O. Henry, pacing the streets in an agony of fear at having run out of story-matter, is only a case of nerves. The one inexhaustible supply of matter in the Universe that is of use to man is story-matter; for, as the first human pair have been a perpetual song and story, so the last pair shall be the theme for some recording angel, or else they will leave a diary.
The real ill with literature is writer’s cramp, an inability to seize the story, all of it, its truth as well as its facts—an ill, not of too much observation, but of too little imagination. Art does not watch life and record it. Art loves life and creates it.
“No one knows the stars,” says Stevenson, “who has not slept, as the French happily put it, à la belle étoile. He may know all their names, and distances, and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone concerns mankind, their serene and gladsome influence on the mind.”
Art and literature have turned scientist of late, as if our magnitudes, names, and distances, as if the concern of psychologists, physiologists, ethnologists, criminologists, and pathologists, were the concern of mankind! These things all belong to the specialists.
What does mankind reck of the revolution of the node and apsides? that Neptune’s line of apsides completes its revolution in 540,000 years? Instead of an astronomer, mankind is still the simple shepherd, keeping watch by night, and all he knows of the stars is that they brood above the sleeping hills, and now and then, in some holy hush, they sing together.
Science is concerned with the names, distances, and magnitudes of the stars; and with problems touching the “intestinal parasites of the flea.” Art, literature, and religion are concerned only with mankind; with the elemental, the universal, the eternal; with the dream, the defeat, the romance of life.
I have much to do with writers—with great writers, could they only think of something to write about. “There is nothing left,” they cry, “to write about.” “But here am I. Take me,” I answer. Out come pads and pencils flying. There is hard looking at me for a moment. Then a cynical smile. I won’t do. Becky might have done, but Thackeray got her; just as some one has got everybody! My tribe can never furnish her like again. Yet my tribe is not infertile; it is Thackeray’s, rather, that has run out.
A sweet young thing in one of my extension courses, voicing the literary despair of the class in a poem called “The Fairy Door,” made this end of the whole matter:
“The world seems black and ugly
When I shut the Fairy Door;