[Footnote 14: From _The Writing of English_, by John Matthews Manly and
Edith Rickert. Copyright, 1919, by Henry Holt and Co. By permission of the
authors and of the publishers.]
Do you like to write? Probably not. What have you tried to write? Probably
"themes."
The "theme" is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the
education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the
world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme"
was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between
the covers of a book in the hope that it might live for centuries. In a
word, a "theme" is first and last a product of "composition"--a laborious
putting together of ideas, without audience and without purpose, hated
alike by student and by instructor. Its sole use is to exemplify the
principles of rhetoric. But rhetoric belongs to the past as much as the
toga and the snuffbox; it is an extinct art, the art of cultivating style
according to the mannerisms of a vanished age.
Forget that you ever wrote a "theme," and ask yourself now: "Should I like
to write?" Of course you would--if you could. And you can. You have had,
and you will have, some experiences that will not be repeated exactly in
any other life--that no one else can express exactly as you would express
them. And the art of expressing what you have experienced, what you think,
what you feel, and what you believe, can be learned.
If you stop to consider the matter, you will realize that self-expression
is one of the laws of life; you do express yourself day after day, whether
you will or not. Hence, the more quickly you learn that successful
self-expression is the source of one of the greatest pleasures in life, the
more readily will you be able to turn your energy in the right direction,
and the more fun will you get out of the process. The kind of delight that
comes through self-expression of the body, through the play of the muscles
in running or hurdling, through the play of muscles and mind together in
football or baseball or tennis or golf, comes also through the exercise of
the mind alone in talk or in writing.
Remember always throughout this course, that you have something to
say--something peculiar to yourself that should be contributed to the sum
of the world's experience, something that cannot be contributed by anyone
but yourself. It may be much or it may be little: with that you are not
concerned at present; your business now is to find out how to say it; how
to clear away the obstacles that clog self-expression; how to give your
mind free swing; and how to get all the fun there is in the process.
The initial problems in learning to write are: How can you get at this
store of material hidden within you? and how can you know when you have
found it? Your experience, however interesting, is as yet very limited. How
can you tell which phases of it deserve expression, and which are mere
commonplace? The quickest way to answer this question is by reading.
Reading will tell you which phases of experience have been commonly treated
and which have been neglected. Moreover, as you read you will be surprised
to find that very often the features of your life which seem to you
peculiarly interesting are exactly those that are commonly--and even
cheaply--written about, while those which you have passed over as not worth
attention may be aspects of life that other people too have passed over;
they may therefore be fresh and well worth writing about. For instance,
within the last twenty-five years we have had two writers, Joseph Conrad
and John Masefield, writing of the sea as it has never been written of
before. Both have been sailors; and both have utilized their experience as
viewed through the medium of their temperaments in a way undreamed of
before. Again, within the last ten years we have had Algernon Blackwood,
using his imagination to apply psychology to the study of the supernatural,
and so developing a field peculiar to himself. Still again, H. G. Wells,
who began his career as a clerk and continued as a teacher of science, has
found in both these phases of his experience a mine of literary wealth; and
Arnold Bennett, born and educated in the dreariest, most unpicturesque,
apparently least inspiring, part of England, has seen in the very prosiness
of the Five Towns untouched material, and has given this an enduring place
in literature. In your imagination there may lie the basis of fantasies as
yet unexpressed; or in your experience, aspects of life that have not as
yet been adequately treated. As you read you will find that until recently
the one phase of life most exploited in literature was the romantic love of
youth; this was the basis of nearly all novels and of most short stories;
its presence was demanded for either primary or secondary interest in the
drama; and it was the chief source of inspiration for the lyric. But within
the last thirty years all sorts of other subjects have been opened up.
To-day the writer's difficulty is, not that he is restricted by literary
convention in his choice of material, but that he is so absolutely
unrestricted that he may be in doubt where to make his choice. He is, to be
sure, conditioned in two ways: To do the best work, he must keep within the
bounds of his own temperament and experience; and he should as far as
possible avoid phases of life already written about, unless he can present
them under some new aspect.
With these conditions in mind, you are ready to ask yourself: What have I
to write about? Let us put the question more concretely: Have you lived,
for instance, in a little mining town in the West? Such a little town, with
its saloons and automatics and flannel-shirted hero, stares at us every
month from the pages of popular magazines. But perhaps your little mining
town is dry, perhaps there has not been a shooting fray in it for ten
years, and all the young men go to Bible class on Sunday. Well, here is
something new; let us have it. Is New York your home? The magazines tell
you that New York is parceled out among a score of writers: the Italian
quarter, the Jewish quarter, the Syrian quarter, the boarding-houses, Wall
Street. What is there left? The suburbs? Surely not; and yet have you ever
seen a story of just your kind of street and just the kind of people that
you know? If not, here is your opportunity.
You have read about sailors, fishermen, farmers, detectives, Italian
fruit-peddlers, Jewish clothes-merchants, commercial travelers, financiers,
salesmen and saleswomen, doctors, clergymen, heiresses, and men about town,
but have you often read a thrilling romance of a filing clerk? How about
the heroism of a telephone collector? the humors of a street-car conductor?
The seeing eye will find material in the street car, in the department
store, in the dentist's waiting room, in college halls, on a lonely country
road--anywhere and everywhere. And the seeing eye is cultivated by a
perpetual process of comparing life as it is with life as it is portrayed
in literature and in art. In other words, to get material to write about,
you must cultivate alertness to the nature and value of your own
life-experience, and to the nature and value of all forms of life with
which you come into contact; but this you can never do with any degree of
success unless you at the same time learn how to read.
You may say that you know how to read. It is almost certain that you do
not. If by reading you mean that you can run your eye over a page, and,
barring a word here and there, get the general drift of the sense, you may
perhaps qualify as able to read. If you are set the task of interpreting
fully every phrase in an article by a thoughtful writer, the chances are
that you will fail. When only a small part of a writer's meaning has passed
from his mind to yours, you can hardly be said to have read what he has
written. On the other hand, no one can get out of written words all that
was put into them. What was written out of one man's experience must be
interpreted by another's experience; and as no two people ever have exactly
the same experience--no two people are exactly alike--it follows that no
interpretation is ever entirely what the writer had in mind. The ratio
between what goes into a book and what comes out of it varies in two ways.
Granted the same reader, he will take only to the limit of his capacity
from any book set before him: he may get almost all from a book that
contains but little, a good share of a book that contains much, but very
little of a book that is far beyond the range of his experience. Granted
the same book, one reader will barely skim its surface, another will gain a
fair idea of the gist of it, a third will almost relive it with the author.
The main point is that this varying ratio depends upon the amount of
life-experience that goes into the writing of a book and the amount of
life-experience that goes into the reading of it. For as writing is the
expression of life, so reading is vicarious living--living by proxy,
reliving in imagination what the author has lived before he was able to
write it. Hence, we grow _up to_ books, grow _into_ them, grow _out of_
them. Our growing experience of life may be measured by the books that we
read; and conversely, as we cannot have all experience in our own lives,
books are necessarily one of the most fruitful sources of growth in
experience.
This is true, however, only of what may be called vitalized
reading--reading, not with the eyes alone, nor with the mind alone, but
with the stored experiences of life, with the emotions that it has brought,
with the attitudes toward men and things and ideas that it has given--in a
word, with imagination. To read with imagination, you must be, in the first
place, active; in the second place, sensitive, and, because you are
sensitive, receptive. Instead, however, of being merely passively receptive
of the stream of ideas and images and sensations flowing from the work you
are reading, you must be alert to take all that it has to give, and to
re-create this in terms of your own experience. Thus by making it a part of
your imaginative experience, you widen your actual experience, you enrich
your life, and you increase the flexibility and vital power of your mind.
In order, then, to tap the sources of your imagination, you must learn to
experience in two ways: first, through life itself, not so much by seeking
experiences different from those that naturally come your way, as by
becoming aware of the value of those that belong naturally to your life;
and second, through learning to absorb and transmute the life that is in
books, beginning with those that stand nearest to your stage of
development. In the process of reading you will turn more and more to those
writers who have a larger mastery of life, and who, by their skill in
expressing the wisdom and beauty that they have made their own, can admit
you, when you are ready, to some share in that mastery.