Facts, thought, and imagination; a book on writing

Front matter

THE LIBRARY

OF

THE UNIVERSITY

Preface

The authors of this volume have long felt the need of a book on writing which should view the subject as it presents itself to the writer, that is, as the problem of how to prepare the raw material of thought, knowledge, or experience for expression in words. They have wished to put into the hands of their students a book that should take up the study of English composition where formal rhetorics of an elementary character leave it, a book upon handling facts and developing thought. The three theoretical chapters of this volume represent an attempt to supply this need. They are to be regarded as three essays upon writing, to be read by students who have subjects ready, and need advice. This departure from the usual textbook method will commend itself to teachers who wish to break free from the conventional ruts of composition work. These essays not only give instructions for writing, but also, directly or by implication, suggest an abundance of subjects ; they will be found, the authors hope, to be comprehensive in plan and thorough in detail. But their chief aim is to teach principles, not rules, to discuss the practical requirements for handling facts and thought. It is as a second-year or second-term book that this volume is presented, to be used by men or women who have been taught all they can absorb of Unity, Coherence, and Emphasis, and need most of all to write.

This experiment in a new method is based upon a successful course, now three years old. The course itself begins vi PREFACE

with a careful drill in the difference between fact and no fact or part fact. The use of important and interesting documents from contemporary writing makes the student feel the significance of this training for his intellectual selfrespect. At the same time he is given practice, both oral and written, in precis making, as a means of guaranteeing accuracy and thoroughness in his reading, and precision in the planning of his own work. Next comes the study of the means and methods of thought development, freely illustrated as before from good writing, and driven home by practice in composing articles, essays, editorials, and arguments. Next and last is the indirect method of handling ideas, too little considered in textbooks, the method of the story with a moral, the play with an idea, the satiric sketch, and all those forms of writing where the imagination serves as a bridge over which thought may progress to its desired end.

For such a course this book has been planned ; and therefore, throughout the three following chapters, subject matter has been given precedence over form. Facts, thought, imagination in the service of thought, have taken the place of the usual rhetorical categories.

The selections included in this book have been tested by classroom experience. They are not to be regarded merely as illustrations of rhetorical theory, but also as material for laboratory practice in the technique of composition. It will be noted, however, that in conformity with the plan of the volume they have been selected for the interest of their subject matter as much as, if not more than, for technical excellence. The grouped reports of historical events will provide an exercise in the testing of fact more instructive than a hundred pages of comment. The essays, the stories, and the plays have been chosen because the ideas they present are fresh, definite, often debatable, and always interesting

PREFACE Vll

to the college undergraduate. A nucleus of excellent material for precis writing, for the analysis of fact, and the pursuit of thought, is thus made part of this book. The value of such an accessible body of tested material is known to every teacher; but the book is not limited by its contents. It is designed to be used in closest connection with good reading of every kind, whether drawn from other courses the student may be pursuing, or from such periodicals as "The Atlantic Monthly," "The New Republic," or "The Yale Review." With such additions of material from without, the theory presented can be made the basis of a full and satisfying year's work. Indeed, the scope of this volume is as wide as the intellectual needs of the undergraduate writer.

Contents

PAGE

Preface v

Acknowledgments xi

Part I

THEORY Chapter I. Facts . . . Frederick Erastus Pierce i Chapter II. Thought . . Henry Seidel Canby . 24 Chapter III. Imagination in

the Service of Thought . Willard Higley Durham 45

PART II Group One

(To accompany Chapter I)

Habit Formation and Reformation ..... Eliott Park Frost . . 65

The Odyssey of the Sockeye

Salmon ..... William Charles Scully 84

The Coronation of Charles

the Great .... From various sources . 100

Accounts of the Naval Battle

of Jutland .... From various sources . 111

ix x CONTENTS

Group Two

(To accompany Chapter II)

A Defence of Penny Dread- page

The Case of the Forgotten

Man William Graham Sumner 161

Life, Art, and America . . Theodore Dreiser . .173

The Moral Equivalent of War William James . . 195

The Prolongation of Peace . Simeon Strunsky . .210

Group Three (To accompany Chapter III) The Speech of Ellis (from "A

Modern Symposium") . . G. Lowes Dickinson . 225 The Passing of the Third Floor

Back Jerome K. Jerome . 236

The Story of the Last Trump H. G. Wells . . . 261 Two Plays Alfred Sutro

The Man on the Kerb 279

The Bracelet 292

APPENDIX Directions for Making a Precis 317

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledgment is here made of the kindness shown by the following publishers in allowing material to be reprinted from works copyrighted by them: "The Atlantic Monthly " ; Dodd, Mead, & Co. ; The George H. Doran Co. ; Doubleday, Page & Co. ; Harper & Brothers ; " The New York Times"; "The Seven Arts"; "The Yale Review"; The Yale University Press. Detailed acknowledgments will be found in connection with the separate articles.

XI

PART I

Chapter I Facts

Ancient writers usually bracketed war and pestilence together as the two great evils of mankind. War remains with us ; but the most terrible forms of pestilence during the last eighty years have been almost driven from the earth by the advances of medical science. Yellow fever no longer ravages Havana ; the Black Plague is being hunted even from its lair in dirty, primitive Asia. Throughout once deadly Panama — over the bones of uncounted Chinese coolies whom the mosquitoes and climate killed — delicate women now make their homes and grow strong. In the Crimean war seven-eighths of the deaths were due to sickness, about twelve per cent, to wounds received in battle. During the far greater conflict that began in August, 1914, these proportions have been nearly reversed. The comparison of such figures from different periods shows a mighty revolution in the living conditions of the race ; and that far-reaching revolution was made possible by the patient accumulation and the wise interpretation of facts. Millions of apparently petty details had to be observed and recorded by thousands of men before the causes and cures of bubonic plague, smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever were discovered. Could all the note-books, memoranda of experiments, and painfully gathered tables

B I of statistics, that through decades prepared the way for these great discoveries, be piled together, they would form a pyramid perhaps not incomparable to Cheops in size, and certainly far more useful to mankind.

The history of this hygienic revolution well illustrates how completely our modern system of thought is based upon a wide and accurate knowledge of facts. This is hardly more true of hygiene than of other sciences. War is no longer decided either by the physical might of Achilles or by the sudden inspirations of Joan of Arc. Before the first cannon booms, millions of facts, military, geographical, historical, and economic, have been accumulated in the war offices of the prospective belligerents ; and these facts would enable their possessors to outgeneral an unprepared Napoleon. "Now I can take a holiday," said Von Moltke, the German chief of staff, when he learned that his country in 1870 had declared war on France. Soon after, being informed of some unexpected development in French strategy, he pointed to his card catalogue, the accumulated data of half a lifetime, and answered, "It is all in drawer number so-and-so." In the same way a painstaking knowledge of detail often lies at the bottom of industrial success. According to the newspapers, when the battleship Oregon was on her trial trip, a reporter said to the head of the firm that built her: "Are you not worried? The breaking of a ten-cent bolt may cost you a hundred thousand dollars in premiums for extra speed." "No bolt will break," he is reported to have answered, "I know them all personally."

"But," exclaim readers who are more literary than scientific, "is not this glorification of facts rank sordidness and commercialism ? Does it not substitute the card catalogue and microscope for the altar and art gallery?" By no means. The greatest poets, painters, and architects have been supreme partly through their mastery of facts. The details which they observed were aesthetic, not utilitarian, but none the less facts. The poet who first saw the beauty of

"The yellow wall-flower stained with iron-brown,"

or of the sunset sky,

"With its peculiar tint of yellow green,"

just as definitely added a new fact to our mental storehouse as the scientist who first observed the hookworm. It was partly by their greater wealth of observed facts — glorified by the imagination, if you will, but none the less facts — that Wordsworth, Burns, and Keats excelled in their nature poetry the vague, generalizing rhymers of Queen Anne. When Tennyson describes a young lady's nose as

"Tip-tilted like the petal of a flower,"

he shows himself a keen observer of details in regard to both flowers and faces. Wherein lies the success of Sir Joshua Reynolds as a portrait painter if not in his minute scrutiny of a thousand details concerning the rounding of a cheek or the precise curve in a lock of hair ? Whether men are following business for money and position or are artists and visionaries in quest of beauty, they need ability to see and use the uncounted facts in their particular field of existence. "The great heart, the clear deep-seeing eye" says Carlyle, "there it lies; no man whatever, in what province soever, can prosper at all without these."

In one sense of the word, everything which truly exists is a fact. According to one definition, the relation of God to his universe could be considered a fact, incomprehensible to mortal mind, but actually there. Such an all-embracing conception, however, would defeat the purpose of this volume. The word "fact," as used in the following pages, stands in the first place for separate details ascertained by the five senses : the odor of a shrub, the contour of a mountain, the peculiar tint of overheated metal, the fatal dagger thrust that some one saw. It would include also similar facts of experience drawn from a wide field and tabulated as statistics. It stands in the second place for isolated details that must be determined by reason because nobody was present to see or hear them. The height of a prehistoric animal whose thigh bones only are found, the exact nature of a crime that nobody witnessed, these would be facts as far as they could be determined. Under the word are also included truths demonstrated by experiment, such as the fact that oxygen and hydrogen mixed in due proportions form water. For the sake of clearness the present book draws a fairly sharp distinction — sharper than that found in actual life — between this realm of facts and the realm of ideas. To the latter belong studies of far-reaching general principles, brilliant suggestions that come spontaneously and can be tested by facts later, problems of the relationship between man and man or between man and his environment.

Facts, as we have said, may be employed for either utilitarian and scientific or for aesthetic and literary ends. The latter use will be considered in a later chapter; the former concerns us at present.

II

This is a book on writing, and discusses facts only as a means to that end. Whatever his material, it is every writer's duty toward his reader to see that his data are in some respects new and in all important respects true. If he fails in the first requirement he is usually a bore ; if in the second, he is — intentionally or unintentionally — a liar. Hence the problem for the would-be author is always a double one : to amass a wealth of material, and to handle it discerningly and honestly.

It is when he is writing on facts gathered by firsthand personal observation that this problem confronts him in its simplest phase. The traveler preparing a lecture on scenery and manners in countries he has visited ; the spy transmitting his report of fortresses examined ; the geologist giving an account of regions surveyed by him ; the inspector reporting on factories under his charge ; the polar explorer writing a book on his hardships and discoveries — all of these men face certain similar problems. These same considerations confront also the undergraduate who writes of some locality, building, or exciting situation.

Before all things else, before the planning of paragraphs or the polishing of phrases, must come the power to see much and clearly. Details which an ordinary man would overlook may be precisely the factors that give beauty to a description or significance to a spy's report. But, beyond this consideration, the author must realize the significance of facts and distinguish the essential from the unessential. Every man daily sees a thousand things not worth remembering ; he may notice a few, the recording and interpretation of which are a service to the community. The haggard face that shows disease and unsanitary conditions in the workshop is something more than a mere face, it is a revelation. When the first explorer among the Niam-niam savages saw quarters of human bodies hanging like pork in the market place, he beheld a sight the significance of which was not to be forgotten. In a hundred similar ways the trained eye can derive from its surroundings a truth worth uttering.

When a man has observed life until he has a mass of new and valuable data to present, then, and not till then, should he attempt to reduce it to written form. The problems of actual composition are many; and any elementary textbook will give rules for expressing the gathered material in clear, orderly, and condensed form. What concerns us here is not a repetition of these well-known formulas, but the way in which observation enables men to apply them with new force and vitality ; for that, and not mechanical structure, is the aim of the present chapter. Not only does observation give the writer something to express, it aids him in the actual expression. A factory inspector presents a well-written report only when he knows what points to emphasize and what points to slur. Choice of words is one of the marks of a good style ; yet how can the traveler choose the precise words in describing the color and shape of a foreign tree unless he has trained his vision to notice hues and forms ? Only when the hitherto careless author has learned to visualize in his imagination the thing that he is talking about, to realize its significance and far-reaching effects — only then does he realize how inadequately he has passed the fact from his brain to his reader's by the first ill-chosen word that suggested itself. How can an author develop a paragraph by the method of examples or detail unless he has at hand the facts which are his examples ? One of the chief virtues of Macaulay as an orator was his ability to buttress up any point by numerous illustrations from past history. It was the power of his mind in amassing facts that made him able to round out a convincing paragraph. In the arrangement and style of an essay, as in all things else, knowledge is power, and accumulated facts are knowledge.

One need not be a great author or traveler in order to find the above principles useful. Let any man walk with discerning eye through the slums, the museums, the art galleries, or the wharves of a great city, and then write his experiences. Proper variations of emphasis on his different points will come naturally from the varying intensity of his emotions; his paragraphs will round out spontaneously from the wealth of gathered material ; amusement, indignation, and enthusiasm in alternation will give him words that sting and glow instead of the hackneyed vocabulary of textbooks; and if in the end he does not write well it will be largely because he has not yet learned to see well.

Ill

Next to facts gained by simple observation come those acquired by experiment. Of these, the most simple and conclusive are those derived from the laboratories of the physical sciences, where various ingredients can be tested first together, then separately, and the varying results noted. Such experiments have led to most of the great discoveries in chemistry, physics, medicine, and machinery. The results, like those of observation, are usually definite and unquestionable, and can be used in the same way to buttress a point or furnish an illustration. Moreover, an account of the experiment itself may become valuable reading matter for the public, partly because it suggests new lines of similar experiments, still more because of the appeal that it makes to the restless ingenuity and eager curiosity of the human mind.

A greater interest for the average man, however, is found in another field, where the elements to be examined are neither simple nor separable, but complex in themselves, and still more complex through the inextricable way in which they are twisted together. They must be examined, not in some simple combination arranged wholly by the investigator, but in an exceedingly complicated one made by nature and only slightly modified by the experimenter. Such are the problems of the social sciences, dealing with human passions, causes and consequences of war, of immorality, of race suicide, of economic success and failure. The simple pairing off of related phenomena and elimination of every other disturbing element, which is the chief feature of the laboratory experiment, become impossible. What man ever separated the intemperance of a drunkard from his other characteristics, and examined its reactions when combined or not combined with ten measures of will power ? Chemistry makes a few perfect experiments under ideal conditions and arrives at certainty; the social sciences, finding this rarely possible, fall back on a great number of imperfect experiments which gradually approximate toward certainty with the increase in the number of attempts. The mental training developed by experiment in physical sciences is helpful to the social scientist. The methods of reasoning in the two fields are often similar, but must in the study of economics and government be supplemented by such a knowledge of life as no textbook can give.

Yet more vague in their details, but still depending at bottom on the old principles of elimination and comparison, are the experiments, not of any science, but of what is usually spoken of as human experience. All life is, in one sense of the word, an unending experiment in an eternal laboratory. Every test of a neighbor's temper is an experiment, every new device for entertaining a guest. All these become part of the tissue of life, part of what the writer must handle in either scientific or literary work.

Detailed directions for making experiments in either the physical or social sciences can be found in other books. Our present concern is with the use of such procedure for purposes of writing. In the first place, any fact gained by a trustworthy form of experiment — like the facts gained by observation — can be employed for purposes of proof or illustration, without reference to the methods by which it was proved to be a fact. The truth about human evolution is daily used to illustrate thoughts on widely differing subjects, and used by men who do not even know the experimental processes that Darwin followed. In addition, an account of the actual experimental procedure is often valuable for writing. It may strengthen an argument for or against the encouragement of certain experiments by showing how the very attempt now mooted wholly failed or partly succeeded before. It may further become a means of expressing exact truth by showing precisely how far a certain experiment was, how far it was not, convincing, and just what reservations we should make in accepting the results. The history of social reform is a never-ending study of partial success in man's ever varying attempts. Even for the most purely imaginative literature descriptions of scientific methods have a distinct value. Novels, tales, and dramas teem with imaginary experiments, not always possible in actual life, perhaps, but suggested by the methods of genuine science. Mr. Thomas's "Witching Hour" and Edgar Poe's "Strange Case of Monsieur Valdemar" both turn on experiments in mesmerism. A narrative of country life might gain excellent local color from the scientific testing both of provincial tempers and of farming machinery. Any man who desires to become a stimulating and forcible writer may well train himself to examine all phenomena of life with which he comes in touch, now separately, now together, now under one set of circumstances, now another, until he has thus gained insight into their true nature and causes and so laid up plentiful material for future writing which men will be eager to read.

IV

So much for facts obtained at first hand by the writer's own observation or experiment. It is somewhat humiliat-

IO FACTS, THOUGHT, AND IMAGINATION

ing to realize how small a part of any man's knowledge falls into either of these categories. At every turn one must depend instead upon facts gained at second hand, facts of which one knows nothing except what other men have told him. How do we know that there is a frigid zone ? Most of us, certainly, have never been there. Why are we certain that the human race existed two hundred years ago ? We were not alive then to see. Why shudder at the reported horrors of the Inquisition ? We have no first-hand proof even that the water torture is disagreeable, much less that anybody was ever so tortured. Few of us have had any ocular proof that Europe during and after 1914 was not in a state of the most exemplary tranquillity. Why are our readers convinced that a plural subject requires a plural verb ? They have not examined one one-millionth of the printed books in the language ; they have not heard that language from one one-thousandth of the Englishspeaking world ; — and half of that less than one one-thousandth appear to follow another usage. Nearly all our knowledge, on which we depend for our code of honor, our present happiness, and our future salvation, is taken on trust from the statements of others.

More ominous yet is the fact that our limited experience does not inspire us with implicit trust in such derived knowledge. A large part of the human race will not tell the truth, and another large part cannot if they try. The history of cross-questioning in law courts shows that only a small minority of witnesses can give a consistently true account of what they have actually seen. King David said in his haste that all men are liars ; and we may assume that in calmer hours he but modified slightly the numerical adjective. Even the works of our most erudite scholars are found by other scholars to be full of crass errors in fact. No textbook on geology fifty years old would be tolerated in a modern university. Warton's "History of English Poetry," which five generations ago was a masterpiece in the field of literary history, has now been almost annotated out of existence by the desperate efforts of recent editors to correct its multitudinous mistakes. If this is true of professional scholars, how frail is our dependence on the word of the untrained amateur, the immature undergraduate, the impulsive enthusiast ; and below them on the drudging, unlettered masses.

It seems at first as if under such conditions one must despair of genuine knowledge ; must accept the universe as a terra incognita, peopled with fictions, dreams, and delusions. Deeper analysis, however, shows that this is not the case. Most men may be inaccurate witnesses, but all their separate statements are not falsehoods ; and truth may usually be sifted out of untruth if only the right process is known. Modern architects have learned how to build the most heavy sky-scrapers on foundations that are little better than shifting mud ; and on a foundation of testimony equally unstable, man may rear a reasonably accurate body of knowledge, once he has found the method. This task lies especially in the province of the speaker or writer. As an author he is the transmitter of thought, therefore the custodian of truth. Every statement which he repeats without examination may be a lie which he thereby endorses. In the historian this may prove a gross injustice to the noblest of his contemporaries, or a libel on a whole people. In books on science and finance it may become a false beacon, luring misguided readers along dangerous paths to their ruin. The undergraduate who like a parrot reports an untested statement to a Discipline Committee may find himself the means of expelling an innocent man from college or of rendering an honorable amateur ineligible for a championship team.

How then is the writer to grasp and impart truth in this befogged and befibbed world ? His first requisite is the power to repeat accurately to others what has already been told accurately to him. The man who does this becomes a benefactor of his race, one of a small and noble aristocracy at once honest and scholarly. Law courts either reject second-hand evidence entirely or discount it heavily. They do this because they have learned through the centuries that few people can reproduce accurately what some one else has told them. Error grows like a snowball in its passage from mind to mind. Not until a man has overcome this tendency has he any right to meddle with the thought of his age by entering into print. Swift tells us in his "Voyage to Laputa" that the commentators on Homer and Aristotle durst not come near these worthies, so wroth were the two great men at the way that they had been misinterpreted ; yet the fate of Homer and Aristotle was mild compared with that of many a modern scholar, whose noblest thoughts, the result, perhaps, of years of labor, have been garbled and travestied and turned from truth into falsehood by the most morally irreproachable of our young college men, not in examinations only, but in conversation, and even in print.

What is meant by truth in the reproduction of another man's statements ? Partly, the most rigid accuracy of detail. Any man may forget and omit; no man has a right to forget and garble. What is given at all must be given correctly. Details are often sacred things, no matter how small they seem. A young man in Europe writes home to a local paper that one thousand innocent people were killed in a recent massacre, when the real number reported to him was only ten. The difference in significance is great, for the larger the number of innocent dead, the stronger is the presumption that the brutal spirit accountable for their fate was national and not merely local. Had this man changed 10 to 1000 on a check he would have received five years at hard labor; yet is not a printed slur on a nation's honor more criminal than some slight pilfering from her coffers ? In Grant's campaign of the Wilderness a careless dispatching officer, copying an order, inadvertently wrote a wrong destination, and thereby sent thousands of men miles from their proper position in the crisis of a great action. He made a slip of only a word ; yet it almost decided a battle, and might have decided a war.

Mere accuracy of detail, however, is not reproduction of the truth. It is as if a thief who had stolen the Mona Lisa should return its mangled fragments as an honest equivalent for the purloined masterpiece. Truth in proportion and in subordination is just as essential as truth in details. Relative emphasis on different points, order, relation, the subservience of one idea to another, must all be preserved. Stevenson in "Pulvis et Umbra" stresses the brutality of man's origin and environment, but uses this point merely as a means to prove man's nobility in struggling so bravely under such a terrible handicap. The most accurate report of his paragraphs on man's origin and surroundings, separated from the main thought to which the author made them subordinate, would give an utterly distorted conception of Stevenson's meaning.

Two forms of writing which illustrate how the principles so far discussed can be applied are the book review and the precis. A reviewer does not necessarily give an orderly and logical digest of the book he is discussing; but it is frequently desirable to do so, especially with works on science or social and military conditions, where the conclusions are not disputed, the style is a minor matter, and the substance of the book needs to be widely diffused and justly understood. Such a review would bear the same relation to the book discussed as a miniature does to the human face it copies. The main points of the author must be accurately grasped and fairly worded ; the reviewer should apportion his emphasis among them approximately as the author does. Detailed statements should be accurately reproduced in connection with the main points which they are intended to illustrate; and since all details cannot be reproduced in such limited space, those chosen should be typical of those omitted.