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A word about writing “compositions” in high school English classes. Make ’em write stories instead. If they want to tackle thumbnail sketches or abstracter writing—little essays—why, let ’em. Abstractions in thought and writing are like the ocean—it’s fatally easy to get beyond your depth, and every one else’s. Read what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch says about this in his Studies in Literature. Once in a while a theologian urges us to “get back to the Bible.” Well, there is one sense, at least, in which the world would do well to get back to the Bible, or to the Old Testament, at any rate. As Gardiner points out in his The Bible as English Literature, it was the fortune or misfortune of ancient Hebrew that it had no abstractions. Everything was stated in terms of the five senses. There was no such word as “virtue”; you said “sweet smellingness” or “pleasant tastingness” or something like that. And everybody knew what you meant. Whereas “virtue” means anything from personal chastity to a general meritoriousness that nobody can define. The Greeks introduced abstract thinking and expression and some Germans blighted the world by their abuse.
What should enter into the training of high school teachers of English? Only humbleness, sanity, catholicity of viewpoint, humor, a continual willingness to learn, a continuous faith in the people—and undying enthusiasm. Only these—and the love of books.
LITERARY EDITORS
BY ONE OF THEM
V
LITERARY EDITORS, BY ONE OF THEM
THE very term “literary editor” is a survival. It is meaningless, but we continue to use it because no better designation has been found, just as people in monarchical countries continue to speak of “King George” or “Queen Victoria of Spain.” Besides, there is politeness to consider. No one wants to be the first to allude publicly and truthfully to “Figurehead George” or “Social Leader Victoria.”
Literary editors who are literary are not editors, and literary editors who are editors are no longer literary. Of old there were scholarly, sarcastic men (delightful fellows, personally) who sat in cubbyholes and read unremittingly. Afterward, at night, they set down a few thoughtful, biting words about what they had read. These were printed. Publishers who perused them felt as if knives had been stuck in their backs. Booksellers who read them looked up to ask each other pathetically: “But what does it mean?” Book readers who read them resolved that the publication of a new book should be, for them, the signal to read an old one. It was good for the secondhand trade.
We’ve changed all that, or, if we haven’t, we’re going to. Take a chap who runs what is called a “book section.” This is a separate section or supplement forming part of a daily or Sunday newspaper. Its pages are magazine size—half the size of newspaper pages. They number from eight to twenty-eight, depending on the season and the advertising. The essential thing to realize about such a section is that it requires an editor to run it.
It does not require a literary man, or woman, at all. The editor of such a section need have no special education in the arts or letters. He must have judgment, of course, and if he has not some taste for literary matters he may not enjoy his work as he will if he has that taste. But high-browism is fatal.
Can our editor “review” a book? Perhaps not. It is no matter. Maybe he knows a good review when he sees it, which will matter a good deal. Maybe he can get capable people to deal with the books for him. Which will matter more than anything else on earth in the handling of his book section.
A section will most certainly require, to run it, a man who can tell a good review (another word-survival) and who can get good reviewers. It will require a man, or woman, with a sharp, clear and very broad viewpoint. Such exist. What do we mean—viewpoint?
The right conception, it seems to us, starts with the proposition that a new book is news (sometimes an old one is news too) and should be dealt with as such. Perhaps, we are dealing only with a state of mind, in all this, but states of mind are important. They are the only states where self-determination is a sure thing. To get on:
Your literary editor is like unto a city editor, an individual whose desk is usually not so far away but that you can study him in his habitat. The city editor tries to distinguish the big news from the little news. The literary editor will wisely do the same. What is big news in the world of books? Well, a book that appears destined to be read as widely fifty years hence as it is to-day on publication is big news. And a book that will be read immediately by 100,000 people is bigger news. People who talk about news often overlook the ephemeral side of it. Much of the newsiness and importance of news resides in its transiency. What is news to-day isn’t news to-morrow. But to-day 100,000 people, more or less, will want to know about it.
Illustration: Two events happen on the same day. One of them will be noted carefully in histories written fifty years hence, but it affects, and interests, at the hour of its occurrence very few persons. Of course it is news, but there may easily, at that hour, be much bigger. For another event occurring on that same day, though of a character which will make it forgotten fifty years later, at once and directly affects the lives of the hundred thousand.
Parallel: Two books are published on the same day. One of them will be dissected fifty years later by the H. W. Boyntons and Wilson Folletts of that time. But the number of persons who will read it within the twelvemonth of its birth is small—in the hundreds. The other book will be out of print and unremembered in five years. But within six months of its publication hundreds of thousands will read it. Among those hundreds of thousands there will be hundreds, and maybe thousands, whose thoughts, ideas, opinions will be seriously modified and in some cases lastingly modified—whose very lives may change trend as a result of reading that book.
No need to ask which event and which book is the bigger news. News is not the judgment of posterity on a book or event. News is not even the sum total of the effects of an event or a book on human society. News is the immediate importance, or interest, of an event or a book to the greatest number of people.
Eleanor H. Porter writes a new story. One in every thousand persons in the United States, or perhaps more, wants to know about it, and at once. Isidor MacDougal (as Frank M. O’Brien would say) writes a literary masterpiece. Not one person in 500,000 cares, or would care even if the subject matter were made comprehensible to him. The oldtime “reviewer” would write three solid columns about Isidor MacDougal’s work. The present-day literary editor puts it in competent hands for a simplified description to be printed later; and meanwhile he slaps Mrs. Porter’s novel on his front page.
The troubles of a literary editor are the troubles of his friend up the aisle, the city editor. The worst of them is the occasional and inevitable error in giving out the assignment. All his reporters are good book reporters, but like the people on the city editor’s staff they have usually their limitations, whether temperamental or knowledgeable. Every once in a while the city editor sends to cover a fire a reporter who does speechified dinners beautifully but who has no sympathy with fires, who can’t get through the fire lines, who writes that the fire “broke out” and burns up more words misdescribing the facts than the copyreader can extinguish with blue air and blue pencil. Just so it will happen in the best regulated literary editor’s sanctum that, now and then, the editor will give the wrong book to the right man. Then he learns how unreasonable an author can be, if he doesn’t know already from the confidences of publishers.
The literary editor’s point of view, we believe, must be that so well expressed by Robert Cortes Holliday in the essay on That Reviewer “Cuss” in the book Walking-Stick Papers. Few books that get published by established publishing houses are so poor or so circumscribed as not to appeal to a body of readers somewhere, however small or scattered. The function of the book reporter is transcendently to find a book’s waiting audience. If he can incidentally warn off those who don’t belong to that audience, so much the better. That’s a harder thing to do, of course.