constantly on the regular old staff of contributors, whose
average product has been gauged already; just as every country-lyceum
attempts annually to arrange an entirely new list of lecturers, and ends
with no bolder experiment than to substitute Chapin and Beecher in place
of last year's Beecher and Chapin.
Of course no editor is infallible, and the best magazine contains an
occasional poor article. Do not blame the unfortunate conductor. He
knows it as well as you do,--after the deed is done. The newspapers
kindly pass it over, still preparing their accustomed opiate of sweet
praises, so much for each contributor, so much for the magazine
collectively,--like a hostess with her tea-making, a spoonful for each
person and one for the pot. But I can tell you that there is an official
person who meditates and groans, meanwhile, in the night-watches, to
think that in some atrocious moment of good-nature or sleepiness he left
the door open and let that ungainly intruder in. Do you expect him to
acknowledge the blunder, when you tax him with it? Never,--he feels it
too keenly. He rather stands up stoutly for the surpassing merits of the
misshapen thing, as a mother for her deformed child; and as the mother
is nevertheless inwardly imploring that there may never be such another
born to her, so be sure that it is not by reminding the editor of this
calamity that you can allure him into risking a repetition of it.
An editor thus shows himself to be but human; and it is well enough to
remember this fact, when you approach him. He is not a gloomy despot,
no Nemesis or Rhadamanthus, but a bland and virtuous man, exceedingly
anxious to secure plenty of good subscribers and contributors, and very
ready to perform any acts of kindness not inconsistent with this
grand design. Draw near him, therefore, with soft approaches and mild
persuasions. Do not treat him like an enemy, and insist on reading your
whole manuscript aloud to him, with appropriate gestures. His time has
some value, if yours has not; and he has therefore educated his eye till
it has become microscopic, like a naturalist's, and can classify nine
out of ten specimens by one glance at a scale or a feather. Fancy an
ambitious echinoderm claiming a private interview with Agassiz, to
demonstrate by verbal arguments that he is a mollusk! Besides, do
you expect to administer the thing orally to each of the two hundred
thousand, more or less, who turn the leaves of the "Atlantic"? You are
writing for the average eye, and must submit to its verdict. "Do not
trouble yourself about the light on your statue; it is the light of the
public square which must test its value."
Do not despise any honest propitiation, however small, in dealing with
your editor. Look to the physical aspect of your manuscript, and prepare
your page so neatly that it shall allure instead of repelling. Use good
pens, black ink, nice white paper and plenty of it. Do not emulate
"paper-sparing Pope," whose chaotic manuscript of the "Iliad," written
chiefly on the backs of old letters, still remains in the British
Museum. If your document be slovenly, the presumption is that its
literary execution is the same, Pope to the contrary notwithstanding.
An editor's eye becomes carnal, and is easily attracted by a comely
outside. If you really wish to obtain his good-will for your production,
do not first tax his time for deciphering it, any more than in visiting
a millionnaire to solicit a loan you would begin by asking him to pay
for the hire of the carriage which takes you to his door.
On the same principle, send your composition in such a shape that it
shall not need the slightest literary revision before printing. Many a
bright production dies discarded which might have been made thoroughly
presentable by a single day's labor of a competent scholar, in shaping,
smoothing, dovetailing, and retrenching. The revision seems so slight
an affair that the aspirant cannot conceive why there should be so much
fuss about it.
"The piece, you think, is incorrect; why, take it;
I'm all submission; what you'd have it, make it."
But to discharge that friendly office no universal genius is salaried;
and for intellect in the rough there is no market.
Rules for style, as for manners, must be chiefly negative: a positively
good style indicates certain natural powers in the individual, but an
unexceptionable style is merely a matter of culture and good models. Dr.
Channing established in New England a standard of style which really
attained almost the perfection of the pure and the colorless, and the
disciplinary value of such a literary influence, in a raw and crude
nation, has been very great; but the defect of this standard is that it
ends in utterly renouncing all the great traditions of literature, and
ignoring the magnificent mystery of words. Human language may be polite
and powerless in itself, uplifted with difficulty into expression by the
high thoughts it utters, or it may in itself become so saturated with
warm life and delicious association that every sentence shall palpitate
and thrill with the mere fascination of the syllables. The statue is
not more surely included in the block of marble than is all conceivable
splendor of utterance in "Worcester's Unabridged." And as Ruskin says of
painting that it is in the perfection and precision of the instantaneous
line that the claim to immortality is made, so it is easy to see that a
phrase may outweigh a library. Keats heads the catalogue of things real
with "sun, moon, and passages of Shakspeare"; and Keats himself has
left behind him winged wonders of expression which are not surpassed by
Shakspeare, or by any one else who ever dared touch the English tongue.
There may be phrases which shall be palaces to dwell in, treasure-houses
to explore; a single word may be a window from which one may perceive
all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them. Oftentimes a word
shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter:
there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a
sentence.
Such being the majesty of the art you seek to practise, you can at least
take time and deliberation before dishonoring it. Disabuse yourself
especially of the belief that any grace or flow of style can come from
writing rapidly. Haste can make you slipshod, but it can never make
you graceful. With what dismay one reads of the wonderful fellows in
fashionable novels, who can easily dash off a brilliant essay in a
single night! When I think how slowly my poor thoughts come in, how
tardily they connect themselves, what a delicious prolonged perplexity
it is to cut and contrive a decent clothing of words for them, as a
little girl does for her doll,--nay, how many new outfits a single
sentence sometimes costs before it is presentable, till it seems at
last, like our army on the Potomac, as if it never could be thoroughly
clothed,--I certainly should never dare to venture into print, but for
the confirmed suspicion that the greatest writers have done even so. I
can hardly believe that there is any autograph in the world so precious
or instructive as that scrap of paper, still preserved at Ferrara, on
which Ariosto wrote in sixteen different revisions one of his most
famous stanzas. Do you know, my dear neophyte, how Balzac used to
compose? As a specimen of the labor that sometimes goes to make an
effective style, the process is worth recording. When Balzac had a new
work in view, he first spent weeks in studying from real life for it,
haunting the streets of Paris by day and night, note-book in hand. His
materials gained, he shut himself up till the book was written, perhaps
two months, absolutely excluding everybody but his publisher. He emerged
pale and thin, with the complete manuscript in his hand,--not only
written, but almost rewritten, so thoroughly was the original copy
altered, interlined, and rearranged. This strange production, almost
illegible, was sent to the unfortunate printers; with infinite
difficulty a proof-sheet was obtained, which, being sent to the author,
was presently returned in almost as hopeless a chaos of corrections as
the manuscript first submitted. Whole sentences were erased, others
transposed, everything modified. A second and a third followed, alike
torn to pieces by the ravenous pen of Balzac. The despairing printers
labored by turns, only the picked men of the office being equal to the
task, and they relieving each other at hourly intervals, as beyond
that time no one could endure the fatigue. At last, by the fourth
proof-sheet, the author too was wearied out, though not contented. "I
work ten hours out of the twenty-four," said he, "over the elaboration
of my unhappy style, and I am never satisfied, myself, when all is
done."
Do not complain that this scrupulousness is probably wasted, after all,
and that nobody knows. The public knows. People criticize higher than
they attain. When the Athenian audience hissed a public speaker for a
mispronunciation, it did not follow that any one of the malcontents
could pronounce as well as the orator. In our own lyceum-audiences there
may not be a man who does not yield to his own private eccentricities of
dialect, but see if they do not appreciate elegant English from Phillips
or Everett! Men talk of writing down to the public taste who have never
yet written up to that standard. "There never yet was a good tongue,"
said old Fuller, "that wanted ears to hear it." If one were expecting to
be judged by a few scholars only, one might hope somehow to cajole them;
but it is this vast, unimpassioned, unconscious tribunal, this average
judgment of intelligent minds, which is truly formidable,--something
more undying than senates and more omnipotent than courts, something
which rapidly cancels all transitory reputations, and at last becomes
the organ of eternal justice and infallibly awards posthumous fame.
The first demand made by the public upon every composition is, of
course, that it should be attractive. In addressing a miscellaneous
audience, whether through eye or ear, it is certain that no man living
has a right to be tedious. Every editor is therefore compelled to insist
that his contributors should make themselves agreeable, whatever else
they may do. To be agreeable, it is not necessary to be amusing; an
essay may be thoroughly delightful without a single witticism, while a
monotone of jokes soon grows tedious. Charge your style with life,
and the public will not ask for conundrums. But the profounder your
discourse, the greater must necessarily be the effort to refresh and
diversify. I have observed, in addressing audiences of children in
schools and elsewhere, that there is no fact so grave, no thought so
abstract, but you can make it very interesting to the small people, if
you will only put in plenty of detail and illustration; and I have not
observed that in this respect grown men are so very different. If,
therefore, in writing, you find it your mission to be abstruse, fight to
render your statement clear and attractive, as if your life depended on
it: your literary life does depend on it, and, if you fail, relapses
into a dead language, and becomes, like that of Coleridge, only a
_Biographia Literaria_. Labor, therefore, not in thought alone, but in
utterance; clothe and reclothe your grand conception twenty times, until
you find some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is
this unwearied literary patience that has enabled Emerson not merely to
introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never
reached the popular mind before. And when such a writer, thus laborious
to do his utmost for his disciples, becomes after all incomprehensible,
we can try to believe that it is only that inevitable obscurity of vast
thought which Coleridge said was a compliment to the reader.
In learning to write availably, a newspaper-office is a capital
preparatory school. Nothing is so good to teach the use of materials,
and to compel to pungency of style. Being always at close quarters with
his readers, a journalist must shorten and sharpen his sentences, or he
is doomed. Yet this mental alertness is bought at a severe price; such
living from hand to mouth cheapens the whole mode of intellectual
existence, and it would seem that no successful journalist could ever
get the newspaper out of his blood, or achieve any high literary
success.
For purposes of illustration and elucidation, and even for amplitude of
vocabulary, wealth of accumulated materials is essential; and whether
this wealth be won by reading or by experience makes no great
difference. Coleridge attended Davy's chemical lectures to acquire new
metaphors, and it is of no consequence whether one comes to literature
from a library, a machine-shop, or a forecastle, provided he has learned
to work with thoroughness the soil he knows. After all is said and done,
however, books remain the chief quarries. Johnson declared, putting the
thing perhaps too mechanically, "The greater part of an author's time is
spent in reading in order to write; a man will turn over half a library
to make one book." Addison collected three folios of materials before
publishing the first number of the "Spectator." Remember, however, that
copious preparation has its perils also, in the crude display to which
it tempts. The object of high culture is not to exhibit culture, but
its results. You do not put guano on your garden that your garden may
blossom guano. Indeed, even for the proper subordination of one's own
thoughts the same self-control is needed; and there is no severer test
of literary training than in the power to prune out one's most cherished
sentence, when it grows obvious that the sacrifice will help the
symmetry or vigor of the whole.
Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare
no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be
struck out. Remember the Lacedemonian who was fined for saying that in
three words which might as well have been expressed in two. Do not throw
a dozen vague epithets at a thing, in the hope that some one of them
will fit; but study each phrase so carefully that the most ingenious
critic cannot alter it without spoiling the whole passage for everybody
but himself. For the same reason do not take refuge, as was the
practice a few years since, in German combinations, heart-utterances,
soul-sentiments, and hyphenized phrases generally; but roll your thought
into one good English word. There is no fault which seems so hopeless as
commonplaceness, but it is really easier to elevate the commonplace
than to reduce the turgid. How few men in all the pride of culture can
emulate the easy grace of a bright woman's letter!
Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down
for a year or two. A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot
treat himself to a brief interval of modesty. Premature individualism
commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a
mannerism which perpetuates them. For mannerism no one is great enough,
because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in novel
fascination, yet we soon grow weary, and then hate our prison forever.
How sparkling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in "Peg Woffington"!--but
into what disagreeable affectations it has since degenerated! Carlyle
was a boon to the human race, amid the lameness into which English style
was declining; but who is not tired of him and his catchwords now? He
was the Jenner of our modern style, inoculating and saving us all by his
quaint frank Germanism, then dying of his own disease. Now the age has
outgrown him, and is approaching a mode of writing which unites the
smoothness of the eighteenth century with the vital vigor of the
seventeenth, so that Sir Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell seem quite as
near to us as Pope or Addison,--a style penetrated with the best spirit
of Carlyle, without a trace of Carlylism.
Be neither too lax nor too precise in your use of language: the one
fault ends in stiffness, the other in slang. Some one told the Emperor
Tiberius that he might give citizenship to men, but not to words. To be
sure, Louis XIV. in childhood, wishing for a carriage, called for _mon
carrosse_, and made the former feminine a masculine to all future
Frenchmen. But do not undertake to exercise these prerogatives of
royalty until you are quite sure of being crowned. The only thing I
remember of our college text-book of Rhetoric is one admirable verse of
caution which it quoted:--
"In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold,
Alike fantastic, if too new or old;
Be not the first by whom the new are tried,
Nor yet the last to lay the old aside."
Especially do not indulge any fantastic preference for either Latin or
Anglo-Saxon, the two great wings on which our magnificent English soars
and sings; we can spare neither. The combination gives an affluence of
synonymes and a delicacy of discrimination such as no unmixed idiom can
show.
While you utterly shun slang, whether native-or foreign-born,--(at
present, by the way, our popular writers use far less slang than the
English,)--yet do not shrink from Americanisms, so they be good ones.
American literature is now thoroughly out of leading-strings; and the
nation which supplied the first appreciative audience for Carlyle,
Tennyson, and the Brownings, can certainly trust its own literary
instincts to create the new words it needs. To be sure, the inelegancies
with which we are chiefly reproached are not distinctively American:
Burke uses "pretty considerable"; Miss Burney says, "I trembled a
few"; the English Bible says "reckon," Locke has "guess," and Southey
"realize," in the exact senses in which one sometimes hears them used
colloquially here. Nevertheless such improprieties are of course to be
avoided; but whatever good Americanisms exist, let us hold to them by
all means. The diction of Emerson alone is a sufficient proof, by its
unequalled range and precision, that no people in the world ever had
access to a vocabulary so rich and copious as we are acquiring. To
the previous traditions and associations of the English tongue we add
resources of contemporary life such as England cannot rival. Political
freedom makes every man an individual; a vast industrial activity makes
every man an inventor, not merely of labor-saving machines, but of
labor-saving words; universal schooling popularizes all thought and
sharpens the edge of all language. We unconsciously demand of our
writers the same dash and the same accuracy which we demand in
railroading or dry-goods-jobbing. The mixture of nationalities is
constantly coining and exchanging new felicities of dialect: Ireland,
Scotland, Germany, Africa are present everywhere with their various
contributions of wit and shrewdness, thought and geniality; in New York
and elsewhere one finds whole thoroughfares of France, Italy, Spain,
Portugal; on our Western railways there are placards printed in Swedish;
even China is creeping in. The colonies of England are too far and too
provincial to have had much reflex influence on her literature, but
how our phraseology is already amplified by our relations with
Spanish-America! The life-blood of Mexico flowed into our newspapers
while the war was in progress; and the gold of California glitters in
our primer: Many foreign cities may show a greater variety of mere
national costumes, but the representative value of our immigrant tribes
is far greater from the very fact that they merge their mental costume
in ours. Thus the American writer finds himself among his phrases like
an American sea-captain amid his crew: a medley of all nations, waiting
for the strong organizing New-England mind to mould them into a unit of
force.
There are certain minor matters, subsidiary to elegance, if not
elegancies, and therefore worth attention. Do not habitually prop your
sentences on crutches, such as Italics and exclamation-points, but make
them stand without aid; if they cannot emphasize themselves, these
devices are commonly but a confession of helplessness. Do not leave
loose ends as you go on, straggling things, to be caught up and dragged
along uneasily in foot-notes, but work them all in neatly, as Biddy at
her bread-pan gradually kneads in all the outlying bits of dough, till
she has one round and comely mass.
Reduce yourself to short allowance of parentheses and dashes; if you
employ them merely from clumsiness, they will lose all their proper
power in your hands. Economize quotation-marks also, clear that dust
from your pages, assume your readers to be acquainted with the current
jokes and the stock epithets: all persons like the compliment of having
it presumed that they know something, and prefer to discover the wit or
beauty of your allusion without a guide-board.
The same principle applies to learned citations and the results of
study. Knead these thoroughly in, supplying the maximum of desired
information with a minimum of visible schoolmaster. It requires no
pedantic mention of Euclid to indicate a mathematical mind, but only the
habitual use of clear terms and close connections. To employ in argument
the forms of Whately's Logic would render it probable that you are
juvenile and certain that you are tedious; wreathe the chain with roses.
The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you will be
disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background: the proper result of such
acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words; so that Goethe said,
the man who had studied but one language could not know that one. But
spare the raw material; deal as cautiously in Latin as did General
Jackson when Jack Downing was out of the way; and avoid French as some
fashionable novelists avoid English.
Thus far, these are elementary and rather technical suggestions, fitted
for the very opening of your literary career. Supposing you fairly in
print, there are needed some further counsels.
Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others
the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate
itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to
something which needs no advocate but itself. It was said of Haydon,
the English artist, that, if he had taken half the pains to paint great
pictures that he took to persuade the public he had painted them, his
fame would have been secure. Similar was the career of poor Horne, who
wrote the farthing epic of "Orion" with one grand line in it, and a
prose work without any, on "The False Medium excluding Men of Genius
from the Public." He spent years in ineffectually trying to repeal the
exclusion in his own case, and has since manfully gone to the grazing
regions in Australia, hoping there at least to find the sheep and the
goats better discriminated. Do not emulate these tragedies. Remember how
many great writers have created the taste by which they were enjoyed,
and do not be in a hurry. Toughen yourself a little, and perform
something better. Inscribe above your desk the words of Rivarol, "Genius
is only great patience." It takes less time to build an avenue of
shingle palaces than to hide away unseen, block by block, the vast
foundation-stones of an observatory. Most by-gone literary fames have
been very short-lived in America, because they have lasted no longer
than they deserved. Happening the other day to recur to a list of
Cambridge lyceum-lecturers in my boyish days, I find with dismay that
the only name now popularly remembered is that of Emerson: death,
oblivion, or a professorship has closed over all the rest, while the
whole standard of American literature has been vastly raised meanwhile,
and no doubt partly through their labors. To this day, some of our most
gifted writers are being dwarfed by the unkind friendliness of too early
praise. It was Keats, the most precocious of all great poets, the stock
victim of critical assassination,--though the charge does him utter
injustice,--who declared that "nothing is finer for purposes of
production than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers."
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