FOR JOURNALISTS AND AUTHORS
[Sidenote: The Development of Style]
No writer can consider the use he will make of the tools of his
trade—and the Britannica is certainly the chief among them—unless he has
very definite views as to the particular kind of work he is trying to
do. Where writing is regarded as a business, the art of writing is the
art of being read, and the art of being read lies, nowadays, in
convincing the reader that you have something fresh to say, rather than
in arousing his admiration of your way of saying it. Writing is none the
less one of the fine arts: the modern writer must form his style with
the utmost care, and always guard himself against the temptation to
relax his standards. But the juggling with words, the “rhythmical
sequences of recurring consonants,” the musical prose in which sounds
are adjusted as artfully as in verse, presuppose readers to whom these
elaborations are delightful. Such readers are rare, to-day. Thirty or
forty years ago it was a matter of course, in thousands of homes, for
some one member of the household to read aloud to the others. The custom
has almost disappeared, and there has been a change in public taste,
due, perhaps, in great measure to a change in the _pace_ at which people
read. A book does not “last” as it did. Newspaper reading has trained
the eye and the mind to swifter consumption. The modern professional
writer adapts himself to the existing conditions. He knows that those
who ride in automobiles do not peer under tufts of leaves to look for
roadside violets. But he also knows that they want a straight, smooth
road. He endeavors to write as concisely as possible, yet to write so
clearly that every point he makes is made once for all; and he can work
fully as hard, and apply talents fully as great, in forming a style that
pleases by its simple directness—or, better, that pleases because the
reader does not think of it as “style,”—as if he were aiming at the most
elaborate ornament.
[Sidenote: “Vitalized Observation”]
In developing the power of clear and concise statement, the first
essential is to form the habit of getting your “something to say”
absolutely plain to your own mind before you attempt to say it. A writer
deliberately strives to be wordy and vague when he is trying to
misrepresent facts, and it is impossible, when he is groping for his
facts, that he should avoid wordiness and vagueness. The Britannica
article on Rudyard Kipling speaks of his “powers of observation
vitalized by imagination.” It would be difficult to find a phrase more
tersely describing the ideal equipment of a writer, and Kipling’s
observation is rapid observation _amplified by deliberate
investigation_. He gets a swift impression of the complex framework of a
ship or of the intricate machinery of a locomotive, and then, before he
writes “The Ship that Found Herself” or “.007,” he makes as elaborate a
technical study as if he were writing an engineering article instead of
a story. His imagination so vitalizes the result that when you read the
story, although it describes beams and valves you never saw, you
recognize the accuracy of his technical description as you recognize, in
an art gallery, the fidelity of a portrait, although you never saw the
person portrayed. In using the Britannica, the investigation by which
you amplify your personal observation helps you in four ways. _First_,
you correct your facts if they need correction. Whatever your subject
may be, you find information so authoritative that you cannot question
it. _Second_, you amplify your own observations; you discover the
underlying causes and relations of the events or opinions you are about
to discuss. _Third_, the reading by which you have, consciously or
unconsciously, been influenced in forming your style, is rendered more
profitable and stimulating by your study of the Britannica articles in
which the work of all the world’s great writers, past and present, is
analyzed by the most brilliant critics. [Sidenote: Models of Style]
_Fourth_, you have in the Britannica itself such examples of scholarly,
forcible, compacted English as cannot often be found in contemporary
books. It is not within the province of this Guide to institute detailed
comparisons between these articles by the leading literary men of the
day and other writings from the same pens. But the reader will discover
for himself that the editorial policy which demanded rigorous concision
has stimulated, not hampered, the distinguished writers whose Britannica
articles are, in case after case, the best of their productions.
[Sidenote: Practical Tests]
The foregoing summary of the uses of the Britannica to writers is based
upon reviews of the work which have appeared in the daily and weekly
press; and it may be supplemented by brief extracts from one or two
letters to the publishers, written by men whose reputations give their
opinions great weight. In one of these Horace White, formerly editor of
the _Evening Post_ of New York, spoke highly of the practical utility of
the Britannica. Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York _World_, shortly before
his death wrote: “I want to thank you for the intellectual pleasure I
enjoyed this winter in examining this extraordinary production. I have
already distributed a dozen sets in America as presents among _editors_
and my children. [He afterwards ordered six more sets.] The work is a
liberal education.” John Habberton wrote: “The new edition of the
Britannica has already cost me hundreds of hours that I should have
given to my work, but I do not regret the outlay, for I have been richly
repaid. There never was a handier book for a desk or a more readable
one.”
It is not only true that no ordinary library would supply the
information to be found in the Britannica, but it is as true, and as
relevant, that no ordinary library presents information in a form as
stimulating to the writer who uses books as the tools of his trade.
The editor-in-chief of the Britannica had all the world’s greatest
experts in all fields of human knowledge and endeavour to choose from.
He chose in each instance the expert whose knowledge was so thorough,
and whose correlation of his special knowledge with related branches
was so complete, that his articles are not merely “last word”
information but interesting and alive. You may remember the new
interest you felt in natural science when you first read an essay by
Huxley, because he had the power of creating enthusiasm. It is a
justifiable figure of speech to say that, in this sense, the
Britannica has been written by Huxleys. Perhaps you have ransacked a
public library for some out-of-the-way fact and finally found it, in
skeleton form, and in crabbed German, in _Meyer_ or _Brockhaus_ or
some other German encyclopaedia. Or did your search end by finding the
fact in _Larousse_ or _La Grande Encyclopédie_, in some clever phrase,
so brilliantly written, so strikingly put, that it was the phrase and
not the fact that you had got—and you felt that the Frenchman had
hidden the fact, if he ever had had it, in his epigram? You may have
wished, then, for a third type of encyclopaedia which should be
“German-thorough” and “French-interesting.” Such a combination is the
Britannica,—more authoritative, more up-to-date, more interesting,
than any other book.
[Sidenote: The Journalist’s Needs]
A newspaper man, reporter or editor, must be informed at a moment’s
notice on any one of so large a number and so wide a range of topics
that the best library of reference obtainable can be none too good for
him. This is especially true of the man on the smaller newspaper which
does not have the luxury of specialists on its editorial staff, or of
many reporters dividing among them the work of gathering news on such
lines that each may work in a field with which he is intimately
acquainted and in which he is particularly versed. And the rural
newspaper is, besides, further from good public libraries and
financially less able to have a large office library. The authority, the
scope, the interest and the convenience of the Britannica make it just
the book to fill these varied needs of the newspaper man. If he has to
write a “murder story” in which some unusual poison has been used, he
can find a full description of the origin, the use, the action and the
tests of the drug by turning to the Britannica—instead of hunting for
(and then through) a text book on medicine. And if, on the same day, or
the next, he must write an editorial on the tariff, he will find in the
article TARIFF, in the articles FREE TRADE and PROTECTION, and in that
part of the article UNITED STATES which deals with the country’s
economic history, the information that he wants; and he can get it
quickly, and can be sure of its being authoritative.
If the Britannica is evidently _the_ work of reference for the writer,
how is he to use it?
It has already been suggested that he will find authoritative and recent
information on any topic connected with the subject on which he is
writing. It would be interesting to see—or at least to imagine—how
largely the Britannica might be used as a source for fiction. A novelist
with an appetite for human documents like Balzac’s or like that of
Charles Reade—with his many albums full of newspaper clippings,—could
satisfy himself with the Britannica, taking his characters “from life”
in its biographical and historical articles and his setting from its
geographical articles.
[Sidenote: Literary Criticism]
It has already been suggested that the writer will find in the
Britannica the clearness and conciseness of style which he cannot but
wish to attain in his own work. Here he has the writings of great
masters of English. He may remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of
how he played “the sedulous ape” to the great stylists; and in the
Britannica he can read not only an excellent sketch of Stevenson by
Edmund Gosse, his friend and a well-known essayist, but Stevenson’s own
article on Béranger. He may read Matthew Arnold on Sainte-Beuve; Walter
Besant on Froissart and on Richard Jefferies; John Burroughs on Walt
Whitman; G. W. Cable on William Cullen Bryant; Edmund Kerchever Chambers
on Shakespeare: Ernest Hartley Coleridge on Byron; Sidney Colvin on
Giotto, Leonardo, etc.; Austin Dobson on Fielding, Hogarth, Richardson,
etc.; Henry van Dyke on Emerson; John Fiske on Francis Parkman; Richard
Garnett on T. L. Peacock and on Satire; Israel Gollancz on “The Pearl”;
Edmund Gosse on many literary _genres_, on Ibsen, etc.; Edward Everett
Hale on James Freeman Clarke and on Edward Everett; Frederic Harrison on
Ruskin; W. E. Henley on James Fenimore Cooper; William Price James on
Barrie, Henley and Kipling; Prince Karageorgevitch on Marie
Bashkirtseff; Stanley Lane-Poole on Richard Burton; Andrew Lang on
Ballads, Molière, etc.; Henry Cabot Lodge on Albert Gallatin; E. V.
Lucas on Jane Austen and Charles Lamb; Lord Macaulay on Bunyan,
Goldsmith, Johnson and Pitt; David Masson on Milton; Brander Matthews on
Mark Twain; Alice Meynell on Mrs. Browning; William Minto on Dryden,
Pope, Spenser and Wordsworth; John Nichol on Robert Burns; Charles Eliot
Norton on George William Curtis; Mark Pattison on Casaubon, Erasmus,
Macaulay and Thomas More; W. H. Pollock on Thackeray and de Musset;
Quiller-Couch on Thomas Edward Brown; Whitelaw Reid on Greeley; C. F.
Richardson on Bronson Alcott and John Fiske; W. M. Rossetti on Shelley;
Viscount St. Cyres on Fénelon and Madame Guyon; Saintsbury on French
literature, Balzac, Montaigne, Rabelais, etc.; Carl Schurz on Henry
Clay; H. E. Scudder on Lowell and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Thomas Seccombe
on Boswell, Dickens, Charles Lever, etc.; William Sharp (“Fiona McLeod”)
on Thoreau; Clement Shorter on the Brontës, Crabbe, Cowper and Mrs.
Gaskell; W. W. Skeat on Layamon; E. C. Stedman on Whittier; Sir Leslie
Stephen on Browning and Carlyle; Richard Henry Stoddard on Hawthorne;
Swinburne on Beaumont and Fletcher, Congreve, Hugo, Landor, Marlowe,
Mary, Queen of Scots; John Addington Symonds on the Renaissance,
Machiavelli, Tasso, etc.; Arthur Symons on Hardy, Mallarmé, Verlaine; W.
P. Trent on Sidney Lanier; A. W. Ward on Drama; Mrs. Humphry Ward on
Lyly; Theodore Watts-Dunton on Poetry, Sonnet, Borrow, Wycherley,
Matthew Arnold; Arthur Waugh on William Morris, Walter Pater; and G. E.
Woodberry on American Literature.
The more you know of the subjects or authors in this list the more
likely you will be to say what a Western professor of theology said, in
reviewing the articles in the Britannica dealing with the Bible: “They
are the very authorities that I would have chosen to write these
articles!”
But the Britannica will serve the professional author in other ways than
by giving him information in special fields and by keeping before him
admirable models of style. He might well follow any of the courses
suggested in the chapter on _Literature_ in this Guide; and if he will
read the articles on great authors written by great authors, already
mentioned, he will have a doubly valuable course in biographical
criticism by the ablest of literary critics.
Any newspaper writer or contributor to the periodical press should read
such articles as:
[Sidenote: Newspapers and Magazines]
NEWSPAPERS (Vol. 19, p. 544; equivalent to 125 pages of this Guide), by
Hugh Chisholm, editor-in-chief of the Britannica, with sections on the
price of newspapers by Lord Northcliffe, on illustrated papers by
Clement Shorter, general information on American newspapers, and an
elaborate historical account of British, American and foreign
newspapers.
PERIODICALS (Vol. 21, p. 151; equivalent to 40 pages in this Guide), by
Henry Richard Tedder, librarian of the Athenaeum Club of London, treats
the subject under the heads: _British_, _United States_, _Canada_,
_South Africa_, _Australia and New Zealand_, _West Indies and British
Crown Colonies_, _India and Ceylon_, _France_, _Germany_, _Austria_,
_Italy_, _Belgium_, _Holland_, _Denmark_, _Norway_, _Sweden_, _Spain_,
_Portugal_, _Greece_, _Russia_, and _other Countries_.
SOCIETIES, LEARNED (Vol. 25, p. 309), also by H. R. Tedder, deals with
the publications of such societies and classifies them (with
geographical sub-classification for each head) under _Science
Generally_, _Mathematics_, _Astronomy_, _Physics_, _Chemistry_,
_Geology_, _Mineralogy_ and _Palaeontology_, _Meteorology_,
_Microscopy_, _Botany and Horticulture_, _Zoology_, _Anthropology_,
_Sociology_, _Medicine and Surgery_, _Engineering and Architecture_,
_Naval and Military Science_, _Agriculture and Trades_, _Literature_,
_History and Archaeology_, and _Geography_.
Local information in regard to newspapers and journalism will be found
in separate local articles. Thus under Boston, Philadelphia, New York
City, New Orleans, San Francisco, etc., there is valuable information in
regard to these cities as literary centers and about their principal
periodical publications, including newspapers; and in the articles on
smaller cities, such as Albany and Springfield, Mass., there are
valuable historical sketches of the local press of each.
[Sidenote: Literary Biographies]
The newspaper man should read the biographies of great American printers
and editors: WILLIAM BRADFORD (Vol. 4, p. 370); BENJAMIN FRANKLIN (Vol.
11, p. 24; equivalent to 20 pages of this Guide); ISAIAH THOMAS (Vol.
26, p. 867); NOAH WEBSTER (Vol. 28, p. 463); WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT (Vol.
4, p. 698); JAMES G. BIRNEY (Vol. 3, p. 988); GAMALIEL BAILEY (Vol. 3,
p. 217); W. L. GARRISON (Vol. 11, p. 477); JAMES GORDON BENNETT (Vol. 3,
p. 740); THURLOW WEED (Vol. 28, p. 466); GIDEON WELLES (Vol. 28, p.
506); JOHN BIGELOW (Vol. 3, p. 922); HORACE GREELEY (Vol. 12, p. 531);
HENRY J. RAYMOND (Vol. 22, p. 933); GEORGE RIPLEY (Vol. 23, p. 363); C.
A. DANA (Vol. 7, p. 791); GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS (Vol. 7, p. 652); CARL
SCHURZ (Vol. 24, p. 386); SAMUEL BOWLES (Vol. 4, p. 344); JOSEPH R.
HAWLEY (Vol. 13, p. 101); WHITELAW REID (Vol. 23, p. 52); GEORGE W.
CHILDS (Vol. 6, p. 141); E. L. GODKIN (Vol. 12, p. 174); and HENRY
WATTERSON (Vol. 28, p. 418).
The reading of these biographies will give the student many interesting
starting-points for studies in American politics, economics, literature,
reform movements as widely separated as abolition and the introduction
of the merit system into the civil service. The author should also read
the article AMERICAN LITERATURE (Vol. 1, p. 831; equivalent to 35 pages
of this Guide), by Professor G. E. Woodberry, and, if his field is that
of the publicist, he should read the article on the history of the
UNITED STATES (Vol. 27, p. 663), equivalent to 225 pages of this Guide;
and the allied articles to which he is referred from that.
The advertising writer will find a valuable and stimulating article on
ADVERTISEMENT (Vol. 1, p. 235, equivalent to 20 pages in this Guide),
which gives a history of the subject, deals with posters and signs,
circulars, periodical advertising, and legal regulation and taxation.
For a full list of articles of particular usefulness for the author, see
the chapter _Literature_ in this Guide. The following brief list may
serve as the basis for a preliminary course of reading.
Alliteration
Ana
Anecdote
Anthology
Anticlimax
Antithesis
Aphorism
Apologue
Apophthegm
Archaism
Assonance
Bathos
Belles-Lettres
Biography
Book
Book-Collecting
Bookselling
Burlesque
Comedy
Criticism
Dialogue
Drama
Elegy
Encyclopaedia
Epic Poetry
Epigram
Epilogue
Epistle
Essay
Euphemism
Fable
Feuilleton
Gazette
Humour
Hyperbole
Idyll
Impromptu
Index
Irony
Lampoon
Laureate
Legend
Libraries
Limerick
Litotes
Lyrical Poetry
Manuscript
Melodrama
Metaphor
Metonymy
Metre
Monologue
National Anthems
Newspapers
Novel
Ode
Pamphlets
Parable
Paradox
Paraphrase
Parody
Pasquinade
Periodicals
Philippics
Plagiarism
Pleonasm
Poetry
Proof-Reading
Prose
Prosody
Proverb
Psalm
Pseudonym
Pun
Quatrain
Quotation
Reporting
Rhetoric
Rhyme
Rhythm
Romance
Saga
Satire
Song
Sonnet
Squib
Stanza
Style
Tale
Tract
Treatise
Verse