CHAPTER I
THE INBORN TALENT
It is always helpful, in writings possessing
even the mildest of text-book flavour, for
author and reader to start with a clear
mutual understanding of scope and purpose.
The best way in which to forestall
that aggrieved sense which a student often
feels of having derived no profit from a
certain book or article or lecture course, is
to say frankly, at the outset: "Here, in
brief, is what we intend to do. If your
individual case falls outside these limits,
you will waste your time, since it belongs
upon the list of what we have no intention
of doing."
In the present volume of papers on The Craftsmanship of Writing, the best and quickest
way to reach this helpful understanding is to explain what first
suggested them, and what results it is hoped that they will achieve.
There has probably never been a time when so large a number of men and
women, of all sorts and conditions, have yielded to the lure of
authorship—and the elemental, naive and random questions that they often
ask shows that there has never been a time when so many were in need of
a word of friendly guidance. And this is precisely what the present
volume claims to give. It does not pretend to point a royal road to
literature—to furnish a new philosopher's stone for transmuting ordinary
citizens into famous poets and novelists. It has no ambition to create
new authors—since authors worthy of the name are born, not made nor to
compete with the efforts of our college English Departments, our summer
lecture courses, our correspondence schools and literary agencies—for we have a surfeit of these already. The aim of The Craftsmanship of Writing
is nothing more pretentious than to help would-be writers to reach a
somewhat saner, more logical understanding of the real nature of the
profession they are entering upon, both on its technical and its
artistic side; to discount its delays and disappointments; and above
all, to learn to help themselves by intelligent self-criticism. For it
is a somewhat curious fact that there is no other line of intellectual
work in which a man or a woman may remain, through months and years, so
fundamentally ignorant of his or her real worth.
Now the reason why a struggling author may waste years of
misdirected effort, without knowing just how good or bad his productions
really are, is not difficult to explain. The sources of any workman's
knowledge of his worth are practically
only three in number: the market value of his ware; his own
self-criticism, and the opinions of others. Now it is a common
experience among young authors to find through weary months that their
wares apparently have no market value at all—this does away with the
first source of knowledge. Secondly, the ability to criticise one's self
in a detached, impartial way is one of the rarest of human
faculties—and not a bit less rare in authors than in other people. Yet,
unfortunately, it is upon his own judgment that every young writer must
very largely depend. For there is probably no other craft or employment
in which it is so difficult to obtain a really authoritative opinion—for
the excellent reason that in no other craft or employment is there such
a lack of any general requirement, any standard of apprenticeship.
Indeed, it is often as hard to guess the potential powers of
a beginner in letters as to predict how a raw recruit is likely to
conduct himself under fire. Let us, therefore, take up separately these
two questions: First, the various kinds of critical opinion a young
author is able to obtain upon his writings; secondly, the nature and
degree of systematic training it is possible for him to acquire.
But first let us ask one more preliminary detail: where does the
raw recruit in the army of authorship mainly come from? In other trades
and professions there is some sort of selective barrier: a college
degree, a regent's certificate, a Civil Service examination, a Union
Membership, some sort of initial guarantee of fitness. Then, too, in
many cases, there is the prohibitive question of expense. It costs both
time and money to become a lawyer or physician—even to go upon the stage
means nowadays a year or two in
a dramatic school, if one does not want to start with a handicap. In
contrast writing seems so simple; pen and ink, a pad of paper, a table
in a quiet corner—these to the uninitiated seem to be the net amount of
required capital. Frank Norris,
in a burst of rather curious optimism, once wrote, "The would-be novel
writer may determine between breakfast and dinner to essay the plunge,
buy (for a few cents) ink and paper between dinner and supper, and have
the novel under way before bedtime. How much of an outlay does his first
marketable novel represent? Practically nothing." Mr. Norris seems for
the moment to have forgotten that his own first "marketable novel," McTeague (although published subsequently to Moran of the Lady Letty),
represented careful labour scattered over a period of four years, and
that a portion of it at least necessitated quite literally a further
delay than
that of ink and paper, being submitted in part fulfillment of the
requirements of a course at Harvard University. La Bruyère came
considerably nearer the truth when he cynically wrote, from a different
angle:
A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink and Paper, and without
ever having had a thought of it before, resolves within himself to write
a Book; he has no Talent at writing, but he wants fifty Guineas.
Now, as in every other attempt to obtain a high rate of interest upon
a small investment, the results are extremely precarious. The
difference in this particular case of the beginner in literature is that
the fault lies less with the investment than with the investor. Out of a
hundred beginners, taken at random, no two have had the same sort or
degree of training, the same advantages of worldly knowledge, the same allotment of that
special fitness which it is convenient to
speak of as the Inborn Talent. And it
would be most extraordinary if all of
them, or any considerable portion of
them should have. The field is open to
all comers, without prejudice of colour,
sex or age. And so we find competing
side by side, the university man, with
half a dozen letters after his name; the
young woman from some Western farm,
who thinks herself a second Mrs. Browning;
the underpaid teacher, the starveling
minister, the physician with a dwindling
practice, who seek to eke out a meagre
income with an occasional magazine article;
the society woman and the man of
leisure whose whim it is to see themselves
in print; the suffragette, the sweet
girl graduate, the whole motley host
that, rightly or wrongly, believe themselves
to have the Inborn Talent. Now, if
these new writers seek advice—and sooner or later they practically all
of them do—from whom can they seek it? What avenues are open to them?
Some writers, of course, are more fortunately placed than others,
in this respect; but in practice it will be found that the usual
sources of criticism, whether favourable or hostile, narrow down to
four:I. The biassed opinions of interested friends;II. The bought opinions of professional advisers;III. The rejections or acceptances of editors, either with or without comment;IV.
The published criticisms in the review departments of newspapers and
magazines. Now, as already said, there is a certain degree of luck in
all four of these sources of criticism. Thus, to take them up in order,
the opinions of the first class may not always be biassed. A young
author may have the good luck to number among his friends or relatives one
or more authors of big accomplishment and fine discernment who may
serve the place of literary godfather, and who in rare and wonderful
instances, such as that of Flaubert and Maupassant,
actualise that ideal form of apprenticeship which all the arts enjoy
save only that of letters. Again, it sometimes happens that a beginner
is fortunate enough to choose for his adviser a professional reader
whose horizon happens to be wider than that of the mere market value of
literary ware, and whose suggestions stimulate the growth of his
mentality as well as of his bank account. And then again, there are
editors, who, in spite of the burden they carry, are not always too busy
to send, with a rejected manuscript, a line or two of welcome advice to
a young author whom they see to be stumbling needlessly—or a few words
of equally valued praise to the beginner whose first work shows,
through all its crudeness, the unmistakable gleam of the Inborn Talent.
And as to the fourth class, that of the professional critic, there are a
good many successful authors who freely admit the debt they owe to him
for many a frank word of praise or censure in earlier years. Indeed,
this last source of outside help ought to be the most disinterested and
the most useful of them all. That it is not, is due to two simple and
rather obvious facts: first, that it cannot possibly reach the novice in
letters until he begins to get his writings into print; secondly, that
the rank and file of reviewers think it their duty to speak to the
readers of books rather than to the writers of them—to tell the general
public why they ought to like or dislike a certain volume, instead of
telling the author in what particulars his work was good and in what
others it might have been better.
"I believe," says Sir Walter Besant, in his Autobiography, "that one can count on ten fingers the few critics whose judgments are lessons of instruction to writers as well as readers."
It is this dearth of real enlightenment that makes so many first
attempts—whether poetry or prose, essays, stories or special
articles—sheer guess-work, gropings in the dark. Hundreds of first
manuscripts, and second and third manuscripts, too, are written with
tremulous hopes and fears, absurdly overvalued one moment and blackly
despaired of the next. They start out on their travels, meekly submitted
"at your usual rates," and soon come homing back, with only the empty
civility of a printed slip to save them from the waste-paper basket That
is a fair statement of the average beginner's experience, is it not?
And it is looked upon as quite in the natural course of things, a special application of the economic law of
supply and demand. It places the young
author in the same category with every
other class of workman who goes around
peddling the produce of his handiwork.
And if that produce does not happen to
be wanted, there is no logical reason why
anyone should be required to buy it,
whether it be a sonnet or a sugared waffle.
In an essay entitled, L' Argent dans la Littérature,
Zola, writes, with customary
bluntness: "The State owes nothing to
young writers; the mere fact of having
written a few pages does not entitle them
to pose as martyrs, because no one will
print their work. A shoemaker who has
made his first pair of shoes does not
force the government to sell them for him.
It is the workman's place to dispose of his
work to the public. And if he can't do it,
if he is a nobody, he remains unknown
through his own fault, and quite justly so."
Now
it does no good to argue that there is something radically wrong about
the present system. It is quite sufficient if we frankly recognise that
literature occupies an anomalous position, and to seek for the reason.
The great advantage that the arts and professions enjoy in theory over
trade and business is that they aim to produce objects of such beauty or
service of such importance that the ordinary laws of market value do
not apply to them. Aside from literature, there is no profession,
excepting the closely allied one of the magazine illustrator, which is
subjected to a like degree of precarious uncertainty. Architects, it is
true, do occasionally enter plans in a competition for some big public
building—but this is an exception to the custom of their craft, a gamble
which they enter into voluntarily, fully prepared to be cheerful
losers. Young artists may repeatedly have their pictures refused admission to the annual Salons; but at least they
have the comfort of knowing that there was
just one ground for such refusals, namely,
that the pictures were not sufficiently
good art. A doctor has some trouble
in getting his first case, a lawyer in getting
his first brief; but when once they have secured
respectively a client and a patient,
they count upon being regularly employed;
it is inconceivable that they should be dismissed
with a printed notice that their
dismissal "does not imply a criticism of
their intrinsic merits." Even your corner
grocer, if you leave him without specified
reason and go to a competitor halfway
down the block, considers it a criticism,
and one that he has a right to resent.
As already implied, there is a very simple
reason why the man of letters stands in a
class apart. The artist and sculptor, the
lawyer and doctor, even the grocer and the
plumber, have all in their several ways served
a long and relatively costly apprenticeship. They have, to put it
colloquially, learned their job before they have been allowed to
practise for themselves. Whether they will become distinguished in their
several callings or even demonstrate an average skill remains to be
proved. But they start with a certain guaranteed fund of foundation
knowledge, a certain preliminary craftsmanship. It is conceivable, of
course, that a medical student might in his first year, successfully
treat some simple case of croup or whooping-cough. But that one
achievement would not give him sufficient self-assurance to hang out his
sign, even if the laws of his State permitted such recklessness. Yet
when the merest tyro
in writing happens by some lucky hit to write a story good enough to
win acceptance, or even, let us say, a story that has somehow won
acceptance although not good enough, his pendulum
of self-criticism swings to the outmost verge of elation. He refuses to
entertain the possibility of further rejections. He begins to multiply
the number of stories he can write a month by the number of months in
the year, and the product again by the number of dollars on his first
cheque.
Of course, in a majority of cases, such dreams are doomed to the
same fate as in the fable of the "Pot of Milk"—and it is fortunate for
the world at large, and doubly fortunate for the young author that this
is so. The truth is that in literature, as in every other art, there is
no such thing as a royal road to fame. Just because a writer is free to
hang out his shingle, so to speak, at the very beginning, it does not by
any means follow that he is permanently exempted from serving an
apprenticeship. And this fact is the sole excuse for dwelling at length
upon so commonplace a grievance as rejected manuscripts.
Every young writer knows, of
course, that he faces repeated rejection;
but very few recognise that each manuscript
that comes back is part of their education,
a definite amount of the time and
effort which every apprentice is expected to
pay.
The present writer well remembers his
own first attempts to write short stories,
while still a college undergraduate, and
his surprise and resentment when one by
one the magazines failed to appreciate
them. He grudged the labour spent upon
them; he felt, in a vague sort of way, that
he had been defrauded. College themes,
curiously enough, rested on a different
basis. The time spent on them involved
no irritation, although they were doomed
in advance to be still-born. The reason
for this difference was that the writer
recognised his college themes as part of the
cost of preparation, and that he had not yet learned that his rejected
manuscripts were also part of that same preparation—and by far the more
important part.
"The worst of all evils, for a beginner," says Zola, in the
above-mentioned essay, "is to arrive and to succeed too soon. He ought
to know that behind every solid reputation there lie at least twenty
years of effort and of labour."
What each man or woman learns from a rejection depends, of
course, upon the circumstances of the individual case. It may teach
nothing more than the unwisdom of submitting a certain type of story or
article to one particular magazine; or again, it may bring a salutary
awakening to the fact that what the author fondly believed to be a
masterpiece is, after all, a rather tawdry and banal performance. But in
any case, a setback
is wholesome discipline if it makes a writer ask himself seriously what
is the matter with his work—for it is better to tear up half a dozen
good manuscripts than to let a single bad one find its way into print.
"As remediless as bad work once put forward," is a wise little simile of
Mr. Kipling's—you will find it in The Light that Failed,
not far from the point at which the two versions of that story part
company. It must, however, be borne in mind that no sort of
apprenticeship ever created genius—its utmost value is to develop
technical skill. In every art there are two indispensable qualities—an
Inborn Talent and a slowly and painfully acquired technique the only
difference, in the case of literature, being that the technique must in
the main be self-taught. The Inborn Talent is, by its very definition, a
thing unteachable, although it may be discovered, fostered and developed.
It can no more be created by teachers of rhetoric or grammar than a
singing-master can create a voice. But the would-be singer has this big
advantage over the would-be writer, in that he can easily find a teacher
of authority who will tell him in the course of a single interview
frankly and conclusively whether his case is hopeless or not—while the
young author has no chance of getting such an opinion, and if he had
would probably refuse to credit it.
The result is that most new writers are left to learn their
value, slowly and painfully, in the unsparing school of experience. And
the nature of the lesson is best grasped by applying it to the analogous
art of painting. Suppose the young artist left quite to himself, thrown
wholly on his own judgment, regarding subject and composition, colour,
light and shade. He paints and paints, picture after picture, with only his
instinct to tell him whether they are good or bad—and every now and
then someone having authority comes along and blots them out with
turpentine or a palette knife, and with no word of explanation. The
young artist tries again, and still again—and if he has the Inborn
Talent, it is conceivable that he may grow slowly through his own
efforts, helped only by this purely destructive criticism, until he
achieves real greatness. As a matter of fact, this is not the road over
which the great painters have travelled, but it is the road by which the
masters of literature have attained their goal.
Now let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that a young writer
is in no haste to see himself in print, that he would be glad to have
some sort of systematic instruction through a period of years, analogous
to that of the other arts and crafts: what possible avenues are open to
him? The
Inborn Talent, of course, cannot be taught; but the technique of good
writing not only can be taught, but ought to be. Yet at present, and I
say this advisedly, we have not a single well equipped school of
instruction in technique—nothing which even pretends to do for writing
what the conservatories do for vocal and instrumental music, and schools
like the Beaux Arts for painting and architecture. The odd thing is
that people have fallen into the habit of thinking that we do possess
such opportunities for instruction. Our schools and colleges and
universities are paying more attention than ever to rhetoric and theme
writing. Children daily puzzle their parents with intricacies of
sentence diagrams and strange nomenclature of grammar undreamed of in an
earlier generation. And yet the average city editor will tell you that
the young college graduate has almost as much to unlearn
as to learn before he becomes a useful member of the staff. The late
David Graham Phillips, who heartily concurred in this view of the value
of college English, was fond of telling the story of how and why he lost
his first newspaper position. It was when he was fresh from his studies
at Princeton, that after a good deal of persistence he obtained a
position on a leading western newspaper, to which he offered his
services free of salary. Although it was mid-winter and the city room
was barn-like in temperature, he tells how he used to sit at his desk
with the perspiration of mental labour pouring from his brow, while he
struggled to make literature with a capital L from such material as
"This afternoon John Smith, a house-painter, fell off a ladder and broke
his arm." Mr. Phillips had held his unsalaried position for about ten
days when the higher power who presided over the paper's
destinies happened to come through the city room. "Who is that man?" he
asked, indicating Mr. Phillips. The city editor explained. "Discharge
him," came the curt mandate. "But we are getting him for nothing,"
protested the city editor. "I don't care if he is paying for the
privilege," came the rejoinder; "discharge him immediately! I can't bear
to see any human being work so hard!"
The trouble is that in writing we have confused the medium with
the art; we have been content, a good deal of the time, to teach
language where we meant to teach technique. Writing differs from the
other arts in this: that from earliest childhood, its medium of
expression has been more or less familiar, more or less skilfully
employed. A child of five who cannot put together simple sentences that
express his physical needs is considered mentally deficient; whereas, if
he can already whistle or
sing a popular air correctly his family indicate the fact with pride;
and if he can draw a cow that really looks like a cow and not like an
abnormal table endowed with horns and tail, he is an infant prodigy. But
if we could conceive of a race of intelligent deaf mutes whose
customary mode of communication was a highly developed picture language,
then we might imagine a manual skill of draughtsmanship acquired from
early childhood that would place the medium of the painter on an
equality with that of the writer to-day.
Now in our schools and colleges, with the best intentions in the
world, what is actually achieved goes very little beyond an increased
dexterity in the use of the medium, language. Grammar and rhetoric, even
the ability to say quite accurately certain simple and obvious things,
do not make up the technique of good writing, any more than the ability
to draw a circle
or a straight line or to match colours makes up the technique of good
painting. And even those few courses which the English departments of
our larger universities have in recent years established for the benefit
of their graduate students—courses in the structure of the short story
and the play and the novel—although they are an encouraging step in the
right direction, are not either in kind or in degree quite comparable to
the practical training that is open to students in every other branch
of art. The best instruction in any craft or profession is a practical
training by someone who has already proved himself a master of it. The
instructors in our medical schools, our seminaries, our schools of law,
are nearly always men who have won their reputation in the sick chamber,
the pulpit, the courtroom. And this is the one logical source of
learning. Yet in authorship the chance of
working directly under the guidance of a master has, so far as I can
recall, been exemplified in practice on a large scale only once in the
history of letters—and that was in the special brand of historical
romance tirelessly produced by the author of Les Trois Mousquetaires and his apprentices—satirically designated as Dumas et Cie, Fabrique de Romans.
College instruction in the art of writing is, with a few brilliant
exceptions, given by men who are trained critics rather than creative
writers—men who know infinitely more about taking a work to pieces than
about putting it together. Dissecting is an important part of class work
in a course in botany, but it does not help us to a knowledge of how to
grow a rose. And you will learn more about building a cathedral by
watching it go together, stone by stone, than by seeing a gang of
professional wreckers dustily pulling it down.
Are
we to understand, then, someone will ask, that the English courses in
colleges and graduate schools are a waste of time? Emphatically no, not
by any means, so long as we do not mistake the nature of their help. So
far as they go they are of distinct value to a student with ambition for
authorship—valuable in the same way that courses in literature and
foreign languages are valuable; but they carry him no further in his
technical training than college courses in biology or constitutional
history carry a student forward in the practice of medicine or the law.
Professor A. S. Hill,
whose English courses are a pleasant memory to Harvard men of the older
generation, wrote pessimistically only a few years ago, in a little
volume entitled Our English:
Under the most favourable
conditions, the results of English composition as practiced in college
are, it must be confessed, discouraging. The
shadow of generations of perfunctory writers seems to rest upon the
paper, and only here and there is it broken by a ray of light from the
present.… I know of no language—ancient or modern, civilized or
savage—so insufficient for the purposes of language, so dreary and
inexpressive, as theme-language in the mass.
The practical question, then, is: In the absence of special
training-schools what advice should be given to a beginner?
Are there any lines of special study that he may follow, any form of
self-training that he may put himself through? The answer is: Yes, there
is the theoretical help of text-books on technique, and there is the
practical training of journalism. But it is well to remember, on the one
hand, that all the text-books ever written on the English novel will
not make a novelist, any more than Ruskin's Modern Painters, even though committed to memory, would make a Millais or a Bouguereau. A
newspaper training is a good, wholesome tonic, especially as an
antidote to the stilted heaviness of the academic style. It gives a
certain fluency, a certain colloquial tone that makes for freedom. "To
the wholesome training of severe newspaper work when I was a very young
man, I constantly refer my first successes," was Dickens's stereotyped
reply to the questions of American reporters. And yet one hesitates
to recommend it with the same assurance with which it was to be
recommended a quarter century ago. For if the younger generation of
American writers have any one conspicuous fault in common, it is that of
too journalistic a style.
But there is one question which every amateur writer should ask
himself in advance of everything else, and that is: Has he the Inborn
Talent? Has he any talent at all, anything worth the saying—worth, that
is, the trouble of learning to say in the best possible manner? Has he
ideas?—not mere raw material, in the form of things seen and experiences
lived—but ideas about them that may be of importance or interest to
some portion of the world at large. Let us ask this direct question of
every man and woman who reads these pages: Have you taken any pains to
satisfy yourself that you possess this Inborn Talent? If not, do so
without delay,
before you scatter futile ink over another sheet of wasted paper. And
it is not just a question of having or not having the creative instinct,
but of having it in sufficient degree to make its development really
worth while. For the Inborn Talent in a writer may be compared to the
grade of ore in a mine—the question is not simply whether there is any
precious metal there at all, but whether it is present in paying
quantities. It is well to find out, if you can, just how richly your
talent will assay, and then work it accordingly.
But, you may retort, how is any one to find out whether he has
talent? Who is to be the judge? How can the author himself or any one
else know surely whether repeated rejections through a course of months
mean hopeless mediocrity or the handicap of crude methods—whether
improvement is a matter of being
born again or merely of buckling down and laboriously learning the job?
And just here, of course, lies the real difficulty of making this
advice practical. No one can answer this first and most important
question for you—no one, at least, so authoritatively as to convince you
even against your will. But you yourself can answer a few, frank
questions that will go a long way toward enlightening you: Why are you
trying to write? What preparations have you had that make you believe
you are qualified? How long ago did you begin to try? What sort of
encouragement have you so far received? These are questions which no one
else can answer for you; for no two cases are precisely alike. But you
cannot answer them honestly without having a strong conviction steal
over you either that you have or that you have not the Inborn Talent.
Do you write, for instance, as the born artist
paints or the born musician plays, because you feel a compelling
necessity for self-expression? Or do you write as the house painter
wields his brush or the barrel-organ man turns his handle, merely for
the sake of the dollars or the dimes? Have you strong prejudices in
regard to the kind of writing you are ready to do? Or are you willing to
write in any form, on any subject, from a sonnet to a breakfast food
advertisement? Most of us at one time or another have found ourselves
under the temporary necessity of doing something more or less in the
nature of "hack-work," work that not only meant drudgery but that took
us away from bigger, finer things. Yet it is not the willingness to do
"hack-work" and to do it cheerfully and thoroughly, when the occasion
demands, that proves we lack the Inborn Talent—it is the failure to
distinguish between what is "hack-work" and
what is not; the spirit of indifference which looks upon all kinds of
writing indiscriminately as a marketable produce, that degrades
authorship from a profession to a trade.
Or again, what has been your preparation, up to the time when you
send off your first essay or poem or story, stamps enclosed, to take
its chances with some editor? Does your real apprenticeship begin now
with its toll of disappointments and delays; manuscripts that grow
soiled and shabby and one by one are consigned to the waste-basket? Or
have you been unconsciously apprenticed to literature from early
childhood, surrounded by an atmosphere of books, absorbing, because you
could not help it, correct ideas of form and technique from the daily
conversation around you? Are you still in the first enthusiasm of youth
with your views of life still mainly rose-coloured dreams? Or have
you spent the first thirty or forty years of your life face to face
with hard realities, in the activities of business or of travel and
adventure—as a soldier of fortune rather than man of letters? It does
not follow that in the one case you have the inborn literary instinct
and that in the other you have not. Ruskin at the age of five had
already entered upon his apprenticeship. Before he had learned to write,
he had taught himself a makeshift method of vertical printing with a
pencil, and had undertaken a story in three-volume form, the name of
which escapes the memory, and really does not matter. The significant
thing about it is that this precocious child of five was already so
saturated with the atmosphere of books, so familiar with their form and
make-up, that with the imitative fidelity of his age, he added to his
own work a carefully compiled page of errata. Sir Walter Besant, after having
endured a six years' exile, occupying a Colonial Professorship on the
island of Mauritius, records upon his return, "I began life again at the
age of thirty-one; my capital was a pretty extensive knowledge acquired
by voracious and indiscriminate reading."
Mr. Morgan Robertson, the writer of sea stories, is a conspicuous
example of a man who for years had lived apart from books, one decade
before the mast, and another as an expert diamond setter and then
suddenly surprised himself by revealing the Inborn Talent. But his is an
exceptional case. There are a good many men whose love of adventure has
given them a rich variety of experience, whose early life has been
spent in the danger-places of the world. They are apt to think that they
possess the gift because they have the material—and yet these two
things have practically nothing in common. It is not the material but
the instinct to use it in the right way
that makes the Inborn Talent. It is quite
a common experience to have men come
for advice who have spent years in queer,
out-of-the-way corners of the earth and
have had adventures rich in thrills and
shudders, such as would make Robinson Crusoe
or Treasure Island sound a little
tame; and almost invariably what they say
is this: "We have the material. Teach
us the technique!" Yet in the majority of
cases even a knowledge of technique would
probably not make stories that they would
write sound otherwise than commonplace.
For it is one of the commonest things in the
world to find that men can live adventurous
lives without being really aware of it
in a big dramatic sense that they can
pass through places of great danger,
inimitable strangeness, matchless beauty;
and yet when they come to write them down, they might just as well be describing adventures in their own back yard.
The Inborn Talent, then, is something distinct from the material
of our experience and the technical use we make of that material. Just
what it is proves rather baffling to define. But at least it includes
several different elements: First, the art of really seeing—the artist's
eye, which looks through and beyond the mere outward material aspect
and sees the vision of some great, unpainted picture. Secondly, a fine
instinct for the value of words—a gift that is something quite different
from mere richness of vocabulary on the one hand, and the possession of
style, on the other. Vocabulary may be increased at will by patiently
memorising a dictionary; and style is a matter of cadence and sound
sequence—it is quite possible to write rather sad trash in an impeccable
style. But a sense of the value of words, an instinct
for finding, within the limits of our spoken language, the precise word
and phrase that will as nearly as possible convey a thought that is
perhaps bigger or subtler than any spoken words—this indeed stamps the
possessor as having the Inborn Talent. And lastly, it includes the
possession of ideas, as distinct from knowledge. You may know a vast
number of useful facts, such as that a straight line is the shortest
distance between two points—but such knowledge no more constitutes the
Inborn Talent than such a definition constitutes literature. But ideas,
big, vital ideas, of the compelling sort that force themselves into
written words, in the face of obstacles and disappointments and the
inertia of public indifference, are the very essence of the creative
spirit, the golden hallmark of the Inborn Talent.
