“A new fact or a new idea is worth more than a fine phrase. A lovely phrase is a lovely thing and so is a lovely flower. But their duration is almost the same—a day, a century. Nothing dies more swiftly than a style which does not rest upon the solidity of vigorous thinking. Such a style shrivels like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy does from the rotten tree that once gave it support....
“It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish between form and substance.... There is no such thing as amorphous matter; all thought has a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representation of true or possible, real or imaginary life. Substance engenders form exactly as the tortoise and the oyster do the materials of their respective shells....
“Form without a foundation, style without thought—what a poor thing it is!...
“If nothing lives in literature except by its style, that is because works well thought out are invariably well written. But the converse is not true. Style alone is nothing....
“The sign of the man in any intellectual work is the thought. The thought is the man. And style and thought are one.”[27]
If we were candid enough the proper answer to make to this brilliant Frenchman would be: “Who told you that literature is an ‘intellectual work’?” But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly professional journals do we dare liken literature to cobbling or tin-smithing or hod-carrying; in the official world, in our lectures and book-reviews, we consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus and all the artistic divinities of Mount Olympus and Chillicothe.
A simple confession will not be amiss here. This discussion has been largely a plea for the man and woman who would find in literature, and in the short story specifically, the relief of a burdened soul. The influences that would withhold this relief are multitudinous and powerful. The struggle is unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds of literary aspirants that have come to my personal notice only an isolated individual here and there was blessed with any kind of a burden. The vast multitude of souls were cheerfully lightweight and unencumbered. These aspirants came to study technique so that they might learn how to write salable stories, but they had no stories to tell. Some of them believed they could become great story writers because when at school they had received excellent marks in composition; others claimed on more general grounds a gift of expression and they wished to put it to practical use. That it was necessary to have lived in order to write of life was a thought that had never occurred to them. They were blissfully unaware of such a necessity. They needed form, nothing else, and applied themselves conscientiously toward its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter is that they actually estimated their deficiency accurately: form was what they wanted, and nothing else. After a while they began to sell. In all cases the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with thoughts and emotions have found it harder to sell, no matter how much excellence of form they succeeded in acquiring. In the field of the American short story, the “lightweights” have it, so far.
It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must have something to clothe with his all-potent form—be it a skeleton ever so rattling. But that has been answered in Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures. There are themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless themes that no respectable editor, reader, or Board of Censorship can object to. They can be adapted and readapted an infinity of times, provided each time a new twist or a “different” trick is introduced.
All our themes seem to have divided themselves into two grand classes: Stereotyped themes out of which stories are made, and Life themes out of which literature is made. The first class contains an abundance of material that any one might have for the taking, but which to make salable requires all the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The second class contains all the substances of existence that only those that feel their kinship thereto can transmute into literature. All the style and form that the science of writing can teach cannot hope to produce one breathing story unless the theme is eloquent with this kinship. Such is the story of genius—the story that lives and endures. Such a story may or may not have mechanical values; it will captivate and thrill; ruffle and soothe; make and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a theme not chosen with an eye for gallery approval; not even because the writer himself approves of it. One cannot approve or disapprove of the stuff he is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there is only one theme—inexhaustible—out of which genuine literature has always been and always will be made, perhaps it is the simple theme of Tagore’s court poet: “The theme of Krishna, the lover god, and Radha, the beloved, the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes from the beginning of time, and the joy without end.”[28]