In developing the power of clear and concise statement, the first essential is to form the habit of getting your “something to say” absolutely plain to your own mind before you attempt to say it. A writer deliberately strives to be wordy and vague when he is trying to misrepresent facts, and it is impossible, when he is groping for his facts, that he should avoid wordiness and vagueness. The Britannica article on Rudyard Kipling speaks of his “powers of observation vitalized by imagination.” It would be difficult to find a phrase more tersely describing the ideal equipment of a writer, and Kipling’s observation is rapid observation amplified by deliberate investigation. He gets a swift impression of the complex framework of a ship or of the intricate machinery of a locomotive, and then, before he writes “The Ship that Found Herself” or “.007,” he makes as elaborate a technical study as if he were writing an engineering article instead of a story. His imagination so vitalizes the result that when you read the story, although it describes beams and valves you never saw, you recognize the accuracy of his technical description as you recognize, in an art gallery, the fidelity of a portrait, although you never saw the person portrayed. In using the Britannica, the investigation by which you amplify your personal observation helps you in four ways. First, you correct your facts if they need correction. Whatever your subject may be, you find information so authoritative that you cannot question it. Second, you amplify your own observations; you discover the underlying causes and relations of the events or opinions you are about to discuss. Third, the reading by which you have, consciously or unconsciously, been influenced in forming your style, is rendered more profitable and stimulating by your study of the Britannica articles in which the work of all the world’s great writers, past and present, is analyzed by the most brilliant critics. |Models of Style| Fourth, you have in the Britannica itself such examples of scholarly, forcible, compacted English as cannot often be found in contemporary books. It is not within the province of this Guide to institute detailed comparisons between these articles by the leading literary men of the day and other writings from the same pens. But the reader will discover for himself that the editorial policy which demanded rigorous concision has stimulated, not hampered, the distinguished writers whose Britannica articles are, in case after case, the best of their productions.
Practical Tests
The foregoing summary of the uses of the Britannica to writers is based upon reviews of the work which have appeared in the daily and weekly press; and it may be supplemented by brief extracts from one or two letters to the publishers, written by men whose reputations give their opinions great weight. In one of these Horace White, formerly editor of the Evening Post of New York, spoke highly of the practical utility of the Britannica. Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, shortly before his death wrote: “I want to thank you for the intellectual pleasure I enjoyed this winter in examining this extraordinary production. I have already distributed a dozen sets in America as presents among editors and my children. [He afterwards ordered six more sets.] The work is a liberal education.” John Habberton wrote: “The new edition of the Britannica has already cost me hundreds of hours that I should have given to my work, but I do not regret the outlay, for I have been richly repaid. There never was a handier book for a desk or a more readable one.”
It is not only true that no ordinary library would supply the information to be found in the Britannica, but it is as true, and as relevant, that no ordinary library presents information in a form as stimulating to the writer who uses books as the tools of his trade. The editor-in-chief of the Britannica had all the world’s greatest experts in all fields of human knowledge and endeavour to choose from. He chose in each instance the expert whose knowledge was so thorough, and whose correlation of his special knowledge with related branches was so complete, that his articles are not merely “last word” information but interesting and alive. You may remember the new interest you felt in natural science when you first read an essay by Huxley, because he had the power of creating enthusiasm. It is a justifiable figure of speech to say that, in this sense, the Britannica has been written by Huxleys. Perhaps you have ransacked a public library for some out-of-the-way fact and finally found it, in skeleton form, and in crabbed German, in Meyer or Brockhaus or some other German encyclopaedia. Or did your search end by finding the fact in Larousse or La Grande Encyclopédie, in some clever phrase, so brilliantly written, so strikingly put, that it was the phrase and not the fact that you had got—and you felt that the Frenchman had hidden the fact, if he ever had had it, in his epigram? You may have wished, then, for a third type of encyclopaedia which should be “German-thorough” and “French-interesting.” Such a combination is the Britannica,—more authoritative, more up-to-date, more interesting, than any other book.
The Journalist’s Needs
A newspaper man, reporter or editor, must be informed at a moment’s notice on any one of so large a number and so wide a range of topics that the best library of reference obtainable can be none too good for him. This is especially true of the man on the smaller newspaper which does not have the luxury of specialists on its editorial staff, or of many reporters dividing among them the work of gathering news on such lines that each may work in a field with which he is intimately acquainted and in which he is particularly versed. And the rural newspaper is, besides, further from good public libraries and financially less able to have a large office library. The authority, the scope, the interest and the convenience of the Britannica make it just the book to fill these varied needs of the newspaper man. If he has to write a “murder story” in which some unusual poison has been used, he can find a full description of the origin, the use, the action and the tests of the drug by turning to the Britannica—instead of hunting for (and then through) a text book on medicine. And if, on the same day, or the next, he must write an editorial on the tariff, he will find in the article Tariff, in the articles Free Trade and Protection, and in that part of the article United States which deals with the country’s economic history, the information that he wants; and he can get it quickly, and can be sure of its being authoritative.
If the Britannica is evidently the work of reference for the writer, how is he to use it?
It has already been suggested that he will find authoritative and recent information on any topic connected with the subject on which he is writing. It would be interesting to see—or at least to imagine—how largely the Britannica might be used as a source for fiction. A novelist with an appetite for human documents like Balzac’s or like that of Charles Reade—with his many albums full of newspaper clippings,—could satisfy himself with the Britannica, taking his characters “from life” in its biographical and historical articles and his setting from its geographical articles.
Literary Criticism
It has already been suggested that the writer will find in the Britannica the clearness and conciseness of style which he cannot but wish to attain in his own work. Here he has the writings of great masters of English. He may remember Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of how he played “the sedulous ape” to the great stylists; and in the Britannica he can read not only an excellent sketch of Stevenson by Edmund Gosse, his friend and a well-known essayist, but Stevenson’s own article on Béranger. He may read Matthew Arnold on Sainte-Beuve; Walter Besant on Froissart and on Richard Jefferies; John Burroughs on Walt Whitman; G. W. Cable on William Cullen Bryant; Edmund Kerchever Chambers on Shakespeare: Ernest Hartley Coleridge on Byron; Sidney Colvin on Giotto, Leonardo, etc.; Austin Dobson on Fielding, Hogarth, Richardson, etc.; Henry van Dyke on Emerson; John Fiske on Francis Parkman; Richard Garnett on T. L. Peacock and on Satire; Israel Gollancz on “The Pearl”; Edmund Gosse on many literary genres, on Ibsen, etc.; Edward Everett Hale on James Freeman Clarke and on Edward Everett; Frederic Harrison on Ruskin; W. E. Henley on James Fenimore Cooper; William Price James on Barrie, Henley and Kipling; Prince Karageorgevitch on Marie Bashkirtseff; Stanley Lane-Poole on Richard Burton; Andrew Lang on Ballads, Molière, etc.; Henry Cabot Lodge on Albert Gallatin; E. V. Lucas on Jane Austen and Charles Lamb; Lord Macaulay on Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson and Pitt; David Masson on Milton; Brander Matthews on Mark Twain; Alice Meynell on Mrs. Browning; William Minto on Dryden, Pope, Spenser and Wordsworth; John Nichol on Robert Burns; Charles Eliot Norton on George William Curtis; Mark Pattison on Casaubon, Erasmus, Macaulay and Thomas More; W. H. Pollock on Thackeray and de Musset; Quiller-Couch on Thomas Edward Brown; Whitelaw Reid on Greeley; C. F. Richardson on Bronson Alcott and John Fiske; W. M. Rossetti on Shelley; Viscount St. Cyres on Fénelon and Madame Guyon; Saintsbury on French literature, Balzac, Montaigne, Rabelais, etc.; Carl Schurz on Henry Clay; H. E. Scudder on Lowell and Harriet Beecher Stowe; Thomas Seccombe on Boswell, Dickens, Charles Lever, etc.; William Sharp (“Fiona McLeod”) on Thoreau; Clement Shorter on the Brontës, Crabbe, Cowper and Mrs. Gaskell; W. W. Skeat on Layamon; E. C. Stedman on Whittier; Sir Leslie Stephen on Browning and Carlyle; Richard Henry Stoddard on Hawthorne; Swinburne on Beaumont and Fletcher, Congreve, Hugo, Landor, Marlowe, Mary, Queen of Scots; John Addington Symonds on the Renaissance, Machiavelli, Tasso, etc.; Arthur Symons on Hardy, Mallarmé, Verlaine; W. P. Trent on Sidney Lanier; A. W. Ward on Drama; Mrs. Humphry Ward on Lyly; Theodore Watts-Dunton on Poetry, Sonnet, Borrow, Wycherley, Matthew Arnold; Arthur Waugh on William Morris, Walter Pater; and G. E. Woodberry on American Literature.