“What do you do when you are preaching and can’t think of anything to
say?” asked a Fledgeling of his pastor.
“I just holler,” was the answer of the experienced Exhorter.
With half a million preachers in the United States, with families to keep
on an average salary of five hundred dollars, I do not blame them for
“hollerin’;” neither do I censure editors who have to fill three columns
each day if they often “holler;” as an economist I might advise a man to
“holler,” but as a lover of literature I cannot conscientiously do so.
I have a clerical friend who, being much before the public, is often
called upon unexpectedly to reduce moral calculi. Being a man of force,
and not a man of power, he never says, “I do not know,” but always boldly
faces the problem after this manner: “My friends, this subject naturally
divides itself under three heads: firstly,”... Here he states some
general commonplace for the first head, and casts about in his mind for
the other two; having secured them, he launches forth with much emphasis
on some other theme and carries all before him. His swashing and marshal
manner makes him everywhere a great success; he is considered one of the
most powerful men in his denomination.
And I am fully convinced that a painstaking show of system is one of
the first essentials in making a favorable impression. We are like the
Hebrew salesman who called on a firm who occupied a sixth floor and
who, on starting to show his samples, was promptly kicked down stairs;
having arrived at the first landing a second man took him in hand and
kicked him one flight further; this was continued until his battered form
reached the sidewalk, when he picked himself up and admiringly exclaimed,
“Mein Gott! vot a system!” So when a rhetorician flashes his “heads” and
“divisions” and syllogisms and analyses and figures (that do not lie)
upon us, we are so lost in bedazzled admiration that we can only lift up
our hands and say, “My God! what a system!”
Good work never comes from the effort to be “clear” or “forceful” or
“elegant.” Clear to whom, forsooth? and as for force, it has no more
place in letters than has speed.
Power in Art there surely is, but power is quite a different thing
from force. Power is that quality by which change is wrought; it means
potentiality, potency. The artist uses only a fraction of his power, and
works his changes by the powder that he never explodes; while force means
movement, action, exertion, violence, compulsion.
Literature is largely the result of feeling. The “hustler” is a man of
force; very, very seldom is he a man of power; still rarer is it that he
is a man of feeling. The very idea of force precludes tender sensibility
and delicate emotion. If I should write on a scrap of paper, “Hate is
death, but love is life,” and drop the slip into the street, there might
be power in the words, but surely there is no force.
And as for elegance, let him who attempts it leave all hope behind; he is
already damned. The elegance of an act must spring unconsciously from the
gracious soul within. There is no formula.
In letters, “clearness” should be left to the maker of directories,
“force” to the auctioneer, and “elegance” to the young man who presides
at the button counter. Were I an instructor in a Commercial College, I
might advise that in business correspondence there should be clearness
and force and elegance; but if I were a Professor of Literature and
Oratory, I would not smother inspiration in a formula. I would say,
Cultivate the heart and intellect, and allow nature to do the rest. For
while it is still a mooted question whether a man’s offspring after the
flesh are heirs to his mental and spiritual qualities, it is very sure
that the children of his brain are partakers in whatsoever virtue that
his soul possesses.
The teacher who teaches best is not he who insists on our memorizing
rules, but he who produces in the pupil a pleasurable animation. We
learn only in times of joy and in times of grief. The teacher who can
give his pupils pleasure in their work shall be crowned with laurel, but
grief—grief is the unwelcome gift of the gods alone!
Let the writer have a clear conception and then express it so it is at
the moment clear to his Other-Self—that Self that looks on over the
shoulder of every man, endorsing or censuring his every act and thought
and deed. The highest reward of good work consists in the approbation of
this Other-Self, and in that alone; even though the world flouts it all,
you have not failed. “I know what pleasure is,” said Stevenson, “for I
have done good work.”