“One of these professors, on my complaining that these little sketches
of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make
them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me on the method by which
the young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English
themes.”
When, with the solemn thoughts brought to each soul at the “turn of
the year,” we recount to ourselves our many mercies, let us never fail
to remember with gratitude that the magnanimous offer of that seminary
professor was never accepted.
We do not have to wait to-day for chance offers from solemn professors
of instruction and revision in literary composition; “the method by
which young gentlemen in the seminary are taught to compose” is thrust
upon us at every hand. “Bureaus of revision” and “Offices of literary
criticism” abound and thrive and become opulent through examining,
correcting, and revising the work of confiding authors. We are told
with pride that in one bureau alone three thousand manuscripts a year
were thus revised. Among those three thousand young fledglings of
authors there may _not_ have been a Charles Lamb, but the lamentable
thought also will arise that there _may_ have been a Charles Lamb,
and that his unmethodical little “sketches” may have been pruned or
amplified, or arranged and revised till they proved true “English
themes.”
There is a wearying monotony in the make-up of many of our periodicals,
some of those even of large circulation. There is a lack of literary
color, a precise and proper formation of each sentence, and a
regularity of ensemble which is certainly grammatical but is fully as
uninteresting as grammar. A surfeit of these exactly formal “English
themes” has made the gasping public turn to some of our literary freaks
and comets with a sensation as if seeking an inspiration of fresh air
after mental smothering.
I attribute this too frequent monotony, and even stultification of
composition, to the “literary reviser”—the trail of the serpent is over
all our press.
And what does this literary revision offer for the large fees paid?
One alleged benefit is the correction of punctuation. It certainly
performs this service; but the editor and proofreader in any
responsible publishing-house will, as a duty, correct with precision
the punctuation of any paper or book printed by the house. A benefit
alleged by one circular is “a pruning of too riotous imagination.” I
groaned aloud as I read this threat. Too riotous imagination to-day!
when we long for imagination and long in vain; when a wooden realism
thrusts its angular outlines in our faces from every printed page. “To
curb the use of adjectives” is another of the reviser’s duties. The
meagre style too often seen of late may arise from this curbing.
The most astonishing aspect of this bureau of revision is shown in the
patience with which authors endure its devastations. They confidingly
send into this machine the tenderly nourished children of their brains,
dressed with natural affection in all the frills and ruffles of
rhetoric, and receive them home again with ornaments torn away, laid
in a strait-jacket which has been cut with rigid uniformity, and made
with mathematical precision—and yet they kiss the rod that turned the
natural children of their brains into wretched little automatons.
I would not judge all revision bureaus by one; but I must give my
experience at the hands of a very reputable one. I had written four
books of more than average sale, and had been ever commended by the
press for my grammatical construction, when I sent to a bureau for
criticism a short magazine-paper. It was returned to me full of very
large and legible corrections—or rather alterations such as these:
Where I wrote of my heroine being _dressed in_, etc., my reviser placed
_gowned in_; where I wrote _the little child_, the reviser altered
to _the young babe_; where I said _nothing happened after this_, to
my horror, in heroic blue-pencilled letters, I read my pet aversion,
_nothing transpired_. Where a compound sentence contained several
clauses with verbs in the past tense, all dependent clauses were made
participial in form; not always to the advantage in elegance, never of
moment or indeed of real difference in grammatical construction.
I must confess that I did not send to this bureau my real name, as
palpably too well known to men of literary ilk. My three dollars’ worth
of advice was contained in a single sentence: “Your style is fair, but
commonplace; if you practise literary composition you may succeed; but
this article is, in our judgment, not salable.”
I had the pleasure of sending the paper immediately to a well-known
magazine and receiving therefrom in payment a check for fifty dollars.