The Power Of Self-Criticism / The Craftsmanship of Writing by Frederic Taber Cooper

 

 

The Craftsmanship of Writing

 

 The Power Of Self-Criticism

 

by Frederic Taber Cooper

 

 

CHAPTER II

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

Let us assume, from this point onward, that any would-be writer, whose eye happens to fall upon these pages, possesses in some degree that quality which is inborn and not made—the potential force of authorship. The next all-important question is, how is this inborn talent to be best developed? What is the first faculty for a young author to cultivate? The answer may be given with emphatic assurance: The faculty of self-criticism. Yet a good many teachers will answer differently; they will tell you that in writing, as in everything else that is worth doing well, the one indispensable factor is perseverance, industry, the tenacity that sticks to a task ​until that task is mastered. In a certain sense the teachers who say this are right. There is just one way of learning to do a thing, and that is by doing it—doing it over and over, until the trick of it is mastered—and this holds just as true of the trick of constructing a short story as of that of kneading bread. But all the industry in the world will not take you far if it Is misdirected. No amount of wasted flour and wasted energy will make a baker of you, if you cannot tell good bread from bad—and no amount of straining thought and patient twisting and untwisting of the threads of a plot will make a good short story if you do not know the right twist from the wrong.

For this reason, a young author who has developed the power of self-criticism enjoys a distinct advantage. He has within him the ability to help himself as no one else can help him. Others may tell ​him whether his work is good or bad; but only the author himself is in a position to know just what he was trying to do and how far or short he has fallen of doing it. It is easy for a critic of broad sympathies and keen discernment to point out a writer's faults and to show how a specific piece of bad writing may be worked over and improved. But in a big, general way it may be said boldly that no one can teach a writer how to remedy his faults, no one can provide a golden rule for his future avoidance of them. Suppose, for instance, that an author's trouble is in plot construction. It may be easy to tell him where his plot is wrong and explain to him the principle that he has violated. But if he is to obtain any real and lasting profit he must find out for himself how to set the trouble right. Of course, you might construct the plot for him—but then it would be your plot and not his; you would be, not ​his teacher, but his collaborator; and his working out of your plot would almost surely result in bad work. Or suppose again that his fault is one of style. You may point out that his prose lacks rhythm, that his language is pompous, or high-coloured, or vulgar. You may remedy specific paragraphs with a rigorous blue pencil; but the writer must learn for himself how to acquire an ear for rhythm or a sense of good taste in word and phrase.

Unfortunately the power to judge one's own work with the detachment and impartiality of an outsider is so rare a quality that we may seriously question whether any author ever acquires it in an absolute sense. Many writers of distinction have been to the end of their lives notoriously unable to discriminate between their good work and their bad. Wordsworth is a flagrant case in point.^[1] Mark Twain, in our own ​generation, is another—or else the genius that produced Tom Sawyer and Innocents Abroad would never have allowed such sorry stuff as Adam's Diary to don the dignity of print. Other writers, even some of the greatest, can get the proper outside perspective of their work only by some systematic method, some mechanical device. Balzac, for instance, needed the impersonality of the printed page before he could judge the value of his writings or do any effective revision; it was only through ​repeated sets of proof sheets that much of his work slowly grew into final shape.^[2]

Now this vital power of self-criticism, which even great writers have, many of them, developed slowly and painfully, is at best rudimentary in the average beginner. Every writer, whether he will or not, puts a good deal of himself into his work; and every amateur writer is inordinately pleased with that part of his work which he feels to be distinctive, that quality which stamps it as his own. It may bristle with mannerisms, as a hedgehog bristles with spines—nevertheless it is the part dearest to him, the part that he is slowest to recognise as wrong. He cannot see himself as others see him. How is this rudimentary sense to be developed? First of all, it would seem, by learning to criticise others. Writing in this respect does not differ from ​shoeing a horse or making a pair of trousers. If you have not learned to judge whether a horse is well shod or a pair of trousers well cut, then you may go through life without knowing the quality of your own work as blacksmith or tailor. What you must do is to go to blacksmiths and to tailors of recognised skill and patiently study their methods and their results until you make yourself an expert on these subjects—perhaps, even, until you discover ways in which their work may be improved. And the same rule holds good, if instead of horseshoes and trousers you wish to learn the craftsmanship of essay and sonnet.

Now, it is far easier to say, Learn to criticise others, than it is to tell how to go to work to learn. But the first and weightiest rule is this: begin by reading the best models in whatever line of work you are desirous of taking up. Go to the ​fountain-head, read the books themselves, don't read what someone else has written about them—or if you do, at least make such reading a secondary matter. If your chosen field is the short story, spend your time in reading the recognised masterpieces of Poe and Maupassant, Kipling and O. Henry, in preference to the best text-book ever written on short-story structure. If your life work is lyric poetry, then by all means read lyrics, memorise lyrics, the best you can find and the more the better. You may get some help from critical studies, but you will get vastly more from the knowledge which you slowly and laboriously dig out for yourself. When someone once wrote to Matthew Arnold on behalf of a young woman who thought that she possessed the poetic gift and wished to know if there was such a thing as a dictionary of rhymes, he replied: "There is a Rhyming Dictionary and there is a book ​called a Guide to English Verse Composition. But all this is sad lumber, and the young lady had much better content herself with imitating the metres she finds most attract her in the poetry she reads. Nobody, I imagine, ever began to good purpose in any other way."

It is rather surprising and extremely suggestive to find how many of the world's great writers were insatiable and omnivorous readers in early youth. Pope records that as a boy "I took to reading by myself, for which I had a very great eagerness and enthusiasm.… I followed everywhere as my fancy led me, and was like a boy gathering flowers in the fields and woods just as they fell his way." Moore, in his Life of Byron, gives a list which the author of Childe Harold jotted down from memory, of books read before he was twenty^[3]—a list so varied and extensive ​as to make many a mature man of letters of his day feel sadly delinquent. George Eliot, at about the same age, writes to a friend as follows: "My mind is an assemblage of disjointed specimens of history, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry picked up from Shakespeare, William Cowper, Wordsworth and John Milton; newspaper topics; morsels of Joseph Addison and Francis Bacon, Latin verbs, geometry, entomology and chemistry; reviews and metaphysics." Théophile Gautier is perhaps, the most extreme ​instance that can be cited. He learned to read at the age of five. "And since that time," he adds, "I may say, like Apelles, Nulla dies sine linea." And his biographer, Maxime du Camp, says further:

This is literally true; I do not think there ever existed a more indefatigable reader than Gautier. Any book was good enough to satisfy this tyrannical taste, that at times seemed to degenerate into a mania.… He took pleasure in the most mediocre novels, equally with books of high philosophic conceptions, and with works of pure science. He was devoured with the thirst for learning, and he used to say, "There is no conception so poor, no trash so detestable, that it does not teach something from which one may profit." He would read dictionaries, grammars, prospectuses, cook-books, almanacs.… He had no sort of system about his reading; whatever book came under his hand he would open with a sort of mechanical movement, nor lay it down again until he had turned the closing page.

​Now there may be some disadvantages in this sort of voracious and undisciplined reading, in which many a famous author has confessedly indulged. But at least it tends toward forming an independent taste and avoiding the slavish echoing of cut-and-dried academic judgments. In an essay entitled "Is it Possible to Tell a Good Book from a Bad One?" Mr. Augustine Birrell remarks pertinently: "To admire by tradition is a poor thing. Far better really to admire Miss Gabblegoose's novels than to pretend to admire Miss Austen's." There is nothing so deadening to the critical faculty as the blind acceptance of text-book and encyclopedic verdicts. No critical estimate of any author, living or dead, is ever quite final. As Anatole France is fond of reminding us, even Homer has not been admired for precisely the same reasons during any two consecutive centuries. "The works that everyone ​admires are those that no one examines.

We receive them as a precious burden, which we pass on to others without having looked at them." And in much the same vein, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: "Nothing is interesting to all the world. An author who is spoken of as universally admired will find, if he is foolish enough to inquire, that there are not wanting intelligent persons who are indifferent to him, nor yet those who have a special emphatic dislike to him." Unless you are devoid of literary taste, you must find pleasure in a certain number of the recognised masters; but you are under no obligation to admire them all.^[4] The ability to give an intelligent reason for differing from the accepted estimate of Milton, ​or Fielding, or Dickens, is not a bad test of the possession of the critical gift. "A man," says George Eliot, "who dares to say that he finds an eminent classic feeble here, extravagant there, and in general overrated, may chance to give an opinion which has some genuine discrimination in it concerning a new worker or a living thinker."

As a basis, then, for forming a sound critical estimate of books, one needs: first, a broad acquaintance with the best authors, the wider and more catholic the better; secondly, an open and independent mind. If, beyond this, your taste happens to run to a serious study of criticism, its history, its methods, its controversies, all this will tend to strengthen your self-confidence and sureness of touch. Yet, for the purpose of craftsmanship, the principles on which to judge a book are few and simple. You are not required to dogmatise about the ​ultimate value, in the universal scheme of things, of the newest novel or the youngest verse. As a craftsman you are interested primarily in its possible present value to you. Accordingly, there is just one way in which to judge the books you read, the new books equally with the old: and that is, to ask yourself what was the author's underlying purpose, what special means he took to accomplish it, and whether or not he attained his goal. The further question, whether the thing was worth doing at all, concerns the craftsman only indirectly—just as the question whether a cube and cone and pyramid are worth reproducing in black and white need never trouble the art student. If his purpose is to draw a cube or a cone, then his one concern is to find out how to do it in the best possible way. The moral or ethical value of a painting or a book is not a part of the craftsmanship of art or of literature. The ​one paramount question is always: What did the author try to do, and how near did he come to doing it? This form of criticism, which seeks to classify books according to the author's purpose, is very nearly what Mr. Howells had in mind when he wrote:

It is hard for the critic to understand that it is really his business to classify and analyse the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel or an essay that does not please him as in a botanist grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. He does not conceive that it is his business rather to identify the species, and then explain how and where the species is imperfect and irregular.

It has already been said that the young writer can get comparatively small aid ​from volumes of criticism and monographs on how to write; that he should go to the authors who have produced literature rather than to those who tell others how to produce it. There is, however, one class of critical essay, the importance of which, to the young writer, can hardly be overrated; and that is the criticism written by men who have proved themselves masters of the art they criticise. I have in mind such essays as that of Poe, in which he analyses the structure of The Raven; Maupassant's introduction to Pierre et Jean; and Valdès's introduction to La Hermana San Sulpicio; Trollope's chapter on the novel in his Autobiography; and in general the various critical writings of Zola and Anatole France, Henry James and William Dean Howells—the list could be amplified at pleasure—in which they allow themselves to theorise freely about their conception of the art they ​practise and the methods by which they strive to produce their results. Every page of such criticism is in the nature of a craftsman's confessions—they are full of priceless illumination.

Yet it cannot be too strongly insisted that, in writing far more than in painting, there is a great deal that cannot be taught and that you must think out for yourself. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the craftsmanship of letters is more elastic than that of the other arts—there is scope for a greater freedom and originality. Henry James, in The Art of Fiction, shrewdly says: "The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude) both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. Yet … the literary artist would be obliged to say to his pupil much more than the other, 'Oh, well, you must do it as you can.'" Again, ​there are some things which an author cannot teach because he does not quite know how or why he did a certain thing. Often-times a novelist achieves some of his happiest results unconsciously,^[5] and by sheer instinct; and then, again, a carefully planned chapter or in some cases an entire volume fails of its effect, and the reason of the failure eludes him.^[6] These are the sort ​of questions which a young writer should have constantly before him, in all his reading: Why is a certain chapter tedious and a certain other chapter tingling with an almost painful suspense? And did the author mean to achieve these results, or has he simply failed in what he tried to do? Take, for example, two passages from ​Kipling; not perhaps the best we might find for the purpose; but at least they are to the point—the one conveying the sense of dragging, monotonous hours, the other that of tremendous speed, the conquest of time and space. On the one hand we have in The Light that Failed the unforgettable picture of Dick sitting, day after day, in his unending darkness, dumbly turning over Maisie's letters, which he is never to read; on the other, in Captains Courageous, we see Harvey Cheyne's father speeding across the breadth of the American continent, goaded by an intolerable impatience to reach the son, whom by a miracle the waves have given back to him. Now, the first case is flawless. The second, much praised and often quoted, is off the key. That private care of the elder Cheyne, "humming like a giant bee" across the mountain and prairie, by the very sense of motion it conveys, robs us of a true perception of the ​way in which time seems to drag to the impatient man within it.

But above all, in your reading, do not be content with studying the so-called masterpieces of literature. It is wise to know the Decameron and Don Quixote, Richardson, and Smollett, and Sterne; but the modern writer can do no more depend on them as models than the modern painter can depend on Botticelli and Ghirlandajo. A knowledge of Elisabethan footgear, or of the relative artisitc value of the moccasin and the sabot, is of little value to a modern shoemaker. What he wants to know is how shoes, the best sort of shoes, are made to-day, by the latest methods. And it is precisely the same with literature. There is no demand to-day for a new Hamlet, a second Paradise Lost, another Sir Roger de Coverly, or even a Tom Jones, David Copperfield or Vanity Fair. The technique of writing is ​constantly in a state of transition; and however much we may delight in the methods of a generation or a century ago, we do not tolerate them at the hands of modern writers. Take for instance the modern novel; its form and structure—one might almost say its spirit, too—have been radically changed from that of Thackeray and Dickens. And it does not help us nearly so much, as writers, to know which of the two is the greater novelist, as to understand in what respects Henry James and Maupassant are better craftsmen than either of them. Professor Woodberry, in The Appreciation of Literature, insists that, even for the general reader, "the serious study of one's own literature is most fruitfully begun by acquaintance with those authors who are in vogue and nearly contemporary." In the case of the would be writer it is not merely most fruitful, but absolutely imperative, to keep abreast ​of the best contemporary work that is done in the field of his own labours. And by "best work" I do not mean only such books as seem likely to stand the test of time, books that are unmistakably big in theme, in purpose and in technical skill: contemporary works of this class are so few that the apprentice's lesson would be soon ended. No, I go much further than that and include all the new books which exhibit even in some single direction, an encouraging tendency, the evidence of some problem faced and solved, some interesting innovation attempted. Above all, in your reading, avoid that narrow provincial spirit that limits your range to the works of your own countrymen. The American writer cannot afford to ignore what is being done in his own field by Englishmen. And if he has the time and the gift of languages he will be the broader and better artist for keeping abreast of the best ​thought and best work of France and Germany and Italy.

And in all your studies let the two great essentials, reading and writing, go hand in hand. Clarify your impressions by transferring them to paper. They may never be of value to anyone else, but they will be of inestimable service to you, as milestones of your own progress. "Of late years," wrote Trollope at the close of his Autobiography, "I have found my greatest pleasure in our old English dramatists, not from excessive love of their work, but from curiosity in searching their plots and examining their character. If I live a few years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my copies of these dramatists, down to the close of James I., written criticisms on every play." In Zola's published Lettres de Jeunesse, letters written between the ages of twenty and twenty-two, the chief interest centres in their testimony of the ​eagerness with which he devoured books, the earnestness with which he thought about them, and the enthusiasm with which he poured out his opinions upon paper. Through those rapid, immature and often turgid pages one sees already the germs of ideas that later came to fruition, the origin of many of his articles of literary faith. And not so far removed was the method by which an author of widely different quality and creed learned his craftsmanship. This paragraph from Stevenson's letters, though often quoted, will hurt no one to read once again:

All through my boyhood and youth I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my private end, which was to learn to write. I always kept two books in my pocket, one to read, the other to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil ​and a penny version-book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas.… And what I wrote was for no ulterior use; it was written consciously for practice.… I had vowed that I would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me, and I practiced, to acquire it, as a man learns to whittle, in a wager with myself.

But in all your studies of other writers, the living and the dead, cultivate independence. Never slavishly imitate. Take what you find best from the technique of each book you read and reject the rest. Notice what qualities and what defects the authors you read have in common and what are their individual sins and virtues. In learning your lesson from them, do not be afraid of independence, so long as you know the reason why. But as Miss Ellen Terry remarks aptly, in her volume of autobiography, before you are allowed to be ​eccentric you must have learned where the centre is. Mistrust the extravagant individualism of youth; realise that there is no virtue in being different, unless the difference produces some deliberately sought result. To come down from your apartment by the fire-escape will no doubt make you conspicuous—but there is really no point in doing so unless the elevator has stopped running and the stairs are on fire. In writing we want some better and more logical reason for eccentricity than a mere peacock vanity, a desire to attract attention. Where a literary form is well established, do your share in maintaining it, excepting when you have some excellent reason for making a change. The chances are that in doing a thing differently from the established formula you will not do it half so well. Only a madman would try to write a sonnet in fifteen lines, just for the sake of being different from others. ​Yet George Meredith made use of a sixteen-line form of verse in his Modern Love, which is often loosely spoken of as a sonnet sequence—and he was justified in doing so because he knew exactly why he did it. The poem is not merely a series of separate and complete thoughts, connected by a single thread, like pearls strung on the same string, after the fashion of Shakespeare's sonnets, or the Sonnets from the Portuguese. They form a continuous piece of narrative, and for that reason the extra two lines help the forward movement, where the formal sestet of the sonnet would have continually broken in with a misplaced sense of finality. Many a rule of rhetoric and prosody and technique may be broken—provided always that you have a reason that justifies you. The early stories of Kipling fairly bristled with strange phrases, words forced into new partnerships, and what Mr. Gosse has ​called "the noisy, newspaper bustle of his little peremptory sentences." And yet, more often than not, he justified himself, because he knew so well what he was about—and knew also that he was succeeding in expressing his thoughts a little better than they could have been expressed in any other and more conventional way. So remember, in writing, to be independent; on occasion be even boldly innovative, so long as you can be so intelligently.

1. 
   

Mr. Henry James's own confessions regarding The Awkward Age, contained in the preface to the "New York Edition," seems very much to the point: "That I did, positively and seriously—ah, so seriously!—emulate the levity of Gyp and by the same token, of that hardiest of flowers fostered in her school, M. Henri Lavedan, is a contribution to the history of The Awkward Age that I shall obviously have had to brace myself in order to make. . . . My private inspiration had been in the Gyp plan (artfully dissimulated, for dear life, and applied with the very subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret view); yet I was to fail to make out in the event that the book succeeded in producing the impression of any plan on any person. No hint of that sort of success, or of any critical perception at all in relation to the business, has ever come my way. … I had meanwhile been absent in England, and it was not until my return, some time later, that I had from my publisher any news of our venture. But the news then met at a stroke all my curiosity: 'I am sorry to say the book has done nothing to speak of; I've never in all my experience seen one treated with more general and complete disrespect.'"

Walter Pater, in Appreciations, says: "Nowhere is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's own poetry, of work touched with intense and individual power, with work of almost no character at all.… Of all poets equally great he would gain most by a skilfully made anthology." And similarly Lowell, in his essay entitled "Shakespeare Once More:"

"His (Wordsworth's) poems are Egyptian sand-wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite greenery, a grand image Sphynx-like, half buried in drifting commonplaces, or a solitary pillar of some towering thought."

See page 163.

In the list referred to, the books are grouped under the headings, History, Biography, Law, Philosophy, Geography, Poetry, Eloquence, Divinity, and Miscellaneous, concluding with the following paragraph: "All the books here enumerated I have taken down from memory. I recollect reading them and can quote passages from any mentioned. I have, of course, omitted several in my catalogue, but the greater part of the above I perused before before the age of fifteen. . . . I have also read (to my regret at present) about four thousand novels, including the works of Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie, Sterne, Rabelais, Rousseau, etc."

This is practically the thought of Thoreau, when he wrote: "If the writers of the brazen age are most suggestive to thee, confine thyself to them and leave those of the Augustan age to dust and the bookworm."

Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, writing the chapter describing how Rawdon Crawley, released from the sponging house, returns to his home to find Lord Steyne in Becky's company and hurls the noble black-guard to the ground, gives the final touch with "Becky admired her husband, strong, brave and victorious." After he had written these words the novelist dropped his pen and brought his fist down on the table. "By God! That's a stroke of genius!"

 

Excerpted from The Craftsmanship of Writing by Frederic Taber Cooper

The Inborn Talent: The Craftsmanship of Writing

 

The Craftsmanship of Writing

 

by Frederic Taber Cooper

 

The Inborn Talent

 

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.

1. 
   

The late Edouard Rod declared himself even more emphatically in favour of a newspaper training: "Journalism is an excellent school: it stimulates sluggish minds, it disciplines roving imaginations, it brings into direct contact with the public certain writers who otherwise would have remained unknown to the general public, and who during the process of becoming known, learn reciprocally to know their public. This is useful and healthy: because it is, after all, for others that we write.… The school of journalism is exacting and wearisome, it is true; but that is not an evil. Certain writers, they tell you, in the slang of the editorial room, 'write themselves dry;' but it is only those who had nothing of importance to lose."

Excepted from The Craftsmanship of Writing by Frederic Taber Cooper

The Craftsmanship of Writing by Frederic Taber Cooper (1920)

 

THE

CRAFTSMANSHIP

OF WRITING

BY

FREDERIC TABER COOPER

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1920

​

Copyright, 1910, 1911
By DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

​

TO

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE

In recognition of long-standing and loyal friend-
ship as well as of his special kindliness
towards this particular volume,
it is herewith cordially
inscribed
 

​PREFACE

The present volume is the outgrowth of a course in essay writing, offered two years ago in connection with the University Extension work of Columbia University. It embodies in part what the author then undertook to teach his students, supplemented by what the students quite unconsciously taught the author. There was a class which, taken collectively, offered much diversity of scholarship, a wide range of preparation for writing. Yet one and all of them presented practically the same sort of problem; one and all said in effect: "I have had such and such training; I have worked hard and willingly; yet my manuscripts do not sell. What is the matter with my preparation? What books should I read? What course should I take?" And in a wider way, these are the questions that are to-day being asked throughout the length and breadth of this continent. Now the purpose of this volume is to answer these questions, by pointing out that the fault is primarily with the ​would-be authors themselves, and not with their preparation. The best teaching they can anywhere receive is at most a makeshift, a mere starting point; they must learn to rely upon themselves, and the earlier the better. The most that this book or any other can do is to guide them away from certain wrong paths and toward certain right ones ; they must cultivate self-criticism, industry, the art of taking infinite pains, the habit of looking upon to-day's failures as the stepping stones toward to-morrow's success. The laurels of authorship are worth the winning largely because there is no primrose path leading to them.
    

 New York: April 13, 1911.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER		PAGE
I	The inborn talent	3
II	The Power of self-criticism	47
III	The Author's Purpose	79
IV	The technique of form	115
V	The gospel of infinite pains	153
VI	The question of clearness	179
VII	The question of style	209
VIII	The technique of translating	243

Not listed on the contents page:
Index	269

    Index   269 

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