Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 | Page 6

also, clear that dust
from your pages, assume your readers to be acquainted with the current
jokes and the stock epithets: all persons like the compliment of having
it presumed that they know something, and prefer to discover the wit or
beauty of your allusion without a guide-board.
The same principle applies to learned citations and the results of study.
Knead these thoroughly in, supplying the maximum of desired
information with a minimum of visible schoolmaster. It requires no
pedantic mention of Euclid to indicate a mathematical mind, but only
the habitual use of clear terms and close connections. To employ in
argument the forms of Whately's Logic would render it probable that
you are juvenile and certain that you are tedious; wreathe the chain
with roses. The more you have studied foreign languages, the more you
will be disposed to keep Ollendorff in the background: the proper result
of such acquirements is visible in a finer ear for words; so that Goethe
said, the man who had studied but one language could not know that
one. But spare the raw material; deal as cautiously in Latin as did
General Jackson when Jack Downing was out of the way; and avoid
French as some fashionable novelists avoid English.
Thus far, these are elementary and rather technical suggestions, fitted
for the very opening of your literary career. Supposing you fairly in
print, there are needed some further counsels.
Do not waste a minute, not a second, in trying to demonstrate to others
the merit of your own performance. If your work does not vindicate
itself, you cannot vindicate it, but you can labor steadily on to
something which needs no advocate but itself. It was said of Haydon,
the English artist, that, if he had taken half the pains to paint great
pictures that he took to persuade the public he had painted them, his
fame would have been secure. Similar was the career of poor Horne,
who wrote the farthing epic of "Orion" with one grand line in it, and a
prose work without any, on "The False Medium excluding Men of
Genius from the Public." He spent years in ineffectually trying to repeal
the exclusion in his own case, and has since manfully gone to the

grazing regions in Australia, hoping there at least to find the sheep and
the goats better discriminated. Do not emulate these tragedies.
Remember how many great writers have created the taste by which
they were enjoyed, and do not be in a hurry. Toughen yourself a little,
and perform something better. Inscribe above your desk the words of
Rivarol, "Genius is only great patience." It takes less time to build an
avenue of shingle palaces than to hide away unseen, block by block, the
vast foundation-stones of an observatory. Most by-gone literary fames
have been very short-lived in America, because they have lasted no
longer than they deserved. Happening the other day to recur to a list of
Cambridge lyceum-lecturers in my boyish days, I find with dismay that
the only name now popularly remembered is that of Emerson: death,
oblivion, or a professorship has closed over all the rest, while the whole
standard of American literature has been vastly raised meanwhile, and
no doubt partly through their labors. To this day, some of our most
gifted writers are being dwarfed by the unkind friendliness of too early
praise. It was Keats, the most precocious of all great poets, the stock
victim of critical assassination,--though the charge does him utter
injustice,--who declared that "nothing is finer for purposes of
production than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers."
Yet do not be made conceited by obscurity, any more than by notoriety.
Many fine geniuses have been long neglected; but what would become
of us, if all the neglected were to turn out geniuses? It is unsafe
reasoning from either extreme. You are not necessarily writing like
Holmes because your reputation for talent began in college, nor like
Hawthorne because you have been before the public ten years without
an admirer. Above all, do not seek to encourage yourself by dwelling
on the defects of your rivals: strength comes only from what is above
you. Northcote, the painter, said, that, in observing an inferior picture,
he always felt his spirits droop, with the suspicion that perhaps he
deceived himself and his own paintings were no better; but the works
of the mighty masters always gave him renewed strength, in the hope
that perhaps his own had in their smaller way something of the same
divine quality.
Do not complacently imagine, because your first literary attempt
proved good and successful, that your second will doubtless improve
upon it. The very contrary sometimes happens. A man dreams for years

over one projected composition, all his reading converges