Expository Writing
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Title: Expository Writing
Author: Mervin James Curl
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EXPOSITORY WRITING ***
EXPOSITORY WRITING
BY
MERVIN JAMES CURL
FORMERLY INSTRUCTOR IN ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
[Illustration: Publisher's Device]
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY MERVIN JAMES CURL
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A.
TO
THE STUDENTS IN RHETORIC III
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS
WITH WHOM I HAD PLEASANT ASSOCIATION
FROM 1914 TO 1918
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Since one of the pleasures of life is in being indebted to friends
for kindnesses so generously given that the givers were unaware of
the indebtedness which they were creating, the author is happy to set
forth several acknowledgments of most helpful counsel and aid. To Dr.
Emerson G. Sutcliffe, with whom a complete text on the whole subject of
rhetoric had been projected, only to be set aside, and to result, for
the present, in the text now published, the author wishes to express
his thanks for advice, criticism, and general wise help throughout the
preparation of this text. Dr. Herbert L. Creek read many sections of the
book in manuscript, and made valuable suggestions. At the suggestion of
Dr. Jacob Zeitlin the chapter on the "Informal Essay" was rewritten,
with much improvement. Helpful advice was given concerning different
sections of the book by Dr. Frank W. Scott, Dr. Harold N. Hillebrand,
Dr. Clarissa Rinaker, and Miss Ruth Kelso. Dr. Robert C. Whitford and
Mr. Bruce Weirick read a part of the book and kindly commented upon it.
All these kind friends were members, at the time of giving aid, of the
faculty of the University of Illinois.
To Professor Fred L. Pattee, of the Pennsylvania State College, the
author feels an especial debt of gratitude for unfailing interest and
cheer and much wise counsel.
To Mr. Warner G. Rice, a student in the University of Illinois, the
author wishes to make acknowledgment for reading one chapter in
manuscript and making valuable suggestions.
So many friends have helped at one time and another that whatever of
good the book may contain is doubtless due largely to them. For its
faults the author alone is responsible.
Due credit is made in the proper places to the several publishers who
with unfailing kindness and courtesy allowed the use of material drawn
from their publications.
_Boston, Massachusetts_
_August 9, 1919_
CONTENTS
I. THE NATURE AND MATERIAL OF EXPOSITION 1
II. HOW TO WRITE EXPOSITION 11
III. DEFINITION 73
IV. ANALYSIS 113
V. MECHANISMS, PROCESSES, AND ORGANIZATIONS 157
VI. CRITICISM 190
VII. THE INFORMAL ESSAY 231
VIII. EXPOSITORY BIOGRAPHY 257
IX. THE GATHERING OF MATERIAL FOR WRITING 297
INDEX 305
EXPOSITORY WRITING
CHAPTER I
THE NATURE AND MATERIAL OF EXPOSITION
"The Anglo-Saxons," Emerson said, "are the hands of the world"--they,
more than any other people, turn the wheels of the world, do its work,
keep things moving. Without lingering to quarrel with Emerson, or
to justify him, we may safely assert that Expository Writing is the
hands of literature. In a world which man even as yet only slightly
understands, surrounded as he is by his fellows who constantly baffle
his intelligence, and shut up within the riddle of himself, Exposition
attempts to explain, to make clear, to tear away the clouds of mystery
and ignorance.
Exposition attempts to answer the endless curiosity of man. "What is
this?" man asks, of things and of ideas. "Who are you?" he addresses to
his fellows. "How did this originate, what caused it, where is it going,
what will it do, how is it operated?" he repeats from birth to grave.
Perhaps the most interesting question in the world is the never-ending
"What does this mean to me, how does it affect me, how can I use it?"
These are the questions--and there are more of them--which Exposition
tries to answer. Obviously, in making the answers the writing will
often be garbed in the sack suit of business, will sometimes roll up
its sleeves, will pull on the overalls or tie the apron. Then it may
explain the workings of a machine, the wonders of a printing press, or
may show the mysteries of Congressional action, or the organization
of a department store, or even tell how to bake a lemon pie. But it
may also appear in the opulence of evening costume, and criticize the
ensemble of an orchestra, discuss the diplomacy of Europe, address us
in appreciation of the Arts. It may assume the fine informality of the
fireside and give us of its most delightful charms in discussing the
joys of living and learning, the whimsicalities of the world. In any
case it will be answering the endless curiosity of man.
It would not be rash to say that more expository thinking is done than
any other kind of mental activity. The child who dismantles a clock to
find its secret is doing expository thinking; the official, of however
complicated a business, who ponders ways and means, is trying to satisfy
his business curiosity; the artist who studies the effect of balance, of
light and shade, of exclusion or inclusion, is thinking in exposition;
politicians are ceaselessly active in explaining to themselves how
they may, and to their constituents how they did. We cannot escape
Exposition. The question then arises, since this form of writing is
always with us how can we make it effective and enjoyable?
All writing should be interesting; all really effective writing does
interest. It may not be required that every reader be interested in
every bit of writing--that would be too much to hope for in a world
where sympathies are unfortunately so restricted. To peruse a directory
of Bangkok, if one has no possible acquaintance in that city, might
become tedious, though one might draw pleasure from the queer names and
the suggestions of romance. But if one has a lost friend somewhere in
New York, and hopes that the directory will achieve discovery, the bulky
and endless volume immediately takes on the greatest interest. Lincoln,
driven at length to write a recommendation for a book, to escape the
importunities of an agent, wisely, whimsically, wrote, "This is just the
right kind of book for any one who desires just this kind of book." Wide
though his sympathies were, he recognized that not every one enjoys
everything. The problem of the writer of exposition is to make as wide
an appeal as he can.
Interest in reading is of two kinds: satisfaction and stimulation. And
each of these may be either intellectual or emotional or both. The
interest of satisfaction largely arises when the questions which the
reader brings with him to his reading are answered. A reader who desires
to know what is done with the by-products in a creamery, where the skim
milk goes to, will be satisfied--and interested--when he learns the
complete list of uses, among them the fact that skim milk is largely
made into the white buttons that make our underclothing habitable.
The reader who leaves an article about these by-products with the
feeling that he has been only half told is sure to be dissatisfied,
and therefore uninterested. In the same way, when a reader picks up an
article or a book with the desire to be thrilled with romance or wonder,
to be taken for the time away from the business of the world, to be
wrenched with pity for suffering or with admiration for achievement--in
other words, when a reader brings a hungry emotion to his reading--if he
finds satisfaction, he is interested.
The interest of stimulation may include that of satisfaction, but
not necessarily. It is the interest that drives a person to further
thinking or acting for himself, that loosens his own energies and makes
him aware of desire for satisfaction that he did not know he had. A
reader may, for example, peruse an editorial in a daily paper and find
a complete array of facts, setting forth in detail the subject, and may
be satisfied about the subject. He may read another editorial which will
not leave him cold, indifferent, but will set his brain to churning with
ideas, or may even make him clap on his hat and start forth to change
things in the world. The second editorial has given him the interest of
stimulation.
Writing that makes the interest of stimulation is the writing of power:
to the mere satisfaction of hunger, such as one can get from eating
dry oatmeal, it adds the stimulation, the joy in life that a fragrant
cup of coffee would add to the oatmeal. Exposition that satisfies is
adequate; that which stimulates is powerful. Obviously, some expository
writing would suffer from being filled with the power to rouse the
reader. Much legal writing must be addressed to the intellect alone;
often the entrance of stimulation, the rousing of the emotions, will
destroy the chance for justice. Obviously, again, some subjects can be
treated to contain both kinds of interest: an account of the devastation
of northern France may be as cold as a ledger in its array of facts
which are to be added; it may also be so treated as to rouse a vitriolic
hatred for the government that caused such devastation to be made.
Each treatment is allowable, and each necessary for a perfectly proper
purpose.
Let us admit, without debate, that much expository writing is stupid.
Why is it thus? Largely for two reasons: the writer has not made his
material mean anything to himself, and he has not made it significant
for his reader. In writing exposition there is no place for him who
draws his pen along like a quarry slave who is soon to be scourged
to his dungeon and does not care for anything. A person who finds no
interest in his subject should do one of two things: consult a physician
to see if his health is normal so that he may expect reasonably vivid
reactions to life and things; or choose a new subject. Interest, in
other words, enters at the moment when the writing becomes related
vitally to human beings, and not until that moment. Why do students
enjoy reading the writings of William James? Simply because the author
made his facts relate to himself and to everybody else. If a writer
feels like saying, "I don't see anything interesting in this!" and
yet he feels duty pointing a stern finger at composition, he should
examine the subject more nearly, should see if it does not in some way
affect him, does not present a front that he is really concerned with.
Suppose, for example, that the task presents itself of accounting for
the use of skim milk, and suppose that the writer thinks skim milk of
all things the stupidest. Well, buttons, they say, are made from it--but
who cares what buttons are made from; their purpose is to hold clothes
together, and that's all! But wait a bit: here are some hundreds of
gallons of skim milk, from which thousands of buttons can be made.
Without the milk, the buttons will be cut from shells, perhaps, at a
much larger cost. Ah, the pocketbook is affected, is it--well, let's
have the milk used, then. And when one stops to think of it, is it not
remarkable that from a soft thing like milk a hard thing like a button
should be made? Isn't man, after all, rather ingenious? Who in the world
ever thought of milk buttons? Some such process the mind often passes
through in its approach to a subject. At length it finds interest, and
then it can write--and not before.
Here is the difference, then, between being a dumb beast of a reporter
of facts, and a free agent of an interpreter. Some facts, to be sure,
are in themselves so startling that mere report is sufficient. Slight
comment is needed to horrify an audience at Turkish atrocities in
the war. Perhaps comment would even weaken the effect. The terrible
poignancy of such facts so fires the imagination that more is perhaps
positively harmful. Many facts are not thus immediately translated into
human experience. At first thought the fact that a new hotel will be
supplied with indirect lighting seems a mere fact of trade: instead
of ordering hanging chandeliers of one kind, the builder will order
another kind. But thought of more fully, this fact takes on both the
interest of satisfaction and that of stimulation: why did the builder
decide to install the indirect system? and what will the effect be?
Imagining one's self in that hotel at the end of a long and bewildering
journey, with nerves on edge and eyes aflame with dust, will relate the
fact of choice at once to human feelings and needs--and the subject
is interesting. A reader can be made to understand the workings of the
engine in a super-six automobile, and also to feel the power of it; to
understand a cream separator and also to thrill to the economy of time
and strength which it brings; to understand a clarinet and also to rouse
to the beauty of its voice; to understand an adding machine and also to
marvel at the uncanny weirdness of the invention. The writer interprets
as soon as he brings his subject into relation with human life and shows
its real value.
As already mentioned, care is to be exercised to use the treatment
which the subject demands. An explanation, for practical purposes, of
a machine lathe will be dangerous if it attempts too much imaginative
stimulation: there would lurk too great a danger to material fingers. An
essay, on the other hand, such as those of Lamb and Stevenson, depends
largely on its imaginative interpretation, on its appeal to the interest
of stimulation. For a neutral newspaper account of a football game the
following heading was used: "Yesterday's game between the University of
Illinois and the University of Chicago resulted in no score for either
side." That is a bald report of the facts, for a neutral audience. The
interpreting spirit, as it appeared at the two universities, colored
the tale: "Fighting Illini tie Maroons 0-0"; and, "Maroons hold Illini
to 0-0 score." These two headings, if expanded into complete articles,
would color the story with interpretation for a specific audience that
is vitally interested. The accounts would probably be more interesting
than that of the newspaper, but they would also run the chance of being
less fair.
For Webster's New International Dictionary _art_ is defined as follows:
"Application of skill and taste to production according to æsthetic
principles; an occupation having to do with the theory or practice of
taste in the expression of beauty in form, color, sound, speech, or
movement." George Gissing, making a definition of the same subject for
his book, _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, writes as follows:
It has occurred to me that one might define Art as: an
expression, satisfying and abiding, of the zest for life. This
is applicable to every form of Art devised by man, for, in his
creative moment, whether he produce a great drama or carve a piece
of foliage in wood, the artist is moved and inspired by supreme
enjoyment of some aspect of the world about him; an enjoyment
keener in itself than that experienced by another man, and
intensified, prolonged, by the power--which comes to him we know
not how--of recording in visible or audible form that emotion of
rare vitality. Art, in some degree, is within the scope of every
human being, were he but the ploughman who utters a few would-be
melodious notes, the mere outcome of health and strength, in the
field at sunrise; he sings or tries to, prompted by an unusual
gusto in being, and the rude stave is all his own. Another was he,
who also at the plough, sang of the daisy, or the field mouse,
or shaped the rhythmic tale of Tam o' Shanter. Not only had life
a zest for him incalculably stronger and subtler than that which
stirs the soul of Hodge, but he uttered it in word and music such
as go to the heart of mankind, and hold a magic power for ages.[1]
[1] George Gissing: _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_. By
permission of the publishers, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York City.
Of these two definitions obviously the first attempts merely to satisfy
the intellectual curiosity of the reader, is a mere report of facts, and
the second is interested in making an interpretation, in stimulating the
reader. For most readers the words of Gissing would be more interesting;
though, since a dictionary is not primarily an amusement, it is a bit
unfair to mention the fact.
Interesting our expository writing must be; it must also be truthful.
Nothing worse can be imagined than the kind of writing that forgets the
facts, that remembers only the desire to please. Under the pleasing
phraseology of any bit of expository writing there must be the firm
structure of thought, and the close weave of fact. Expository writing
is commonly divided into Definition and Analysis. Definition attempts
to set bounds to the subject, to say "thus far and no farther," to tell
what the subject is. Analysis regards the subject as composed of parts,
mutually related, which together form the whole, and attempts to divide
the subject into as many parts as it contains. Analysis is divided into
classification and partition. Classification groups individual members
according to likeness, as one might classify Americans according to
color or birthplace or education or health, in every case placing those
who are alike together. Partition divides an organic whole into its
parts, as one might divide the United States Government into its three
branches of legislative, judicial, and executive, or the character of
George Washington into its components. Now definition and analysis often
intermingle and help each other, and are often informally treated,
but somehow, in every piece of exposition, the underlying thought
must have a sound basis of one or the other or both. This will be the
nucleus of the thinking; it may then be treated as a bald report or
as an interpretation, aiming merely to give information or to rouse
the further interest of the reader. The method of treatment will be
determined by the nature of the facts and the purpose of the author in
writing.
It cannot be too strongly stated that the underlying thought and the
interest are really one, after all. As you approach a subject, and
learn its character and meaning, you will be at the same time learning
whether it is a subject capable of great appeal or only of slight
attraction. Interest is not something laid on, but is a development from
the nature of the facts themselves. The first question should be, "Is
this interesting?" and then the second question may follow, "How shall I
bring out the interest?" Remember that interest depends on relation to
human beings; the closer the relation, the greater the interest.
Mr. Henry Labouchere, English statesman and for many years editor of
_Truth_, had an ideal reaction to life, so far as interest is concerned.
If, scanning the horizon for interest, he had bethought himself of the
rather impolite advice of the Muse to Sir Philip Sidney, "'Fool,' said
my Muse to me, 'look in thine heart and write,'" he would have found,
upon following the advice, a heart full of eager curiosity and readiness
to be attracted to anything. The following account of one of his
qualities, as related in his biography, is worth remembering when you
feel like saying, "Oh, I don't see anything interesting in that!": "If
he had encountered a burglar in his house already loaded with valuables,
his first impulse would have been, not to call the police, but to engage
the intruder in conversation, and to learn from him something of the
habits of burglars, the latest and most scientific methods of burgling,
the average profits of the business, and so forth. He would have been
delighted to assist his new acquaintance with suggestions for his future
guidance in his profession, and to point out to him how he might have
avoided the mistake which had on this occasion led to his being caught
in the act. In all this he would not by any means have lost sight of his
property; on the contrary, the whole force of his intellect would have
been surreptitiously occupied with the problem of recovering it with
the least amount of inconvenience to his friend and himself. He would
have maneuvered to bring off a deal. If by sweet reasonableness he could
have persuaded the burglar to give up the 'swag,' he would have been
delighted to hand him a sovereign or two, cheer him with refreshment,
shake hands, and wish him better luck next time; and he would have
related the whole story in the next week's _Truth_ with infinite humor
and profound satisfaction."
To make clear, to explain,--that is the task of exposition. Such
writing does not have the excitement of the fighting-ring, which we
find in argument, nor does it attain the lyric quality of impassioned
description, or the keen wild flight of narrative. It keeps its feet on
the earth, tells the truth--but tells it in such a way, with so much
of reaction on the writer's part, and with so strong an appeal to the
reader's curiosity or imagination or sympathy, that it is interesting,
that it is always adequate, and may be powerful.
CHAPTER II
HOW TO WRITE EXPOSITION
The Problem
All writing--except mere exercise and what the author intends for
himself alone--is a problem in strategy. The successful author will
always regard his writing as a problem of manipulation of material
wisely chosen to accomplish an objective against the enemy. The enemy is
the reader. He is armed with two terrible weapons, lack of interest and
lack of comprehension. Sometimes one weapon is stronger than the other,
but a wise author always has an eye for both. The strategic problem is,
then, so to choose material, and so to order and express it, that the
reader will be forced to become interested, to comprehend, to arrive,
in other words, at the point in his feeling and thinking to which the
author wishes to lead him. The author's objective is always an effect
in the reader's mind. In so far as the author creates this effect he is
successful. And the time to consider the effect, to make sure of its
accomplishment, is before the pen touches the paper.
Sometimes the author makes a mistake in his planning, as did the
composer Handel when he wrote the oratorio of "The Messiah." He placed
the "Hallelujah Chorus" at the end of the oratorio. But when, toward the
end of the second section, he saw from his place on the stage that the
audience was not so enthusiastic as he had expected it to be at that
point, he changed his plan, with practical shrewdness rushed to the
front and shifted the famous chorus from the end of the third section to
the end of the second, and had the satisfaction of seeing the audience
so moved that first the King rose, and then, of course, the audience
with him. The chorus has stood at the end of the second part to this
day; that is the place for it--it brings about the effect that Handel
desired much better there than if it were saved for the end of the
oratorio. The oratorio is, in other words, a greater work than it would
have been had not the author kept a keen eye for the audience, for the
effect, and a willingness to change his plans whenever the gaining of
the effect required a change. Just so the writer should constantly scan
the horizon of the reader's mind for signs of interest and for shafts of
intelligence.
The effect that the writer desires in the reader's mind may be of
different natures. In Baedeker's Guide-Book the aim is largely to
satisfy the understanding, to meet the reader's desire for compact
information. In some of Poe's tales the effect is of horror. Patrick
Henry aimed primarily to rouse to vigorous action. Shakespeare wished to
shed light upon the great truths of existence, to satisfy the reader's
groping curiosity, and also to thrill the reader with pity and terror or
with high good humor or the unrestrained laughter of roaring delight.
In so far as the author accomplishes his purpose, in just so far he is
successful. When friends complimented Cicero, telling him that he was
the greatest orator, he replied somewhat as follows: "Not so, for when I
give an oration in the Forum people say, 'How well he speaks!' but when
Demosthenes addressed the people they rose and shouted, 'Come, let us
up and fight the Macedonians!'" If Cicero was correct in his estimate,
Demosthenes was the greater orator--of that there can be no doubt--for
he gained his effect. President Wilson's great war messages had as one
of their objects, certainly, the rousing in American hearts of a high
thrill to the lofty object for which they fought, the overcoming of
might with right. The remarkable success of the messages attests the
author's power.
Now the author will accomplish this effect in the reader's mind only
if his writing "takes hold," and it will "take hold" only if it is
weighty, that is, only if it bears toward the desired end in every part
and in every implication. This is as true in writings that aim at light,
frivolous effects as in those that stir the deeper emotions, in writing
that aims at the understanding almost alone as in that which strives not
only to make clear but to infuse with deathless appeal to the heart.
A treatise on the fourth dimension must bear, in every stroke, toward
the complete satisfaction of the reader's intellectual curiosity; a
comedy must lay down each word in the intention of liberating the
silver laughter of humor; a tragedy must leave us in every implication
serious, even in its introduction of comical material to heighten the
tragic nature of the whole. To make every word bear in the one general
direction--that is the writer's task. In no other way can he move the
reader's mind and heart as he wishes to.
An author finds, however, that to gain the desired effect requires
skillful manipulation on his part. He confronts a mass of refractory
material, often full of contradictions, in which any potential effect
seems almost as difficult to discover as the proverbial needle in the
well-known haystack. For example, when a historian sits down, one
hundred years hence, to the task of explaining the Great War, he will
be confronted with an amazing welter of endless facts, tendencies,
personal, national, and racial ambitions, enmities, competitions in
trade, language, customs, indiscretions of diplomats, inscrutable
moves of controlling powers, checks and counter checks, assertion
and denial, accusation and assurance of innocence, bribery and plots
and spy systems, amateur comment in newspaper and magazine, defenses
by people who have retained their poise and other defenses by those
whose faculties have been unseated by the awful strain of war--and
everywhere he will find the endless array of events and detailed facts
of organization of civil and military life to mold somehow into a
consistent, intelligible whole. Well may he say that the task is too
great for mortal man. Yet somehow the history is to be written, somehow
the effect that he wishes is to be gained. Obviously the great prime
task is to unify, to bring order out of chaos, to create from formless
material a real edifice of thought. Exactly the same task awaits the
writer of any kind of literature; in a short theme no less, the first
great duty is to find some principle whereby the author can exclude the
useless and include what is of value.
The first question to ask is--and it is also the last and the
intervening question--"What am I trying to accomplish?" At first
thought this question may seem the most obvious, the most elementary,
and the least helpful query possible. But upon its being successfully
met depends the whole success of the writing, whether of choosing or
ordering or proportioning the material, or of expressing the selected
ideas. For, since the chief task before the writer is to make his
thoughts and his expression drive in one direction, so that the whole
composition is simplified in the reader's mind, is unified and given an
organic existence, even the choice of words, upon which depends so much
of the tone of the composition, is largely settled by the answer to this
question of what the author hopes to accomplish.
In Exposition, the explaining the relations among things and ideas, we
are commonly told that we must "cover the ground," must "stick to the
subject," must "include whatever is valuable and reject the rest." But
such directions are insufficient. Until I have some touchstone, some
applicable standard, I cannot tell whether material is valuable or not.
It is as if one were brought into the presence of multifarious building
material,--wood both hard and soft, cement and the other ingredients
of concrete, bricks, stucco, and steel beams, and terra cotta
tiles,--and then were requested to build a house, using whatever of the
material might be of value, and removing the rest. The builder would
be nonplussed. He cannot build, now with wood, now with stone, and
again with tile; if he did, the saying would be all too true, "There's
no place like home!" He can do nothing reasonable until he has been
informed as to the kind of house desired, until he is given a principle
of selection. Then, if he has been bidden to make a brick house, he
at once knows what his object is, and can then reject whatever does
not help him, in the accomplishment. In the same way, if I am asked to
write five thousand words about Horticulture, I am at a loss to choose
from the history of the science, or the present status, or the still
unsolved problems, or the relative advancement in different countries,
or the possibility of the pursuit of horticulture as a profession, or
the poetic, the imaginative stimulus of working among apple blossoms,
or the value to health of working in the open air. Perhaps any one
of these divisions of the total subject would require five thousand
words; certainly with so limited an amount of material of expression
I cannot cover all; and if I choose a bit of each, the result will
hopelessly confuse the reader as to the science, for I shall perforce
write a series of mere _disjuncta membra_. I must, then, choose at once
some guiding principle of selection that will make clear whether, for
instance, the poetic appeal of the science has anything to do with my
object. Then, and only then, shall I be able to write an article that
will "take hold," that will bear in every part toward some definite
goal, that will leave my reader with a well-organized, easily understood
piece of writing. Only thus can I escape making a mere enumeration about
as sensible as to add potatoes and church steeples and treasurers'
reports and feather boas and card parties and library paste in the
hope of making an integral whole. This guiding idea, which avoids such
selections, may perhaps best be called the "controlling purpose" of the
theme or article or book.
The Controlling Purpose
_What, then, is the controlling purpose? It is the answer to the
question, "What am I trying to accomplish?" It is the intelligent
determination on the writer's part to make the material of his writing
march straight toward a definite goal which he wishes the reader to
perceive. It is the actively operating point of view of the writer,
the positive angle of vision that he takes toward the subject._ The
controlling purpose in Lincoln's mind as he rode up to Gettysburg
must have been to bring home to the civilians of the country, with a
great humble thrill toward accomplishment, the fact that after the
soldiers had done all they could, the civilians must reverently take
up the fight for freedom and union. His address is immortal. But
suppose, for a moment, that he had ascended the platform with the vague
idea of "saying something about America, the war, you know, and the
soldiers, and liberty,--oh, yes, Liberty, of course,--and, oh, things
in general." Though he had thundered for hours his words would likely
have been ineffective. Only an intense realization of the purpose in
one's mind, and a consistent bending of one's efforts to gain this end,
bring simplicity, weightiness, and the powerful effect in the reader's
mind. From the reader's point of view, in fact, we might say that
the controlling purpose is the means of making writing interesting,
since nothing so holds a reader's mind as to feel that he is getting
somewhere, that he is accomplishing something by his efforts. In no
other way can he be made so clearly to see his progress, for only thus
can he be prevented from undirected wandering.
Source of the Controlling Purpose
_a._ _The Subject itself_
When we ask how we shall find and choose the controlling purpose, we
discover that it is determined by three things; the subject itself, the
personality of the writer, and the character of the reader. Just how
these three operate to determine the cast of the writing we shall now
attempt to discover.
The first thing for the writer to do is to look at the subject itself
and learn what it is, really understand it. He must know its exact
nature before he can be allowed to proceed with the development. Now
this often requires much honesty, for it is necessary to put aside
prejudice and bias of all kinds and to look at the subject just as it
is, with a passionate desire to learn its exact nature. For example, if
you are to write about the value of a college education, and you are an
idealist, you may be tempted to overlook the fact that such a training
does actually help a man to earn more money than he otherwise would. You
may think that such a consideration is beneath your dignity. But you
must put aside your prejudice for the time being and must look the fact
honestly in the face. And, if you are a hard-headed, practical person,
you must nevertheless admit that a college education is broadening,
chastening, in its influence. In either case you will not stop until
you have looked at all possible sides of the subject. You will amass
such facts, then, as that a college education is broadening, that it
increases earning capacity, that it puts a person in touch with the
world, that it makes him more able to be a useful citizen. Other facts
also will occur to you, but let us suppose that these are the most
important. If you carefully examine them you will perhaps come to the
conclusion that a college education is valuable in that it helps a
person to realize his best possibilities in every way, as a citizen,
a friend, a personality. Or, if you are to write about the aeroplane,
you will discover that it is heavier than air, that it is propelled
by motor-power, that it attains certain speeds, that it has definite
lifting power, that it is self-stabilizing to a remarkable degree, that
it is made of certain kinds of material, of certain weight, and that
it has one, or two, or even three planes. In addition you will note
the qualities of efficiency, of triumphing over winds, of beautiful
poise, and smoothness of execution. In both these cases you have been
seeking the core of your subject, the real meaning of it, its essence.
You must, before you begin to write a word, be able to say what all the
noticed facts amount to, to say, "All told, this subject, this machine,
or whatever it is, means so-and-so." Perhaps of the aeroplane you would
say, "This machine stands for wonderful potential efficiency, not yet
completely understood." In the same way we say of people and things, "He
is a bore," or "a tyrant," or, "That is a great social menace," or some
other such comment. In each case we have tagged the person or thing with
what we think it is at its heart, with its total significance. And not
until we have done this are we at all ready to begin writing.
_b._ _The Writer's Attitude_
The second influence in determining the controlling purpose is the
reaction of the writer to the subject. In the following estimate of Lord
Morley, the great English statesman, you will notice that, though the
treatment seems to be, at first, purely objective, quite impersonal,
the author cannot keep himself out: he enters with the fifth word,
"thrilling," in which he shows where he stands himself in regard to
truth, and he appears more at length in the last two clauses of the
selection, where he definitely set the approval of his own heart upon
Lord Morley's attitude. The third influence, that of the reader, appears
also, for when you consider that the article was written for Englishmen
to read, you see the molding for the national temper, different of
necessity from that which would have been made for Frenchmen, for
example. The author relies upon a knowledge of Morley among his readers,
and upon a certain definite attitude among them toward the truth.
You will catch that thrilling note in the oratory of Lord
Morley at all times, for he touches politics with a certain
spiritual emotion that makes it less a business or a game than a
religion. He lifts it out of the street on to the high lands where
the view is wide and the air pure and where the voices heard are
the voices that do not bewilder or betray. He is the conscience of
the political world--the barometer of our corporate soul. Tap him
and you will see whether we are at "foul" or "fair." He has often
been on the losing side: sometimes perhaps on the wrong side: never
on the side of wrong. He is
True as a dial to the sun,
Although it be not shined upon.
There is about him a sense of the splendid austerity of
truth--cold but exhilarating. It is not merely that he does not
lie. There are some other politicians of whom that may be said. It
is that he does not trifle with truth. It is sacred and inviolate.
He would not admit with Erasmus that "there are seasons when we
must even conceal truth," still less with Fouché that "les paroles
sont faites pour cacher nos pensées."[2] His regard for the truth
is expressed in the motto to the essay "On Compromise": "It makes
all the difference in the world whether we put truth in the first
place or in the second." This inflexible veracity is the rarest
and the most precious virtue in politics. It made him, if not, as
Trevelyan says of Macaulay, "the worst popular candidate since
Coriolanus," at least a severe test of a constituency's attachment.
It is Lord Morley's contribution to the common stock. Truth and
Justice--these are the fixed stars by which he steers his barque,
and even the Prayer Book places Religion and Piety after them, for
indeed they are the true foundation of religion and piety.[3]
[2] Words were made to conceal our thoughts.
[3] A. G. Gardiner: _Prophets, Priests, and Kings_. By permission of
the publishers, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York City.
The second consideration, then, is, "What does this subject mean to
me?" Of course there are subjects in which this question is of slight
importance: in writing a treatise on mathematics, for instance, one
might be quite indifferent to any personal reaction, though in even such
a piece of writing there might appear a thrill at the neat marshaling
of forces for the inevitable waiting answer to the problem. In general,
however, this question is of great importance. Stevenson goes so far as
even to say that the author's attitude is more important than the facts
themselves. Certainly a writer cannot tell what is the truth for himself
unless he expresses his ideas in the light of his own personality.
Suppose that in the case of the aeroplane, though you believe the
central fact as we expressed it above, you are primarily appealed to by
the fact that the motor is of the utmost importance, and that at present
it is not so highly developed as it should be for perfect flying. You
are, in other words, impressed with the problem that confronts engineers
of making the motor more efficient. Your controlling purpose would now
be modified, then, and would perhaps read, "The aeroplane is a machine
of wonderful potential efficiency not yet completely understood,
_especially as regards the driving power_." In the same way you would
modify the purpose of the treatment of college education and might say,
"A college education is valuable in that it helps a person to realize
his best possibilities in every way, but _especially as an heir of all
the wisdom of the ages gone_."
The relative importance of this second consideration depends on whether
the subject is much or little affected by personal interpretation. In
the personal essay, as written by Lamb, for example, we may care more
for the man than for the facts, or more for the facts as seen by the man
than for the mere facts alone. In questions of society, of morality, of
taste, in which the answer is not absolute in any case, in all matters
that affect the well-being of humanity and in which there is a shifting
standard, the attitude of the writer is important. The writer who wishes
to have a voice of authority must cling to the fact as to a priceless
jewel, but he must also remember that if, for example, he is writing
on Feminism, or Socialism, or Church Attendance, or The Short Ballot,
or The New Poetry, or The Value of Social Clubs in the Country, or
any such subject, we, the readers, eagerly wait on his words as being
primarily an expression of his personal reaction to the matter. And the
final value of the treatment will depend on whether the personality is
well-poised, largely sympathetic, able to take an elastic view of the
subject and to bring it home to the reader as a piece of warmly felt and
honestly stated conviction. In exposition, as well as in argument, we
must ask the witness,--that is, the writer,--whether he is prejudiced
or not. Especially must we do this when we happen to be the author
ourselves. Violent condemnation of Capital by a man who has become
embittered by mistreatment at the hands of employers must be taken with
somewhat of caution, just as sweeping arraignment of Socialism by an
arrogant capitalist must be eyed askance.
It might not be amiss to remark here that the writer in a college class
who declares that he has no reaction to his subject, that he is quite
indifferent to it, should do one of two things, either choose a new
subject, or drop from college and go to work at some vitalizing effort
with other people which will bring home realities to him in such a way
that he cannot fail to react.
In the following brief incident it is interesting to note how the author
shows his own personality. Another would have thought of the problem
of dietetics involved, or of the absence of coffee or "parritch" or
the rasher of bacon, or of the austerity of the meal. To Gissing[4]
the incident was significant as showing a national characteristic both
admirable and amusing.
[4] George Gissing: _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, "Summer,"
XXI. By permission of the publishers, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York
City.
At an inn in the north I once heard three men talking at their
breakfast on the question of diet. They agreed that most people ate
too much meat, and one of them went so far as to declare that,
for his part, he rather preferred vegetables and fruit. "Why," he
said, "will you believe me that I sometimes make a breakfast of
apples?" This announcement was received in silence; evidently the
two listeners didn't quite know what to think of it. Thereupon the
speaker, in rather a blustering tone, cried out, "Yes, I can make a
very good breakfast on _two or three pounds of apples_."
Wasn't it amusing? And wasn't it characteristic? This honest Briton
had gone too far in frankness. 'T is all very well to like vegetables
and fruit up to a certain point; but to breakfast on apples! His
companions' silence proved that they were just a little ashamed of him;
his confession savoured of poverty or meanness; to right himself in
their opinion, nothing better occurred to the man than to protest that
he ate apples, yes, but not merely one or two; he ate them largely,
_by the pound_! I laughed at the fellow, but I thoroughly understood
him; so would every Englishman; for at the root of our being is a
hatred of parsimony. This manifests itself in all manner of ludicrous
or contemptible forms, but no less is it the source of our finest
qualities. An Englishman desires, above all, to live largely; on
that account he not only dreads but hates and despises poverty. His
virtues are those of the free-handed and warm-hearted opulent man; his
weaknesses come of the sense of inferiority (intensely painful and
humiliating) which attaches in his mind to one who cannot spend and
give; his vices, for the most part, originate in loss of self-respect
due to loss of secure position.
_c._ _The Reader_
The third consideration is, "Who is my reader, and what are his
characteristics?" The counter-question, "What difference does it
make who my reader is?" can be summarily answered with the statement
that it makes a great deal of difference. As soon as you note what a
large part temperament plays in the forming of opinions in politics
and religion and social questions, and remember that no two people
ever react to any truth in exactly the same way--that what seems to
one sensible person monstrous will appear to another equally sensible
person as highly virtuous--you will see that in all writing, where
either the understanding or the emotions are involved, this question
assumes importance. If we believe the theory with which we set out,
that all writing is done to accomplish an object, that is, a certain
effect in the reader's mind, and then remember that different readers
take different trails to the same objective, and that some must be even
coaxed back from one trail into another, we shall see that it is vital
that the reader do not select the wrong way, and, like a futile dog,
"bark up the wrong tree." A hasty glance at current magazines will at
once show how operative this consideration is in practical writing:
_The Atlantic Monthly_ uses a different set of subjects and a different
style of expression from that of _The Scientific American_ or _The Black
Cat_ or _The Parisienne_. The editors, in other words, are remembering
who their readers are and are trying to meet them with gifts, not with
weapons of offense. After all, the reader is always the destination of
all writing; the place where the effect will be made is the reader's
mind.
To apply this third consideration to our two subjects, the value of a
college education and the aeroplane, let us see how the treatment should
differ according to the differing readers. If, in the treatment of the
first subject, we are presenting our statements to a body of educators,
even though the facts of college education remain unmoved, and though
our personal leaning toward the supreme value in dowering the student
with the wisdom of the past is unchanged, we shall yet see that these
educators have already thought as we have about the matter, that merely
to repeat to them will be futile and wearying; and we shall, if we are
wise, change the point of attack and develop the value as enabling the
student _to apply to practical problems the wisdom of the past_. Or, if
the readers are to be politicians whom we wish to enlist in sympathy
with larger endowments, we shall perhaps treat the subject as being
_increased political insight and sympathy with all people_. In the
treatment of the aeroplane, if we are presenting our words to engineers,
we shall probably analyze the present lack of proper engine power and
try to suggest means of correction. And we shall make our presentation
in language that has not been stripped of its technicalities but has
been allowed to stand in engineering terms. But if we address a body of
benevolent women who are trying to organize an "Airmen's Relief Fund,"
and who look upon the machine with horror as a potential destroyer
of life, we shall simply show that _accidents may be caused through
faulty engines which may often result in loss of life_. The original
controlling purpose will now appear, "The value of a college education
lies in its offering the best chance for personal development through
showing to the student his heirship to all the wisdom of the ages
past, especially as this is applied to present-day problems," or, "The
aeroplane is a machine of great potential efficiency not yet completely
understood, especially as regards the driving power, through which lack
of understanding grave accidents may occur."
Now if we scan these two statements carefully, I believe that we shall
be persuaded of their inadequacy. To explain to the benevolent women
who are interested in saving lives the fact that we do not yet fully
understand the aeroplane, is like attempting to persuade a man from the
path of an oncoming thunderous locomotive by telling him of the lack of
laws to regulate public safety. In other words, we have forgotten that a
wedge makes the easiest entrance, and we have attacked on far too broad
a front, have failed to whittle away the chips that are of no value to
the reader. Perhaps we need a complete restatement of the controlling
purpose, occasioned by the nature of the reader. We may say that the
value of a college education is in enabling a student to be of service
to the state by applying the wisdom of the past, or that the aeroplane,
partly through our ignorance of it, is causing terrible accidents.
These purposes are far different from those with which we started out.
All are perfectly true; these are better adapted to our particular
readers, are more useful in helping to accomplish our selected aim. The
gist of the matter is this: wisdom in writing demands that we discover
the special loophole through which our readers regard the subject and
then bring our material within the view from that loophole, bearing
in mind always the training and the prejudices of the reader, and
conforming material to suit the special needs.
One large reason why college themes are liable to dullness is the fact
that few students write for any one in particular. They merely put down
colorless facts which do not stir a reader in the slightest. They forget
that facts exist, really, only as they relate to people, individual
people, and that they must be clothed attractively, as is virtue for
a child's consumption, or the reader will have none of them. Even
the patient writer of themes should regard a specially chosen reader
as at the same time his best friend and his potentially worst enemy:
friend in the sense of recipient of literary gifts, and enemy in the
sense of possible foiler of all the author's good intentions. As enemy
the reader must be conquered, must be made to read and understand; as
friend he is to be sympathetically met and smiled upon. And if there
be no reader determined by the circumstances, the writer should choose
some well-known friend and adapt his material to that friend, or should
select any ordinarily intelligent being and use the widest appeal that
he can.
_d._ _Relative Value of Sources_
Now the relative value of these three sources of the controlling purpose
is variable. In an article for the encyclopædia the writer's reaction
should be subordinated, since the reader comes to the encyclopædia for
facts and not for opinion. Likewise the reader, in such an article,
will be of minor importance, for the article is addressed to general
ordinary intelligence that desires a straightforward statement. But as
we have seen, an article on Feminism must with the greatest care watch
the reader and the writer--the reader because the subject rouses both
assent and opposition; the writer because the subject is of the kind
that depend largely on opinion. So a theme on the problem of the hired
man, or Tennyson's attitude toward science, or the reasons for attending
one university rather than another, or the value of mechanical stokers,
or the application of Mendel's Law to human beings will vary its purpose
according to the varying importance of the three sources. Only one great
caution needs to be made. Never falsify or mistreat the facts: they are
the supreme thing. It is for this fault that the newspapers are most
blameable: they consider their readers and their own points of view, but
all too often they treat the facts cavalierly. A high reverence for the
truth, and an unflinching determination to tell it are prime essentials.
The Controlling Purpose and the Emotional Reaction
So far we have been concerned with the problem of placing the _facts_
before the reader, of appealing to his intelligence. But writing
consists of vastly more than that alone. After the understanding,
sometimes before, must be considered the emotions. We have the facts, we
know what we think of them, and we are reasonably sure of the reader's
attitude. Now we must discover how to set the reader's emotions afire
in so far as we desire such an effect. In listening to a great tragedy
we perceive the cold analysis of a great truth of life; but that is
not all: far out beyond the bounds of understanding our emotions are
profoundly stirred and we _feel_ pity and terror. So in the account of
a tremendous battle, of a fire, of anything that touches human life
at all nearly and with power, our emotions are called into play. Now
different pieces of writing, just like different subjects, call for
different degrees of emotional reaction. Drama always rouses us, lyric
poems depend upon their emotional quality, the informal essay has much
emotional appeal, fiction of any sort stirs our feelings, and the more
powerful the writing is, the more sure the appeal.
At first thought most expository writing might be considered to make
slight appeal, if any, to emotions. That is not necessarily true; the
more effective the exposition, the more real is usually the call to
feeling. Often this call is subtle, usually it is subordinate to the
appeal to the understanding, but in most effective expository writing
it will be found. In an explanation of the Panama Canal certainly there
would be roused the reader's admiration and wonder at the magnitude
of the operation. The mere analysis of the facts in a criminal trial
often settles the case, so great is the emotional appeal. In didactic
writing the call to emotion is less strong, though such a writer as
Jonathan Edwards could explain the writhing of man like a spider before
the Almighty in a profoundly moving way. In axiomatic mathematical
propositions we find perhaps the least strong appeal: that the sum of
the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles might seem to be
divorced from all excitement. But in most exposition when emotional
appeal is overlooked the writing suffers.
In an account of the American Civil War, for example, the writer
might set out to show that the conflict was the culmination of the
struggle between yeoman and cavalier begun long since in England. But
the war meant more than that. The author will then see the emotional
significance of the fight and will add to his purpose the intention
to thrill the reader at the magnificent exhibition, on both sides, of
devotion to an idea. So Emerson, in his essay on "Fate" in _The Conduct
of Life_, fills the reader with gloom for page after page, detailing how
thoroughly the individual is bound down by conditions of birth, sex,
breeding, wealth--and then in two wonderful sentences he turns the
whole course of thought and emotion by saying, "Intellect annuls fate.
So far as a man thinks, he is free," and the reader is stirred as with a
trumpet call to renewed courage, which, to use Emerson's words, "neither
brandy, nor nectar, nor sulphuric ether, nor hell-fire, nor ichor, nor
poetry, nor genius" can overcome. And the historian Greene, in his
well-known account of Queen Elizabeth, states his controlling purpose
in the words, "Elizabeth was at once the daughter of Henry and of Anne
Boleyn." But these words are not the whole of his purpose; he intends,
besides the intellectual grasping of the Queen's character, an intense
admiration and wonder at the resourcefulness, the shrewd judgment, and a
reaction of amusement to the strange outbreaks of unwomanly freaks or of
feminine wiles.
The controlling purpose, then, is almost always of a dual nature; it
aims at both the understanding and the emotions. Whenever there is any
real possibility of making it thus double the writer should so express
it to himself.
In the following magazine article such a double purpose obviously
exists. First of all there are the facts of the marching of American
troops through London. These facts are unchangeable. Baldly stated, the
significance of the fact is that the New World is coming to the help
of the Old World against the monster of unrestrained militarism. To a
person who regards life coldly, as the mere interplay of calculable
forces, one whose emotions are not concerned, this would be a sufficient
statement of the whole truth, of the total significance. But such
writing would miss the chance of power, would be forever less valuable
than it ought to be, for a great warming of the heart answers those
footfalls in London streets. In other words, just as we have seen that
there are two kinds of exposition--mere noting of facts and interpreting
of facts--so we now see that interpretation can be either lifeless,
or moving, charged with power. It is the old difference between the
drama and a sermon: the play thrills and the sermon convinces. Either
may add the other quality--a fine drama or a well-made sermon does. In
this account of American soldiers in London the truth is made clear, but
far more than that it is made alive, pulsating with emotion of national
pride, of racial solidarity, of high moral purpose. In so far as the
writer succeeds in stirring us, in just so far he is more likely to make
the truth take hold upon us and bind us firmly in its grasp. It is the
writing that both convinces and moves us that is lasting, that is really
powerful.
"SOLEMN-LOOKING BLOKES"[5]
[5] Stacy Aumonier, in _The Century Magazine_, December, 1917. By
courtesy of the publisher, The Century Company, New York City.
At midday on August 15 I stood on the pavement in Cockspur
Street and watched the first contingent of American troops pass
through London.
I had been attracted thither by the lure of a public "show,"
by the blare of a band, and by a subconscious desire to pay tribute
in my small way to a great people. It was a good day for London,
intermittently bright, with great scurrying masses of cumuli
overhead, and a characteristic threat of rain, which fortunately
held off. Cockspur Street, as you know, is a turning off Trafalgar
Square, and I chose it because the crowd was less dense there than
in the square itself. By getting behind a group of shortish people
and by standing on tiptoe I caught a fleeting view of the faces of
nearly every one of the passing soldiers.
London is schooled to shows of this kind. The people gather
and wait patiently on the line of route. And then some genial
policemen appear and mother the people back into some sort of line,
an action performed with little fuss or trouble. Then mounted
police appear, headed by some fat official in a cockade hat and
with many ribbons on his chest. And some one in the crowd calls out:
"Hullo, Percy! Mind you don't fall off yer 'orse!"
Then the hearers laugh and begin to be on good terms with
themselves, for they know that the "show" is coming. Then follows
the inevitable band, and we begin to cheer.
It is very easy and natural for a London crowd to cheer. I
have heard Kaiser William II cheered in the streets of London!
We always cheer our guests, and we love a band and a "show"
almost as much as our republican friends across the channel. I
have seen royal funerals and weddings, processions in honor of
visiting presidents and kings, the return of victorious generals,
processions of Canadian, Australian, Indian, French and Italian
troops and bands. I wouldn't miss these things for worlds. They
give color to our social life and accent to our everyday emotions.
It is, moreover, peculiarly interesting to observe national traits
on a march: the French, with their exuberant élan, throwing kisses
to the women as they pass; our own Tommies, who have surprised the
world with their gayety, and keep up a constant ragging intercourse
with the crowd and cannot cease from singing; the Indians, who
pass like a splendidly carved frieze; the Canadians, who move
with a free and independent swing and grin in a friendly way; the
Scotch, who carry it off better than any one. But I had never seen
American troops, and I was anxious to see how they behaved. I said
to myself, "The American is volatile and impressionable, like a
child." I had met Americans who within an hour's acquaintance
had told me their life-story, given me their views on religion,
politics, and art, and invited me to go out to Iowa or Wisconsin or
California, and spend the summer with them. Moreover, the American
is above all things emotional and--may I say it?--sentimental. It
would therefore be extremely interesting to see how he came through
this ordeal.
The first band passed, and the people were waving flags and
handkerchiefs from the windows. We could hear the cheers go up from
the great throng in the square. And there at last, sure enough, was
Old Glory, with its silken tassels floating in the London breeze,
carried by a solemn giant, with another on either side.
And then they came, marching in fours, with their rifles at
the slope, the vanguard of Uncle Sam's army. And we in Cockspur
Street raised a mighty cheer. They were solemn, bronzed men, loose
of limb, hard, and strong, with a curious set expression of purpose
about them.
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
And they looked neither to the right nor the left; nor did
they look up or smile or apparently take any notice of the cheers
we raised. We strained forward to see their faces, and we cried out
to them our welcome.
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
They were not all tall; some were short and wiry. Some of the
officers were rather elderly and wore horn spectacles. But they did
not look at us or raise a smile of response. They held themselves
very erect, but their eyes were cast down or fixed upon the back
of the man in front of them. There came an interval, and another
band, and then Old Glory once more, and we cheered the flag even
more than the men. Fully a thousand men passed in this solemn
procession, not one of them smiling or looking up. It became almost
disconcerting. It was a thing we were not used to. A fellow-cockney
near me murmured:
"They're solemn-looking blokes, ain't they?"
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
The band blared forth once more, a drum-and-fife corps with
a vibrant thrill behind it. We strained forward more eagerly to
see the faces of our friends from the New World. We loved it best
when the sound of the band had died away and the only music was
the steady throb of those friendly boots upon our London streets.
And still they did not smile. I had a brief moment of some vague
apprehension, as though something could not be quite right. Some
such wave, I think, was passing through the crowd. What did it mean?
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
The cheers died away for a few moments in an exhausted
diminuendo. Among those people, racked by three years of strain and
suffering, there probably was not one who had not lost some one
dear to them. Even the best nerves have their limit of endurance.
Suddenly the ready voice of a woman from the pavement called out:
"God bless you, Sammy!"
And then we cheered again in a different key, and I noticed
a boy in the ranks throw back his head and look up. On his face
was the expression we see only on the faces of those who know the
finer sensibilities--a fierce, exultant joy that is very near akin
to tears. And gradually I became aware that on the faces of these
grim men was written an emotion almost too deep for expression.
As they passed it was easy to detect their ethnological
heritage. There was the Anglo-Saxon type, perhaps predominant; the
Celt; the Slav; the Latin; and in many cases definitely the Teuton:
and yet there was not one of them that had not something else, who
was not preëminently a good "United States man." It was as though
upon the anvil of the New World all the troubles of the Old, after
being passed through a white-hot furnace, had been forged into
something clear and splendid. And they were hurrying on to get this
accomplished. For once and all the matter must be settled.
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
There was a slight congestion, and the body of men near me
halted and marked time. A diminutive officer with a pointed beard
was walking alone. A woman in the crowd leaned forward and waved an
American flag in his face. He saluted, made some kindly remark, and
then passed on.
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
The world must be made safe for democracy.
And I thought inevitably of the story of the Titan myth, of
Prometheus, the first real democrat, who held out against the gods
because they despised humanity. And they nailed him to a rock, and
cut off his eyelids, and a vulture fed upon his entrails.
But Prometheus held on, his line of reasoning being:
"After Uranus came Cronus. After Cronus came Zeus. After Zeus
will come other gods."
It is the finest epic in human life, and all the great
teachers and reformers who came after told the same story--Christ,
Vishnu, Confucius, Mohammed, Luther, Shakespeare. The fundamental
basis of their teaching was love and faith in humanity. And
whenever humanity is threatened, the fires which Prometheus stole
from the gods will burn more brightly in the heart of man, and they
will come from all quarters of the world.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible, swift sword.
There is no quarter, no mercy, to the enemies of humanity.
There is no longer a war; it is a crusade. And as I stood on the
flags of Cockspur Street, I think I understood the silence of those
grim men. They seemed to epitomize not merely a nation, not merely
a flag, but the unbreakable sanctity of human rights and human
life. And I knew that whatever might happen, whatever the powers
of darkness might devise, whatever cunning schemes or diabolical
plans, or whatever temporary successes they might attain, they
would ultimately go down into the dust before "the fateful
lightning." "After Zeus will come other gods."
_Tramp, tramp, tramp, tramp._
Nothing could live and endure against that steady and
irresistible progression. And we know how you can do things,
America. We have seen your workshops, your factories, and your
engines of peace. And we have seen those young men of yours at the
Olympic Games, with their loose, supple limbs, their square, strong
faces. When the Spartans, lightly clad, but girt for war, ran
across the hills to Athens and, finding the Persian hosts defeated,
laughed, and congratulated the Athenians, and ran back again--since
those days there never were such runners, such athletes, as these
boys of yours from Yale and Harvard, Princeton and Cornell.
And so on that day, if we cheered the flag more than we
cheered the men, it was because the flag was the symbol of the
men's hearts, which were too charged with the fires of Prometheus
to trust themselves expression.
At least that is how it appeared to me on that forenoon in
Cockspur Street, and I know that later in the day, when I met a
casual friend, and he addressed me with the usual formula of the
day:
"Any news?"
I was able to say:
"Yes, the best news in the world."
And when he replied:
"What news?"
I could say with all sincerity:
"I have seen a portent. The world is safe for democracy."
Proper Use of the Controlling Purpose
Despite whatever of good has been said here about the controlling
purpose, there may lurk the suspicion that it is, after all, dangerous,
that perhaps it gives to a piece of writing a tendency toward bias,
partial interpretation, even unfairness, and that it makes toward
incompleteness. In the first place, in answering this charge, we must
remember that facts _as related to people_ are eternally subject to
different interpretations according to shifting significance, which is
determined largely by the individual to whom the facts are related. In
the second place we have to remind ourselves that seldom does a writer
try to say all that can be said about his subject. Much is always either
implied or left to another piece of writing. And finally, even when
an author attempts perfect completeness and objectivity, he usually
addresses his work to some one in particular, even though the "some
one" is as vague as the general reading public; and that some one has a
particular attitude that must be borne in mind.
In "Solemn-Looking Blokes" not everything about the subject is said.
From one point of view the tramp of American feet in London streets
signified that the United States had emerged from its traditional
aloofness and had joined the main current of the world; from another,
that a tremendous military preparation was going on in America, the
first fruits of which were those solemn ringing steps; from another,
that however Europe had professed to despise American power, she
was now willing, eager, to accept American aid; from another, that
the old enmity between England and America has been forgotten in
the common bond of like ideals and racial traditions. Each of these
possible meanings--and there are more not listed here--is implied in
the treatment actually given to the subject. No one of them is really
developed. Instead, we have flowering before us the idea that the world
is to be made safe for democracy. No one would presume to declare that
the total possibilities of the subject are here met and explained; yet
no one can rightly say that the chosen treatment is unfair. Considering
the facts, the author, and the people who would read the article, and
their emotional connection with the facts, we see that the author chose
the purpose that seemed most useful--to make American hearts warm to
the fact that their country was helping to make the world safer for all
men everywhere. In other words, facts are useful only in so far as they
accomplish some definite end, which, in writing, is to make the reader
see the truth as the author thinks that he should try to make the reader
see it.
Now, of course, if the writer makes an unfair analysis, if he blindly
or willfully falsifies in seeing or expressing his subject, his writing
is not only useless but actually vicious. The analysis must be correct.
Every subject has its center of truth, which can be discovered by
patient clear thinking; if the thinking be either unclear or impatient,
the interpretation will be false. If the author of "Solemn-Looking
Blokes" has made an incorrect estimate, his writing is futile. There is
no more challenging quest than the search for the real truth at the core
of a chosen subject. Perhaps the very difficulty of attaining success is
what has stayed many minds in floundering, timid, fogginess.
As to the charge that infusion of emotional quality into the writing
produces bias, first of all it must be said that if the subject contains
no emotion, none should be attempted in the writing. In a report, for
example, of the relative value of different woods for shingles, an
author will hardly try to infuse emotion, for the reader wishes to
learn, quickly and easily, just what kind of wood is the best. But most
subjects are not thus aloof; even the report about shingles becomes
of vast significance to the owner of extensive timber lands which are
suddenly found to be of high value. All subjects which concern the
prosperity and happiness of humanity are charged with emotion; the
nearer to the great facts of life, such as birth, marriage, death,
food, shelter, love, hatred, the keener the emotion. Who shall write of
problems of heredity and leave us unstirred? Who shall treat of our
vast irrigation projects, which turn the deserts into fair gardens and
give food to millions of people, without firing the imagination? The
writer's task is to look so clearly at his subject that he discovers its
true value to both brain and heart.
As a matter of fact, in writing of such subjects a writer finds that
words _will be_ emotional, whether he will have them so or not, that
they take sides, are charged with tendency and fly toward or away from
an emotional quality with all the power of electricity. Now, this
emotional quality, when it is uncontrolled, is dangerous. Words that
show tendency must be guided with the firm hand lest they lead the
reader into wrong impressions and into the confusion that comes from
counter emotions, the strong impression of disunion. It is only by
relating these cross-tendencies to a guiding idea that they can be made
to serve the author's purpose. To choose wisely a controlling purpose
that recognizes and handles the inherent emotions of words is merely to
organize inescapable material. In the following selection from Emerson's
"Fate" we find the emotional quality both high and well-organized.
Such a paragraph might easily be made to confuse a reader hopelessly,
but Emerson drives the chargers of his thought straight to his goal,
intellectual and emotional, and holds tight his reins:
Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us.
We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind
drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain
of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way
of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the
snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle
of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these are
in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
dined, and however the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful
distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races--race
living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from
comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and
volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers
dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns
and counties fall into it. At Lisbon an earthquake killed men like
flies. At Naples three years ago ten thousand persons were crushed
in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea, the sword of the climate in
the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off
men like a massacre. Our western prairies shake with fever and
ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some
tribes as a frost to crickets, which, having filled the summer with
noise, are silenced by the fall of the temperature of one night.
Without uncovering what does not concern us, or counting how many
species of parasites hang on a bombyx, or groping after intestinal
parasites or infusory biters, or the obscurities of alternate
generation,--the forms of the shark, the _labrus_, the jaw of the
sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus,
and other warriors hidden in the sea, are hints of ferocity in the
interior of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has
a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to
try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up
that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neck-cloth of a
student in divinity.[6]
[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fate," _The Conduct of Life_. Houghton
Mifflin Company, publishers, Boston.
Now this controlling purpose, including both the appeal to the
understanding and that to the emotions, should be stated, clearly,
before the author begins his actual writing, in one sentence. The value
of this is at once apparent: our minds tend all too much to wander from
subject to subject, browsing here and there, without any really directed
feeding. Now such procedure, though difficult to avoid, is nevertheless
harmful to our writing. The edge of the writing is never so keen, the
telling of the message, whatever it may be, is never so well done,
until we thoroughly organize and direct all that we are to say. In
phrasing the controlling purpose in one sentence, we make just such an
organization. And we have one which is most easily handled, most easily
remembered, least likely to allow us to escape into empty wandering.
Even in a long work this should be done, this unifying knot should be
tied in the writer's mind. Those readers who rise from the last pages
of a long historical work, covering several volumes and hundreds or
thousands of pages, with a clear central conception of the whole work
are profoundly grateful to the author. It is safe to say that such a
conception could not have been given to the reader had not the writer,
before he wrote a word, formulated in a few words the goal, the aim of
his writing. This sentence should include the emotional appeal either as
stated in a separate clause or phrase, or as expressed in the choice of
words to present the facts.
The amount of machinery that seems to be required for using the
controlling purpose may appear too much for practical purposes in one
short lifetime. The truth is that the actual finding of the purpose will
require much less time, often, than the explanation of the process here
has needed. In a short theme you will often be able to scan the subject
itself, to estimate your own reaction to the subject, and to determine
upon your reader with remarkable quickness. More frequently you will
find difficulty in determining the emotional quality of the material
and your desires. But a little practice will enable you to do the
preliminary thinking with rapidity and comfort. But if your subject is
difficult, and if the effect is of great importance, by no means allow
yourself to be swerved from determination to find the real object which
you are seeking, but even at the expense of time and trouble state the
center of your intentions as related to the subject, yourself, and your
reader.
Practical Use of the Controlling Purpose
We have yet to answer the practical question: when I sit down to
write, of just what value will the controlling purpose be to me in the
actual task of expressing my ideas? How can it really serve me in my
writing? The answer is clear: the controlling purpose is of the utmost
strategic value in helping to select and arrange material for attack
upon the objective, which is the effect to be created in the reader's
mind. Now the best strategy always combines the line of greatest
advantage to the writer, the line of least resistance from the reader,
and the necessities of the subject. In other words, what point can
I attack easiest, where is my opponent weakest, what demands of the
ground--gullies, hills, swamps, etc.--must I allow for? Sometimes these
three are more or less mutually antagonistic; sometimes they unite with
the greatest helpfulness, as we shall see.
_Selection of Material_
The first question is, What, and how many, forces shall I choose for
the attack? Remember, we do not now merely attack in general, wherever
we find an enemy. Instead, we decide that our objective is, perhaps,
a hill ten miles across the enemy's frontier. The taking of that hill
is our controlling purpose. It would be easiest for us to use several
regiments of fresh young troops. But the terrain is strewn with gullies
and hillocks, with boulders and tangled timber. So we shall use two
regiments of veteran troops who are accustomed to rough country, and
follow these with some fresh youngsters who are endowed with sense and
a desire to outdo the veterans. Since the enemy has a strong battery,
we shall use heavy artillery. And since the enemy lacks machine guns,
we shall use many of them and catch him where he is weak and may be
terrified. We could easily send thirty camp kitchens to the fighting
lines, but strategy demands that they be kept back.
In exactly the same way Mr. Burroughs plans the essay which follows this
discussion. His controlling purpose is obviously to make the reader
understand the process of bee-hunting in such a way as to be attracted
to it as a delightful sport. The nature of the subject demands that
the several steps in the process be explained. Well, that suits Mr.
Burroughs, because he knows these steps. The easiest method for him
is to narrate his own experiences. Of course he could investigate the
authorities on bee-hunting, and write a treatise, but that would be more
difficult, and moreover, it would not meet the line of least resistance
from the reader. To be successful, the essay must overcome the reader's
inertia and make him feel that he is actually sharing in things that he
enjoys. The selection is thus determined. From his personal experience,
as giving the writer the greatest advantage, Mr. Burroughs chooses.
He selects details about the beauty of nature because a reader would
prefer to have fine surroundings. He mentions traits of the bee that are
interesting or necessary to know. He narrates two special experiences
of his own for added attractiveness. And all the while, lest inertia
raise its head, he lures the reader with the glimpses of pails full of
rich golden honey. In other words, keeping his eye for his controlling
purpose, Mr. Burroughs can easily select the things that will accomplish
that purpose to his own greatest advantage, the reader's greatest ease,
and according to the demands of the subject.
You do not find in the essay a discussion of the lucrative value of
bees, nor of the complicated life of the hive, nor of the present
standing of the science of bee-keeping. These topics, however
interesting, are not useful to the controlling purpose. The standard
is, not connection, but usefulness. "Any road," says Carlyle, "this
simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the world," and if
you follow mere connection with your subjects, you will find yourself
at the end of the world. The practical helpfulness of the controlling
purpose is seen when you ask yourself the question, "Does the matter
that I am putting in this paragraph, this sentence, actually advance my
reader in thought or emotion or both, nearer the point to which I wish
to lead him?" Thus the question of selection is answered.
_The Ordering of the Material_
If we could have our own sweet will in attacking the hill ten miles
beyond the border, we should ask the enemy to stack his arms, and then,
with trumpet and drum and flag we should sweep in and take possession.
But our sweet will must give way to necessity. Since unscalable crags
lie ahead, we shall have to go round to the rear of the hill. Since we
must cross a swamp, engineers must precede and build a road. Though we
should like to crawl up a wide valley on the other side, we must choose
a smaller one, because the enemy could wither us away in the larger one.
And, to trick the enemy, we shall perhaps open fire far off on the left,
while we are stealing out to the right, and thus we may take him off his
guard. Our purpose of securing that hill makes these things necessary.
Similarly, in writing, we may sometimes employ the order of greatest
advantage, but more often we must modify this order to meet the
requirements of the subject and to rouse the least resistance from
the reader. In Stevenson's essay, "Pulvis et Umbra," part of which
follows the essay by Mr. Burroughs, the author used the method of
greatest advantage. His object is to thrill the reader at the thought
that mankind constantly strives in spite of all his failures. Several
orders are possible: he could treat of the striving alone, neglecting
the failure; he could treat the striving first and then the failure, or
vice versa, and so on. He saw that he would gain his purpose best if he
treated failure first, until he had fairly overwhelmed the reader, and
then suddenly shifted and showed that in spite of all this failure man
still strives. He had to run the risk of offending the reader at the
beginning by his insistence upon failure, and thus rousing the reader's
possible great resistance. For we do not like to read unpleasant things.
But he took the chance, knowing that if, by skillful use of words he
could persuade the reader through the first part, he could easily thrill
him with the reaction. For it makes a great difference whether we say,
"In spite of striving, man always fails," or "In spite of failure, man
always strives." The selection from the essay which appears here is
taken from the middle. It is interesting to note that the first two
sentences of the essay read: "We look for some reward of our endeavors
and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of
conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties
are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to
the going down of the sun." And the words of the final sentence of the
essay are: "Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans
in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: surely not all
in vain."
In the essay by Mr. Burroughs the author's advantage and the reader's
acquiescence largely coincide, so that the author can at once begin
with remarks about the attractiveness of the hunt, the delights of its
successful conclusion. To discuss at once the possibility of being stung
would have been unwise, because unpleasant, and the controlling purpose
of the essay is to attract. Later, this topic can safely be tucked in.
Mr. Wilson's war messages showed a combination of the lines of greatest
advantage and of least resistance with the nature of the historical
events. These messages began with a series of facts which, obviously
true, would rouse no resistance and would at the same time insert some
resentment against Germany, the very thing that the author wished to
do. Then they followed the strict chronological order, as if the author
were pursuing a course already mapped for him--which, of course, he
was not doing. With the controlling purpose of showing that America's
entrance into the war was occasioned entirely by Germany's actions, he
then proceeded to base the proposals of the messages upon the very facts
that the readers had already accepted in accordance with his ultimate
point of view. Such skillful manipulation deserved the success that the
messages met.
All three of these examples gain their point, their objective. They do
this largely because the authors knew exactly what they wished to do,
what their controlling purposes were, and then marshaled their material
so as to accomplish this end. Some of the topics that are subordinated,
such, for example, as the possibility of being stung, are as important
as others which are magnified, such as the beauty of nature--that is,
they are as important in an impersonal way. As soon as the controlling
purpose is known, however, they immediately become dangerous unless so
placed as to bring the reader nearer the goal and not to push him from
it. The point is that knowing the controlling purpose, that is, having
thought out beforehand exactly what you wish to do with subject and
reader, you are at once aware of both helps and obstacles, and can make
use of the one, avoid the other.
Thus you will consider both the reader's ease and his prejudices. If
you are to write of abstruse matters, of some question in philosophy
or ethics or religion, in order to carry your reader with you you will
begin with things that he can understand, and thus pave a highway into
the misty lands where you desire to take him. Failure of some eminent
philosophers to receive recognition has been due to their lack of a
comprehensive controlling purpose, to their restricting attention to the
subject alone regardless of the reader. In setting forth the principle
of the machinery that digs tunnels under rivers Mr. Brooks in _The
Web-foot Engineer_ first shows how a boy digs a tunnel into a sand
bank, and then proceeds, with the reader's understanding assured, to the
more complex but still similar operation under the river. In explaining
inductive reasoning, with the controlling purpose of making it seem both
frequent and natural, Huxley showed first how we reason practically
about the nature of apples in a basket at the grocer's. The reader's
resistance is thus avoided and the writer's advantage is increased.
A shrewd controlling purpose also makes allowance for the reader's
prejudices. You ought to take as much care to cajole your reader into
following you as the cook does to make us happy to the final morsel.
After ices and cakes and coffee a roast or a soup is positively
offensive; the cook wisely wins the battle of the spit and the dripping
pan while the epicure is still receptive. So, if you are to explain
democracy in a state where the recall of judges is practiced to an
aristocrat who distrusts the "common herd" and is easily ruffled, you
will do well to preface discussion of this recall with words about the
general excellence of life in the state and then, when your reader is
in a mood of acceptance, pass to the possibly offensive topic. Without
knowing just what you wish to accomplish, you are likely to write in
what may seem a dogged, defiant mood that intends to strike right and
left, hoping to wallow through to victory.
If between us and the enemy's fort is a stream which needs pontoons for
crossing, and we blindly start out marching up toward victory with no
pontoons, we shall perhaps sail away to sea, but shall also probably
not win the fort. If we insist upon keeping our platoon as rigidly
straight, even while we climb hills through the woods, as ever a line
was kept at West Point, we shall come to grief. So, if the logic of the
subject has imperious demands, the controlling purpose must make count
of them. William James in his essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War,"
saw that before a reader could understand how civic work could be a
moral equivalent, he must see what the morality of war is. The subject
demands this. In an account of the United States Government it might be
logically necessary to state and explain first the theory of checks and
balances before the relations of executive, legislative, and judicial
branches could be properly estimated. Wisely chosen, the controlling
purpose of such an account would make this fact at once evident.
Constantly keeping in mind, in planning and composing an article, what
the objective is, makes even the individual paragraphs and sentences
more successful. If you will examine the paragraphs in "Pulvis et
Umbra," you will observe, pretty uniformly, at the beginning and end of
each, a strong statement of the message of the paragraph, sentences of
high emotional value. Each paragraph definitely advances the cause of
the controlling purpose. Even the sentences--an example of a sentence
uncontrolled occurs in Mr. Hamlin Garland's book, _A Son of the Middle
Border_: "It stood on the bank of a wide river and had all the value of
a seaport to me, for in summer-time great hoarsely bellowing steam-boats
came and went from its quay, and all about it rose high wooded hills."
The final item about the hills is in no way necessary, does not even
help to give the feeling of a seaport, which more often than not lacks
high hills. A sentence from Stevenson is in contrast: "The sun upon my
shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I stooped forward and plunged into
the sea." In this sentence facts, rhythm, even the sound of the words
drive in one direction.
Without being too dogmatic--for every problem in writing is new and
not infrequently a law to itself--you may be sure that if you have a
definite controlling purpose, and know well what it is, you will be more
likely to attain success with subject and with reader when you come to
the ordering of your material.
Finally, since strategy suggests that we attack the weakest places in
the enemy's defense, we shall do well, unless the logic of the subject
or the reader's prejudice demand otherwise, to make our strongest
blows when the enemy, the reader, is least prepared, that is, at the
beginning and the end. Success in writing depends so much upon the
freshness of the reader's mind, that an _attaque brusque_ at first to
insert important things, and a strong reinforcement at the end, when
the reader is pricking up his ears at the coming final period, form
a wise strategy. If, in order to understand one point, another is
necessary, or to avoid irritation, a roundabout method is advisable,
the path is plain. When these accidents do not obtain, the reader's
understanding will be most easily won at the beginning and the end. At
these points you must see to it that the reader is guided, with the
first word, toward the emotional tone that your controlling purpose
demands, and toward some important idea that bolsters this purpose, even
if, as we have seen Stevenson do, you seem to be at first flying away
from the purpose which we later discover. Thus Mr. Taft, in an article
entitled "Present Relations of the Learned Professions to Political
Government," places the ministry at the beginning and the law at the
end. His controlling purpose is to make the reader believe that every
profession offers large chance for the conscientious man to be of use to
the political government. Consequently he chooses the two that he thinks
most important, and of these places the less important at the beginning
and the more important at the end. In this way he succeeds at once in
turning the reader as he wishes, and leaves him also with the strongest
possible bias toward belief. And since these two professions offer the
greatest chance for victory for his controlling purpose, he gives them
much more space than to the others, almost three times as much to law,
for instance, as to teaching.
Moreover, since the emotions are affected in much writing, the skilled
strategist will instantly bear in mind just what emotion he wishes
to rouse, and will see that the ideas of greater moving value receive
larger development. Mr. Burroughs gives much more space to the sections
that deal with the excitement and the joy of bee-hunting than to those
that deal with the less pleasant side. To the difficulty of detecting
the flight of a bee he gives the single sentence: "Sometimes one's head
will swim following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the sun." To
the interesting actions of the bee when it is caught he gives at least
ten times as much space. In this way he guides the reader's emotions in
the way he wishes them to go--and makes successful writing.
The chief strategic problem in exposition, then, is that of so choosing
and arranging the material that the point of the writing is made
with the proper emphasis. For the accomplishment of this purpose the
writer must be able to answer the question, "_What do I wish to do
in this piece of writing?_" Then he must bring all the material and
its expression to bear upon the reader's mind so that the desired end
may be inevitable. To determine what his purpose is the writer must
consult the subject itself, his own personality, and the reader. He
must also bear in mind the reader's intellect and his emotions. And
he must unify the approach to both intellect and emotions. The firmly
held conception of what his purpose is will determine what material he
is to choose--what is useful and what is not--and also how to arrange
this material and how to proportion the space that different sections
shall have. He will arrange the material for the greatest advantage to
himself and the least resistance from the reader. In other words, to
make his writing successful in the sense of accomplishing its end, the
writer must, before he sets down a single word, decide upon what his
controlling purpose is to be and just how he intends to make material
and expression--even in the individual sentence--unite to drive in the
one direction of that controlling purpose.
AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE[7]
_John Burroughs_
[7] John Burroughs: _Pepacton_. Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers,
Boston.
One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects
they hold a colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is; a tree
with a heart of comb-honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of
Sicily or Mount Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches;
secret chambers where lies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little
free-booters, great nuggets and wedges of precious ore gathered
with risk and labor from every field and wood about.
But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how
many sweets such a trip yields beside honey, come with me some
bright, warm, late September or early October day. It is the golden
season of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad
upon the hills or by the painted woods and along the amber colored
streams at such a time is enough. So, with haversacks filled with
grapes and peaches and apples and a bottle of milk,--for we shall
not be home to dinner,--and armed with a compass, a hatchet, a
pail, and a box with a piece of comb-honey neatly fitted into
it--any box the size of your hand with a lid will do nearly as
well as the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regular
bee-hunter--we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the
highway, under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping,
then through an orchard and across a little creek, thence gently
rising through a long series of cultivated fields toward some high,
uplying land, behind which rises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain,
the most sightly point in all this section. Behind this ridge for
several miles the country is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no
doubt the home of many wild swarms of bees.
After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point
where we will make our first trial--a high stone wall that runs
parallel with the wooded ridge referred to, and separated from it
by a broad field. There are bees at work there on that goldenrod,
and it requires but little manoeuvring to sweep one into our
box. Almost any other creature rudely and suddenly arrested in
its career and clapped into a cage in this way would show great
confusion and alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee
has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear of death,
namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat, but to carry home as
booty. "Such rage of honey in their bosom beats," says Virgil. It
is quick to catch the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to
fall to filling itself. We now set the box down upon the wall and
gently remove the cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of
the half-filled cells, and is oblivious to everything else about
it. Come rack, come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few
paces, and sit down upon the ground so as to bring the box against
the blue sky as a background. In two or three minutes the bee is
seen rising slowly and heavily from the box. It seems loath to
leave so much honey behind and it marks the place well. It mounts
aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveying the near and minute
objects first, then the larger and more distant, till having
circled about the spot five or six times and taken all its bearings
it darts away for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the bee
till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim following it,
and often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee gradually
drifts down the hill, then strikes away toward a farm-house half
a mile away, where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and
another, and the third bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight
toward the woods. We could see the brown speck against the darker
background for many yards.
A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's
box before it brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not
tell its fellows what it has found, but that they smell out the
secret; it doubtless bears some evidence with it upon its feet or
proboscis that it has been upon honey-comb and not upon flowers,
and its companions take the hint and follow, arriving always many
seconds behind. Then the quantity and quality of the booty would
also betray it. No doubt, also, there are plenty of gossips about
a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did you see that?
Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and one of
the up-stairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with
apple-blossom honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
like mad. Apple blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
something! Let's after."
In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
established--two to farm-houses and one to the woods, and our box
is being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes
to the woods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly
they do not make the long preliminary whirl above the box, but
start directly from it. The woods are rough and dense and the hill
steep, and we do not like to follow the line of bees until we
have tried at least to settle the problem as to the distance they
go into the woods--whether the tree is on this side of the ridge
or in the depth of the forest on the other side. So we shut up
the box when it is full of bees and carry it about three hundred
yards along the wall from which we are operating. When liberated,
the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in the same
directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that
they have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent,
and it is not many minutes before a second line to the woods is
established. This is called cross-lining the bees. The new line
makes a sharp angle with the other line, and we know at once that
the tree is only a few rods into the woods. The two lines we have
established form two sides of a triangle of which the wall is the
base; at the apex of the triangle, or where the two lines meet in
the woods, we are sure to find the trees. We quickly follow up
these lines, and where they cross each other on the side of the
hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an oak and
examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
their entrance is on the upper side near the ground, not two feet
from the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their
going and coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the
hill. Failing in this direction, I return to the oak again, and
then perceive the bees going out in a small crack in the tree. The
bees do not know they are found out and that the game is in our
hands, and are as oblivious of our presence as if we were ants
or crickets. The indications are that the swarm is a small one,
and the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" a bee-tree it is
usual first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes of burning
sulphur or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on
the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree
with an axe we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up
a loud buzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity
is soon cut away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of
comb-honey is exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of
its all. This may seem singular, but it has nearly always been my
experience. When a swarm of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an
axe, they evidently think the end of the world has come, and, like
true misers as they are, each one seizes as much of the treasure as
it can hold; in other words, they all fall to and gorge themselves
with honey, and calmly await the issue. When in this condition they
make no defense and will not sting unless taken hold of. In fact
they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always to be managed with
boldness and decision.
Any halfway measures, any timid poking about, any feeble
attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be quickly resented. The
popular notion that bees have a special antipathy toward certain
persons and a liking for certain others has only this fact at the
bottom of it; they will sting a person who is afraid of them and
goes skulking and dodging about, and they will not sting a person
who faces them boldly and has no dread of them. They are like dogs.
The way to disarm a vicious dog is to show him you do not fear
him; it is his turn to be afraid then. I never had any dread of
bees and am seldom stung by them. I have climbed up into a large
chestnut that contained a swarm in one of its cavities and chopped
them out with an axe, being obliged at times to pause and brush the
bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not been stung once. I
have chopped a swarm out of an apple-tree in June and taken out the
cards of honey and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped out the
bees with a dipper, and taken the whole home with me in pretty good
condition, with scarcely any opposition on the part of the bees. In
reaching your hand into the cavity to detach and remove the comb
you are pretty sure to get stung, for when you touch the "business
end" of a bee, it will sting even though its head be off. But the
bee carries the antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee
sting is honey, and when your hands are besmeared with honey, as
they are sure to be on such occasions, the wound is scarcely more
painful than the prick of a pin.
When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day,
of course a good many bees are away from home and have not heard
the news. When they return and find the ground flowing with honey,
and piles of bleeding combs lying about, they apparently do not
recognize the place, and their first instinct is to fall to and
fill themselves; this done, their next thought is to carry it home,
so they rise up slowly through the branches of the trees till they
have attained an altitude that enables them to survey the scene,
when they seem to say, "Why, _this_ is home" and down they come
again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more they still think
there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and
then drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight
of all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few
drops of their wasted treasures.
Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber-bees
appear. You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care
hum. It is an ill-wind that blows nobody good, and they make the
most of the misfortune of their neighbors; and thereby pave the way
for their own ruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day
looks them up. On this occasion the day was hot and the honey very
fragrant, and a line of bees was soon established S.S.W. Though
there was much refuse honey in the old stub, and though little
golden rills trickled down the hill from it, and the near branches
and saplings were besmeared with it where we wiped our murderous
hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to which not only
honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies, ants. The
bumble-bees, which at this season are hungry vagrants with no fixed
place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the bits
of empty comb or fragment of bark and pass the night, and renew the
feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter
sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull
and clumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by
the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and
blunder into it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.
The honey-bee that licked up our leavings on the old stub
belonged to a swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down
the ridge, and a few days afterward fate overtook them, and their
stores in turn became the prey of another swarm in the vicinity,
which also tempted Providence and were overwhelmed. The first
mentioned swarm I had lined from several points, and was following
up the clue over rocks and through gulleys, when I came to where
a large hemlock had been felled a few years before and a swarm
taken from a cavity near the top of it; fragments of the old comb
were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood another short, squatty
hemlock, and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it
I noticed where the tree had been wounded with an axe a couple of
feet from the ground many years before. The wound had partially
grown over, but there was an opening there that I did not see at
the first glance. I was about to pass on when a bee passed me
making that peculiar shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes when
besmeared with honey. I saw it alight in the partially closed
wound and crawl home; then came others and others, little bands
and squads of them heavily freighted with honey from the box. The
tree was about twenty inches through and hollow at the butt, or
from the axe mark down. This space the bees had completely filled
with honey. With an axe we cut away the outer ring of live wood and
exposed the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb
so that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the root of
the tree and trickled down the hill.
The other bee-tree in the vicinity, to which I have referred,
we found one warm November day in less than half an hour after
entering the woods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche
in a wall of hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The bees entered a
small hole at the root, which was seven or eight feet from the
ground. The position was a striking one. Never did apiary have a
finer outlook or more rugged surroundings. A black, wood-embraced
lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the Catskills filled the
far distance, and the more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range
filled the near. On every hand were precipices and a wild confusion
of rocks and trees.
The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a
half long and eight or ten inches in diameter. With an axe we cut
away one side of the tree and laid bare its curiously wrought
heart of honey. It was a most pleasing sight. What winding and
devious ways the bees had through their palace! What great masses
and blocks of snow-white comb there were! Where it was sealed up,
presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like
some precious ore. When we carried a large pail of it out of the
woods, it seemed still more like ore.
In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter
are to pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or
cut down the trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still
go forward, he goes forward also and repeats his observations till
the tree is found or till the bees turn and come back upon the
trail. Then he knows he has passed the tree, and he retraces his
steps to a convenient distance and tries again, and thus quickly
reduces the space to be looked over till the swarm is traced home.
On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the surface alternated
between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of
timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest-tossed
sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set them to
work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant.
One would have expected them under such circumstances to have gone
straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled
me for hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with
the woods only from the top side, and from the air above; they
recognize home only by landmarks here, and in every instance they
rise aloft to take their bearings. Think how familiar to them the
topography of the forest summits must be--an umbrageous sea or
plain where every mark and point is known.
Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a
bee-tree sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are
only a few yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in
the near at hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant
field, they are lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence
overlook the flower and the sweet at their very door. On several
occasions I have unwittingly set my box within a few paces of a
bee-tree and waited long for bees without getting them, when, on
removing to a distant field or opening in the woods I have got a
clue at once.
Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do
water their honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then
of course thicker and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old
bee-hunters look for bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs
in the woods. I once found a tree a long distance from any water,
and the honey had a peculiar bitter flavor imparted to it, I was
convinced, by rain water sucked from the decayed and spongy hemlock
tree, in which the swarm was found. In cutting into the tree,
the north side of it was found to be saturated with water like a
spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitter flavor. The
bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their own house.
Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their
brothers in the hive. The only difference is that wild honey
is flavored with your adventure, which makes it a little more
delectable than the domestic article.
PULVIS ET UMBRA[8]
_Robert Louis Stevenson_
[8] R. L. Stevenson: _Across the Plains_. Copyright, 1892, by Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York City.
What a monstrous specter is this man, the disease of the
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies
of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes
that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children
screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows
know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for
so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely
descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives:
who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny
and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead
filled with imperfect virtues, infinitely childish, often admirably
valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary
life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity;
rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out
his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch
the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something
owing to himself, to his neighbor, to his God; an ideal of decency,
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below
which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most
men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with
independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought.
It sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come
second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears
are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks
from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all
but the most cowardly stand amidst the risks of war; and the more
noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal,
affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular
origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded
in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the
contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike
them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of
misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organized
injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous crime; and of the
damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn.
Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But
where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable
that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it
both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success
is banished, our race should not cease to labor.
If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory
isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this
nearer sight he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters
not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what
stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what
erroneous morality; by campfires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering
his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing
the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a
Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile
pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering
with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time)
kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears as she drowns her
child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society,
living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief,
the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honor
and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches: everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the
ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:--ah! if I could show you
this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over,
in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor,
the poor jewel of their souls!
OUTLINES
The Value of Outlines
It has been thought that the old Scotchman who said, "A man's years are
three score and ten, or maybe by good hap he'll get ten more, but _it's
a weary wrastle all the way through_!" came to his final words as the
result of writing outlines. If this be true, surely it is unfortunate,
for the writing of outlines brings exceeding great reward. An outline
is not an ancient form of blind discipline, but rather a helping hand
across the bogland of facts and ideas. It is a most useful instrument
toward good writing; its justification is its practical usefulness. This
usefulness, helpfulness, is double in its value--to the writer and to
the instructor, when there is one.
As to the value of an outline for the writer--without an outline you
face in your writing a complicated problem, more complicated, in
fact, than is justifiable. At one and the same time you must make
your thinking logical and your expression adequate--distinguished if
possible. Either of these tasks is sufficient to demand all your powers;
together, they offer a really overwhelming problem. Stevenson, to whom
style was of the greatest importance, as bone of the bone and blood of
the blood of the writing, wrote to a friend, "Problems of style are
(as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative--to
get this stuff joined and moving." It was only after he had fitted his
material together that he felt able to devote himself to making the
beautiful prose that is so much admired. A noted Frenchman is quoted
as exclaiming, when first he beheld the famous Brooklyn Bridge, "How
beautiful it is!", then, "How well made it is!" and finally, after a
moment's reflection, "How well planned it is!" A good piece of writing
should have the same comments made; but they cannot be made, usually,
without the carefully planned outline.
You face the problem, without an outline, of answering the two questions
about every detail that presents itself for treatment: first, shall I
include or exclude this detail; and secondly, how shall I make this
detail help the general flow of my writing, and how shall I express it
so that it shall contribute to the proper tone of the work? And while
you thus judge each small detail, you must also keep your critical
faculties active to estimate your total course, whether you are cleaving
your way clearly, steadily, and with sufficient directness to your goal,
whether the work as a whole is answering your desires.
Now to ask the unaided brain, unless it has had long years of training,
to perform all this critical work during the actual process of
expression, is nothing short of cruel--and almost sure of failure. For
in any writing which enlists from you even a spark of interest the
fervor of creative work, the stimulating effect of seeing the work grow
under your pen, tends often to unseat the critical powers, to destroy
perspective, to make a detail seem more valuable or less valuable than
it should, on the whim of the momentary interest or repulsion. Thus the
logic of the writing is impaired, for details are included which should
not enter, and others are excluded which ought to be welcomed, and
proportions are bad. And the expression is so liable to unevenness as to
be less worthy than it should be. Bad logic and uneven expression beget
failure.
The outline helps to overcome these difficulties. In the first place,
it is not final, can be changed at will, and makes no extraordinary
demands on the powers of expression. In the second place, as regards
logic, the outline shows the relation of ideas to each other and to
the whole subject; you can estimate rather easily whether a detail is
of sufficient value to warrant inclusion, and, if so, how much space
it deserves. For in the outline you have the bare fact, succinctly
expressed, which enables you to focus your attention upon the thought.
But since logic is more than mere inclusion and order and spacing, and
deals also with the logic of attitude, the outline is again of service.
For it shows what should be the tone of the complete piece of writing,
and how this tone should be modified by the individual section of the
writing. Suppose that you are to write of the attitude of a politician
toward party principles. If a heading in your outline reads, "He never
_feared_ to _modify_ principles to meet inevitable conditions," the
attitude which you take in writing will be radically different from
that which you would assume if the heading read, "He never _hesitated_
to _warp_ principles to outwit unfavorable conditions." Both the logic
of structure and that of attitude, then, are aided by the use of an
outline. And, at any point in the actual completed writing, you can
easily determine by referring to the outline, whether you are gaining
the effect that you desire and what progress you have made. And in
the third place, as regards expression, the outline relieves you of
the necessity of doing the constructive thinking of the subject, and
enables you to apply all your powers to the actual saying of your
message. Shakespeare might have written, instead of "the multitudinous
seas incarnadine," "make all the ocean, that's full of fishes,[9] look
red"--but he did not. Had he done so, where would now have been the
power and the charm? Expression is of utmost value, and you can ill
afford to slight it. For this reason, and especially since distinguished
expression is so difficult to form, to be released from the attendant
worry of constructive thinking is of the greatest help to the writer.
Both logic and expression, then, are dependent on the outline: with it
they are more sure.
[9] If this be the meaning of "multitudinous."
Instead, then, of feeling that dim dread of failure, which ever dogs the
writer's steps, with a well-constructed outline you can feel comparative
safety in the possession of a safe guide in case of perplexity. You will
be initiated, will know the secrets of your subject, will have a "grip"
with your facts and ideas, and can apply your powers to putting the
intangible thoughts into tangible words.
As for being of value to the instructor, often he too can estimate more
surely and easily the worth of the writing if he has the skeleton to
examine. For there the structural defects are more apparent, are not
concealed by the pleasant flow of words, just as the structure of a
skyscraper is more apparent before the wall-tiles or bricks are laid
on to conceal the girders. The instructor can therefore often point
out insufficiencies in the thought, or wrong relations, which might
otherwise stand as defects in the finished work.
The Form of the Outline
Shall an outline be written in words and phrases or in complete
sentences? In the first place, so far as any reader except the author
is concerned, complete sentences are necessary for understanding.
Often they are necessary for the writer himself. In an outline of a
theme explaining gas engines the isolated heading _Speed_ means nothing
definite to any one but the author, if indeed to him. A reader cannot
tell from such a word whether speed is important or insignificant, or
whether the author intends to give to gas engines credit for comparative
excellence in this property. If, however, the heading reads, "In the
important property of _Speed_ gas engines are the equal of steam
engines," the reader knows at once what is meant, whether he may agree
with the statement or not. He can definitely tell from an outline of
complete sentences what the course of thought is to be and what will be
the tone of the theme. The reader, then, needs complete sentences. The
writer, on the other hand, might seem to be sufficiently helped by mere
words or phrases, since he naturally knows what he means. But does he
know? The chances are that when an author puts down such a heading as
_Speed_ he has only a large general notion of what he means, without
being sure of the immediate connection and application, and with perhaps
no idea at all of the tone which he intends to catch. If the author will
write the sentence quoted above, he will complete his thought, make it
really definite, and be pretty sure to know what he is talking about,
what he intends to do. Furthermore, even though he know, when he sets
down a phrase, what he means by it, the chance is strong that when he
arrives at the expansion of the phrase he will have forgotten some of
the implications and may give the heading a cast that he did not intend.
Whether he knows definitely what he means or not, the writer is more
safe if he uses complete sentences, and for any other reader of the
outline complete sentences are quite necessary.
Outlines are of three kinds: those that show the topic relations by
division into indented headings; those that show the sequence of
paragraphs by statement of the topic sentence; and those that combine
these two forms. The primary object of the first form, which is
illustrated by the first outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee" which
follows, is to aid in the thinking, to plot out the ground and to group
the material. In this first outline a glance at the five main headings
makes the plan of the essay at once apparent--first a statement of the
effect of bees upon us; then an account of a hunt; then some specific
examples to drive things home; then some special directions that might
be overlooked, and finally a tribute to the joy of the hunting. The
benefit of this kind of outline is that the general relationships
among topics are made clear, the large divisions of thought appear,
and the writer can with comparative ease tell whether he has covered
the subject, and whether he has chosen the best order of thought. It
avoids the invertebrate flow of thought that is unaware of structure. In
other words, it is of value chiefly to the thinking. It does not show
which topics shall be grouped into paragraphs together, and it does
not, of course, phrase the topic sentences, usually. In such an outline
care should be taken to make each heading a complete sentence, and to
make headings that are of the same rank fairly parallel in structure
of expression unless this interferes with the tone of the heading. For
example, A, B, and C under III are made similar in structure since they
bear the same general relation to III.
The second type of outline, that in which a list of the topic sentences
is given, and which is illustrated by the second outline of "An Idyl of
the Honey-Bee" which follows, is of value, especially if used with an
outline of the first type, in that it shows just how much of the thought
should go into the various paragraphs, and thereby establishes the
divisions of expression. Comparison of the two outlines of "An Idyl of
the Honey-Bee" will show that paragraph 5 in the second outline includes
all the material in the four headings, 2, a, 1´, and b, under II in the
first outline. Now for the writer to know beforehand how he intends
to divide his material into paragraphs is of great value; otherwise he
might be giving to some comparatively minor point--which for the moment
assumes interest for him--a separate paragraph, as if, for example, Mr.
Burroughs had dwelt at length on the interesting location of trees on
ledges. In other words, this second kind of outline is valuable chiefly
in its arrangement and placing of material. Its service in making
the original choice is not so immediately apparent. It has also the
advantage that it indicates pretty well what kind of expression is to be
used in the expanded form.
The third type of outline, which many writers prefer to either of
the others, indicates both the topics to be treated and the division
into paragraphs. It may be constructed in either of two ways: first,
the topic sentences may be stated in their regular order, with the
subdivisions of the thought as they appear in the indented outline
grouped under the topic sentences; or in the indented outline the
paragraphs may be indicated by the regular sign for the paragraph at
any point where a new division is to be made. That is, in the first of
the two outlines that follow, the first paragraph might be indicated
in the first outline as including I and I, A; the second as including
II and II, A; the third as including II, B, 1, a, b, etc. Or, in the
second outline the subheadings of the first might be indicated under
the various topic sentences. The value of this type of outline is
obviously that it both shows the logic of the thought and the divisional
arrangement for presentation in paragraphs. With such an outline the
chances that you could go wrong, in even a long theme on a difficult
subject, are slight.
Do not fail, therefore, when your theme is to be of any considerable
length, or when the subject is at all difficult, to make an outline.
There is no greater pleasure in the world than that of creative effort
when the creator knows what he is about. But when the ideas are hazy,
when the writer does not know exactly what he wishes to do and what
impression he wishes to make--then the process of creation is anything
but pleasant. And since the outline presents a pattern of your work,
since with it you cannot fail to see what your intentions are and
what the requirements of your subject, regard it as your best writing
friend--and make use of the rights of friendship and require service.
FIRST OUTLINE OF "AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE"
I. A colony of bees increases our interest in a wood.
A. The secret of the hidden golden store of honey is pleasing.
II. The hunt is most interesting, especially in the autumn.
A. Nature, as we tramp with luncheon and with bait, is in her
greatest glory.
B. We are stimulated by the odds against our finding the tree.
1. Determining the direction of the tree is a problem.
a. It is easy to catch the first bee and watch it devour
the bait.
b. But to be sure of its rapid flight home requires
sharp eyes and concentrated watching.
c. Only after three or four trips of the first bee do
others discover the secret of our bait and join in
establishing the necessary "line" to the tree.
2. Determining the distance of the tree requires skill.
a. From another point we make a new "line" that meets
the first at the tree.
1´. This is called "cross-lining."
b. It is easy to pass by the tree even when we know
about where it is.
C. Once found, the tree must be attacked boldly.
1. Bees do not sting a bold person.
2. But when a sting is touched, even on a dead bee, it
hurts.
3. Honey is the best cure for the sting.
D. The actions of the bees are interesting.
1. Those which are away from home do not recognize the ruins
of their own hive, and begin to eat.
a. At last they pathetically understand.
2. Robber bees come for plunder.
a. Bumble-bees arrive in large numbers.
1´. Compared with honey-bees they are clumsy.
III. Two examples from experience show the chances for missing and the
delights of triumph.
A. Both trees were hemlocks.
B. Both were in interesting situations.
C. Both yielded good store of honey.
IV. Special facts, occasioned by the habits of bees, need to be
remembered.
A. In the woods, the hunter must stop, every little while, to
test his "line."
1. Sometimes he is baffled, because the bees do not know the
woods from the ground side.
B. Bees hunt for honey far from home.
1. Usually it is easier to find a tree half a mile away than
from only a few yards.
C. Since bees like water, a careful hunter looks along creeks
and near springs.
V. Wild honey is better than tame because it tastes of the adventure
of finding it.
SECOND OUTLINE OF "AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE"
1. The presence of a colony of bees in a wood gives it interest.
2. The fall is the best time to start with luncheon and bait off
across the fields a-hunting.
3. After two miles we catch several bees and watch them start for
home with our honey.
4. After several trips, other bees that have discovered the secret
arrive.
5. With one line established, we move on, establish another, find
the tree and attack it.
6. Boldness in handling bees is essential.
7. Bees that are away from home when their tree is attacked have
considerable difficulty in recognizing it.
8. Robber bees join the plundered to eat all the remnants of honey.
9. A neighbor honey-bee leads to another store in a hemlock.
10. Another tree in the vicinity, also a hemlock, had a superb
situation.
11. The honey in this tree was most pleasing to see and to carry
home.
12. In lining bees one must stop every little while and test his
line; bees puzzle sometimes by their actions since they know the
woods only from above.
13. Bees discover their home to the hunter better when they are
caught at some distance from the tree.
14. Since bees like water, it is well to hunt along brooks and near
springs.
15. Wild honey is sweeter than tame.
EXERCISES
I. Select the words and phrases in the selection from _Pulvis et
Umbra_ which immediately help to accomplish the controlling
purpose of the essay.
II. From what grade in the intellectual and social world does
Stevenson select his examples in the paragraph beginning: _If the
first view of this creature_, etc.? Why? From what grade would
you select examples for a similar paragraph if you intended the
creation of despair as your controlling purpose? What common
qualities are found in _all_ Stevenson's examples through the
selection? Why does he strive for this quality?
III. Make an outline of "An Idyl of the Honey-Bee," using the material
which now appears, but placing the accent of the essay upon the
difficulty of obtaining the honey, instead of upon the pleasures
of the hunt, as it is now placed--in other words, outline the
essay with change of controlling purpose.
IV. Write the first paragraph of the essay, and the last one, as you
would wish them to appear if your intention were to make
difficulty rather than joy the controlling purpose.
V. 1. Make an outline for "Solemn-Looking Blokes" with the
controlling purpose of bringing out the romantic nature of
the presence of American troops in England.
2. Make an outline such as would suit the expression of an
American who had been living in England since the declaration
of war in 1914 and had been taunted with the apathy of the
United States government, and now was supremely proud to see
United States troops in England.
VI. Write a final paragraph of "Solemn-Looking Blokes" to express any
of the following controlling purposes:
1. Joy at the union of the old and the new worlds in a common
cause.
2. Heartache at the awfulness of soldiers' sailing 3000 miles
to die because an autocratic government precipitated war.
3. The pride of an American resident in London over the physique
of the United States soldiers.
4. The astonishment of a London school-boy who has just read in
his history how the American colonies rebelled.
5. The apprehension of a British Tory lest aristocracy be doomed
when the troops of a great democracy appear so far away from
home to battle against autocracy.
VII. Write outlines and themes on any of the following subjects to
accomplish the different controlling purposes:
1. The Scientific Reduction of Noise.
1. To show the _social duty_ of engineers.
2. To show the wonder of man's analytical powers.
3. To show the seriousness of the difficulties that must be
faced.
2. The Growing Appreciation of Good Architecture in America.
1. To show the good educative work of our architects.
2. To show the influence of European travel.
3. To show the effect of the general rise in standards of
education.
3. The Popular Magazines.
1. To show the general looseness of thinking.
2. To show the senseless duplication of material and ideas.
3. To show the opportunity for a host of authors.
4. The Effects of the Big Mail-Order Houses.
1. To show how they ruin the small country store.
2. To show how they increase the opportunities of the small
buyers.
3. To show how they help give employment in the large
cities.
5. Is Religion Declining?
1. To show the shifting of responsibility from creeds to
deeds.
2. To show the changed status of the church.
3. To show the effect of increased education on religion.
6. "Best Sellers."
1. To show the relation of their immediate popularity to
their final valuation.
2. To indicate the qualities necessary to a "best seller."
3. To show the effect upon the thinking of a nation that has
many "best sellers."
7. Results of the Farm Credit Legislation.
1. To show the relief gained for the farmers.
2. To show the effect on increased production.
3. To show the fairer economic distribution.
8. The Use of Concrete.
1. To show the general economic value.
2. To show the general lightening of toil that it may have
caused.
3. To show the variety of its service.
9. The American Spirit.
1. To show its idealism.
2. To show its indebtedness to England, or France, or
Germany.
3. To show how it may help the world.
10. Beethoven's Piano-forte Sonatas.
1. To show them as the culmination of the sonata
development.
2. To show their romantic nature.
3. To show the development of Beethoven's genius as he
matured.
11. Heredity in Plants.
1. To show the similarity to heredity in man.
2. To show how knowledge of heredity in plants may serve an
economic purpose.
3. To show the wonderful consistency of the laws of heredity
in plants.
12. Glacial Action in the Mississippi Valley.
1. To show the economic result.
2. To indicate the sweep of time consumed in the formation.
3. To show the picturesque qualities in the gradual action.
VIII. What is the controlling purpose in the following selection? Point
out the influence upon the writer of knowing that Bostonians
would read his words. Indicate how the selection would differ if
the controlling object were to be bitter jealousy expressed by a
resident in a newer, larger, envious city.
Boston has a rather old-fashioned habit of speaking
the English language. It came upon us rather suddenly one day
as we journeyed out Huntington Avenue to the smart new gray
and red opera house. The very coloring of the _foyer_ of that
house--soft and simple--bespoke the refinement of the Boston
of to-day.
In the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, in every
other one of the glib opera houses that are springing up
mushroom-fashion across the land, our ears would have been
assailed by "Librettos! Get your Librettos!" Not so in Boston.
At the Boston Opera House the young woman back of the _foyer_
stand calmly announced at clocklike intervals:
"Translations. Translations."
And the head usher, whom the older Bostonians
grasped by the hand and seemed to regard as a long-lost
friend, did not sip out, "Checks, please."
"Locations," he requested, as he condescended to the
hand-grasps of the socially elect.
"The nearer door for those stepping out," announces
the guard upon the elevated train, and as for the surface and
trolley-cars, those wonderful green perambulators laden down
with more signs than nine ordinary trolley-cars would carry at
one time, they do not speak of the newest type in Boston as
"Pay-as-you-enter-cars," after the fashion of less cultured
communities. In the Hub they are known as Prepayment cars--its
precision is unrelenting.[10]
[10] Edward Hungerford: _The Personality of American Cities_. By
courtesy of the publisher, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York
City.
IX. What is the controlling purpose in the following selection from
Mr. John Masefield's volume of _Gallipoli_? Analyze this
controlling purpose as to the subject itself, the author's
personal reaction, and the intended readers--largely perhaps, the
American people.
Let the reader imagine himself to be facing three
miles of any very rough broken sloping ground known to him,
ground for the most part gorse-thyme-and-scrub-covered,
being poor soil, but in some places beautiful with flowers
(especially a "spiked yellow flower with a whitish leaf") and
on others green from cultivation. Let him say to himself that
he and an army of his friends are about to advance up the
slope towards the top, and that as they will be advancing in
a line, along the whole length of the three miles, he will
only see the advance of those comparatively near to him, since
folds or dips in the ground will hide the others. Let him,
before he advances, look earnestly along the line of the hill,
as it shows up clear, in blazing sunlight only a mile from
him, to see his tactical objective, one little clump of pines,
three hundred yards away, across what seem to be fields. Let
him see in the whole length of the hill no single human being,
nothing but scrub, earth, a few scattered buildings, of the
Levantine type (dirty white with roofs of dirty red) and some
patches of dark Scotch pine, growing as the pine loves, on
bleak crests. Let him imagine himself to be more weary than he
has ever been in his life before, and dirtier than he has ever
believed it possible to be, and parched with thirst, nervous,
wild-eyed and rather lousy. Let him think that he has not
slept for more than a few minutes together for eleven days and
nights, and that in all his waking hours he has been fighting
for his life, often hand to hand in the dark with a fierce
enemy, and that after each fight he has had to dig himself a
hole in the ground, often with his hands, and then walk three
or four roadless miles to bring up heavy boxes under fire. Let
him think, too, that in all those eleven days he has never
for an instant been out of the thunder of cannon, that waking
or sleeping their devastating crash has been blasting the air
across within a mile or two, and this from an artillery so
terrible that each discharge beats as it were a wedge of shock
between the skull-bone and the brain. Let him think too that
never, for an instant, in all that time, has he been free or
even partly free from the peril of death in its most sudden
and savage forms, and that hourly in all that time he has seen
his friends blown to pieces at his side, or dismembered, or
drowned, or driven mad, or stabbed, or sniped by some unseen
stalker, or bombed in the dark sap with a handful of dynamite
in a beef-tin, till their blood is caked upon his clothes and
thick upon his face, and that he knows, as he stares at the
hill, that in a few moments, more of that dwindling band,
already too few, God knows how many too few, for the task to
be done, will be gone the same way, and that he himself may
reckon that he has done with life, tasted and spoken and loved
his last, and that in a few minutes more may be blasted dead,
or lying bleeding in the scrub, with perhaps his face gone
and a leg and an arm broken, unable to move but still alive,
unable to drive away the flies or screen the ever-dropping
rain, in a place where none will find him, or be able to help
him, a place where he will die and rot and shrivel, till
nothing is left of him but a few rags and a few remnants and
a little identification-disc flapping on his bones in the
wind. Then let him hear the intermittent crash and rattle of
the fire augment suddenly and awfully in a roaring, blasting
roll, unspeakable and unthinkable, while the air above, that
has long been whining and whistling, becomes filled with the
scream of shells passing like great cats of death in the air;
let him see the slope of the hill vanish in a few moments into
the white, yellow, and black smokes of great explosions shot
with fire, and watch the lines of white puffs marking the hill
in streaks where the shrapnel searches a suspected trench; and
then, in the height of the tumult, when his brain is shaking
in his head, let him pull himself together with his friends,
and clamber up out of the trench, to go forward against an
invisible enemy, safe in some unseen trench expecting him.[11]
[11] John Masefield: _Gallipoli_. By courtesy of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, New York City.
What light does the following paragraph which appears at the
beginning of the book throw upon the controlling purpose?
Later, when there was leisure, I began to consider
the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a tragedy, nor as a mistake,
but as a great human effort, which came, more than once, very
near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times, and
failed, in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed,
from something which had nothing to do with arms nor with the
men who bore them. That the effort failed is not against
it; much that is most splendid in military history failed,
many great things and noble men have failed. To myself, this
failure is the second grand event of the war; the first was
Belgium's answer to the German ultimatum.[12]
[12] John Masefield: _Gallipoli_. By courtesy of the publishers, The
Macmillan Company, New York City.
X. Explain what would be your controlling purpose in a theme on any
of the following subjects, and how you would _arrange your
material_ to accomplish this purpose.
1. What is the Primary Function of a Successful Novel?
2. The Philosophy of Woman Suffrage.
3. Lynch Law and Law Reform.
4. The Conservatism of the American College Student.
5. Intellectual Bravery.
6. A Mediæval Free City.
7. Mr. Roosevelt's Career as an Index of the American Character.
8. Practical Efficiency as an Enemy to "Sweetness and Light."
9. The Æsthetics of the Skyscraper.
10. Possibilities for the Small Farmer in America.
11. The Future of Civil Engineering.
12. Housekeeping as an Exact Science.
XI. Indicate what your controlling purpose would be in writing of
the following subjects, if you chose your purpose from the
_subject-matter alone_. Then show how the purpose might be
affected by the different sets of readers as they are indicated
in the subheadings.
1. The Intelligence of the Average Voter.
a. For a woman who eagerly desires woman suffrage.
b. For a refined but narrow aristocrat, descendant of an old
family.
c. For an agitating member of the I.W.W.
2. The Value of Courses in Literature for the Technical Student.
a. For a hard-headed civil engineer.
b. For a white-haired, kindly old professor of Greek, who
resents the intrusion of science and labor.
c. For a mother who wants her son to "get everything good
from his technical course."
3. The Delights of Fishing.
a. For a woman who cannot understand why her husband wants
to be always going on silly fishing trips.
b. For a group of city men who are devotees of the sport.
c. For a small boy who hopes some day to go with "Dad" on
his trips.
4. The Value of the Civic Center.
a. For a man who resents the extra taxation that would be
necessary to make one in his city.
b. For a prominent, public-spirited architect.
c. For a young woman graduate from college who eagerly
desires to "do something" for her city.
5. The Spirit of the "Middle West," the "Old South" or any other
section of the country.
a. For a proud resident.
b. For a sniffy resident of another section.
c. For a person who has never thought of such a thing.
CHAPTER III
DEFINITION
Definition is the process of explaining a subject by setting bounds to
it, enclosing it within its limits, showing its extent. The ocean is
properly defined by the shore; a continent or island is defined by its
coastline: shores set limits to the ocean; coastlines bound the island
or continent. So, when a child asks, "What is Switzerland?" you show
on the map the pink or yellow or green space that is included within
certain definite boundaries. These boundaries set a limit to the extent
of that country; in other words, they define it. As soon as a traveler
steps beyond the limit of that country, he is at once in another
realm, has become identified with a quite different set of conditions
and circumstances--he is, in fact, in a country that has a different
definition from that of Switzerland. In the same way, when some one
asks what truth is, or nickel steel, or a grand piano, or humanism, or
art, or rotation of crops, or a rocking chair, or the forward pass,
you attempt, in your reply, to set bounds to the thing in question, to
restrict it, to fence it off, to state the line beyond which if it goes
it ceases to be one thing and becomes another. It is by no means always
an easy task to find this line. Many a child has come to grief in his
attempts to keep safely within the limits of truth and yet be close up
to the realm of desirable falsehood. Likewise many witnesses in court
have been beguiled or browbeaten into crossing the line without knowing
that they were getting into the country of the enemy. But though the
quest for the line may be difficult, a true definition must set off the
thing being defined from other things, must set bounds to it, enclose it
within its limits, show its extent.
The Process of Definition
The logical process of defining consists of two steps: first, stating
the class or group to which the object of definition belongs, as to say
that Switzerland is a _country_, the forward pass is a _strategic device
in football_, humanism is a _philosophy of personal development_; and
second, pointing out the difference between the object of definition
and other members of the class, showing how it is distinguished from
them. Since the purpose of definition is to limit the thing defined,
the practical value of the first step is at once apparent. If, in
total ignorance, a resident of India asks you, "What is ragtime?" the
most helpful thing in the world that you can do for him is to cleave
away with one stroke everything else in the world but music--absolute
exclusion of all other human interests--and place ragtime in that
comparatively narrow field. That is the first thing of great help.
However many qualities you may attribute to ragtime,--whether you call
it inspiring, invigorating, pleasing, detestable, or what not,--you
are making at best only slow progress toward defining, really limiting
ragtime. The number of pleasing things, for example, is so endless, and
the things are so diverse in character that your listener is almost as
ignorant after such a quality has been attributed as he was before. But
the moment that you limit ragtime to music you scatter untold clouds of
doubt and place the inquirer in the comfortable position of having a
fairly large working knowledge. What is left for the inquirer to do is
merely to distinguish ragtime from other kinds of music--after all, a
rather simple task. Likewise in any definition, such as that of rotation
of crops, the first necessity is to place the subject in its proper
field, in this case agriculture; the grand piano in the class of musical
instruments; the rocking chair in the class of furniture.
Now sometimes the task of discovering to what class your subject
belongs is difficult. Is a believer in Unitarianism a Christian? He
follows the ethical teachings of Jesus but denies him any special
divinity. In this case obviously the question of classification will
depend on the definition that we make of Christianity. Is a man who
serves the state in legislative or judicial capacity and at the same
time writes novels to be called a statesman or a man of letters?
Governments have fallen into difficulty with each other over such
things as contraband of war, there being great doubt at times whether
a particular thing is properly contraband or not. The question is
sometimes doubtful--you will be inclined to say, "I don't know what to
call this," but in making a definition call it you must. The United
States Government, facing the problem of discovering the proper class
for frogs' legs, in determining customs duties after much perturbation
placed them under the heading "poultry." Ordinarily you will find
slight difficulty in determining the class; but in every case you must
patiently search until you have found some class into which your subject
naturally fits. Until you have done this you obviously cannot set it
apart from other members, because you will not really know what the
other members are, you will be forced to run through the total list of
human ideas and things. Until you know that _oligarchy_ is one form of
political society you cannot know whether to set it off from _democracy_
and _monarchy_ or from _Christianity_ and _Buddhism_. First, then,
however difficult, discover the class to which your subject belongs. In
the following definition of a _clearing-house_, you will find that in
the course of time the class to which the subject belongs has changed,
has come to include more space, needs a larger fence to surround it, and
therefore the definition has been changed.
What is a clearing-house? The Supreme Court of the State
of Pennsylvania has defined it thus: "It is an ingenious device
to simplify and facilitate the work of the banks in reaching
an adjustment and payment of the daily balances due to and from
each other at one time and in one place on each day. In practical
operation it is a place where all the representatives of the banks
in a given city meet, and, under the supervision of a competent
committee or officer selected by the associated banks, settle their
accounts with each other and make or receive payments of balances
and so 'clear' the transactions of the day for which the settlement
is made."
But we must go farther than this, for though originally
designed as a labor-saving device, the clearing-house has expanded
far beyond those limits, until it has become a medium for united
action among the banks in ways that did not exist even in the
imaginations of those who were instrumental in its inception. A
clearing-house, therefore, may be defined as a device to simplify
and facilitate the daily exchange of items and settlements of
balances among the banks, and a medium for united action upon all
questions affecting their mutual welfare.[13]
[13] Francis M. Burdick: _The Essentials of Business Law_. By courtesy
of the publishers, D. Appleton & Co., New York City. Copyright
1902, 1908, by D. Appleton & Co.
The second step in the logical process of definition is to show how the
subject for definition differs from other members of its class. Once I
am told that the piano is a musical instrument I must next learn wherein
it differs from the violin, the kettle-drum, and the English horn. The
surname _Tomlinson_ partly defines a person as a member of the Tomlinson
family, but the definition is not complete until the name is modified
and the person is distinguished by _George_ or _Charles_ or whatever
name may belong to him. A skillful shepherd knows not only his flocks
but also the characteristics of the different members of the flocks,
so that he can say, "This sheep is the one in X flock that is always
getting into the clover." Here "X flock" is the class, and the quality
of abusing the clover is the distinguishing individual tag. Since the
desire in this part of the process of defining is to set individuals
apart, no mention will be made of qualities that are shared in common
but only of those that are peculiar to the individual. These qualities
that distinguish individual members of classes from each other are
called the _differentia_, just as the class is commonly called the
_genus_.
For convenience in keeping the list of differentia reasonably small,
to avoid unwieldiness of definition, care must be exercised in
choosing the class. When a class which itself contains other possible
classes is chosen, a long list of differentia will be necessary. It
is well, therefore, to choose a relatively small class to begin with.
For example, if I put the piano into the large class of _musical
instruments_, I shall then be under the necessity of amassing sufficient
differentia to set it apart from wind instruments whether of brass
or wood, from instruments of percussion, and from other stringed
instruments that do not use metal strings. If I restrict the class
to _stringed instruments_, I thereby exclude the differentia of both
wind instruments and instruments of percussion. If I further restrict
the class, at the beginning, to _instruments with metal strings_, I
need then to employ only such differentia as will set it off, perhaps,
from instruments that do not have a sounding board for their metal
strings. Such restriction of the class is advisable chiefly for purposes
of economy of effort in discovering the differentia, and is usually
accomplished, in expression, by preceding the class name with a limiting
adjective or by using a limiting phrase. This adjective or this phrase
is likely to be the expression of differentia among smaller classes, the
differentia among individual members being stated more at length later
in the definition.
The process of definition will be complete, then, when the subject of
definition has been assigned to a class, which for convenience should be
relatively small, and the qualities that distinguish the subject from
other members of the class have been found.
The Two Main Classes of Definitions
Two main classes of definition exist: first, the rigidly logical,
scientific kind such as is found in dictionaries, textbooks, and
other such writings which are not concerned with emotional values;
and second, the less rigid, more expanded, more informal kind which
aims to please as well as to instruct, and which is found in essays
and all forms of writing with a strong human appeal. The two kinds
are alike in the presence of both genus and differentia; they differ
chiefly in the presence, in the less formal, of the qualities of
pleasingness and stimulation as opposed to the quality, in the formal,
of scientific impersonality, cold intellectuality. For example, the
Standard Dictionary defines a _correspondent_ as "one who communicates
by means of letters; specifically one who sends regular communications
from a distant place to a newspaper or a business house." The author
of the volume entitled _Famous War Correspondents_[14] defines, with
much the same fundamental ideas, if not indeed exactly the same, a _war
correspondent_ as follows:
[14] F. L. Billiard: _Famous War Correspondents_. By courtesy of the
publishers, Little, Brown & Co., Boston. Copyright, 1914.
The war correspondent is a newspaper man assigned to cover a
campaign. He goes into the field with the army, expecting to send
his reports from that witching region known as "the front." He is
a special correspondent commissioned to collect intelligence and
transmit it from the camp and the battle ground. A non-combatant,
he mingles freely with men whose business it is to fight. He may be
ten thousand miles from the home office, but he finds competition
as keen as ever it is in Fleet Street or Newspaper Row. He is
engaged in the most dramatic department of a profession whose
infinite variety is equalled only by its fascination. If he becomes
a professional rather than an occasional correspondent, wandering
will be his business and adventure his daily fare. Mr. A. G. Hales
is of the opinion that the newspaper man who is chosen as a war
correspondent has won the Victoria Cross of journalism.
For the making of a first-rate war correspondent there are
required all the qualifications of a capable reporter in any other
branch of the profession, and others besides. Perhaps it is true
that the regular hack work of the ordinary newspaper man is the
best training for the scribe of war. The men who had reported
fires and train wrecks in American cities proved themselves able
to describe vigorously and clearly the campaign in Cuba. William
Howard Russell had been doing a great variety of descriptive
writing before he was sent to the Crimea. The prime requisites for
a satisfactory war correspondent are those fundamental to success
in any kind of newspaper work, the ability to see straight, to
write vividly and accurately, and to get a story on the wire.
Occasionally a brilliant workman appears from nowhere, the
happy possessor of an almost uncanny intuition of movements and
purposes. Such a man was Archibald Forbes. But Forbes, no less than
the average special, had to have the physical capacity to march
with the private soldier, to ride a hundred miles at a clip at
top speed over rough country, to sleep in the open, to stand the
heat of the desert and the cold of the mountain height, to endure
hunger and thirst and all the deprivations of a hard campaign.
Every correspondent at times must keep going until his strength is
utterly spent. He must have the tenacity which does not yield to
exhaustion until his messages are written and on the way to his
paper. When the soldier ceases fighting, the correspondent's work
is only begun. He needs also to have a degree of familiarity with
the affairs of the present and the history of the past which will
secure him the respect of the officers with whom he may associate.
Along with the courage of the scout he should possess the suavity
and tact of the diplomat, for he will have to get along with men of
all types, and occasionally, indeed, his own influence may overlap
into the field of international diplomacy. British correspondents,
having covered many wars, small and great, since 1870, usually
are acquainted with several languages, and often have acquired a
knowledge of the technicalities of military science.
Of the two kinds of definition--formal and informal--you will more often
have occasion to write the second. You must guard against the danger,
in such writing, of allowing the interest to cloud the truth, of being
led into inaccurate partial statements by your desire to please. At the
root of every good definition is still the accurate statement of genus
and differentia. It is chiefly of the second kind that we shall treat
here. If you can write a definition that is pleasing and stimulating and
also accurate, you can always boil it down into the more bald formal
statement such as the dictionary offers. Whatever powers of grace or
neatness in expression you possess, whatever powers of saying things
in a pleasing manner, it is your privilege to employ in the writing of
definitions.
General Cautions
For the sake of clearness and general effectiveness a few cautions need
to be made. In the first place, be sure to exclude everything from your
definition that does not properly belong in it. For example, if you
define the aeroplane as a machine that journeys through the air under
its own power, you include dirigible balloons, which are not aeroplanes.
You must introduce both the characteristics of being heavier than air
and of having a plane or planes before your definition can stand. You
will make this exclusion by choosing both class and differentia with the
greatest care.
In the second place, include everything that does properly belong in the
definition. If you define a bridge as a roadway over a stream, either
resting on piers or hanging on cables strung over towers, you exclude
pontoon bridges certainly, and all bridges across dry chasms, if not
other kinds. Not until you include all varieties of things crossed and
all the methods of support and the various materials used will your
definition be sound and complete. This does not mean that you will have
to make an endless list of all possible forms, but that you will make a
comprehensive statement which will allow of being distributed over all
the different forms and kinds of bridges.
In the third place, use simple and familiar diction. Since the first
purpose of a definition is to explain, one that is obscure or difficult
makes confusion worse confounded. The famous--or notorious--definition
which Dr. Johnson made of so simple a thing as _network_, "anything
reticulated or decussated at equal distances with interstices between
the intersections," is worse than useless because it positively throws
dust upon a comparatively easy matter to perceive--unless the reader
take time out for meditation. Remember that the Gettysburg Address and
many of Shakespeare's sonnets are largely in words of one syllable. And
then do not be afraid that you will be understood; the fire is always
presumably somewhat more uncomfortable than the frying-pan.
In the fourth place, do not use the term that you are defining, or
any derivative of it. When college freshmen, in mortal combat with a
quiz question, define a description as _something that describes_,
they use words that profit them nothing. That a cow is a cow is fairly
obvious. The temptation to make this mistake, which, in the intellectual
world, occupies the relative space of the saucy old advice, "Chase
yourself round the block!" occurs usually when a long definition is
being written, in which the writer forgets to keep the horizon clear,
and finally falls into the formula _x_ is _x_. To avoid yielding to
such temptation, you will do well, after a definition is complete, to
phrase it in a single sentence which shall include both differentia
and genus, and in which you can easily discover the evil formula _x_
is _x_. Bardolph, in Shakespeare's _King Henry IV_, yields to the
temptation--for which we are glad as to humor but not made wise as to
meaning--when Shallow puts him to the test:
_Shallow_: Better accommodated! it is good; yea, indeed, it
is: good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable.
Accommodated! it comes of accommodo: very good; a good phrase.
_Bardolph_: Pardon me, sir; I have heard the word. Phrase
call you it? by this good day, I know not the phrase; but I will
maintain the word with my sword to be a soldier-like word, and a
word of exceeding good command, by heaven. Accommodated; that is,
when a man is, as they say, accommodated; or when a man is, being,
whereby 'a may be thought to be accommodated; which is an excellent
thing.
In the fifth place, be sure that you define, and do not merely "talk
about" the subject. Any amount of however interesting comment that fails
to accomplish the two necessities of definition, statement of the genus
and the differentia, is futile; it is not definition. This temptation,
like the former one, will be overcome if you take the trouble to phrase
the actual material of your definition in one sentence that really
includes both genus and differentia. As a minor suggestion, do not begin
your definition with the words, "X is when" or "X is where," unless you
are defining either a unit of time or a place--and even then you will do
well to avoid these too frequently used phrases.
Finally, do not make your definition too mechanical, too much lacking in
real life. Thinking of how you must deal with genus and differentia, you
are liable to be overwhelmed with the grim duty of being logical, and to
forget that you should also be human, that people read definitions, as
other kinds of writing, in the double hope of information and pleasure.
No real antagonism exists between logic of the strictest kind and
pleasurable presentation, as is proved by the examples quoted during the
course of this chapter and at the end. While you remember your subject,
remember also your reader; then you will be unlikely to make a dull
definition.
Methods of Defining
You may use various methods of defining. Sometimes you will choose only
one, and sometimes you will combine. There is no special virtue in one
method more than another except as sometimes one happens to be more
useful for a given case, as we shall see. In selecting your method,
then, select on the basis of practical workability for the effect that
you desire to create, adhering to one or using several as seems most
effective.
_a._ _The Method of Illustration_
One of the most useful, natural, and easy methods is that of giving an
example or illustration of the thing that is being defined. The great
usefulness of this method lies in the stimulating quality that the
concrete example always has. If you wish to define an abstract quality,
for example, such as _patriotism_, or _honor_, or _generosity_, you
will often find advantage, for the first, in calling up the figure of
Washington, of Lincoln, of Cromwell; in citing, for the second, the
case of some man who, after bankruptcy, has set himself to pay all his
former debts, or of Regulus who, though he had the chance not to keep
his promise to return to Carthage as prisoner, yet bade Rome farewell
and returned to unspeakable torture; in presenting, for the third, a
specific set of conditions, such as possession of only one dime, which
is then shared with another person who is even less fortunate, or
showing a known person, like Sir Philip Sidney, who, though at death's
door on the field of battle, urged that the exquisite joy of cold water
be given to a comrade who was even more terribly in need. In every one
of these cases the quality under definition is presented in an easily
grasped, concrete form that has the great advantage of human interest,
of stimulating the reader's thought. That using such a method is natural
is apparent as soon as we remember that we think largely in concrete
forms, specific cases. That it is rather easy is obvious, because so
many instances are always at hand to be used.
The danger in this method is that the example chosen will not be
entirely fair. Such lack of fairness may occur if the example covers
too little ground of the definition or if it too highly accentuates
one phase of the subject of definition. If, for instance, you cite the
example of the man who gave away his only pair of shoes, as an example
of generosity, you may run the risk of making the reader think that
nothing but an extreme act has the real stamp of the generous giver, or
that generosity is expressed only in material ways, forgetting that it
is generous to acknowledge a fault or to overlook unintended affront.
To avoid this danger be sure that your example is fair and sufficiently
comprehensive, and if it is not, choose other examples to add to it
until you are convinced of the all-round fitness of your definition. In
the following examples you may feel that Gissing does not wholly define
_poverty_, whereas Shaw is more complete in his approach to defining
_ability that gives value for money_, and Mr. Morman by taking a typical
example and working it out arrives at complete understanding with
perhaps less of piquant interest.
Blackberries hanging thick upon the hedge bring to my memory
something of long ago. I had somehow escaped into the country and
on a long walk began to feel mid-day hunger. The wayside brambles
were fruiting; I picked and ate, and ate on, until I had come
within sight of an inn where I might have made a good meal. But
my hunger was satisfied; I had no need of anything more, and,
as I thought of it, a strange feeling of surprise, a sort of
bewilderment, came upon me. What! Could it be that I had eaten,
and eaten sufficiently, _without paying_? It struck me as an
extraordinary thing. At that time, my ceaseless preoccupation was
how to obtain money to keep myself alive. Many a day I had suffered
hunger because I durst not spend the few coins I possessed; the
food I could buy was in any case unsatisfactory, unvaried. But here
nature had given me a feast, which seemed delicious, and I had
eaten all I wanted. The wonder held me for a long time, and to this
day I can recall it, understand it.
I think there could be no better illustration of what it means
to be poor in a great town.[15]
[15] George Gissing: _The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft_, "Autumn."
By permission of the publishers, E. P. Dutton & Co., New York
City.
* * * * *
In business, as a rule, a man must make what he gets and
something over into the bargain. I have known a man to be employed
by a firm of underwriters to interview would-be insurers. His sole
business was to talk to them and decide whether to insure or not.
Salary, £4000 a year. This meant that the loss of his judgment
would have cost his employers more than £4000 a year. Other
men have an eye for contracts or whatnot, or are born captains
of industry, in which cases they go into business on their own
account, and make ten, twenty, or two hundred per cent where you or
I would lose five. Or, to turn back a moment from the giants to the
minnows, take the case of a woman with the knack of cutting out a
dress. She gets six guineas a week instead of eighteen shillings.
Or she has perhaps a ladylike air and a figure on which a mantle
looks well. For these she can get several guineas a week merely
by standing in a show-room letting mantles be tried on her before
customers. All these people are renters of ability; and their
ability is inseparable from them and dies with them. The excess of
their gains over those of an ordinary person with the same capital
and education is the "rent" of the exceptional "fertility." But
observe, if the able person makes £100,000, and leaves that to his
son, who, being but an ordinary gentleman, can get only from two
and a half to four per cent on it, that revenue is pure interest on
capital and in no sense whatever rent of ability.[16]
[16] George B. Shaw: _Socialism and Superior Brains_. By courtesy of
the publishers, John Lane Company, New York City.
* * * * *
By "amortization" is meant the method of paying a debt by
regular semi-annual or annual installments. To illustrate:
Suppose a farmer gives a mortgage on his farm of $1000, with
interest at 5 per cent. In addition to the interest, he agrees
to pay 2 per cent a year on the principal. This makes a total of
7 per cent a year, or a payment of $70, which may be paid in two
semi-annual installments of $35 each. The first year's interest
and payment on the principal are taken as the amount to be paid
annually. But of the first payment, $50 represents the interest
and $20 the payment on the principal. After the first year's
payment, therefore, instead of owing $1000, the farmer owes only
$980, with interest at 5 per cent.
For the sake of simplicity, let us suppose that payments
are made annually. When the next time of payment comes round,
the farmer pays his $70. Since his debt is less, the interest
the second year amounts to $49 instead of $50, and therefore the
payment on the principal is $21 instead of $20 as it was the first
year. In the second year the debt is reduced to $959.
On the return of the third time of payment the farmer pays
another $70, of which amount $47.95 represents the interest and
$22.05 the payment on the principal. This reduces the farmer's
mortgage debt to $936.95.
Now, this system of payment and method of reducing the debt
continues until the mortgage has been lifted by a gradual process.
Thus, while the annual payments are always the same, the amount
of interest is always decreasing and the amount of the payments
on the debt is always increasing. Consequently, the mortgage is
paid off in ten to forty years according to the rate of payment on
the loan that the debtor himself elects to pay when the contract
is made. This is the simple principle of amortization, and it is
recognized in Europe as the safest, easiest, and best method of
reducing land-mortgage indebtedness hitherto conceived and put into
practice.[17]
[17] J. B. Morman: _Principles of Rural Credit_. By courtesy of the
publishers, The Macmillan Company, New York City.
If, then, you have a subject that is abstract and perhaps difficult
to understand in abstract explanation; if you wish, to stimulate your
readers and make their reading pleasant; if, for any reason, you wish
to write informally, then you may well decide to employ the useful,
natural, and easy method of definition by illustration.
_b._ _The Method of Comparison or Contrast_
A second method, closely akin to that by illustration, is the method of
defining by comparison or contrast. The value of this method lies in
its liveliness and the ease with which it makes an idea comprehended.
The liveliness derives largely from the usual presence of specific facts
or things with which the subject of definition is compared or to which
it is contrasted, and from the imaginative stimulus that perception of
similarity in function creates. The implied definition of leader in
politics in Lincoln's famous remark about changing political parties in
war time, "Don't swap horses while crossing a stream," is not only true,
but more, it is interesting. The ease of comprehension is due largely
to employing the method of proceeding from the known to the unknown
in that comparison is usually made to things already familiar. If
contrast is used, there is the added interest of dramatic presentation
found especially in oratorical definitions. Liveliness and ease in
comprehension make this method a valuable one in addressing a popular
or an unlearned body of readers; it presents the truth and it enlists
interest. In the following examples you will not be aware of dramatic
quality in the first but you will find picturesque qualities in both.
Lord Cromer describes a responsible statesman in a democracy
as very much in the position of a man in a boat off the mouth of a
tidal river. He long has to strive against wind and current until
finally a favorable conjunction of weather and tide forms a wave
upon which he rides safely into the harbor. There is an essential
truth in this which no man attempting to play the part of leader in
a democracy can forget except at his peril. Government by public
opinion is bound to get a sufficient body of public opinion on its
side. But withal it is manifestly the duty of a leader to help form
a just public opinion. He must dare to be temporarily unpopular,
if only in that way he can get a temporary hearing for the truths
which the people ought to have presented to them. He is to execute
the popular will, but he is not to neglect shaping it. It is his
duty to be properly receptive, but his main striving ought to be
that virtue should go out of him to touch and quicken the masses
of his citizens. If their minds and imaginations are played upon
with sufficient persistence and sufficient skill, they will give
him back his own ideas with enthusiasm. A man who throws a ball
against a wall gets it back again as if hurled by the dead brick
and mortar; but the original impulse is in his own muscle. So a
democratic leader may say, if he chooses, that he takes only what
is pressed upon him by the people; but his function is often first
to press it upon them.[18]
[18] Gustav Pollak: _Fifty Years of American Idealism_. Houghton
Mifflin Company. By courtesy of _The Nation_.
* * * * *
The quack novel is a thing which looks like a book, and
which is compounded, advertised, and marketed in precisely the
same fashion as Castoria, Wine of Cardui, Alcola, Mrs. Summers's
free-to-you-my-sister Harmless Headache Remedy, Viavi Tablettes,
and other patent medicines, harmful and harmless. As the patent
medicine is made of perfectly well-known drugs, so the quack novel
of course contains perfectly familiar elements, and like the
medicine, it comes wrapped in superlative testimonials from those
who say they have swallowed it to their advantage. Instead of
"After twenty years of bed-ridden agony, one bottle of your Fosforo
cured every ache and completely restored my manhood," we have "The
secret of his powers is the same God-given secret that inspired
Shakespeare and upheld Dickens." This, from the Philadelphia
_Sunday Dispatch_, accompanies a quack novel by Mr. Harold Bell
Wright, of whom the Portland, Oregon, _Journal_ remarks, "It is
this almost clairvoyant power of reading the human soul that has
made Mr. Wright's books among the most remarkable works of the
present age." Similar to that aroma of piety and charity which
accompanies the quack medicines, an equally perceptible odor of
sanctity is wafted to us with Mr. Wright; and just as imitators
will make their boxes and bottles to resemble those of an already
successful trade article, so are Mr. Wright's volumes given that
red cloth and gold lettering which we have come to associate with
the bindings of Mr. Winston Churchill's very popular and agreeable
novels. Lastly--like the quack medicines--the quack novel is
(mostly) harmful; not always because it is poisonous (though this
occurs), but because it pretends to be literature and is taken for
literature by the millions who swallow it year after year as their
chief mental nourishment, and whose brains it saps and dilutes.
In short, both these shams--the book and the medicine--win and
bamboozle their public through methods almost identical.[19]
[19] Owen Wister: _Quack Novels and Democracy_. By courtesy of The
Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston.
For complete truth you need to present both resemblance and difference.
This necessity is apparent as soon as we remember that the differentia
are of vital importance, that we understand the subject only when we
see how it differs from other members of the same class. When these
differences are obvious, of course they need no mention. But in defining
_wit and humor_, for example, or _immorality and unconventionality_,
we must know not only the parallelisms but also the divergencies. The
best method of procedure is to discover in each of the subjects compared
the vital things, the heart without which it could not exist, and then
to observe how these work out in the particulars of the subject. In
defining _State_ and _Nation_ in the following selection Mr. Russell
takes care to show both resemblances and differences.
_Nation_ is not to be defined by affinities of language or a
common historical origin, though these things often help to produce
a nation. Switzerland is a nation, in spite of diversities of race,
religion, and language. England and Scotland now form one nation,
though they did not do so at the time of our Civil War. This is
shown by Cromwell's saying, in the height of the conflict, that he
would rather be subject to the dominion of the royalists than to
that of the Scotch. Great Britain was one state before it was one
nation; on the other hand, Germany was one nation before it was one
state. What constitutes a nation is a sentiment and an instinct--a
sentiment of similarity and an instinct of belonging to the same
group or herd. The instinct is an extension of the instinct which
constitutes a flock of sheep, or any other group of gregarious
animals. The sentiment which goes with this is like a milder and
more extended form of family feeling. When we return to England
after having been on the Continent, we feel something friendly in
the familiar ways, and it is easy to believe that Englishmen on
the whole are virtuous while many foreigners are full of designing
wickedness.
Such feelings make it easy to organize a nation into a state.
It is not difficult, as a rule, to acquiesce in the orders of a
national government. We feel that it is our government, and that
its decrees are more or less the same as those which we should
have given if we ourselves had been the governors. There is an
instinctive, and usually unconscious, sense of a common purpose
animating the members of a nation. This becomes especially vivid
when there is a war or a danger of war. Any one who, at such a
time, stands out against the orders of his government feels an
inner conflict quite different from any that he would feel in
standing out against the orders of a foreign government, in whose
power he might happen to find himself. If he stands out, he does
so with a more or less conscious hope that his government may in
time come to think as he does; whereas, in standing out against a
foreign government, no such hope is necessary. This group instinct,
however it may have arisen, is what constitutes a nation, and what
makes it important that the boundaries of nations should also be
the boundaries of states.[20]
[20] Bertrand Russell: _National Independence and Internationalism_.
By courtesy of The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston.
_c._ _The Method of Division_
A third method, often used, and similar in its general form to analysis,
divides the subject into its various headings, the sum of which must
equal the whole. This method differs from analysis, perhaps, in that it
treats the subject throughout as a unit rather than as a congregation of
parts. This method may be used to define a subject like _mathematics_,
in stating that it is the pure science which includes arithmetic,
algebra, geometry, etc., or to define a quality like _patriotism_, by
enumerating the qualities that patriotism has. These qualities may be,
also, the uses to which the subject can be put, as in defining a tool or
a machine. The method consists in establishing the genus and then, from
a mental map of the subject, selecting the various parts that constitute
the whole, whether these parts be of physical extent, as in defining
the United States by giving the various sections of the country, or of
spiritual significance, as in defining an honest man by stating the
qualities that he should possess.
One danger from this method is lack of completeness; great practical
value attaches here to the caution to be sure that the definition
includes all that properly belongs under it. Another danger is in the
temptation to "talk about" the subject without actually defining it,
merely saying some pleasant things and then ceasing. The caution against
this danger in general must be remembered. Properly used, this method,
though it is sometimes rather formal, should result in great clearness
through completeness of definition. The following celebrated definition
of a "classic" is a good example of compact definition by this method,
and the definition of "moral atmosphere" of a more leisurely, informal
breaking-up.
A classic is an author who has enriched the human mind, who
has really added to its treasure, who has got it to take a step
further; who has discovered some unequivocal moral truth, or
penetrated to some eternal passion, in that heart of man where it
seemed as though all were known and explored, who has produced his
thought, or his observation, or his invention, under some form, no
matter what, so it be large, great, acute, and reasonable, sane and
beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in a style of his own,
yet a style which finds itself the style of everybody,--in a style
that is at once new and antique, and is the contemporary of all
ages.[21]
[21] Sainte-Beuve.
* * * * *
The moral atmosphere of the office was ideal. I mean more in
the extended and not alone in our specific English sense, though
in the latter it was even perhaps more marked. There was not only
no temporizing, compromising, compounding with candor, in either
major matters or trifling; there was no partiality or ingenuity
or bland indifference by which the devil may be, and so often
is, whipped round the stump. There was in the _Nation's_ field
and conception of its function no temptation to anything of this
sort, to be sure, which consideration may conceivably qualify its
assessment of merit on the Day of Judgment--a day when we may hope
the sins of daily journalism will, in consequence of the same
consideration, be extended some leniency--but certainly cannot
obscure the fact of its conspicuous integrity. There were people
then--as now--that complained of its fairness; which involved,
to my mind, the most naïve attitude imaginable, since it was
the _Nation's_ practice that had provided the objector with his
criterion of fairness in journalism. Of course he might assert that
this was only a way of saying that the paper made extraordinary
claims which in his estimation it failed to justify; but this was
verbiage, the fact being as I have stated it.
But I also mean by moral atmosphere the peace, the serenity,
the gentleness, the self-respect, the feeling of character, that
pervaded the office. We seemed, to my sense, so recently filled
with the reactions of Park Row phenomena, "to lie at anchor in
the stream of Time," as Carlyle said of Oxford--which, actually,
we were very far from doing; there was never any doubt of the
_Nation's_ being what is now called a "live wire," especially
among those who took hold of it unwarily--as now and then some
one did. Mr. Garrison shared the first editorial room with me.
Mr. Godkin had the back office. The publication offices were in
front, occupied by the amiable Mr. St. John
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