The Young Contributor | Page 8

to be so good that the editor must accept him in spite of
all the pressure upon his pages, he will not only be serving-himself best,
but may be helping the editor to a conception of his duty that shall be
more hospitable to all other young contributors. As it is, however, it
must be owned that their hope of acceptance is very, very small, and
they will do well to make sure that they love literature so much that
they can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in its cause.
The love of it is the great and only test of fitness for it. It is really

inconceivable how any one should attempt it without this, but
apparently a great many do. It is evident to every editor that a vast
number of those who write the things he looks at so faithfully, and
reads more or less, have no artistic motive.
People write because they wish to be known, or because they have
heard that money is easily made in that way, or because they think they
will chance that among a number of other things. The ignorance of
technique which they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the
palpable factitiousness of their product. It is something that they have
made; it is not anything that has grown out of their lives.
I should think it would profit the young contributor, before he puts pen
to paper, to ask himself why he does so, and, if he finds that he has no
motive in the love of the thing, to forbear.
Am I interested in what I am going to write about? Do I feel it strongly?
Do I know it thoroughly? Do I imagine it clearly? The young
contributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many
more like them as he can think of. Perhaps he will end by not being a
young contributor.
But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to his own conscience, by
all means let him begin. He may at once put aside all anxiety about
style; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be added unto
him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man's way of
saying a thing.
If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to say, perhaps he will
try to say it in some other man's way, or to hide his own vacuity with
rags of rhetoric and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from this
author and that. He will fancy that in this disguise his work will be
more literary, and that there is somehow a quality, a grace, imparted to
it which will charm in spite of the inward hollowness. His vain hope
would be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is destined to suffer
defeat at the first glance of the editorial eye.
If he really has something to say, however, about something he knows

and loves, he is in the best possible case to say it well. Still, from time
to time he may advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he is
saying the thing clearly and simply.
If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully, and musically; and I
would by no means have him aim to say it barely or sparely. It is not so
that people talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought of the
writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue.
To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some teach, is to practice
a kind of quackery almost as offensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric. In
either case the life goes out of the subject.
To please one's self, honestly and thoroughly, is the only way to please
others in matters of art. I do not mean to say that if you please yourself
you will always please others, but that unless you please yourself you
will please no one else. It is the sweet and sacred privilege of work
done artistically to delight the doer. Art is the highest joy, but any work
done in the love of it is art, in a kind, and it strikes the note of
happiness as nothing else can.
We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted
becomes drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting,
architecture, if you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore
as digging ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the
same blessings of God, become arts if they are done with conscience
and the sense of beauty.
The young contributor may test his work before the editor assays it, if
he will, and he