Your teacher Miss Lawrence has presumed that I might have something to
say to a class of boys and girls studying rhetoric, and, what is
more, that I might be disposed to say it. What she tells me about your
interest in my own writings certainly interests me and makes me wish I
might speak a helpful word to you. But let me tell you that very little
conscious rhetoric has gone into the composition of those same writings.
Valuable as the study of rhetoric undoubtedly is, it can go but a little
way in making you successful writers. I think I have got more help as an
author from going a-fishing than from any textbook or classbook I ever
looked into. Miss Lawrence will not thank me for encouraging you to play
truant, but if you take Bacon's or Emerson's or Arnold's or Cowley's
essays with you and dip into them now and then while you are waiting for
the fish to bite, she will detect some fresh gleam in your composition
when next you hand one in.
There is no way to learn style so sure as by familiarity with nature,
and by study of the great authors. Shakespeare can teach you all there
is to be learned of the art of expression, and the rhetoric of a live
trout leaping and darting with such ease and sureness cannot well be
beaten.
What you really have in your heart, what you are in earnest about, how
easy it is to say that!
Miss Lawrence says you admire my essay on the strawberry. Ah! but I
loved the strawberry--I loved the fields where it grew, I loved the
birds that sang there, and the flowers that bloomed there, and I loved
my mother who sent me forth to gather the berries; I loved all the rural
sights and sounds, I felt near them, so that when, in after years, I
came to write my essay I had only to obey the old adage which sums up
all of the advice which can be given in these matters, "Look in thy
heart and write."
The same when I wrote about the apple. I had apples in my blood and
bones. I had not ripened them in the haymow and bitten them under the
seat and behind my slate so many times in school for nothing. Every
apple tree I had ever shinned up and dreamed under of a long summer day,
while a boy, helped me to write that paper. The whole life on the farm,
and love of home and of father and mother, helped me to write it. In
writing your compositions, put your rhetoric behind you and tell what
you feel and know, and describe what you have seen.
All writers come sooner or later to see that the great thing is to be
simple and direct; only thus can you give a vivid sense of reality, and
without a sense of reality the finest writing is mere froth.
Strive to write sincerely, as you speak when mad, or when in love; not
with the tips of the fingers of your mind, but with the whole hand.
A noted English historian (Freeman) while visiting Vassar College went
in to hear the rhetoric class. After the exercises were over he said to
the professor, "Why don't you teach your girls to spin a plain yarn?"
I hope Miss Lawrence teaches you to spin a plain yarn. There is nothing
like it. The figures of rhetoric are not paper flowers to be sewed upon
the texture of your composition; they have no value unless they are real
flowers which sprout naturally from your heart.
What force in the reply of that little Parisian girl I knew of! She
offered some trinkets for sale to a lady on the street. "How much is
this?" asked the lady, taking up some article from the little girl's
basket. "Judge for yourself. Madam, I have tasted no food since
yesterday morning." Under the pressure of any real feeling, even of
hunger, our composition will not lack point.
I might run on in this way another sheet, but I will stop. I have been
firing at you in the dark,--a boy or a girl at hand is worth several in
the bush, off there in Fulton,--but if any of my words tingle in your
ears and set you to thinking, why you have your teacher to thank for it.
Very truly yours, John Burroughs.