In every life worth writing about there is a ruling passion,--“the very
pulse of the machine.” Unless you touch that, you are groping around
outside of reality.
Sometimes it is romantic love: Natures masterpiece of interested
benevolence. In almost all lives this passion has its season of empire.
Therefore, and rightly, it is the favourite theme of the storyteller.
Romantic love interests almost everybody, because almost everybody knows
something about it, or would like to know.
But there are other passions, no less real, which also have their place
and power in human life. Some of them come earlier, and sometimes they
last longer, than romantic love. They play alongside of it and are mixed
up with it, now checking it, now advancing its flow and tingeing it with
their own colour.
Just because love is so universal, it is often to one of the other
passions that we must look for the distinctive hue, the individual
quality of a life-story. Granted, if you will, that everybody must fall
in love, or ought to fall in love, How will he do it? And what will
he do afterwards? These are questions not without interest to one who
watches the human drama as a friend. The answers depend upon those
hidden and durable desires, affections, and impulses to which men and
women give themselves up for rule and guidance.
Music, nature, children, honour, strife, revenge, money, pride,
friendship, loyalty, duty,--to these objects and others like them the
secret power of personal passion often turns, and the life unconsciously
follows it, as the tides in the sea follow the moon in the sky.
When circumstances cross the ruling passion, when rocks lie in the way
and winds are contrary, then things happen, characters emerge, slight
events are significant, mere adventures are transformed into a real
plot. What care I how many “hair-breadth 'scapes” and “moving accidents”
your hero may pass through, unless I know him for a man? He is but
a puppet strung on wires. His kisses are wooden and his wounds bleed
sawdust. There is nothing about him to remember except his name, and
perhaps a bit of dialect. Kill him or crown him,--what difference does
it make?
But go the other way about your work:
“Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
Look at his head and heart, find how and why
He differs from his fellows utterly,”--
and now there is something to tell, with a meaning.
If you tell it at length, it is a novel,--a painting. If you tell it in
brief, it is a short story,--an etching. But the subject is always the
same: the unseen, mysterious, ruling passion weaving the stuff of human
nature into patterns wherein the soul is imaged and revealed.
To tell about some of these ruling passions, simply, clearly, and
concretely, is what I want to do in this book. The characters are
chosen, for the most part, among plain people, because their feelings
are expressed with fewer words and greater truth, not being costumed for
social effect. The scene is laid on Nature's stage because I like to be
out-of-doors, even when I am trying to think and learning to write.
“Avalon,” Princeton, July 22, 1901.