The well of English and the bucket

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AND THE BUCKET

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THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

THE WELL OF ENGLISH,
AND THE BUCKET

THE WELL OF ENGLISH,
AND THE BUCKET

BY

BURGES JOHNSON

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AND DIRECTOR

OF THE BUREAU OF PUBLICATION

VASSAR COLLEGE

NON- REFER?

aVMVAO • Q3S

BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1917

Copyright, 1917,
By Little, Bbown, and Company.

All rights reserved
Published, October, 1917

Norfooofi ^rc23

Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co., Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

Presswork by S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, Mass., U.S.A.

WW

TO

"ENGLISH B"

FELLOW EDITORS OF RECURRENT JUMBLES OF ENTER-
TAINING MSS. ; FELLOW CRITICS WHO HAVE REQUIRED
MORE REWRITING OF ME THAN I OF THEM ; FELLOW
WRITERS WHO, I HOPE, MAY DISCOVER SEVERAL PLEAS-
ANT CLASSROOM REMINISCENCES BETWEEN THE LINES
OF THESE COLLECTED ESSAYS

A FOREWORD

Recent years have produced a steadily
increasing number of published guides to short
story writing, lessons in journalism, aids to
advertisement writers, and the like. Their ap-
pearance proves a widening interest in voca-
tional training for the profession of letters. To
one who holds that pure literature has thriven
best as an avocation, and that the extended
development of writing as a business has some-
what lowered its standards, many of these
textbooks make small appeal. To be sure,
journalism, in so far as the term refers to the
business of making a newspaper, has now its
professional schools, where classroom study of
theory supplements laboratory practice; and
results have justified their establishment and
the compiling of many textbooks suited to
their needs.

vii

viii A FOREWORD

But skill in the use of practical written Eng- '
lish, while it is so large a part of a journalistic
equipment, belongs exclusively to no vocation
or group of vocations. There is only one
standard of good English. The fact that the
terms "newspaper English" and "college Eng-
lish" have in the past meant definitely differ-
ent things seems to be an aspersion upon the
college as well as upon the newspaper. If the
appearance of textbooks on certain stand-
ardized, commercialized forms of expression
will tend to continue the distinction between
idealized and practicalized English, their pub-
lication is to be deplored. Let us hope it will
be a force in the other direction, and that our
schools and colleges are recognizing that they
must teach an English which should be the
best as well as the most effective medium of
communication in the every-day social and
commercial life of the communities around
them.

These collected essays are addressed to any-
one interested in the art of written expression,
who enjoys a discussion of subjects connected

A FOREWORD ix

with the study of that art. The opening essay-
was published before the writer had any teach-
ing experience; nor had he then enjoyed the
acquaintance of colleagues who have for many
years placed as much importance as he does
upon laboratory work in English courses, and
who might properly be inclined to quote at
him, in their kindly fashion, "Thou sayest an
undisputed thing in such a solemn way!"
Yet because it expressed sincere conviction on
the part of one who then dealt editorially with
college products, and because he still believes
it to be justified by the attitude of many col-
leges, he is so bold as to let it stand.

Thanks are due to the publishers of Harper's
Magazine and The Century for permission to
use several of the essays incorporated into this
book.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

A Foreword vii

I The Well of English and the Bucket . . 1

II Grammar, the Bane of Boyhood .... 29

III Impression and Expression 53

IV Essaying an Essay 83

V The Right Not to Laugh 98

VI The Every-Day Profanity of Our Best People . 115

VII Ethics of the Pen 129

xi

THE WELL OF ENGLISH,
AND THE BUCKET

THE WELL OF ENGLISH AND THE

BUCKET

Prior to the Civil War and for some time
after, while this nation was building, brawn
and "horse sense" were at a premium, and
the refinements of education at . a discount.
So, for generations, our national ideas were
popularly measured by their practical results,
and our ideals by their expediency. But when
the continent-wide structure was fully reared,
and there came a time for the polishing pro-
cess to begin, we seized upon higher education
as an instrument ready to hand. Until that
time it had been a class affair, confined to the
few, and used as a training for the "unpractical "
profession. The many ignored or tolerated,

l

2 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

or even in some cases venerated it, but seldom
criticized; why should they? But as the
popular mind came gradually to recognize the
possible utility of this higher education, it
began to scrutinize through unfamiliar eyes
the means for attaining it, testing those means
in the light of expediency and practical results.
Widespread criticism resulted, much of it
hasty, unsympathetic, and ill-advised.

Those who directed the affairs of our colleges
met this sudden attack in various fashions.
Some hastened more than halfway to meet
what they thought must be a settled public
opinion. Others stubbornly closed their ears
to popular criticism, refusing even to consider
and classify it, and shuddering at the very word
"vocational"; still others, and let us believe
a goodly number, listened discriminatingly,
studying how to attain to the highest degree
of usefulness ; and in general it was their con-
fident belief that this higher education might be
made to serve the life of to-day without any
betrayal of pure learning or any cheapening of
culture.

AND THE BUCKET 3

To me it would seem that in one field of
college activity all of these various groups
might meet and work in harmony. The study of
English expression might be so conducted as
to serve the practical needs of the life of to-day
without any betrayal of pure learning. And
yet, strangely enough, in this very field the old
cultural college and the new vocational uni-
versity alike are weakest. This is particularly
strange because the vulnerable point is such
an obvious one. Achilles kicks up his heel in
the very face of the enemy ! College students
as a general thing have not been taught to
write well, and the fact flaunts itself abroad,
earning for the college, even among thinking
people, a discredit that it does not wholly
deserve.

Business men of the outside world are con-
stantly having called to their attention the
weaknesses in the practical English work of
college-trained young men and young women.
The college throws the burden for this weakness
back upon the high school, and any teacher of
English in any of our American colleges will be

4 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

able to present an amusing array of exhibits
to prove that great numbers of high-school
graduates enter the college unable to express
themselves clearly or even intelligently in
writing. Such an exhibit was compiled and
published by a Harvard instructor some time
ago from the papers that came to his attention
in the course of his routine work, and the ex-
hibit was least surprising to those who were
most familiar with undergraduate material.

But it is not sufficient for the colleges to
throw blame back upon the high schools.
That involves another question that should be
answered in its own time and place. Surely
no excuse justifies the fact that colleges are
conferring their degrees upon young men and
young women inadequately trained in the use
of English.

It seems to be the case that on comparatively
few of the faculties of our universities and
colleges is there any one whose time is devoted
to the business of teaching students to write
letters, to spell correctly, to express themselves
simply and directly in the various ways that

AND THE BUCKET 5

will be expected of them when they enter upon
the activities of outside life. A certain pro-
fessor of English answers that such work should
be done by the high school. He will admit that
seventy-five per cent, of the examination-
papers in his own course show lamentable
abilities in these directions, but it is not for
him to spend a large proportion of his time in
undertaking work that should have been done
long before. His duties relate to the develop-
ment of good taste in the selection of literature,
or analytical consideration of classic examples,
or the development of kindred matters along
cultural lines. If his work calls for the prep-
aration of essays or "themes", or other literary
output on the part of his students, he soon comes
to feel that a certain percentage of the class
never can write and never will, that their
abilities lie along other lines and that he must
handle them according to his best judgment,
either passing them on to get rid of them or
forcing them into other classroom activities;
so far as he is concerned they are the "sub-
merged tenth", as another professor has

6 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

dubbed them, a hopeless fraction of the class,
dulling the edge of the professor's own enthu-
siasm and gaining nothing for themselves.

These students go out from college, along
with their more capable fellows who have
shown aptitude in appreciation and criticism
of literature, quite unable to write a good
business letter or to present in a clear and
effective way in writing any statement that
from time to time they may be called upon
to set forth.

What are colleges doing to train students to
meet everyday tests in their English com-
position work after they are graduated ? This
question was put to an eminent professor in
one of the largest eastern universities. He
replied: "What you suggest is vocational
training for literature. . . . Now, this is
something new ; it is not yet given anywhere.
In fact, it is only within the last decade that
we have given vocational training for jour-
nalism. Here at we have never con-
sidered the advisability of vocational training
for literary workers. Indeed, we are a little

AND THE BUCKET 7

inclined to fight shy of any kind of vocational
training."

Chesterton, in one of his essays, says that
it is a tendency of these lazy times to let others
do our thinking for us. We let some one else
coin a phrase, and we get aboard that phrase
as though it were a train of cars and ride on it
to its destination. To those who have always
believed that the attainment of a general
culture should be the aim of an undergraduate
four years, the phrase "vocational training"
has come to have an alarming ring to it; it
seems to stand for all those popular influences
that menace the cultural ideal. So that in the
phrasing of his reply our eminent teacher of
English dealt a benumbing blow.

But, after all, why be alarmed by a phrase?
If the business of writing so well that the result
will stand the commercial test is a vocation,
it is one in which every student after graduation
should engage at one time or another. Public
spirit may call upon him to write a clear and
concise letter to some newspaper; his own
business may require him to set forth in a brief

8 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

the peculiar qualities of his particular stock in
trade ; his professional associates may call upon
him for a paper, and his progress may be
largely influenced by his ability to meet this
demand ; and in any case he must write effec-
tive letters. The training to meet this partic-
ular commercial test must surely be an essen-
tial part of a broad, general culture ; for it is
safe to say that the college which does not
supply such training is sending out graduates
unfitted for life in general.

Leaders in many sorts of life's activities have
drawn up this indictment against the colleges,
and surely it is giving the colleges every
advantage if we seek testimony in particular
from publishers and editors, for toward them
are turning selected college graduates who
feel that they have an inclination toward liter-
ary activity. A few years ago the head of one
of our large publishing houses, himself a man
of broad culture and scholarly achievement,
said, "I do not want a graduate of Uni-
versity in my employ because I find it hard to
make a master carpenter out of a man who

AND THE BUCKET 9

has not learned the use of the plane." And
yet that university was making a special claim
to effectiveness in its English courses.

But there is no need to single out any
particular institution for attack. One need
only examine the correspondence of any busi-
ness house which deals in some way with
college students. For instance, many publish-
ing houses offering subscription sets of books
endeavor to secure student agents to work
among fellow-students, or to secure young
graduate students who will return to the locali-
ties where they are acquainted. The bulk of
correspondence with candidates for such work
is all the support to these assertions that is
necessary.

Go a little further than this, and con-
sult with the men who conduct graduate
schools. Surely students who have planned to
go from college into the study of law or medi-
cine or theology or journalism are men who
already must have felt some inclination to
gain ability in writing that will stand the test
of everyday use. Nevertheless, just as the

10 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

college complains of the high school, so does
the graduate school complain of the college.
It needs only that life should complain of the
graduate school, and the blame-shifting pro-
cession is complete, so far as mortal knowledge
goes. Behold, a morning paper fills in this
gap ; for the news is prominently displayed
that a committee of the New York State Bar
Association in a certain report places on two
classes of lawyers — the incompetent ones
and the tricksters — the responsibility for
failure to prevent much of the litigation which
now clutters court calendars. The incom-
petents form by far the larger class, the report
states, and it is largely because they cannot
write "clear and unmistakable English" that
a great mass of legal actions come about.

Assuming for the moment the failure of the
secondary school to perform this one of its
functions, how is a compensating training in
the college to be effectively provided? In the
first place, the college must admit the need and
be prepared to say: "Either we will make a
more exacting demand upon the secondary

AND THE BUCKET 11

school, or we ourselves will supply this training
to our students even though we must devote
time to spelling and composition and letter
forms and language work that the high school
and grade school have failed to provide. We
must do it even at the sacrifice of the time and
dignity of those who conduct the English work
upon our college faculties." To such doctors of
literature as feel that they could not properly
lower their estate to that of doctors of spelling
and composition and letter forms, this work
certainly does not belong. Their work is
distinct and of course essential. And surely
no one can effectively teach that which he
feels it beneath him to teach.

But this doctoring of written English is pre-
liminary to all advanced English work, and
the fact is that college faculties as a general
thing do not include enough teachers ready and
fitted to train students in the vocational work
of composition. Undoubtedly, and often as
the result of accident, some do. But the
method of faculty selection lessens the like-
lihood of such an occurrence. Perhaps the

n THE WELL OF ENGLISH

day is going by when it can be said that the
preparation of a thesis upon some fragment
of the literature of another period is a pre-
requisite for such selection. Let us add hastily
that we would not be unjust to a scholastic
honor representing not merely a thesis, but
several years of intensive work under careful
guidance amid scholarly surroundings. Yet if
such a degree stands for nothing that could
equip a man to teach the essentials of clearly
written everyday English, and if in addition it
does not even represent the possession of that
intangible essential, an ability to transfer ideas
to the mind of another, and if it does not stand
for sympathy or morality or manhood, which
of course it does not, then what in the name of
Tom Taylor is its justification as a prerequisite
for teaching English composition ?

Let us agree for the moment that this
particular form of vocational training should
find place in all of the colleges. Who, then,
is to teach it? We quote the words of the
director of a famous graduate school, who
testifies to the woeful lack of this training in

AND THE BUCKET 13

the colleges that supply him with students.
"Writing," he says, "is the only art that is
taught by men who cannot practise it. You
would not think of sending your son or daugh-
ter to study the violin under a teacher who
could not play, or to study singing under a
teacher who had never been able to sing, or
sculpture under some one who had never
modeled. And yet such effort as there is to
teach the art of composition is largely in the
hands of men who have had no practical expe-
rience in the art."

This of course does not mean that in the
speaker's opinion there is no place for the
man who should teach theory and criticism, and
thereby develop understanding and apprecia-
tion. The finest critic need not be a composer.
An English faculty made up wholly of teachers
chosen because of their practical achieve-
ment in the field of composition would be a
one-sided faculty and much weaker in one way
than it is now in another. Work in practice
and in theory must go hand in hand, and
surely they could best be taught by masters

14 THE WELL OF^ ENGLISH

of practice and masters of theory working in
conjunction.

In some colleges to-day the need of more
practical English work has been ostenta-
tiously recognized, and courses are offered
under titles that suggest at once the most
definite vocational training. "Short-story
writing " and titles of similar import may be
found written in a few of the catalogues. The
existence of such courses is evidence of a real
belief that some such practical demand must be
met, but there have been drawn into the work
men selected with other activities in view. An
interesting by-product of result from this fact
is the output of textbooks written by theorists
upon various forms of the art of practical
writing. It is safe to say that there is no tech-
nical bibliography so inadequate as a whole, no
group of books on the subject of any art so
widely ignored or condemned by the successful
practitioners of that art, as this group of books.
The only comforting thought in connection
with them is that it never would have occurred
to their authors to write them had not the

AND THE BUCKET 15

exigencies of the college situation forced them
into a field where they did not belong. They
have found the students greedy for such courses ;
they have found no textbooks ready to hand ;
and, human nature being as it is, who can blame
them ?

There is no quarrel here with the motives
and methods, in general, of our cultural colleges,
or, indeed, with their attitude toward voca-
tional training as a whole. There is only an
expressed belief that one most essential study
— the practical use of good present-day Eng-
lish — is being inadequately taught. The
selection of teachers is only one cause of the
trouble ; a greater difficulty lies in the attitude
of the college itself toward work in English
composition.

"I have two quarrels with college English,"
says the director of a large and successful in-
stitution that trains boys in mechanics. "One
is the English style which my own classical
training in college left with me. It is hampered
by the effect of classic standards, and I use too
many whereas's and nevertheless's and in-

16 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

asrnuch's. I did not learn vigorous colloquial
English to use for present-day needs. My
second complaint is that I cannot get from the
colleges a young man to teach my boys English.
The college-trained teachers that I have secured
are unsatisfactory because they insist upon
following certain conventional methods in
building an English department in a secondary
school, and those methods do not lead to the
acquisition of good English to meet the demands
of present-day life. I am trying the experiment
of drawing a teacher from the business field
rather than from the academic field. I hope
I have found a young man with the instinct for
teaching, who knows from his business expe-
rience the needs of the life of to-day. I am
watching to see whether he can do for me what
the man of purely academic training cannot."
To such testimony as that from a teacher
might be added the personal recollections of
many students not far enough away from the
influence of college life to have injured the value
of their assertions. "The most definite en-
couragement I ever received in college," says

AND THE BUCKET 17

one of them, "to gain any ability in practical
writing came not from any member of the
faculty, but from the literary activities of the
students themselves, and those literary activi-
ties, instead of being encouraged by the Eng-
lish teachers of my day, were frowned upon
and curbed."

Of course he refers to work in connection
with undergraduate publications — the literary
magazine, the student newspaper, and the like.
This opens up a field for discussion by no
means new, and presents a problem that is
faced earnestly by every thoughtful English
instructor in any college. We are told that
the experiment has been tried of utilizing these
student undertakings to give strength to
college English work, and that the result was
satisfactory neither to the activities inside
the classroom nor to those outside. In a re-
cent article on student activities by a college
president who is facing earnestly many new
problems, the following paragraph is of interest
in this connection.

"But now I shall be asked, 'Would you

18 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

substitute these activities for the studies, give
up the classroom for the lounging-room and
the union?' Of course not. The very ex-
cellence of these activities is that fundamen-
tally they are the fruits of the classroom. But
the point is that by these fruits the work of
the classroom shall be known. We need not
forget that these activities are only accidental
and that the real value lies in the studies and
the teaching. But none the less, it is true that
these activities reveal to us far better than any
examinations can do the success or failure of
the classroom itself. They are, as it were,
mirrors in which we can see ourselves and our
work. If we want to know the effect of what
we are doing in the classroom, let us look to
see what the students are doing outside of it,
when they are free to follow their own desires.
If they do not on their own initiative carry on
activities springing out of their studies, then
you may count on it, however well the tests
are met, that the studies are of little value."

Here, then, an authoritative representative
of the colleges suggests a test of the efficiency

AND THE BUCKET 19

of work in English composition. If the col-
lege literary magazine is the result of a wide-
spread effort on the part of the students to
produce a creditable exhibit, then the practical
English work in the classroom is effective.
But bear in mind that it is not the quality of a
student publication that is the test, for that
quality will depend upon the accidental talent
of half a dozen students in the college at any
given time. The test must lie in some equa-
tion that represents enthusiastic support of
the periodical by the bulk of the student
body, the percentage of the total number of
students who offer contributions to its pages,
plus the general average of merit. Is it an
exaggeration to assert that in any of our col-
leges of, say, five hundred students, the lit-
erary magazine publishes contributions from
no more than fifty different students during
the entire course of the year? If we said
twenty-five we might be nearer right, and yet
presumably the business for which these five
hundred students have come together is directly
in line with such individual endeavor as the

20 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

sending of contributions to their own publica-
tion.

Three generations ago Amherst College took
the initiative in requiring physical exercise as
a part of a well-balanced college course, and
built upon its campus the first college gymna-
sium. Out of that wholesome beginning grew
the whole problem of college athletics, and the
same college that had first recognized the need
for attention to athletics was prompt to recog-
nize afterward the dangers attached to their
growth. Those in authority determined that
there was something wrong in a system that
demanded of a student body financial support
and provided the services of an expert teacher
more highly paid than any recognized member
of the faculty, and then applied those funds and
that teaching skill to the super-development
of a small selected squad of students. With-
out upsetting any beloved traditions, therefore,
and without any great stir, they built up a
new system which should provide skilled
training in all of the recognized athletic sports
to every member of the student body; they

AND THE BUCKET 21

provided athletic fields enough to make this
possible, and a system that would bring in all
of the essential elements of rivalry and com-
petition ; and then they required of every
student that he should take some part in one
or another of these activities, and even made
the mastery of the art of swimming essential
to graduation.

Every one applauds the development of
this policy. It has been, or is being worked
out in many other colleges, and the day will
come when it will be as generally accepted as
is the necessity for a gymnasium upon the
campus.

And yet with this parallel before their
eyes, the faculties of these colleges view with
complacency or indifference the fact that a
dozen or so students are being super-trained in
their efforts to maintain certain college publica-
tions up to an accepted standard. The student
body is being urged for the sake of college
loyalty to maintain financially these institu-
tions, conducted solely for the benefit of a small
group. The result is that neither the college

22 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

nor the small group does benefit, because the
burden upon the very few becomes very great.
It is incumbent upon these student editors to
maintain the standards that they deem worthy
of the fame of their college, and lacking ade-
quate support, they must do so much work
themselves that they have too little time for
the classroom.

It seems reasonable to believe that if the
same intelligence might be applied to the
solution of this problem that was applied to
the solution of its parallel in athletics, a result
might be gained that would help to solve two
or three different questions which are now
puzzling the minds of conscientious college
presidents.

Some little part of the remedy, then, in
our opinion, lies in the proper answer to this
question : how may we utilize undergraduate
publications in training students in practical
English work ? But a far more important step
toward the remedy lies in a readjustment of the
balance in the entire department of English.
Our students are placing too much emphasis

AND THE BUCKET 23

upon the literatures of another day, and too
little upon the best standards of present-day
practice. It seems to be a very natural evolu-
tion which has brought about the present
college methods of teaching English. When
higher education began, there was only one
exact science, mathematics, and the only lan-
guages with a body of literature to serve as the
basis for study were dead languages. The
planning of the curriculum was a simple mat-
ter for those pioneer faculties. To-day when
several other exact sciences have come into
existence, two or three of them far more inti-
mate in their human relationship, mathematics
still holds the center of the stage; and as for
language, while Latin and Greek have retreated
a little in the face of severe attacks, the only
methods by which they could be taught have
determined the methods of teaching English.
Their best standards were dead standards, and
so we are accustomed to value dead standards
of English style beyond their deserts. Their
grammatical constructions were fixed and im-
mutable; so we learned to appreciate the

24 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

beauties of a dead form by studying its
bones. This terrible tradition has its dead
hand upon the English work even in our
schools, and little children learn syntax and
parse a verb, and so are able to analyze the
perfection of Thanatopsis !

In a recent educational journal there is an
article by a high-school teacher who paints
this vivid picture of certain high-school work
in English :

"The pupil first, — the one who has re-
peatedly been called hopeless ! He has sup-
posedly been taught penmanship, spelling, and
grammar in the elementary schools ; he has
written compositions of some sort since he was
in the primary grades ; he has had various sorts
of language work. In the secondary schools
he has studied rhetoric, sentence-structure, and
has written compositions which have been duly
corrected. His errors have been pointed out
to him. At the end of the first, second, third,
or even in his graduating year, he is unable to
write a sentence. I do not mean a good sen-
tence or even a grammatical sentence, but I

AND THE BUCKET 25

mean that he will write as complete sentences,
in his compositions, phrases such as 'of beauti-
ful trees' ; clauses such as 'although he came' ;
and still more frequently will he put several
unconnected sentences, simple or otherwise,
into one mess ; or have his whole composition
an incoherent string of words beginning with a
capital letter, — and ending with a period, if
he does not forget it. I think the schools are
few, indeed, where such pupils do not exist in
considerable numbers, and that the kind of
pupil who does this sort of writing is un-
mistakable to any earnest teacher of English."
It is true that the pupils described by this
writer are of the "submerged tenth", and are
assigned to him as a special teacher; yet he
later testifies to the fact that they all can be
saved by special attention and taught to wield
the English language. Your child or mine
might be among them, normal mentally, but
hopelessly confused by the terminology of a
science unrelated to life, and brought to feel
that what he writes for his teacher and what he
says freely for himself are in different tongues.

26 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

This is at the root of the whole matter. No
red-blooded child in grammar school ever en-
joyed grammar, and yet that was the collective
term to cover his study of English speech ;
and he ran forth from the classroom to chatter
his own language in the streets, unaffected by
the dry bones of syntax, which had rattled in
his ears only a minute before. High school
did little more for him, and he found himself in
college unable to speak and write with simple
and lucid directness, and with no one there
among his instructors who had the time to
labor over such elementary details.

A great responsibility rests upon the colleges.
If there is something lacking in the elementary
training of students, then the college must im-
mediately secure teachers of proved efficiency
in teaching more elementary things. More-
over, if you will agree that an art can best
be taught by those who can themselves prac-
tise it, other requirements of a good teacher
being equal, then have that in mind in select-
ing instructors. With the practical literary
adviser upon a post-graduate faculty, it is

AND THE BUCKET 27

possible that the thesis might be forced to
stand for something even more than an evi-
dence of specific research ; it might be forced
to represent ability in the practical application
of a knowledge of English style, and then
there would be greater reason for making the
degree which rests upon that thesis a pre-
requisite for a professorship in the art of
English expression.

"A greater part of the thousands of manu-
scripts submitted to us annually," says the
editor of a leading review, "are by college
professors, and thirty per cent, of these cannot
even be considered because they are so badly
written." Surely this fact in itself indicates
one point at which the strengthening process
might begin.

"What you suggest is vocational training for
literature," I am told. In this English-speak-
ing land of ours, where a great annual inflow of
foreign speech is constantly dashing its waves
against the bulwarks of our language, what
should our colleges be if not technical schools
for the business of using English? Granted

28 THE WELL OF ENGLISH

that the cultural college does not aim to turn
out a student equipped for architecture or
engineering or the ministry or the law, yet it
should turn out artisans, if not artists, in Eng-
lish, competent to handle the most essential
tool in 'the world's workshop — their own lan-
guage. This it does not at present do.

II

GRAMMAR, THE BANE OF BOYHOOD

Once upon a time there was a little boy, as
th© story-books say. He was servant to a
harsh taskmaster who did him harm. It was
not intentional harm, but the taskmaster's
reasoning powers were atrophied, so that he
blundered forward with old momentum rather
than with new initiative. Every day he ill-
used the little boy, who was his slave, trod
upon his faculties, misled and perplexed him ;
and the victim was powerless to protest. Now
that the little boy is a grown man, and free,
his thoughts often revert to that former state
of slavery, and the rancor rises in his soul as
bitter as ever it was. He longs for the pen
and tongue of a Cicero, a Junius, or a Dickens,
with which to shape withering invective or
revealing caricature.

29

30 GRAMMAR,

Such a confession of animus might properly
shake the reader's confidence, if the writer's
earnestness were not a reasonable proof of
his honesty. At his side is another little chap
assigned by certain melancholy powers to the
same bewildering enslavement, unless the God
of Progress intervenes. I would save him, if
I might, from Grammar, the bane of my own
boyhood.

This attempt at constructive criticism, then,
is inspired not by any personal experience as
a teacher, but rather by the recollections of one
small child who was the victim of certain tradi-
tional methods of teaching the use of English.
As a grown-up small boy, even as a grown-up
small girl, I make my assertions, — for there is,
after all, very little sex in the mental equipment
of a child.

The lad that I remember did not deal with
theories. He learned almost wholly by prac-
tice. In his mental processes he went directly
toward his desires. Moralizations and ab-
stractions come with age, and his little mind
had no place for them. He found the world

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 31

full of new things. His time was taken up with
discoveries of new objects.

For you and me the recurring objective phe-
nomena of life are nearly all found out. Our
discoveries are generally new theories, new
philosophies, and new morals to be drawn from
everyday events. That child had little time
to formulate theories for himself, and con-
siderate Mother Nature had not yet equipped
his mind for the ready-made deductions of
others. In this characteristic he did not differ
from the average children of his day, or of any
other day, for that matter. In a paper pub-
lished nearly twenty years ago, Prof. G. T. W.
Patrick stated the matter very clearly. "It is
a well-known fact," he wrote, "that a child's
powers, whether physical or mental, ripen in a
certain rather definite order. There is, for
instance, a certain time in the life of the infant
when the motor mechanism of the legs ripens,
before which the child cannot be taught to
walk, while after that time he cannot be kept
from walking. Again, at the age of seven,
for instance, there is a mental readiness for

32 GRAMMAR,

some things and an unreadiness for others. The
brain is then very impressionable and retentive,
and a store of useful material, both motor and
sensory, may be permanently acquired with
great economy of effort. The imagination is
active, and the child loves to listen to narration,
whether historical or mythical, which plays
without effort of his will upon his relatively
small store of memory images. The powers
of analysis, comparison, and abstraction are
little developed, and the child has only a limited
ability to detect mathematical or logical rela-
tions. The power of voluntary attention is
slight, and can be exerted for only a short time.
All this may be stated physiologically by saying
that the brain activity is sensory and motor,
but not central. The sensory and motor
mechanism has ripened, but not the associative.
The brain is hardly more than a receiving,
recording, and reacting apparatus."

If you follow this sympathetically, you will
agree that it points out, for one thing, the
underlying weakness of the old-fashioned
Sunday-school. That institution devoted itself

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 33

to an effort to teach small children the deduc-
tions of theology while their minds were not
yet equipped for such things. The struggle to
bring together the practical mind of the child
and the abstractions of religious thought by
means, usually, of untrained teachers, led to
all sorts of impasses.

The little boy of my recollection labored
each Sunday for a very brief period, with the
aid of a perplexed teacher, to discover the
moral in such stories as that of the fatted calf
which was prepared for the wicked and not
for the good brother; or of the smug Jacob
who triumphed over Esau. The beclouded
mentality of that youngster during the Sunday-
school hour led him to seize and cling to certain
abstract answers that he hoped might fit all
abstract questions.

"What are we to learn from the lesson to-
day?" said the teacher.

"To be good," said the small boy.

"Yes, yes, I know," said the teacher, with
a certain embarrassment, "but what else are
we to learn?" And the small boy found him-

34 GRAMMAR,

self lost in the fog. His one safe answer had
proved insufficient.

Abstract morals meant nothing to him.
"Do not lie," said his elders, and yet he was
lying every day, even to his sweetly under-
standing mother, who would listen smilingly
when he told of his encounter with a rhinoceros
on the way home. A lie meant nothing defi-
nite enough. He had never met a Lie as he
went upon his way. He could understand
it if he was told that he should not say to
a playmate that his one-bladed knife, which
he desired to swap "sight unseen", had two
blades. He was fully old enough to under-
stand the wrong of that; but that was not
an abstraction.

I have wandered from my path to emphasize
a particular idea. The little boy of my rec-
ollection never met a Lie among the objects
that daily aroused anew his wonder and in-
terest, or a Sacrifice or a Faith or a Contrition,
and he was far less likely, when glancing out
of the school-room window into the happy land
of reality, to see a Verb or an Adjective or a

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 35

Participial Construction flying through the air
or disporting itself upon the grass. He did
not see a Least Common Multiple perching
upon a branch of the neighboring tree, nor a
Highest Common Denominator lurking behind
the hedge.

It is interesting to note that arithmetic
teachers in good elementary schools all over the
land have been wiping from the slate these
confusing abstractions; they are even doing
away with the use of large numbers, on the
theory that a small boy can imagine 101, and
apply it to concrete things, but he cannot
comprehend as an actuality 7,756,821; they
have found that the principles of arithmetic
may be mastered more quickly and thoroughly
by means of comprehendible numbers than by
means of incomprehendible ones. Yet, while
arithmetic teachers have been doing away with
these things, strange to say, teachers of English
and elementary textbooks on the art of com-
position still hold to abstractions even less
justifiable, until little brains have addled in
their little pates, and children have been driven

36 GRAMMAR,

even to physical revolt at the thought of
"grammar."

Any form of self-expression is an art, not a
science. It has no scientific rules of procedure.
Much time has been wasted on the teaching
of "composition" by theory. For theoretical
purposes a system of nomenclature has been
utilized relating first to parts of speech, and
then to exposition, argumentation, narration,
and the like; and finished products have been
dissected as scientifically as possible and then
reconstructed by means of such arbitrary
divisions. It is safe to say that as a result
much of our classroom teaching of written
composition has done little good and often
considerable harm.

Those who work with college students in the
field of written composition are frequently
heard to assert that the secondary school
failed to do its part when their pupils were
under its care; and, in turn, high-school
teachers universally insist that they are handi-
capped by the failure of the lower grades to
provide this same instruction. It is probable

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 37

that in all of these stages there are various
errors in method, rather than one general
fault prevailing throughout. Yet I confidently
believe that the abolition of slavery to "gram-
mar" in the earliest years would result in vastly
greater strength all along the road.

"But," said a teacher only yesterday — a
woman occupying the position of assistant
principal in a large elementary school — "how
are my pupils to study Latin later on if they
have not learned English by the grammatical
method?" In other words, if my baby does
not learn to walk by means of a balancing-rod
along a crack in the floor, how can I teach him
later in life to advance on the tight-rope?

Here is a curious thing to contemplate :
rules of technical grammar which are necessary
for the mastery of Latin, because it is a dead
language of fixed regularity, are not taught in
Latin, but in English. Yet rules of technical
grammar, which so many elementary textbooks
claim are essential to a child's mastery of Eng-
lish, are taught to the child in English — pro-
found English, at that — on the assumption

38 GRAMMAR,

that he already has a fair control of the lan-
guage they pretend to teach. Let me quote
at random from the latest edition of a widely
used textbook in composition, and from a
chapter intended for children approximately
eleven years old :

"A combination of words performing a dis-
tinct office in a sentence, and having a subject
and a predicate, is a clause. A clause that
expresses the leading or principal thought of a
sentence is an independent or principal clause;
as, If our cause is just, we shall succeed. A
clause that depends upon some other part of
the sentence for its full meaning is a dependent
or subordinate clause ; as, If our cause is just,
we shall succeed. Copy the following sen-
tences, and draw lines under the dependent
clauses," etc., etc.

If my little boy can grasp and wield that, he
already knows English pretty well without it.
What, then, is he to do with it? It will not
lead him to better forms of expression in his
composition. It will not strengthen his vocab-
ulary. He will not hark back to it in future

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 39

years in order to determine whether he is
expressing himself according to the best stand-
ards. Moreover, he did not suffer from the
lack of it when he mastered the elementary
forms of oral expression outside the classroom.

Is it not safe to assert that a classroom
where such textbook material dominates the
method of instruction has done and can do
nothing for him ? He steps from the oral work
of his own home and playground, where he is
acquiring by absorption and imitation such
English as he finds there for daily use, into the
schoolroom atmosphere of unreality and ab-
straction, finding nothing there to win his in-
terest or to make him feel that "English" is
a vital thing.

Listen to a phrase from the preface of that
same textbook : "This book provides for three
years' work, and is intended for pupils who are
beginning to write English. The leading aims
of the work are to develop the child's power of
thought, to aid him in forming habits of correct
expression, and to give him a taste for good
literature. . . . By means of simple exercises

40 GRAMMAR,

in dictation, reproduction, narration, and de-
scription, he is given varied practice in using
the same fact again and again." (The italics are
mine.)

Heaven help the poor little chap ! It may
be well enough for him to assert solemnly
once in his class exercise that, if his cause is
just, he will succeed, but if he is to use the same
fact again and again to demonstrate the various
technical terms involved in his classroom drill,
it is possible that his thoughts may wander.
Mine did, even today.

But let us not attempt to prove the case
by one particular textbook. A formidable
array lies before me on my table, and the very
sight of them seems to draw me back into boy-
hood's classroom atmosphere where book and
teacher were arrayed against me in a seven
years' war. Again at random, from a chapter
intended for children approximately eleven
years old, this time from a book written by
two distinguished college professors: "The
copula sometimes ties together the subject
and a noun or pronoun which explains the sub-

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 41

ject, as in the sentence, John is my brother.
The noun following the copula in the predicate
is called a predicate noun. Find the predicate
noun in each of the following sentences. Name
the parts of each sentence."

Here are a few of the "following sentences" :

A friend in need is a friend indeed.
The child is father of the man.
The trees are Indian princes.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
The virtue of prosperity is temperance, the
virtue of adversity is fortitude.

Eleven years old ! And, by the way, this
"copula" has an unfamiliar sound. Can it be
that new terms are springing in this day and
generation full panoplied from the head of some
pedagogical Jove?

From another book, and again absolutely at
random: "If you observe closely, you will
notice that the complements you supplied in
the last exercise are of two kinds : 1. Comple-
ments that name the subject or describe it by
denoting some quality or attribute of it; as,
The first President was Washington. The

42 GRAMMAR,

complement, Washington, names the subject.
The earth is round. Round denotes an attri-
bute of the earth. 2. Complements that name
the object which receives the action performed
by the subject and expressed by the verb;
as, The Romans built ships. Ships is the object
that receives the action performed by the sub-
ject, Romans, and expressed by the verb,
built. ... In the twenty-five sentences of the
preceding exercise you were required to sup-
ply twenty complements. Write these com-
plements in two columns, placing in the first
all those naming the object that receives the
action expressed by the verb. . . . The attri-
bute complement completes the predicate by
naming or describing the subject. An object
complement completes the predicate by naming
that which receives the action expressed by the
verb."

I beg you to read that last selection once
more, aloud if you please, and then clear the
atmosphere by reciting :

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 43

One or another of the books quoted above
is being used in this country by vast numbers
of children from nine to fourteen years old.
True, they survive. They even pass exam-
inations in it.

And hast thou slain the Jabberwock ?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy.

But they do not go to high school and thence
to college with ability to write good English.

What shall we do with this thing called
grammar? It is an abstract science, highly
technical, however it may be tempered for
forcing into the minds of ten-year-olds, and
it is afflicted with a terminology as obscure
and meaningless to the young as would be that
in the pharmacopoeia. Of course, there is
mental discipline to be gained from close
application to the study of it, but let us use
it, then, frankly for that purpose, and not
persuade inexperienced or incompetent young
school-teachers in our training-schools that it
is a means to the attainment of oral and writ-
ten expression in English.

44 GRAMMAR,

"How," says my assistant principal, "shall
we teach our pupils Latin without it?" Why
should we attempt to do so? I yield to none
in my respect for the study of Latin. It is in
connection with that study that technical
grammar, its rules and its terminology, may be
first brought into use. English has always
been mastered without it, or, may I say, in
spite of it, and its distinctions and terms will
have more meaning and arouse more interest
to a student in high school, or even in college,
if he meets them there for the first time.

" Should you be inconvenienced," I asked a
Latin teacher in a public high school of New
York City, — that city whose elementary
schools have been so notoriously enslaved in
this field, "if your pupils came to you with no
knowledge whatever of the terms and defini-
tions of English grammar?" The question in
such extreme form was apparently new to her,
and she answered it thoughtfully: "No, I
should not. The technical grammar that our
pupils need has to be taught to them all over
again after they come to us. Either they have

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 45

forgotten all they ever learned or else they can-
not apply it."

If they did not apply to English this strange
gibberish that was thrust upon them in their
elementary years, should they be expected to
set it reverently aside for application to Latin
later on? That they do not apply it to their
English is most effectively proved by a recent
careful investigation throughout the schools
of Kansas City, supplemented by similar in-
vestigations in Columbia, Missouri; Bonham,
Texas; and Detroit, Michigan. A survey of
all discovered errors in the children's oral
speech and in their written papers indicated
that the percentage of common grammatical
errors in the sixth and seventh grades (in
which grades technical grammar is taught)
was actually higher than the percentage of
errors for all other grades. After summarizing
the result of this investigation in a most in-
teresting address before the National Educa-
tion Association, Mr. H. B. Wilson, Superin-
tendent of the Topeka schools, added the
comment, "These data, while quite differently

46 GRAMMAR,

derived, corroborate the conclusion of Hoyt in
1906 that the extended study of technical
grammar does not enable one to use better
English either in talking or writing."

"I recall," said Superintendent Wilson in
the same address, "that in the lower grades of
the elementary schools my teachers were at
great pains to demonstrate objectively, with
an elaborate tellurian, the movements of the
earth in relation to the sun and moon in the
solar system. It was beautifully objective, but
I am absolutely certain I had no worth-while
appreciation of the significance of the demon-
stration. All of us have seen very learned
teachers, with access to a great museum, give
very extensively illustrated nature-study lessons
without the children ever realizing once that
the birds or other animal forms which were
being illustrated in the class exercise were the
same as those about the homes and gardens
where they lived."

If even this is true, how can we expect little
children to apply abstract data regarding the
proper behavior of adverbs, participles, predi-

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 47

cates, verbals, and copulas — Heaven preserve
us ! — to everyday speech ?

If I might have freed that little boy from the
thraldom of grammar, what should have taken
its place in that old school-room that he found
so painfully unrelated to the life outside?
There are two fundamentals that have received
slight attention in most of our school-rooms
where composition is taught. The mastery of
them alone will not make a skilled writer, but
their pursuit will use school-room time to real
advantage. These two things are control of
a flexible, well-equipped colloquial vocabulary
and a sympathetic consideration of the reader's
point of view.

Here are two lines of study, widely different
in character, that must be followed in order to
accomplish a single result — skill in writing.
The first, that having to do with the vocab-
ulary, surely cannot be gained by any scientific
system. Control of a vocabulary comes not
by theorizing and not by analysis, but by
absorption and then by practice. The second
fundamental is still more impossible of attain-

48 GRAMMAR,

ment by means of a scientific method. Its
pursuit involves considerations apparently re-
mote from all the treatises upon composition
that have come to my attention.

For it is astonishing to observe how generally
the teaching of composition in schools has
failed, not only to emphasize, but even to
mention the fact that two equally important
people are involved in every written exercise
— the writer and the reader. Of course, this
fact is often overlooked outside the school-
room. Many adults who are practised in the
art of writing have failed to recognize it. What
avails a wonderful sermon, if it means nothing
to the particular group of people hearing it?
What avails a perfect piece of argumentation,
if it fails to reach the understanding or the
emotion of its audience? There are certainly
great numbers of preachers whose attention is
so constantly upon the sermons they are writ-
ing that they give too little consideration to
the congregation they are addressing. Many
speakers forget, while they are preparing an
address, that the perfection of material is

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 49

only half of the work in hand ; a consideration
of the audience is the other half. Of what
avail is a splendid accumulation of theories of
teaching if you find you are not reaching the
brains and the hearts of your pupils? Surely
no one denies that it would be better, in that
case, to discard all theories, and be only a
loving man or woman working and playing
with the child. The art of teaching is not for
the art's sake, but for the child's sake.

After all, not many people are left to-day
who hold to a belief in "art for art's sake."
We have come at length to realize that art is
for life's sake; but we should carry this
principle closer to the study of the art of
writing, and say that written composition of
any kind is not good unless it communicates to
the reader in full measure the purpose of its
writer.

All this seems to be of little interest to our
wearied and perplexed small boy in his primary
classroom. Yet we wandered away from him
with a definite purpose. I have attempted to
tear the grammar from his textbook, and now

50 GRAMMAR,

I will tear out the remaining pages. For the
exercises in composition that I find there are
all addressed to his teacher. If it be true
that half the secret of good writing lies in a
sympathetic consideration of the reader's point
of view, then we must bid our children write
to children and not to adults. My small boy's
practice must have nothing to do with theories
and abstractions, but must deal with the
everyday life that surrounds little children.
His task must be to interest his associates.

His chief limitation for the work in hand is
vocabulary. Ideas come rapidly enough if the
atmosphere be normal. All that he possesses
must be spent and spent again — colloquial-
isms, slang, and all. It is when he attempts to
overdraw his account that the teacher stands
ready with new coin for the transaction.
That classroom must be a lively, laughing,
chatting exchange, dealing with realities. It
is the last place in the school for a textbook.

Consider that these children are gathered
together for the purpose of learning to com-
municate ideas by means of written English.

THE BANE OF BOYHOOD 51

They must first formulate the ideas. This they
are doing all the time outside the classroom.
If they can become their lively-minded, normal
selves rather than automatons inside the class-
room, these ideas will reveal themselves. But
they are children's ideas, not adults'. Stand-
ards of good English will not be established
in their minds by a vain repetition of, "If our
cause is just, we shall succeed," or similar text-
book material.

To express their ideas these children in the
elementary schools must have vocabulary. If
all the time that has been devoted to technical
grammar in the school life of children ten to
fourteen years old had been given to word-
mastering, there would be better writing in
high school. The spoken vocabularies of our
school children in grammar grades, says a
competent authority, average from five hundred
to one thousand words. Let children bring
regularly to the classroom new words of their
own discovery and donate them for class use
until mastered by all; this would be a better
game than diagraming a sentence to indicate

52 GRAMMAR,

the dependent participial clauses attached to
the predicate. If they bring their home dialects
and their street slang, so much the better.
The walls of the school-room must not shut
out all sound of the outside world. Most
important of all, what they write must be
tested by the interest of their associates.
There should be a classroom full of critics
whose tongues are untied.

What part has the teacher in this program?
She is director, stimulator, and final authority.
Without a text-book, but with common sense,
she points out good models in many books, or
in that ubiquitous home textbook, the news-
paper. And, above all, she keeps them writing,
for an art is mastered, after all, only by prac-
tice. "Ah," says my school principal, "but
I cannot find enough primary teachers com-
petent to carry out such a program." Per-
haps that is a chief reason for the survival of
grammar as the bane of boyhood. A poor
teacher must go by rule and formula. Take
away her book and she is lost. My little boy
must study grammar for the sake of his teacher.

Ill

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

It is an established principle of education
that the mind is benefited not only by the
storing up of data but also by the giving forth
of it, — by acquiring not only orderly methods
of accumulation but also effective methods of
expression. To debate their relative value is
as though one argued on the question —
Resolved : it is more important to breathe in
than to breathe out.

Clear thinking is necessary in order to get
clear and effective expression, but the acquire-
ment of clear and effective expression brings
about clear thinking. Slovenly speech not only
indicates a slovenly mind, but it may help to
cause a slovenly mind ; no speech at all tends
to produce no mind at all.

53

54 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

A teacher in the New York School for the
Deaf made the following assertions, proved by
her own experience: "Like the hearing child,
the deaf pupil refuses to do much thinking
until he has words. He is actually waiting
in a forlorn, belated babyhood — for words.
And he gives weight to a great psychologist's
contention that thought itself is words — inner
speech. . . . To a child whose mind has been
seriously hindered by his deafness, there comes
a distinct awakening during such a course of
lip and tongue training. It is like a miracle,
a never-ceasing wonder to the teacher who
learns to watch for it. And once it has
happened, the child goes ahead with a speed
before impossible to him."

What is true of the infant or the deaf mute
is true of the student of every age and condition ;
what we are not able to express is less than half
learned. Most of my own generation, for in-
stance, who studied German or French for
two or three years in college, never heard the
language spontaneously spoken in the class-
room during that time. Numbers of us are

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 55

testifying that the hours spent on modern lan-
guages were largely wasted. It is safe to assert
that in a multitude of colleges in this country,
including some of high repute, modern lan-
guages are still taught by teachers who cannot
converse in them, and the language is never
given spontaneous expression in any classroom.
Scientists do not permit such methods.
Principles governing chemical action are
taught, theories are discussed, and textbooks
are read in one part of the time devoted to
chemistry, and all are given expression in the
laboratory in another part of the time assigned
to that course ; and the work done in gaining
impression and the work done in giving ex-
pression both are credited to the student in
determining whether he is fit for a degree.

What of English? In our high schools and
colleges what method is followed in teaching
students to gain a scholar's mastery of their
native tongue? Methods are changing, it is
true. Yet this year I visited a college which
boasts a single-minded devotion to pure scholar-
ship, — not scholarship for its own sake, but

56 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

scholarship for life's sake; a training is there
provided that aims to lay a foundation of fine
general culture, to quicken perceptions and to
make available for the field of affairs every
faculty of the mind that a boy possesses. Yet
I found only one course devoted to written
expression in English, and this course could
not be observed because it happened that it
was not given during that particular half-
year. Courses devoted to impression were
there in plenty. Students of English read
the works of the masters ; they studied the
history and technique of the novel and the
drama; they were guided to appreciation of
poetry ; but of courses in expression there
was none.

Such a condition is not accidental, nor is it
the result of inertia or insufficient means. It
is due to the fact that some authorities feel
that written expression should not be treated
as a separate course of study. It is an inev-
itable part of every course, they say. The
student of Economics or Philosophy, or the
History of the English Drama, must from time

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 57

to time make written expositions of what he
has learned. These papers furnish drill in
written expression in English. English ex-
pression, they say, must be a by-product of
every department in school or college, and it
is not proper or profitable to devote the work
of a classroom wholly to a consideration of
form; the same classroom must supply the
matter. In other words, the work of a class
devoted primarily to expression will produce
but sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

Such an argument, while it is good in theory,
does not work in practice. College papers are
not, as a whole, well written. The colleges
are graduating great numbers of students who
do not express themselves effectively. The
fact is that teachers of Economics and
Philosophy, Physics and Astronomy cannot
devote much attention to the style and form of
written papers. They must be interested chiefly
in the accuracy of the matter, and have far too
little time as it is. This is evidenced by the
fact that the reading of class papers is so
often left to technically trained assistants just

58 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

out of college, who themselves may not be
able to produce or effectively criticize good
English form and style.

There is an especial reason why classrooms
devoted to English expression should today be
increasing in number. Two generations ago
college drill in the ancient languages provided
the best possible training in the English of that
day. The translation of Greek and Latin, and
even Hebrew, was required in proportionately
great quantity. Originals were regularly ren-
dered into English verse, as well as into fine
prose. Orations were thought out in English,
translated into Latin, and understood by stu-
dent audiences. The training in English ex-
pression that came from this classroom work
made stately stylists of our grandfathers.
Even the intimate personal letters that they
wrote are enough proof of this. But Latin and
Greek do not receive the amount of attention
that they did, or demand the same universal
and exacting drill, and so this splendid by-
product of the old classic classroom has suf-
fered. The English department must assume

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 59

the entire burden, and certainly it cannot com-
plain.

If the acquiring of style in written English
is to be the whole purpose of the work in my
classroom, how shall I go about it? Style is
taste in the use of words, a cultivated "ear",
a sense of rhythm and proportion, plus in-
dividual habits of thought. These things are
to so great an extent dependent upon Provi-
dence that teachers come to feel that "writers"
cannot be made in the classroom. I will not
dispute the statement until we have some defi-
nition before us. If a writer is one who takes
up writing as a vocation, to make a living by it,
or one who loves words and phrases for their
own sakes as well as for what they may convey,
— an artist in words, — then the school or
college will not create him any more than it
can create any instinct, — it can only foster it.
But many schools have done something negative
to our young people that I find it hard to define.
I can best describe it as a self-consciousness in
the company of pencil and paper, often so pro-
nounced that it seems to benumb the senses.

60 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

Many a one who can face me and describe
with vividness and artistry a scene or stirring
experience, will gaze into the expressionless face
of a blank sheet of paper and find his mental
functions atrophied. Something in his pre-
vious experience has led him to view with alarm
a situation that brings him and this inquiring,
accusing blank page and pencil together.

If I could but persuade him to see the face
of an interested reader as he gazes upon that
unwritten page ! If he would only undertake
each bit of composition as though it were part
of a letter to a friendly acquaintance, stately or
informal as his mood or the occasion demands.
Let me but bring about that attitude of mind,
and half my battle is won.

If you will agree with me to define a "writer"
as one who can set down upon paper a simple
and clear account of facts or ideas, revealing
at the same time something of his own personal-
ity in the process, then I assert that such writers
can be a product of this classroom.

For a textbook I want at first only the daily
newspaper, not merely because it is already

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 61

familiar, but because it is the most remarkable
product of written expression in our age. This
morning's paper doubtless contains many sins,
both of omission and commission, but here is
a fact to be considered. That thrilling novel
which you have just finished was written by
William Henry Jones in three months of steady
labor; the material which he put into it, of
personal experience and research, took him
several years to accumulate, and the result is
one hundred and twenty thousand words re-
vealing the author's interpretation of life in a
small neighborhood. Today's paper contains
an equal number of words. It reveals a cross-
section of life in the world at large, reproduced
by trained interpreters, and the greater part
of the material in it was assembled and written
within a space of twenty -four hours. The
notable thing about it is not the fact that it
makes mistakes, but that it is as good as it is,
and that it succeeded in training most of its
writers in its own classrooms, often having to
overcome, first of all, some negative work of
the schools.

62 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

There are many interesting generalizations
to be found in my textbook, and one might
lecture interminably to a class on newspaper
mechanics and office regulations, and above all,
newspaper ethics, and draw many morals there-
from. But it is better to dwell upon a very few
things, if they are worth while, and I would
have as a text for almost my only sermon the
fact that a newspaper aims to separate its news
and its editorials ! If a year's work in a col-
lege class could be successfully devoted to this
one point, the existence of that classroom would
be justified. How many speakers, how many
writers, — how many everyday people, — are
willing and able to state facts uncolored by per-
sonal opinion, — to separate news and editorial ?

So I start off upon my work with this analysis
of my textbook, that it has certain pages for
the news, where facts alone should appear, and
it has other pages where editorial opinions re-
garding those facts may be expressed.

Students who are alive to this distinction
quickly discover instances wherein eminent
newspapers flagrantly violate this fundamental

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 63

principle. One, for instance, promptly handed
me a clipping from a reputable New York
paper which pretended to report upon a news-
page a speech by Mr. Bryan with the following
introduction: "If in some future time, even
that dim future when William Jennings Bryan
has ceased railing at preparedness as he did
last night in the Academy of Music in Brooklyn
some belligerent foreign nation should declare
war upon us, all we have to do is reply, 'No !'
. . . What rejoinder the above-mentioned
belligerent nation will make to that remark the
Apostle of Peace did not tell the audience
which listened for two hours while he railed
at war, scoffed at rumors of war, and sneered
at preparedness for defense against war."
Such a travesty upon news should be driven
to the editorial page. If a public speaker,
whoever he may be, is entitled to any hearing
at all, he is entitled to a fair one. The news-
paper which disagrees with his views is entitled
to a full and vigorous expression of editorial
opinion, but it is not entitled to color or distort
or lie about his statements.

64 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

This question of the separation of news and
editorial is a question of fairness and honesty,
— a great question of morals, — and in it lies
the ultimate test of our public press. But in
my class I am treating it simply as a question
of form, and agreeing to take up first the matter
of news, if only because it is presented first in
my textbook.

"Get the news, get all the news, and nothing
but the news," said Charles A. Dana to his
reporters, and his description of a competent
writer in the reportorial field is worth quoting
at greater length. "The reporter must give
his story in such a way that you know he feels
its qualities and events and is interested in
them," he said. "He must learn accurately
the facts, and he must state them exactly as
they are ; and if he can state them with a little
degree of life, a little approach to eloquence,
or a little humor in his style, why his report will
be perfect. It must be accurate; it must be
free from affectation ; it must be well set forth,
so that there shall not be any doubt as to any
part or detail of it ; and then if it is enlivened

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 65

with imagination, or with feeling, with humor,
you have a literary product that no one need
be ashamed of. Any man who is sincere and
earnest, and not always thinking about him-
self, can be a good reporter."

The business of my classroom should be not
to train reporters, but to find whether there is
in this training of reporters something that will
teach the everyday business of good writing.
In other words, it is my task to prove that the
college, as well as Mr. Dana's city room, can
make of anyone who is sincere and earnest, and
not always thinking about himself, a good nar-
rator of facts.

The news-editor seems to have two aims in
mind, to win and hold the attention of his
readers, and to convey to them clearly a knowl-
edge of facts. He wins attention first of all
by his captions, and I have turned to them as
the first lesson in my textbook.

Many as are the faults of average classroom
"themes", perhaps the greatest is the student's
apparent uncertainty as to just exactly what
he is writing about. He begins with a general

66 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

topic in mind, in case one has been assigned,
and he writes inconsequently until his time or
his information has given out, and then stops.
At least in the latter case it is to be hoped that
he stops. There is little preconceived plan.
Now, for a reporter to write his captions first
would be putting the cart before the horse,
assuming it to be his business to write captions
at all. But when I ask my students to consider
what captions are to go above each news-story,
and whether the story suggests any captions
at all, I am forcing them to know beforehand
just what they are writing about, and to con-
sider whether there are any sensational, in-
terest-arousing points among their facts. If
they pick them out beforehand with captions
in mind they are practically sorting their facts
with chief consideration for their reader's
point of view; that is what I wish, somehow
or other, to bring about.

The obvious fact about these captions is
that they aim to arouse, — to create a sensa-
tion. The writer of them is thinking of his
readers all the time. He varies their character

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 67

to suit the particular class of reader his paper
is seeking. He searches his story for the facts
that will supply material for such a caption
as he wants. I asked my students first of all
to spread out in their minds the facts of Paul
Revere's ride as well as they recalled them,
and formulate captions as though the events
occurred yesterday, sacrificing good taste for
the moment, if necessary, in an effort to arouse
their readers. Some of these results were
amusing. Many were most satisfactory. If
my students were to rewrite them at the year's
end, they would use fewer words, eliminating
colorless or non-essential ones, and they would
turn some of their old captions rear-end fore-
most, because of the better sense of emphasis
that they have gained in the meantime.

"WAR — First Blood Shed at Lexington —
English Fired First Shot — Ninety Heroes
Killed — Villages Saved by Wild Midnight
Ride of Daring Youth."

"BRITISH REGULARS REPULSED BY
PREPARED FARMERS — Midnight Rider
Warns Middlesex County of Approaching
Danger — Young Bostonian Hero of the Day

68 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

- Says He Waited Signal-Lights from North
Church Belfry."

"YOUTHFUL PATRIOT GALLOPS
THROUGH NIGHT TO WARN HANCOCK
AND ADAMS — Revere Rouses Countryside
and Saves Day for Lexington — Double Lan-
tern Signal Figures in Daring Midnight Ex-
pedition — British Officers Take Hero Prisoner
but He Escapes."

"TOWNS WARNED BY DARING DEN-
TIST—Revere Rides with News of British
Troops' Departure from Boston — Woman
May Have Let Out Secret — Hero Eats Big
Breakfast and Chats with Reporters."

"BRITISH ARMY INVADES MASSA-
CHUSETTS — All Wires around Boston Cut
by Spies — Revere in High Power Car Breaks
All Speed Records — Rouses Lexington Militia
at Midnight with Shrieks of Claxon — News
of British March Leaks Out through Wife of
General Gage."

I want my students to think in captions,
studying the examples served fresh every day
in my ubiquitous textbook, and I ask them to
criticize, condemn, and improve, with all the
ingenuity they inevitably display when in-
terest is aroused.

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 69

This caption-sense, this idea of relative
interest- values, is akin to the "nose for news"
which the reporter must possess or acquire.
With such development of it as I can bring
about in so short a time I start upon news-
stories. Material appears daily in and about the
classroom. I do not ask students to rewrite the
news of the outside world to any great extent,
simply because they are not then reporting
their own observations ; but I ask them to sift
and select the happenings of this smaller world
in order to find those that justify stirring cap-
tions, and then serve them up in ways best
suited to this classroom audience. Sometimes
I have wished them to have in mind readers in
Kankakee or Medicine Hat, and then serve up
their facts so as best to win a laggard attention.
The facts — all the facts — must be there,
clear and concise ; but with a best foot fore-
most ! That first sentence may win or lose
a reader. Let it be big with news or sugges-
tion of news, let it hint or tantalize, — anything
so it be not dull !

For another prevailing sin of the traditional

70 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

classroom theme is dullness, — deadly mono-
tone. I suspect that sometimes that op-
pressed, unnatural condition of a student's
mind when he stares into the accusing counte-
nance of a blank sheet of paper is due to the
fact that he hesitates to bore others as others
have bored him. I do not fear, for the time
being, an exaggeration of emphasis or attempts
at ultra-sensational appeal, so long as the facts
themselves are facts, set down in order, con-
cisely, with sentences as short as may be, for
clearness' sake. Style that is an evidence of
the individual personality may come later if it
will, and good taste will eventually take care
of over-sensationalism. But the purpose of
any writing is to reach and hold a reader
(otherwise why write?) and dullness is a
deadly sin.

I have been alert to offer suggestions for
news-stories of all sorts. It is better for
students to discover the occurrence that justi-
fies the story, but if they do not, I would have
them come to me, for I want to keep them
writing. No art can be mastered without con-

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 71

stant practice in it. The painter must be ever
working with canvas. The sculptor must be
forever modelling his clay. The most satis-
factory news material that I have been able
to provide is the interview. So I have seized
upon visiting lecturers, fellow faculty-members,
personages of the town, — anyone who is
himself a story or who has one to tell. And
after some experience I have found it desirable
to suggest to the "interviewee" that a certain
amount of reticence or evasion will be welcome.
I would have my students forced to ask ques-
tions in order to bring out a story, and I have
tried to make it clear to them that a reporter
is likely to come away from an interview empty-
handed unless he goes to it with a pretty definite
idea of what he wants to get. He cannot waste
time with vague or purposeless questions. He
must have, in fact, possible captions in mind.
He must scent a story, and go after that story
keenly. Then, if the personage reveals un-
suspected treasures, so much the better. He
can readily revise his plans, and feature some
statement that he had not foreseen.

72 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

At these interviews, I have asked my students
to appoint certain ones of their number as
spokesmen. These are expected to make note
of the lines of questioning their various asso-
ciates wish to pursue, and are then under obliga-
tion to get these into the interview so far as
possible. By this method a perplexed or em-
barrassed visitor is spared a shower of questions
from every direction. Before the time allowed
for the interview is quite over, general ques-
tioning is permitted, in case the spokesmen have
failed in their trust, or new ideas for a story have
occurred to this or that listener.

In these interviews a new consideration is
involved. The story must be interesting, of
course, with a stimulating beginning and a
suitable climax, and it must contain all of the
essential news-data which justify it, — but it
must also consider the rights of the person
interviewed. He must be treated with fairness
and consideration. Sometimes he obviously has
said what he doesn't mean. Sometimes he is
forced by a poor line of questioning or by his
own temperament to give rambling and in-

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 73

consequential replies. He must be spared an
exact reproduction of all this, not only for the
sake of the reader, but for his own sake. More-
over, if he expresses any wish that the reporter
should withhold anything that he has said,
especially if he has said it through a desire to
make clear other statements that are for publica-
tion, this confidence must not under any cir-
cumstances be betrayed. There is no phrase
condemnatory enough to describe such an act
of betrayal.

I have referred to this form of possible class
assignment at greater length because it makes
so many demands. Students have spoiled
good stories by reporting with remarkable
accuracy the words of the person interviewed,
yet failing to measure the relative values of the
statements he has made, and thus they have
created a false impression. Truth-telling, even
as most simply defined, is difficult enough, but
it becomes a doubly difficult responsibility
when we define it as the creating of accurate
impressions in the mind of the reader. As a
theme for profitable class discussion I describe

74 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

how the newspaper artists at the front in the
Boer war were required to paint smoke into
their battle pictures, though smokeless powder
had then come into use. Only thus could
these artists convey to the conventional minds
of their public a sense of battle action and the
sound of guns.

Often my interviewers have failed to see the
most interesting fact of all, namely, them-
selves putting questions. When a certain
distinguished ex-President faced an eager
circle of students, nothing that he said was
so interesting as the picture itself, and yet he
said much that was essentially interesting,
because questions were ingenuously asked him
that no trained reporter would have dared to
ask, and he answered with a frankness and an
enjoyment that would not have been provoked
by a professional interviewer. Perhaps it is
too much for me to expect this detachment,
and yet I am asking them as quondam reporters
to seek the sensational and the picturesque in
news situations, and surely "Ex-President of
the United States Interviewed" is less stimulat-

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 75

ing to the interest than "Ex-President Inter-
viewed by Amateur Reporters."

In the free selection of news by my students
I have felt confident that they would sooner or
later present facts that arouse their preju-
dices and opinions. So, very soon, I ask
for brief editorials based upon their news-
stories. I ask for dignity in criticism —
something constructive, rather than mere
scolding. I ask for the "editorial we",
rather than "I", so that they may select
subjects that they think worthy of dis-
cussion by a board of editors, let us say, and
feel the responsibility of speaking for a group
rather than upon their own individual whim.
In a "letter to the editor", on the other hand,
they are permitted to be more intimate, more
colloquial, refer to personal experience, in
fact go as far as they care or dare publicly
over their own names.

It is always necessary at first to suggest to
some individuals subjects for editorials. Their
ability to find subjects for themselves is not de-
veloped, or their tendency may be to select

76 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

topics not worth discussion; and time given
to such editorials would be neither profit-
able nor entertaining.

There are forms of practical composition in
which it is important to combine news with
editorial, — fact with opinion. The book re-
view, for instance, that potentially delightful
little essay, actually so deeply rutted in certain
conventional forms that it struggles for vocab-
ulary, is properly a combination of news and
editorial. Has the reviewer somewhere in his
work supplied the pure unadulterated news
about his book? Does he tell honestly what
it is about, how it approaches its subject,
and other necessary data, so that someone who
may be seeking the book for that very data
will learn that here is what he wants? Or
does the reviewer color or becloud every de-
scriptive statement with his own opinion as
to the book's goodness or badness, so that it
gets no chance for a hearing, even from those
who should be its sympathetic friends?

In connection with this business of critical
reviewing I have assigned my students at the

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 77

end of the calendar year a task that required
the summarizing of much material in few words,
with their own interpretative judgment upon
it, — namely, surveys of the year in various
fields : certain ones reviewed the past year in
Art, others in Science, others in Religious
Thought, in Fiction, in Poetry, in Finance, in
Our Foreign Relations, and so on; these were
published by a local newspaper and we thereby
gained some brief practical drill in proof-read-
ing.

All this sounds prosaic enough, but there has
been no insistence upon prose ! With only
slight encouragement verse makes its appear-
ance, both free and restrained, and I welcome it
for the condensation it requires, and the flexi-
bility of vocabulary it should bring about.
Book reviews condensed into quatrains and
still retaining their " news " and " editorial "
data prove well worth reading, and many who
vow at first that verse is out of the question
achieve triumphs. As for twenty-minute
"poems ", written in class on a subject assigned
on the spur of the moment, I ask no more

78 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

sensational achievement! And yet I do not
approve any verses that fail to meet the re-
quirements the writers themselves set at the
start. Rhymes must be rhymes, — and there
must be a rhyme for every line. Verse forms
must be correct, and scan without a struggle !
It is light verse that I am speaking of now,
and not poetry. Any poetic variant of form
may be justified by the beauty of the thought,
but light verse is justified only by painstak-
ing mechanical accuracy.

In book reviews, editorials, light verses,
students must keep in mind those interest-
arousing qualities of opening sentence and that
satisfaction of climax which we sought in our
presentation of the news. Then finally I ask
them to wander into a new field which they
have skirted from time to time in editorials
and letters. For now and then, with some,
there has come into their editorial writing a
certain personality of style and a tendency to
argue the point in an intimate, chatty fashion.
It is hard to say where the editorial ends and
the essay begins, but it is evident that attempts

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 79

at essays will only be of value when the writers
choose subjects with which they are on intimate,
friendly terms; and they must let themselves
go with abandon to the pleasure of writing.
I do not expect to get good essays from each,
nor do I want to. The world would be a sorry
place if we all were of the same temperament,
and those who are most practical and matter-
of-fact, most capable in their clear reporting
of facts or in their effective array of arguments
in support of a proposition, may be at their
poorest when they are led into the field of
speculative, reflective, philosophizing, gossipy
chats that we have come to call essays.

Yet those who cannot write an essay are fully
as capable of enjoying a good one, and they will
enjoy them the more for having made this
effort themselves. Partly to cultivate their
power of appreciation, and partly to stir them
from some small rut of ineffective style that
they might have fallen into, I ask each one to
take back his essay and rewrite the first page
of it in imitation of some one of the masters,
holding to the subject and to the very material

80 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

of his own first page, but using the tricks and
verbal mannerisms of Lamb, or Hazlitt, or
Chesterton, or whom he will.

The college year is too short for all of this
program; in fact for each point in it. There
is little time for detailed attention to the
choice of words and the branding of thread-
bare phrases. With a large class there is too
little time to hand back every one of these
literary undertakings marked up with sug-
gestions for rewriting; and yet perhaps there
is such a thing as too much attention to some
pieces of work ! The greatest value lies in the
reading aloud of all work in class. Sooner
or later each has heard others read papers
better than his own, and intelligent criticism
and comparison of one's own work gives real
force and vitality to anything an instructor
might say.

Toward the close of the year work should be
assigned with two ideas in mind; the first, to
assign to each one, so far as possible, some kind
of work best suited to the individual, and the
second, to provide each day enough variety

IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION 81

in the reading program to make the hour an
interesting one.

One point I desire to emphasize in conclu-
sion; the work would lose a great part of
its value without freely expressed class criticism.
To obtain it in good measure we have to over-
come a certain human weakness which tends
to make young people, and people no longer
young, take criticism of work too personally.
A good deal of time may profitably be spent in
creating a class attitude of impersonality. No
written work should ever be anonymous, and
there should be the greatest possible freedom
of open and direct comment. The teacher may
well watch for evidences of that temperament
which resents clear-cut discussion of a paper,
and himself become almost unduly personal,
whenever he guesses that such an attitude
exists !

The aim of the work in such a class is to
help each one to express himself clearly and
effectively with certain readers in mind ; after
that to reveal as much of his personality as pos-
sible through that elusive something we call

82 IMPRESSION AND EXPRESSION

"style", and finally to create if possible some
little enjoyment of writing for its own sake.
But there are three by-products of such a class-
room as this which are actually of as great value
as any of the direct objects of our work. The
first is avoidance of affectation, — honesty in
expression; another is impersonality in criti-
cism, — a readiness to give and take, in dis-
cussion, without bitterness or irritation; the
third, and perhaps the most important, is that
ability to recognize the difference between
news and editorial, — fact and opinion, — and
to keep them distinct.

IV
ESSAYING AN ESSAY

"However little we write," says Mr. Ernest
Rhys, "whether for our friends only or for the
newspapers, we have to attempt sooner or
later something which is virtually an essay."
Then let us go about it now, consciously ; first
of course endeavoring to learn the boundaries
and definitions, if there be any, of this special
literary form, and strive to hold our thoughts
to the prescribed area.

Mr. Rhys says further: "We are gradually
made aware of a particular fashion, a talking
mode (shall we say?) of writing, as natural,
almost as easy as speech itself; one that was
bound to settle itself at length and take on a
propitious fashion of its own. . . . Just as
we may say there is a lyric tongue, which the
true poets of that kind have contributed to

83

84 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

form, so there is an essayist's style or way
with words — something between talking and
writing. ... It may preach, but it must
never be a sermon; it may moralize, but it
must never be too forbidding ; it may be witty,
high spirited, effervescent as you like, but it
must never be flippant or betray a mean spirit
or a too conscious clever pen."

With such a charming and unmistakable
description as this before us let us seek no further
for a definition, but, following its guidance so
far as God gives us ability, ourselves wander
into this field that demands "something be-
tween talking and writing", confident that a
suitable style lies within our reach, if we only
may do away with that self -consciousness which
causes the implements of the writing desk to
stand as a sort of barrier between ourselves
and you, the reader.

Three things I have in mind as essential to
any essay. The first is sincerity. It ought
to be easy to define that quality, and yet I
would not have you understand that the essay-
ist may write only what is true. Charles

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 85

Lamb undoubtedly departed from fact when
he described the first roasting of pig. Yet when
he wrote it he was being true to himself, and
that is the chief function of truth.

At a former time I have had occasion to
speak of that interesting phenomenon, the
amateur writer who in natural, intimate speech
reveals his true self, but when he turns to the
written word reveals another being, stilted,
awkward and insincere. I compared his
written style to the "photograph face" of
certain people who, when facing the camera,
re-arrange their features into an expression
that represents neither themselves nor any
other natural creation under heaven. Yet
such an individual might deliberately "make
a long nose" at the photographer, and I should
call the expression sincere. So the essayist
who intentionally assumes grandiloquence, or
fantastic humor, may be as sincere as when
writing grave and simple phrases to express
those sentiments with which he will not play.
In fact I think that I love him best when he plays
at pedantry or pomposity, or at any other way

86 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

with words. He seems somehow to be taking
me more into his confidence, — into the inner
circle of his friends, — when he consents to
lay aside for the time being that more formal
dress with which his thought is usually clothed !

My second essential for this or any other
essay I consider quite equal to the first in
importance; in fact, I shall place all three
essentials first, and have no second and third.
The second of my first essentials, therefore, is
this : that the essay shall all of it come directly
from the writer's mind rather than from the
written or spoken word of another. For many
years a quotation has lingered in my memory
though the name of its writer has slipped away :
"If a man write a book, let him say what he
knows; I have guesses enough of my own."
So if a man write an essay, let him say what he
himself thinks. He may, — indeed he must, —
have sources innumerable, but the gleanings
from those sources must have been through the
mill of his mind, and be kneaded and mixed
according to the writer's own private recipe.

Number three of these first essentials is that

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 87

the essayist shall gossip with his reader ; and
I have hurried through my other two require-
ments that I might dwell at greater length
upon this final one, and let my plea in its behalf
include some insistence upon the other two.

It occurs to me now, as I chat with you, that
some real essay might well begin here ; and
if you have been wearied so far by anything
assertive or verbose, let me beg you to overlook
all of the foregoing, and call the following an
essay upon gossip.

Gossip — "God + sib " say the dictionaries,
— God's kin. In the old days, when the
relationship was a more definite one, there
was a peculiar and kindly intimacy between
one's god-parents and one's self. The ties of
a legally established relationship were there
without any requirement of severity. They
are fortunate who have in childhood visited a
grandmother who was possessed of all her
faculties, and her interest in life, and broadened
sympathies that came with years, yet who
gratefully resigned to the mother all responsi-
bility for discipline or direction in upbringing.

88 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

That child is truly blessed who has known such
a relative. She was a god-parent, if you will,
caring to know your thoughts, to see your mind
unfold, to enter with sympathy into your plans,
to comprehend your hopes and fears.

I would not claim all of this for the gossip,
but the word as I turn it over in my mind rouses
pleasant fancies of some old crony, sitting
in his doorway in an easy chair, his staff leaning
idly against the step, passing the time of day
with a stalwart god-son who has paused in the
midst of the day's work to hail him as "good
Gossip", and perhaps glean a bit of wisdom or
kindly philosophy or intimate reminiscence,
devoid of the sharpness of responsibility for
instruction, or any pedagogic quality. Or I
see a group of these kindred god-parents fore-
gathering, somewhat ripened in their judgments
and broadened in their outlook, turning over
thoughts in their minds and exchanging them
without the restraint of self-consciousness or
any affectation other than that produced by
the whim or mood of the moment.

Such is gossip; like many other words rep-

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 89

resenting any commodity that has been de-
based by misuse, it has taken on varied mean-
ings. The sharp tongue of the shrew, — and
there are shrews of any age and either sex, —
has turned it often into an ill-natured thing.
But it is a disparagement of ourselves if the
word must always mean to us an ill-mannered
or a harmful mode of conversation.

Gossip, I take it, however much we would
purify the word, must have to do with human
beings. I cannot gossip with you about Egyp-
tian scarabs, or even about hens, or the weather.
I cannot gossip with you about cabbages,
though I can about kings. How / raise my
cabbages, how I treat my hens, and how they
affect me, is, on the other hand, a fruitful field
for gossip. I have introduced the human
element, and what I tell you of my demeanor
in the cabbage patch, and what you reveal to
me of your own hopes and fears when the hoe
is in your hand, are a means of introducing one
human being to another.

I remember as an early lesson of editorial
days, when illustrations were to be sorted and

90 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

a page lay-out to be planned, that my wise
chief would abruptly undo the work of a morn-
ing, throwing aside some beautiful picture of a
scene in the Grand Canyon, let us say, and
substitute for it some lesser achievement of the
photographer's art, because perhaps on an over-
hanging rock the tiny figure of a human being
was barely discernible. "Human interest !" he
would say; "you must find human interest!
That human figure in the picture interprets
height and depth and grandeur. It shows the
littleness of man, if you will, — his weakness
and unimportance, if you choose to interpret
it that way, — but the picture is for a human
reader, and that little figure helps him to read."
Human interest is a primary essential to
gossip, good or bad. The gossip of the small
village which you so commonly deplore is,
after all, an evidence that each villager is in-
terested in what his neighbor is about. Elim-
inate that interest from your village, and what
have you left of charity, or co-operation, or
public spirit? It is a force working for all
of the good that there is in the community.

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 91

The fact that it is most conspicuous when it
is misapplied is not against it. The village
sewing circle can discuss stitches, or the abstrac-
tions of religious thought for a brief time, but
all voices will rise in one harmonious discord
when the conversation turns to human beings.
It is right that this should be so. The wrong
lies only in the soured disposition of the shrew,
misapplying so fine a stimulus to her own ill
purposes.

It is a comfort to think that all that sort of
gossip which has given Gossip a bad name is
insincere. It disregards subjective as well as
objective verities. It is a disease that yields
very quickly to the antitoxin of sincerity. One
voice raised in protest, and uttering truth in
the midst of some plague of exaggeration that
may have seized upon the company and spread
like a galloping epidemic, will cause falsehood
to shrivel up, however small the voice. This
phenomenon only strengthens my assertion that
gossip is essentially a worthy thing, and that its
unworthy form is a sort of fungus growth which
may poison some who come in contact with it,

92 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

but when crushed it leaves other vegetation to
thrive as though its brief life had never been.

If I would gossip with you, then, about cab-
bages, it must be in relation to my cabbage
patch or yours; and to lure you into that
garden I must say at the start that it is my
garden, cultivated in my way. Then, if I
stimulate a little quarrel with you over methods
or tastes, which I should greatly love to do,
your quarrel is not with the cabbages, but with
me. My gossip may contain all that I know
about garden tools or fertilizers, or the best
methods of boiling. It may be most erudite,
if I am erudite, but it will never for a moment
hold the interest of a fellow gossip unless human
interest is there.

Furthermore, if you are to get real enjoy-
ment from my gossip, you will want me sin-
cere; that is, true to myself, even though I
may not be true to cabbages. In fact, I
think you will enjoy having me somewhat un-
true to cabbages, provided I am not an expert,
and provided that there is an understanding
between us. I may tell you how I perfected

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 93

some scheme of cross-fertilization between my
mint bed and my cabbage patch, in order to
destroy those after-effects which are the greatest
detriment to the social success of a worthy
vegetable, so long as you and I both know that
my gossip is taking on a certain exaggerating
quality. It is when I pretend to be what I am
not that our conversational barter becomes un-
satisfactory to you. I am then offering you
payment for your proffered thoughts in counter-
feit coin.

Very often we have nothing but instinct as
a test for the soundness of conversational cur-
rency, and instinct may of course go wrong.
During the recent recrudescence of vers libre
this fact has been widely demonstrated. A
collection of verse appears which deals with the
sordid side of community life — all that is
evil is emphasized, and there seem not to be
ten men in the town to prove it righteous.
Healthy minded readers everywhere find them-
selves consciously or unconsciously putting these
questions to the author: "Did you write the
truth as you saw it ? Did you try to interpret

94 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

life with sincerity? Or were you sacrificing
your own knowledge of the truth in order
to shock me into a neurotic sort of interest?
Is there a clear understanding between us of
your motive ? If I know that you are sincere,
I will take up your book again and seek to find
in it what you want me to find."

The same question comes up in the minds of
most normal people with regard to the work in
certain schools of painting. The friendly ob-
server gazes in puzzled wonder at a jumble of
pigments splashed upon the canvas, and finds
himself returning to the same fundamental
question : " Is there honesty between the artist
and me? Is he sincerely trying to convey
something to me in a language that I cannot
yet read? Or is he offering to play with me?
If the first, I will be equally sincere in an
effort to comprehend the truth he seeks to
convey. If he is laughing, I will enjoy a laugh
with him. But unless I am assured of this
sincerity, I will turn to other gossips, and let
my mind feed with theirs in some more familiar
meadow."

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 95

To gossip together, you and I must be of
one mood. I will withhold my serious thoughts
if I find you laughing at them. I will withhold
my laughing thoughts if I find you taking them
seriously ; I will withhold my fancies if you
are being matter-of-fact; and I know that
you will not give any of my gossip serious
consideration unless you feel that I am sincere.

This establishment of a common mood be-
tween the gossip who writes and the gossip who
reads is so essential that many an essay has
utterly failed because its opening phrases
establish a false relationship. The reader
thought that he found between the lines of
some apparently flippant introduction a re-
quest that the two should laugh together, and
from that point on the writer lost his hold upon
a fellow being who, instead of laughing with
him sympathetically when occasion arose,
was perhaps laughing at him for no occasion.

When I gossip with you by means of the
written word I have this disadvantage, that my
ideas gain no stimulation from any part that
you might take in the conversation. For this

96 ESSAYING AN ESSAY

reason it is doubly important, I think, that the
writer hold to a certain informality of style, an
intimacy of phrase, as though he had not a
public in mind whose collective faces yield no
quick response of tone and glance, but an
individual reader who is already intimate
enough to share his moods and fancies.

And if he is writing to one, he must write
as one. It is not fair for him to introduce
strangers to the tete-a-tete. He may quote
from this or that authority, if the quotation
has become a part of his own apperception,
but he must not drag some strange writer — ■
some third person — bodily into the midst of
his chat. He may not incorporate lengthy
excerpts into his writing. Gossip is not a
lecture; an essay is not a thesis.

Those essayists whom I love best have some-
how mastered the art of writing to me direct,
and writing, too, in such a way that I feel
every now and then that here is my time for
reply, — for an exchange of thoughts, either
in agreement or controversy; and I lay their
books aside with a sense both pleasant and

ESSAYING AN ESSAY 97

regretful, of shaking hands in good-by; look-
ing after them as they move away as one
watches a friend out of sight. For they have
proved themselves kin of mine in the pleasant-
est sort of relationship, and with full satisfac-
tion in the use of the phrase I acclaim each one
as my good Gossip.

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

If one were to accuse you of poisoning your
grandmother you would presumably smile in
unruffled fashion and go about your affairs
without feeling any burden of accusation.
But if one accused you of lacking a sense of
humor, you would first of all resent it indig-
nantly; and furthermore, for an indefinite
time to come you would be conscious of a
desire to disprove the charge, scrutinizing anx-
iously every phrase that might conceal some
subtle hidden test, emitting now and then
forced laughs on suspicion. Perhaps you boast
your emancipation in many fields where public
opinion customarily rules. You wear a straw
hat when you please ; you object to the insignia
of mourning; you flaunt your readiness to
discuss any subject in mixed company; you

98

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 99

do or do not serve butter at your dinner-
table; yet you are afraid you may not laugh
in the right places. Many a one who pro-
claims his right to individuality of opinion
fears to assert an equally inalienable right not
to laugh. Deep in his heart he dreads the
withering accusation that he lacks a sense of
humor.

Here is a human trait the possession of which
lightens burdens, cheers the down-hearted,
recreates the weary, and in fact lubricates the
whole machinery of living, and yet there is an
idea abroad that the Creator has bestowed it
upon only certain ones among His creatures.
Such a belief is one with Predestination and
the Damnation of Infants !

Providence probably needs no human de-
fenders, and yet one should occasionally protest
against making it a scape-goat for too many of
our sins. The division of wealth, the con-
tinuance of drought, the birth-rate, the pro-
ductivity of the soil, these and innumerable
other things were always laid at the door of
Providence in the past, but nowadays thinking

100 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

people are inclined to admit the power of hu-
man agency in the development of human ills.
Nevertheless, we still charge it to Providence
if a man appear to be handicapped by the lack
of a humorous sense.

If it could be generally understood that
humor is as universally a human birthright as,
for instance, hair on top of the head, this
sensitiveness as to its public recognition would
largely disappear. It is true that through lack
of care or misuse it may thin out and even
totally disappear, yet if a shred of it remain
there is hope of redeveloping and regaining it.

Belles-lettres provide a thousand definitions
of humor and the sense of it, but let us agree,
if you will, on this cumbersome description:
a sense of humor is that trait which enables
one to glean laughter from certain situations;
the greater this sense, the wider will be the
variety of situations which give us enjoyment.
Painful or sad, solemn or silly, still we find a
mirth-provoking side to them. We laugh,
whether it be audible, side-shaking guffawry,
or inward titillation with a solemn face to it,

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 101

or any degree between. If you accept this as a
description of the trait, then you may set
aside for the time being a mass of psychological
speculation and treat the matter as a tangible
thing in the physical world. What is this
laughter, and what is its cause? Are we not
all entitled to the use of it? If, as you say,
your friend cannot be properly stimulated to
laughter, should we assume an actual physical
debility on his part, an atrophied function, let
us say, or is it possible that your conclusions
are based upon unfair tests ?

There is a theory, among those who speculate
upon racial psychology, that the reason one
can sit for hours and gaze into the embers of a
fire, with a brain filled with vague half -thoughts,
is that fire is one of the few racial memories
limned in every human brain. In the Stone
Age and the Bronze Age we knew it, once
even we worshiped it ; and as a mystic link
to-day it binds us to that dim racial childhood,
though a world-old civilization rolls between.
So does the spasm of laughter bind us to the
childhood of the race. It is a world-old heritage

102 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

with the same mystic power to drag us back
through lower strata of civilization even into
savagery and beyond.

For it is a fact that laughter may be an un-
lovely thing, and if it control us we may be
divested of refinements — nay, even be carried
back to savagery. Why deny this? Even
you, gentlest of women, know the experience
of a laugh starting to your face, before your
good breeding caught and stifled it, at some
occasion which meant the discomfort or humilia-
tion of a fellow-being.

Laughter is an involuntary physical reaction.
Hughlings Jackson calls it "one of the in-
numerable epilepsies to which man is subject."
It is apparently a universal heritage, though
certain causes may operate more powerfully
upon one individual than upon another to
produce it. In the little child whose sensibilities
are uncomplicated by any mental experience,
unless they be racial ones, the shock of delicate
touch — tickling, as we call it — first causes
laughter. Why? The claim of our psycholo-
gist carries us a long leap backward to the most

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 103

elemental form of animal life. Beyond the
savage stands the monkey, and dimly far beyond
him the mollusk, whose only sense was that
of touch. Picture this great-grandfather of
living things lying motionless save for those
nervous, fluttering, sensitive feelers extended
to play the part of sight and hearing. A bit
of seaweed bumps against them. A spasm
racks the mollusk's whole being, crushing him
into his shell until the surprise has abated;
then the fact that no further attack follows
brings relief. This is the germ of the cause of
our laughter spasm — a sudden shock, instantly
followed by a feeling of relief. Only such shocks
as were followed by relief became racial
memories.

Kant, in his Critique of Judgement, defines
laughter as "an affection arising from the
sudden transformation of a strained expecta-
tion into nothing." Having thus explained its
origin, he reasons further that no cause of
laughter is in itself pleasurable, but that
pleasure comes from the physical experience of
laughter. He says :

104 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

The lungs expel the air at rapidly succeed-
ing intervals and thus bring about a move-
ment beneficial to health ; which, alone, and
not what precedes it in the mind, is the proper
cause of gratification in a thought that rep-
resents nothing.

It is certain that all spontaneous laughter
arises from the same physical cause, whether
it be uncontrolled, or whether it be by habit
so suppressed as to be merely a pleasurable
sensation without a surface ripple. And it is
equally certain that this involuntary physical
reaction called laughter is a universal human
birthright. All experiences that we call
humorous prove on analysis to be but sen-
suous surprises combined with a sense of relief.
The humor of Elia is brother to that of Inno-
cents Abroad, cousin to Joe Miller's joke-book,
cultured grandson to the buffoonery of court
jesters and the practical joke of to-day; while
by many intervening generations it is linked
to the tickling that children love and dread,
and by more generations still to the sudden
frights and relief of infancy's game of peek-a-
boo.

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 105

The sensibilities of to-day are more delicate
than those of yesterday. The humor of early
Europe was the sight of deformity and torture.
The humor of another age was indecency.
Laughter was cruel always, in some of its
manifestations. The gods of high Olympus
were filled with inextinguishable laughter at
the lameness of one of their fellows.

But we have become, in this day and genera-
tion, epicures in titillatory sensation. The
shock of seeing and hearing a slap-stick has
given place in our regard to the most delicate
of causations — the shock of mental surprise
over unexpected thought-contrasts and similari-
ties. We enjoy the laughter which arises from
such causes more than that which reacts from
cruder forms of shock. We roll our thoughts
about upon a mental tongue, tasting and tasting
till we are suddenly startled by an unexpected
"similarity between utterly dissimilar things",
or a "sudden contrast between things appar-
ently similar."

Old Sailor Ben, in the Story of a Bad Boy,
when he builds a house ashore cuts little port-

106 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

holes for windows and rears a bowsprit over the
door. We picture this as we read, and our
enjoyment is coextendent with the shock of
surprise the ideas produce for us.

You laugh at simple occurrences in church
that on the street would cause not the least
enjoyment because of their ordinary environ-
ment. The appearance of a cat on the pulpit
steps will amuse a whole congregation. For
the same cause there is humor in a poem which
relates commonplace things in a stately
Miltonian verse. If the requisite surprise
and relief occur, nothing can prevent the laugh
reaction, though you may check it in its in-
fancy. It is no respecter of proprieties or of
sanctity, or of pity, or of love, though training
may develop any of these considerations into a
power of restraint.

What, then, ails this man who does not
laugh sincerely when you laugh, who gains no
enjoyment from situations that you find
"humorous"?

First of all, are you sure that the situation
rightfully has any surprise in it for him ? The

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 107

old sailor seriously rigs out a bowsprit on his
house, and you smile and say with some sense
of superiority, "He doesn't know how funny
he is ; he has no sense of humor." But it
causes no mental surprise to him to have a
bowsprit on his home. His experience leads
him to expect it. The cat on the pulpit steps
does not amuse the sexton. He sees it there
frequently when it follows him upon his daily
rounds.

There is too much of the "holier than thou"
attitude on the part of those who boast a sense
of humor. They are prone to think that humor
is an inherent quality in certain ideas, and they
arbitrarily class all things which are funny to
them as humorous, and all things which do not
appeal to them as not humorous, and then
proceed to measure the sense of humor of whole
nations by their little yardstick. And others,
on their part, tend to become cowardly, accept-
ing the dictum of some little group of dilettantes
as to what they shall laugh at, forgetting that
nothing is funny which is not funny to them.

We laugh too many empty laughs. Consider,

108 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

for instance, the continued production of any
one form of surprise — limericks, enfant terrible
rhymes, or inverted aphorisms ; after a time
it is inevitable that their denouements shall lose
the power to surprise us; we anticipate them,
and a natural laugh is no more possible than
it is after an anecdote the point of which we
have heard or have foreseen. A new and in-
genious bit of slang, which serves as a short
cut to the expression of an idea, gives a pleasant
mental shock. Effective slang is amusing.
But the persistent repetition of it is a weariness
to the flesh, and it is our right not to laugh !
Obvious puns fail to cause laughter for the
same simple reason. If obvious, they are not
a form of humor.

Your introduction to your amusing anecdote,
if it suggests the nature of the surprise in store,
or even if it overshadows it by arousing too
great an expectation, destroys the humorous
quality of the climax. One funny story after
another, all boasting the same quantity or
quality of surprise, are jading to delicate sen-
sibilities, and the final ones may rightfully

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 109

not be funny to one particular hearer, for he
refuses to be surprised at any outcome.

Max Beerbohm claimed several years ago
that an analysis of the funny stories in certain
English comic papers proved that they and all
their tribe are based upon sixteen subjects
only, and he collates them as follows : mothers-
in-law, henpecked husbands, twins, old maids,
Jews, Frenchmen or Germans or Italians or
negroes (not Russians or other foreigners of
any denomination), fatness, thinness, long hair
(worn by a man), baldness, seasickness, stutter-
ing, bloomers, bad cheese, shooting the moon
(slang for leaving a boarding-house without
paying the bill), and red noses. If this analysis
be true, it would prove merely that the profes-
sional writers of jokes turned for convenience's
sake to those human situations that originally
contained surprises for the majority, and be-
cause of their perennial recurrence are con-
stantly being rediscovered by some portion of
humankind. Yet you would probably admit
your failure to enjoy a mother-in-law joke
unless it reversed all previous conceptions of

110 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

what a mother-in-law joke should be, or unless
the mere phrase revives an echo of old shocks.
You might even react with surprise over the
fact that your intelligent friend deemed it possi-
ble to amuse you thus. No point at all to a
story is much funnier than an anticipated one !

Do you enjoy anecdotes of childhood?
That enjoyment is co-extendant with your
knowledge of the circumstances of childhood.
Your friend who has forgotten his own boyhood,
with no children near by in later life to revive
such memories, has a whole field of humor
closed to him.

Have you laughed at the appearance of a
profane phrase or any other verbal impropriety
in some incongruous environment, just as you
smiled at the cat in church? The small boy
who hears you laugh thinks that some advanta-
geous form of humor must be inherent in the
swear-word itself, and so makes it the whole
point to some futile story.

Perhaps there are a few people who actually
lack a sense of humor, but surely this is because
circumstances or they themselves have grad-

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 111

ually deadened it. Single-mindedness will sub-
due it. The fanatic has no sense of humor.
The man who rides violently upon a hobby
endangers his. The reason is simple. His
thought and imagination run in one deep path.
They do not skip about from one path to
another, gaining mental shocks from sudden
parallels or contrasts. At first he loses ability
to see the real humor in anything aimed at
his chosen hobby. If his zeal increases, his
thoughts never wander through other fields
of experience and none of these mental shocks
is possible for him.

It is so easy to allow your own enjoyment of
the surprise in a certain situation to blind you
to the differing sensibilities of others. That
anecdote of the intoxicated man in the midst of
a street crowd repeatedly gives me enjoyment.
An irresponsible drunken man is so often the
very personification of pure nonsense. His
mental processes are forever producing the un-
expected.

Yet my friend whose life is spent in the slums
where evidences of vice are not phenomena,

112 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

and drunken incoherence is a sordid common-
place, finds no surprises in such a story, — no
shock of climax that produces laughter. I
can not justly disparage on this ground the
quality of her sense of humor. In return I
ask that she shall not accuse me of extolling
or condoning drunkenness by telling of it.
It was not the man's drunkenness at which I
laughed, but at his nonsense.

After all, it is better not to laugh aloud than
to have your laughter misunderstood. Humor
without sympathetic understanding is a posses-
sion with a dangerous kick to it. Humor with-
out kindliness can be a wicked thing. In your
writing remember that the printed symbols
convey neither friendly glance nor tone of
voice to belie the unfriendlier side of some sur-
prising, double-sensed way of phrasing an idea.

Broad human sympathy is absolutely essen-
tial to a complete sense of humor — a compre-
hension of and interest in other men's beliefs
as well as your own. The egotist gradually
loses his sense of humor. One thought domi-
nates all others in his mind. He is seldom

THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH 113

surprised by sudden similarities or contrasts
of experience. His attitude of mind leads him
to believe that no other idea presumes to be
comparable to the idea he now entertains.

On the other hand, a multitude of equally
trodden brain-paths make for a sense of humor ;
therefore it is invariably possessed by the jack-
of-all-trades, who does so many things pretty
well that he succeeds in nothing. Such men
laugh easily. They adopt readily any view-
point, being wedded to none, and these changing
points of view admit constantly of new thought-
surprises. They are certain to possess a strong
sense of humor, and just as invariably have they
a ready sympathy for their fellow-men.

But they hold no monopoly. The man of
one idea and the egotist may regain this power
of laughter just so far as they can widen their
sympathies and learn, in their hours of recrea-
tion, to see life through other men's eyes.
Books will help them, unless they begin too late
or hold to the single course in their reading.
Love is bound to help them ! Many a man has
regained his sense of humor through love for

114 THE RIGHT NOT TO LAUGH

one, just as a starter, and through her a love
for all humanity. Thackeray declares sense
of humor and human sympathy synonymous.
At least they are coextendent. For the humor-
ous literature we love best, whether it be
Dickens or Thackeray, Stockton or Clemens,
depends upon the recurrent shocks of surprise
that come to us when we recognize a common
humanity displaying itself in unexpected places.
But in every case a man's sense of humor is
his own, coextendent with his own private
mental experiences. Therefore, do not force
a laugh. Have the courage of this conviction
— that what is not funny to you is not funny.
And be slow to bring the charge against your
neighbor that he lacks this God-given sense.
See first whether you are not trying to measure
his stock-in-trade by your own individual
standard. If your conscience be clear in this
regard, then search him for the germ which he
alone is crushing down somewhere in the recesses
of his soul. Tell him to cultivate his heart, and
learn to love his neighbor as himself, and life will
be full of the surprises that make for laughter.

VI

THE EVERY-DAY PROFANITY OF OUR
BEST PEOPLE

Swearing is not generally a matter of morals.
It is a question of good taste, if you like, or
propriety and good form, and usually it is a
question of education. Taking the name of
Deity "in vain" violates one of the command-
ments ; but vain use of a word or phrase that
is utterly meaningless to its user does not come
within this description. Seldom, in fact, does
one who utters an oath have the real meaning
of the phrase in his thought.

"Ah," says Mrs. Rollo Merton, "but you
have hit upon the very meaning of 'in vain.'
It is the careless or ignorant use of such terms
that constitutes profanity." If she is right,
then we must grant that the commandment has
been broken by "Zounds!" which is a corrup-

115

116 THE E VERY-DAY PROFANITY

tion of "God's wounds"; "Ods-bodikins !"
which originally was "God's body"; "Dear
me ! " which is really " Dio mio " ; and " Oh my ! "
"Goodness gracious!" "Mercy!" "Gee!" and
all the other long-established evasions and
abbreviations which * never indicate in these
days that the speaker has their origin in mind.
No ; let us assume that this every-day profanity
of good people indicates not a laxity of morals,
not even low ethical standards, but a totally
different and much more superficial ailment,
which may be called a disease of the vocabulary.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, which makes
no real distinction between "oaths" and
"swearing" and "profanity", says epigram-
matically, if one may accuse the Britannica
of epigrams, that oaths are "promises made
under non-human penalty or sanction." As a
definition for an oath in a legal sense this
might be adequate, but it covers less than a
third of the field. Every-day profanity, as it
is commonly understood, naturally falls into
three great divisions : the asseverative, as for
instance "So help me!"; the denunciatory, as

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 117

"Devil take him!"; and the interjectional,
"Zounds!" All of these groups have repre-
sentation in the casual swear-words of our
best people.

Let us consider, in low tones if you like,
asseverative profanity. The very spelling of
the word answer indicates the commonplaceness
of an assertion supported by an oath : answer,
to swear in opposition to ; to take oath in sup-
port of your own statement. Did you go to
church last Sunday? If you were an English
cockney, you might answer, "I did, s'help me !"
If you were an Irishman, you would say, "I
did, begorra !" You yourself may say, "I did,
indeed." If, to quote the Britannica, you
call upon non-human witnesses in support of
your statement, is there not a hint of confession
that your word needs sustaining, and that
perhaps human witnesses might fail you?
Consider the evident consciousness of one's
own integrity that lies in the simple phrase
"I did."

"It comes to pass oft," says Sir Toby Belch,
"that a terrible oath, with a swaggering accent

118 THE E VERY-DAY PROFANITY

sharply twanged off, gives manhood more
approbation than very proof itself would have
earned it."

Of denunciatory expletives one must speak
even more softly. "A pox upon you!" said
Swift, in the days when smallpox was universal.
"Burn him !" said men of that and later genera-
tions, invoking hell fire upon an enemy. Great
and worthy oaths there have been in this group,
many that have won a place for themselves in
history. Washington facing the traitor Lee,
Farragut facing the torpedoes, voiced wrath or
contempt in words so well-timed and obviously
so sincere that they are enshrined (in a some-
what dilute form, we suspect,) even in our
school-books. And yet it is this group that
has, if one may so express it, the lowest social
position. Denunciation requires an object;
it implies an animate one, and therefore means
swearing at somebody or something. If at
somebody, it involves rudeness and "bad
form " ; at something, it involves also futility,
absurdity, or a confession of inadequacy. The
every-day oaths of this class are often only

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 119

cheap substitutes for deeds ; it is easier to drat
a situation than to face it out.

It is the third group, the interjectional
oaths, that largely provides profanity for our
best people. This division covers a field of
expression so broad and so vaguely defined
that a hasty definition might be viewed as
offensive personal criticism by the gentlest
reader. "Jove!" "Gee whiz!" "Jiminy
crickets!" "Oh my!" "Oh dear!" "Gosh!"
"I'll be dinged!" "Shiver my timbers!"
"Gracious!" "Goodness!" "Peste!" "Car-
ramba!" "Donner und Blitzen!" — all were
once asseverative or denunciatory, but time
has rubbed away their keen points and biting
edges, just as waves and sand in time render
harmless a bit of glass on the sea-shore.
"Thunder and lightning!" says the German,
and some remote and devout ancestor shivers
in the grave at this carelessly profane reference
to the weapons of almighty Thor.

Most of our own commonplace exclamations
might be traced back to an earlier day when
the vigor of their youth was still within them.

120 THE EVERY-DAY PROFANITY

Imagine two old Romans standing upon the
deck of a ship gazing upon the eruption of
Vesuvius. They watch in awe-struck silence,
until one of them gasps, "I swear by Father
Jove that never before have I beheld such
wonders ! " And the other echoes, "Oh Gemini,
Heavenly Twins, gaze down into my heart, for
I have no words to paint the glory of this
spectacle!" Centuries later the inheritors of
some of their classic speech gaze upon Vesu-
vius, and one says, "Jove! what a sight!"
and the other echoes, " Jiminy ! ain't it grand !"
Gone are the echoing oaths of a day when
swearing was an art. Those swash-buckling
phrases went with swash-buckling deeds. "By
the bones of Saint Michael ! I will spit thee to
thy cringing gizzard ! " There was a mouth-
filling and classic threat for you ! In these days,
when automatic revolvers have replaced fencing-
swords, there isn't time to say it. Gone are
the cloud-splitting denunciations of militant
churchmen, and if we fling out what is left of
the sounding phrases of some theological curse,
it is as a boy might take from his pocket a

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 121

stingless hornet for the effect that it produces
in the schoolroom, until in time both hornet
and effect become worn out.

Gone are all these mighty invocations ; but
why are they gone? Their parts may all be
found in the dictionary. Might not you and
I put them together again ? Only as we might
reconstruct the mammoth; he will stand here
bravely in his cold bones, but he will not trumpet
for us.

It was a pathetic end to which those old
oaths came. They were done to death, and
their descendants inherit a weakened frame
and vitiated blood, and can never do the sturdy
work their fathers did.

Working our strong words to death, or at
least working them into decrepitude, is a
crime not confined to any age. Our forefathers
accomplished it in their time. "Zounds!"
and " Ods-bodikins ! " we have already referred
to. "Aye, Marry ", is another. 'Yes, by
Mary!" was its meaning in its vigorous youth;
then it declined into merely a mild form of
emphasis, and then, like " Zounds " and " Gra-

122 THE EVERY-DAY PROFANITY

mercy ", — God's mercy, — died altogether.
More humiliating still was the fall of that
stately oath "By our Lady!" for instead of
death when death was welcome, it survives as
a British vulgarism that for some whimsical
reason is considered unworthy a place in repu-
table society's vocabulary.

Current speech of to-day in most walks
of society does not include many mouth-filling
oaths to take the place of the old. It is a politer
age or one certainly of softer expression. But
we are still doing words and phrases to death,
and the sin is of course committed against those
that must do the heavy work. They are
broken down, while those that must do the
delicate work have their edges dulled and their
points blunted. "God's mercy!" became
finally one meaningless word and ceased to
profane the name of Deity; "Perfec'ly ele-
gant" becomes at times a single word, and it
profanes our beloved mother tongue. It and
its like constitute the commonest profanity of
school-girls of our day. What have we left
of " Splendid ! " " Mighty ! " " Gorgeous ! "

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 123

"Awful!" "Horrible!" "Indeed!" and many
more?

Observe the display types of a yellow news-
paper. Those are the oaths of journalism.
Can you recall their gradual growth until
they reached the heyday of their vigor? Once
important news appeared in letters an inch high,
then they were two inches, then three inches,
then they overran the page. If I speak to you
always at the top of my voice, what shall
I do when I feel the need of shouting? Dis-
play type that is so large one cannot read it
at a glance has surely lost its virtue. Nothing
is left for the editor but red ink. Soon, too,
he finds that he is printing the entire outside
page in red, and that too has lost its value.

There is a recourse that has not occurred
to the editor of the yellow journal. He might
revert to the smallest type in the shop for his
scare-heads, centering them in a white space
at the top of the sheet, and you and I, seeing
such a display on the news-stands, would cry
out "Heavens!" or "Jiniiny Christmas!" or
whatever was our custom, "look at the 'New

124 THE EVERY-D AY PROFANITY

York Screech ' ! See that unusual type !
Something enormous must have happened."

Did you go to church last Sunday? "I
did, begorra!" "I did, s' help me!" "I
did." The unusualness of a simple assertion
nowadays gives it a force greater than can be
gained by all the expletives in the dictionary.

I would save our strong wTords, oaths or not,
if I could. Some may have become worn out ;
some are soiled and thrown in the gutter.
Some, in equally hard straits, have not a wide
enough circle of acquaintance to be readily
used or readily understood. What a humiliat-
ing spectacle is the word damn! Once a
powerful invective, conveying all the righteous
anger of the church, now a miserable subterfuge
of the playwright if he needs a laugh in the
midst of a tense situation ; now a commonplace
that a French translator of English idiom found
he could render only by the word tres.

Educators who have investigated the matter
tell us that the average speaking vocabulary
of a grammar-school graduate contains fewer
than one thousand words. This does not mean

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 125

that all of the nouns with which he is acquainted
through his history or geography do not bring
the number up to a greater total, but that the
words which he actually uses in conversation
range from five hundred to one thousand.
With vocabularies such as these no wonder
that young men in their days of enthusiasm
and desire for emphasis grope vainly through-
out their own equipment for forcible expressions,
and then gather soiled discards from the gutter.
No wonder "Perfectly lovely" and "Just ele-
gant" are worked to the extent that they are,
and are spread so thin over so broad a field
that in time they mean nothing at all.

Poor oaths ! Once denunciations and appeals
to Heaven, some of them have reached the
lowest depth, and are substitutes for conversa-
tion, taking rank with 'Well, well!" "Do
tell!" "I want to know!" and the like.
And what greater profanation of our tongue is
there than these? "Well, well !" was once one
of the amenities of speech, a courtesy of con-
versation. "What you have said is well; now
hear my view," was what it implied. But now

126 THE E VERY-DAY PROFANITY

it is a stop-gap, one of several such substitutes
for thought; as though in our conversational
barter you offer me your idea and I return pay-
ment with a draft on a bank where I have no
account, half hoping that before you discover
the deception the cash will come to me.

The conclusion of the matter is this : I do
not argue for the destruction, but for the con-
servation of profanity of all kinds, both old
and new. I would say to a young man, "My
son, you may have two damns for conversa-
tional use between now and Easter," and if I
had control over his vocabulary, I feel confident
of this result : that as each emotional crisis
appeared, and he started to squander one of
his treasures, he would pause and say to him-
self, "No, there may be a greater crisis to-
morrow," and he would search through his
vocabulary for some effective adjective or
adverb that would serve the moment's purpose.
It is probable that when Easter came the two
words would still be at his disposal. With a
free conscience I could then say to him : " Go
forth, young man, and spend them ; spend them

OF OUR BEST PEOPLE 127

riotously. You have earned the right, and,
after all, the better the day the better the deed."
To you, gentle reader, I would not presume
to apply such a restriction. I would set a
task far more difficult. First I would deprive
you in your written communications of those
mildest of all your expletives, underlined words
and double exclamation points ! ! And then I
would impose a greater restraint. There is a
word that once possessed a vigor and a power
that is altogether lost: "Verily, verily" —
"In truth, in truth." Now it is very, and
though it still means in truth, it has become
so weakened by usage that it conveys no force
whatever. You meet me on the street and
say, :'It is a very fine day." What do you
mean? Probably you mean, "How do you
do?" What you have said is simply a saluta-
tion. But if you should say to me, "It is a
fine day," you probably mean that it is a
fine day. That little word very has been so
weakened, so frayed at the edges, that it harms
rather than helps its companions. So, gentle
reader, I would say to you, if I had arbitrary

128 EVERY-DAY PROFANITY

power over your speech or your written corre-
spondence, "This week I will allow you only
two verys" ; and though for a time such re-
straint may make you self-conscious, yet it
will force you to grope about for musty treas-
ures in the storehouse of your memory, and
furbish up old adjectives and adverbs, even
drive you now and again to a careful appraisal
of your best slang; and when this temporary
self-consciousness shall pass, not only your
vigor of speech, but your exactitude and
clarity of thought will be the better for it.
"Thought itself is words — inner speech;"
if this indeed be true then I am urging the con-
servation of the very stuff that mind is made of,
and bespeaking for your spirit wider range with
each unit of strength or subtlety that is added
to your working vocabulary.

VII
ETHICS OF THE PEN

To write as naturally and unaffectedly as you
would chat with a friend, that is an accomplish-
ment worth acquiring. There are many who
having acquired this fluency, discover the pen
to be the liberator of the spirit, and gain a
greater power of expression through it than
their tongue might ever have mastered.

Yet in seeking this freedom of the pen, you
must be aware of certain peculiar limits to its
liberty, not due primarily to any restraint of
your own, but imposed upon it from without.

Society has bridled my tongue. It is not
free to utter what it will, however uncontrolled
may be the mind and disposition behind it.
Man-made laws control it. It must not lie
about my neighbor to his injury, nor bear any
false witness against him. It may not scatter
noisome phrases or ideas; and society asks

. 129

130 ETHICS OF THE PEN

that it shall not become a trouble maker
through mere malice, or habitually decry
others, or unduly vaunt myself or my deeds.

It may not steal; yet I fear this command-
ment rules the tongue in feeble fashion, leav-
ing judgment to a public opinion which does
not yet determine distinctions between my
tongue's grand larceny, its petty thievery and
its mere umbrella borrowing.

The control that society exercises over my
tongue is unquestioned, yet with it I may
break all social rules, even all moral laws with
a certain impunity, for the very simple reason
that the record of its misdeeds is graven on
the imperfect and perishable tablets of a
hearer's memory. It is not so with my pen.
All of these restrictions control it with doubled
force. What is written is written. My pen
is its own incontrovertible and coldly relent-
less accuser.

The misdeeds of my tongue may be exten-
uated by the expression on my face or the tone
of my voice. My pen has no such defenders,
and each petty misdeed is magnified by very

ETHICS OF THE PEN 131

reason of their absence. The stinging phrase,
sheathed in a smile or a friendly tone, may be
flourished harmlessly and theatrically with fine
effect ; and then its wielder, seeking similar
effects with his pen and carelessly forgetting
that it lacks such a scabbard, finds to his sur-
prise that he has cut and jabbed and now
faces a pack of righteously angry enemies.

This is no legal treatise for the guidance of
budding malefactors, so I need not pretend
to define with exactitude any of those restraints
which common and statute law exercise over
my pen. Thank Heaven for that ! Learned
judges have floundered in a morass of such
definition, and the libeler and the pirate and
the plagiarist, the perverter and the poisoner
find many acres of territory in No Man's Land
where their outlawry goes unpunished.

It is not of the legal but of the ethical be-
havior of our pens that I would chat with you.
Not only the morals but the manners of your
writing I would have you consider. Yet not
the morals and manners of any piece of writing
in itself, for I question whether any art can be

132 ETHICS OF THE PEN

discussed in terms of right and wrong, but in
its relation to others and to yourself.

In seeking for some recognised code of be-
havior among the gentlefolk of the pen, I find
myself turning first to journalism, that field
where writing is a commodity that is daily
bought and sold. If here we should find a
recognised code of ethics, perhaps we might
utilize it as a framework in formulating a code
for the individual.

The ethics of newspaperdom ! Surely there
is such a code, whether or not any single sheet
daily abides by it; and I believe that when
one has compressed all of its commandments
into a few comprehensive ones, you would
recognise rules that govern the conduct of
decent folk in any walk of life.

First of all, the respectable newspaper as a
purveyor of certain literary commodities recog-
nises that it should not sell its goods under false
labels. Facts should not be adulterated by
opinion, advertising should not appear as un-
prejudiced news, editorials should not be for
sale to the highest bidder. No competent

ETHICS OF THE PEN 133

newspaper man will deny this first principle
of my code. His journal may sin occasionally,
as undoubtedly it does, but lie will recognise
the sin when it is called to his attention. The
violently partisan paper which inaccurately
presents the political speeches of the other
side; the yellow paper which builds a cabled
rumor into a headlined assertion of fact, though
knowing it is only a rumor ; the paper whose
news columns are controlled by its advertising
department and, therefore, fails to publish
the important fact of a serious accident in
some prominent department store; the se-
cretly owned paper which carries on an edi-
torial propaganda that it dares not avow
clearly and openly ; these all break this first
commandment. If they do it wantonly and
persistently they deserve the epithet "dis-
reputable."

Secondly, that commodity which the news-
paper offers for sale should be gotten honestly.
Theft, bribery, breach of confidence, — none
of these may escape condemnation under any
such alias as "newspaper hustle," "up-to-date

134 ETHICS OF THE PEN

journalism," or the like. No reputable news-
paper man will dispute with me as to this
section of my code, except perhaps that he
may insist upon its standing first. The editor
who allows his reporter to steal private letters
from an office waste basket, or knowing that
they are so stolen publishes them; the editor
who permits a reporter to secure documents
by bribery; or one who publishes statements
given to him or his reporters in confidence;
such men are the pariahs of journalism, lepers
who walk abroad constantly tinkling their own
little bells of warning.

Please do not think of me as dreaming, in
my remote and comfortable chair, of some
fanciful Park Row establishment where St.
Peter has become city editor and Gabriel goes
abroad crying his papers. The graduate of
a very earthly and sinful Park Row tells us
of how he went forth as a reporter to get an
advance statement of the Hughes Insurance
Committee which was to be given out the
following day. The Committee had adjourned,
but a friendly attache let fall the hint that a

ETHICS OF THE PEN 135

stack of the coveted reports lay ready printed
in the locked committee room. Five dollars
to a scrubwoman ought to get you one, he added.
The reporter carried the suggestion to his chief.
"The man who turned that trick would get
fired," said the city editor. Listen again to
the graduate of a Philadelphia paper. "A
wedding was soon to occur in a fashionable
residence and I was sent to interview, if pos-
sible, any member of the reticent household.
I rang the bell, and to my surprise the door
was instantly opened and someone reproached
me for my delay and hurried me upstairs to
a bedroom, where I found a dissheveled and
impatient young woman. She was the bride-
to-be, and they took me for the hairdresser!"
It was a great chance — but he told the truth
and went away. It is pleasant to know that
such quixotic behavior was in accord with the
standards of the office that sent him. "I
make a distinction," said an ex-city editor
in further analysis of the principle, "between
newsgetting in the service of the public weal
and in the pursuit of a 'private' story. I

136 ETHICS OF THE PEN

would conceal myself under a sofa to get proof
of crime, because my paper has certain recog-
nised police functions. Hard to draw the
dividing line? No harder than for you per-
sonally to decide where your duty lies if you
learn, for instance, of a possible enemy con-
spiracy hatching close at hand and you must
act at once, though spying is utterly at vari-
ance with your personal code."

"There is enough news that can be gotten
honestly. Let the rest go." It is safe to assert
that a majority of real newspapers would be
content to have this blazoned in their city
rooms. As for the others — they only prove
the rule.

These two commandments, then, sum up
certain fundamental requirements of clean
journalism. Your own pen, free from the
jurisdiction of any office, nevertheless finds
much of this same code imposed upon it by
accepted social standards and your own ethi-
cal sense. For, firstly, it may not exploit
its writings under false labels. It may not,
for instance, write salaciously under pretence

ETHICS OF THE PEN 137

of sermonizing, when it is actually impelled
by a desire to win the attention of the prurient.
No balder illustrations of this may be found
than in the field of moving picture scenarios,
where alleged preachments on the white slave
traffic or birth control or kindred topics have
even deluded simple-hearted clergymen into
endorsements of their mercenary campaigns
for publicity. We have seen yellow-minded
poets undertake a similar traffic in mislabelled
literary wares ; and the market has known
for many years those fugitive magazines which
serve as a vehicle for one or two writers who
pretend to address "the few" advanced and
emancipated thinkers, but in reality seek the
many who are retarded in moral develop-
ment. Another common example of false
labelling is furnished by the writer who sells
his pen, whether it be to a breakfast food or
a foreign government, and then denies, by
every method of implication, that his product
is hired propaganda. A publisher tells us, for
instance, of an eminent editorial writer who
came to him with the offer to exploit a book

138 ETHICS OF THE PEN

by means of many favorable references, if given
a share in the royalties.

Varieties of evident mislabelling are unfor-
tunately too numerous for cataloging, but
it seems to me that we might mention the
play which exploits race prejudice and alleges
a humanitarian motive; and in fact any
other capitalization of certain intense emo-
tions under the pretence of seeking some
reader's welfare, or the general "uplift." Or,
in quite a different field, we might include the
signed "write-up" which has been published
with certain qualifying sentences omitted,
unless the result be labelled "adv." in one way
or another. There is no law against any of
these things, — just as there was for years no
law against bottling bad whisky and labelling
it "nerve tonic." But the public conscience
has an increasingly clear sense of their im-
propriety. The more a man writes and the
greater the degree of confidence he has gained,
the more firmly established becomes the right
of his readers to demand honest dealing. If,
for instance, he gains some reputation for

ETHICS OF THE PEN 139

shrewd or sound criticism, he has the less
moral right to sell out his critical judgments
to any bidder.

I think it amounts to this : your reader is
entitled to know your motive in writing. You
may write to amuse, to entertain, to preach, to
teach, or to combine them all ; and you may
now and then let him guess your motive. But
you may not deceive him by asserting one
motive while you secretly harbor another. With
all of my enjoyment of Mr. G. B. Shaw's wit
my pleasure is lessened by the unprovable but
instinctive suspicion that he falsely labels many
of his wares.

The bottler of bad whisky who deals in false
labels may be convicted only after an analysis
of his product; but a keen-sensed critic may
be convinced of the crime to his own satis-
faction after merely a smell and a taste. The
sole test of certain literary mislabellings is the
honesty of the writer's purpose; and unfor-
tunately his mind cannot be analyzed. Yet
there is a certain tang in the smell or the taste
— perhaps you note it in the hell-fire that the

140 ETHICS OF THE PEN

sensational preacher uses as an aid toward
conversions, or in the alleged modernity of
form which some poet uses to cloak an igno-
rance of his art, — and you distrust at once the
labels on their goods.

Secondly, what my pen has to offer it must
secure honestly. Greatly have I dreaded the
approach of this assertion. It has shimmered
before me as I wrote, like a distant sea of un-
known depth; and now I am upon its brink,
brought here by some faint hope that I might
wade across. Breach of confidence, trickery,
theft — committed in the struggle to get good
copy — these were the sins that violated our
journalistic code, and they have their parallels
in the behavior of individual writers. Using
your friends and acquaintances as "copy" in
ways that will make them recognisable and
expose some bit of confidential life history or
some frailty for the public entertainment, —
that, like the sale of parental love-letters, is
breach of confidence fully as heinous as the crime
of a reporter who prints interviews gained under
promise of silence. Yet friends and acquaint-

ETHICS OF THE PEN 141

ances may be the best copy in the world for
your romancer ; to build a wall for him between
the legitimate and the illegitimate use of this
material is more than I know how to do, beyond
saying that he must protect them in their right
to anonymity. His own good taste must erect
that barrier, and let him build it stout and
high, for he will find himself tempted often
enough to climb over it, or at least to balance
upon its summit.

After breach of confidence, theft in its various
degrees. A short and ugly word ! Plagiarism
has a better sound, particularly since we are
discussing something other than actual crime
in these pages. What is plagiarism? How
far may a writer go in the use of material
formulated by another? My learned Doctor
tells me that the crime exists in three degrees :
that plagiarism in the first degree merits hang-
ing, whereas plagiarism in the second degree
may be expiated by some milder punishment,
and that the third degree is no crime at all,
but parody, which is a pleasant sport and good
for the literary health.

142 ETHICS OF THE PEN

It is not worth while to cite even a small
proportion of those eminent writers who have
admittedly found their raw material in pages
produced by another and then served it up
with some sauce of their own making. Argu-
ments on this subject have raged since there ever
was a body of written literature, and whatever
the ruling might have been in any particular
age or decade, always there would arise a genius
of that day who took what he wanted wherever
he found it and by the miracle of his skill gave
it rebirth; and that public which is the final
arbiter, after giving some hearing to the case,
would render its decision in favor of Genius.

"An' what 'e thought 'e might require
'E went an' took — the same as me."

a

A great poet may really borrow," says
Landor; "he may condescend to an obligation
at the hand of an equal or an inferior ; but he
forfeits his title if he borrows more than the
amount of his own possessions . . . the low-
lier of intellect may lay out a table in their
field, at which table the highest one shall some-

ETHICS OF THE PEN 143

times be disposed to partake; want does not
compel him."

"The man of genius," says Dumas, "does
not steal, he conquers, and what he conquers
he annexes to his empire. He makes laws for
it, he peoples it with his subjects, and extends
his golden sceptre over it. And where is the
man who, on surveying his beautiful kingdom,
shall dare to assert that this or that part of
his land is no part of his property?"

"But suppose a clamor is raised, what of it?"
says Erasmus; "those are wiser who publish
under their name the works of another ....
thinking that if accused of plagiarism they will
in the meantime have profited by it."

If Landor and Dumas and others of their
opinion be right, is there anything left of the
sin of plagiarism? Not if you are superior
in genius to the man you rob ! And as you
yourself must decide this matter it is apparent
that you may steal with the greater freedom
as you gain the greater self-esteem.

It is pleasant to gather ideas in the garden
of nonsense, but dull duty requires me to seek

144 ETHICS OF THE PEN

some pathway of reason leading out. "Pla-
giarius" says the Latin dictionary, "a man-
stealer or kidnapper : one who gives himself
out to be the author of another man's book."
Clearly, the matter which is stolen must be
the property of another. Yet no writer has
a private right to any particular situation.
Otherwise the public storehouse would now be
empty. Gozzi, the Italian playwright, as-
serted the existence of only thirty-six possible
tragic situations, and Schiller, who at first
disputed this, later admitted he was unable to
find so many.

"No man has a monopoly of the Lost Will,
of the Missing Heir, or of the Infants Changed
at Nurse," says a writer in the Atlantic.
"Whoso will may get what effect he can out of
these well-worn properties of the story teller."
He then quotes these three rules formulated by
an English reviewer; first, we would permit
any great modern artist to recut and to set
anew the literary gems of classic times and of
the middle ages ; second, all authors have
equal right to the stock situations which are

ETHICS OF THE PEN 145

the common store of humanity ; third, an
author has a right to borrow or buy an idea
if he frankly acknowledges the transaction.

Paralleling another's situation may not prove
plagiarism, but what of borrowing his style also ?
Peculiarity of style may be a man's own, yet
if imitation of it be theft, all amateur writers
and most of their betters are kleptomaniacs.
"No actress," says E. F. Benson, "can help
wriggling after seeing the Divine Sarah, no
actor can help ranting after seeing — somebody
else."

But I will not allow this path to lead me
toward any cumbersomely exact assertion,
as that plagiarism is committed when one
repeats some particular combination of situa-
tions, or handles them in a certain fashion.
How do I know? The charge of plagiarism
is so easily and so readily brought by any writer
who thinks himself aggrieved. And yet it is
so difficult to prove because the intent must
be there. A thief must have the intent to
steal. A plagiarist must "give himself out to
be the author of another man's book." In

14G ETHICS OF THE PEN

the many interesting discussions of this sub-
ject that I have read, there is always the as-
sumption that the degree of the crime lies in
the amount of the injury that one writer,
wittingly or unwittingly, has done another.
To my mind the sin of plagiarism lies chiefly
in the writer's betrayal of his reader's con-
fidence. It is just another question of false
labelling. M. Sardou defended himself against
a charge of theft by explaining that he had
privately purchased the rights to the original
from its author. Yet as one critic rightly pro-
tests, "but for the exposure M. Sardou would
have received credit for a humorous invention
not his."

If there be any crime against an original
owner, that is a legal matter for the courts,
if necessary. But if the writer would keep
his pen clean he will not do so by considering
merely how he may avoid legal entanglement.
The greater wrong lies in the deceit of an in-
definite number of readers. M. Sardou and
Charles Reade, to name two notable offenders,
avoided illegality and committed a greater

ETHICS OF THE PEN 147

wrong. Genius partaking without acknowl-
edgment from a table spread by the lowly
typifies a code that we trust may have even
fewer defenders as civilization advances.

If this attitude of mine leaves no room for
so-called "unconscious plagiarism" it is be-
cause I believe there is no such thing. There
is no unconscious thievery. The interesting
coincidences which sometimes do occur, and
those which are so often discovered by metic-
ulous "penny-a-liners" do not long mislead
the fairminded. There is an atmosphere about
real literary theft that is unmistakable when
all the arguments are heard. The writer who
keeps faith with his reader, giving full credit
whenever failure to do so might by any pos-
sibility mislead, being frank whenever he
distrusts the spontaneity of his own inven-
tion, may go ahead with the assurance that
honest critics will find little difficulty in dis-
tinguishing between crime and coincidence.

Honest labels on wares honestly secured !
A compact code, to be sure, but a good deal
of kernel hides in that small shell. The only

148 ETHICS OF THE PEN

other restraints that good morals and good
manners impose upon your pen are those
that common courtesy or human sympathy
compel you to exercise in any of your dealings
with your fellows, intensified by that great
distinction which lies between the freedom of
the tongue and the freedom of the pen. "While
I did perhaps more than any other man to
drive So-and-so out of public life," said a cer-
tain journalist, — and he spoke truly, — "it is
a source of pleasure to me, and of real pride
as I look back over it all, that I was never
unfair to him personally. I liked the man,
and I tried, all the while that I was exposing
his inefficiency for his public office, to acquaint
my readers with his oddly likable traits. As
a matter of fact, I think that through it all
he rather liked me." The courtesy of the pen
is so easily forgotten in the heat of any con-
troversy, or its lack of a sheath to cover its
cutting edge is so readily overlooked ! Let
me but use vigorous English as a means for
attaining an end, and behold I seem to be
making a sharp personal attack. Prove to

ETHICS OF THE PEN 149

me that you are able to write humorously
of a man without thereby implying your own
superiority to him, and I will grant you at
once a place among literary gentlefolk.

The limitations upon our pens are many,
but after all most of them would never occur
to us as restraints if our instincts were sound.
I imagine that the writer who thinks of each
written word as a means of communication
between himself and some good-fellow of a
reader, — someone he would like to know, be-
tween whom and himself he would like to
establish a good understanding, — I imagine
such a writer has little difficulty in making his
pen behave.

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