"WHA "SOULS tremble and shift and fade under the touch, when you portray them. They elude and evade and mock you, fool you with false lights and perplex you with impenetrable shadows, till you are almost ready to give up in despair any effort to interpret them. But you cannot give it up; for there is no artistic effort more fascinating and no study so completely inexhaustible."- GAMALIEL BRADFORD. HAT seems to me very important for young writers is for them to fix their minds on having something to say and not to write for the sake of writing nor set out just because they want to be a writer." The speaker was Gamaliel Bradford, one of the most celebrated of American biographers, whose "Life and I," an autobiography of humanity, has recently been published. We were chatting together in the sitting-room of his lovely old-fashioned white house situated high up on one of the hills in Wellesley; and I had asked him to give me some advice for aspiring authors. "The thing for young writers to do is to get interested in some aspect of life," he said, "some problem or some subject of general interest and then let the writing come as the mere vehicle for that subject. This would save them from a great deal of imitation. They are so apt to do something that someone else has done, whereas they should think of something that they want to say themselves, for that is the only way to give anything that pays. "Let them use their senses to see and hear! That is one of the astonishing things about this age. We see the things which we think we ought to see. Now with a painter, the first thing he has to do is to see things as they actually are. So a writer should see and convey his own impressions. "Write down your own impressions," advised Mr. Bradford. "Have a notebook and make a practice of jotting down the actual reality of the things you see and hear. Go into a room and form the habit of making a record of the quantity of things there — their quality, sizes, and so on. Keep your attention close on facts. Nothing is so important as that basic principle. "As to reading," he continued, "some people say you should not read because it tends to make you slavishly imitative. I think the danger comes in reading just one or two favorite authors and catching their style. The thing to do is to read a great variety of people. Have access to other languages. Enrich your knowledge of your own language by. learning something about other languages. Practice translation. It is the most difficult thing in the world," he admitted, "but well worth your effort. "Do not confine your reading to contemporary writers," counseled Mr. Bradford. "Read the great classical writers, the ones who are established. Reading different works so that you may not fall into the habit of modeling on any special one, unconsciously will produce an effect on your style which will be highly beneficial." I interrupted Mr. Bradford to ask him to name some biographies which he had found interesting. The works of Sainte-Beuve he mentioned first and then spoke of the following books: "Disraeli" by André Maurois; "Queen Victoria" by Lytton Strachey; "Henry Ward Beecher: an American Portrait" by Paxton Hibben; "Andrew Jackson" by Gerald White Johnson; "The Pilgrimage of Henry James" by Van Wyck Brooks; "Brigham Young" and "Barnum" by Morris Robert Werner. "A point I would like to bring out," continued Mr. Bradford, "is in regard to the structure of writing, the building of your story. The way I do it," he explained, "is to get all my material together. I have the whole thing planned out in detail before I write a line. If you want to make yourself clear, that is the first essential. "You know," he maintained, "you should not make your reader conscious of the process through which your story goes. The result is all that concerns him. The proportion in the building of your story is immensely important too. important too. Even in writing short things, it is essential that you should have before you just what you are going to do. You shouldn't drift. You should see clearly and definitely what you are driving at before you start. Bear that in mind, for it will aid you materially," he counseled. "Now about style," he proceeded. "The paradox about style is that you should really never think about it or it will tend to become artificial. Yet you must study all the forms of style before you can succeed. The solution to this problem lies in mastering the forms of style until they become a habit with you and then you won't have to think about style when writing. "Cut out conventional phrases. We have so many words that are trite and commonplace; eliminate these. Use simple, direct, straightforward expressions which are not dull or weak. "Directness, vigor, and simplicity should characterize your style of writing." I was much surprised when, in the course of our conversation, I learned that Mr. Bradford's success in writing was not sudden, but the result of a long, slow, and discouraging pull. He first wrote plays and novels but they did not meet with much success. "I wanted to write from the first," Mr. Bradford told me, "but I failed ten times to once where I succeeded. I was nearly fifty when I hit on biographical portraits which proved successful. "It was purely by accident that I happened to hit on these studies. It was John Fiske's success with his American histories which made me conclude that what I should do was to write about American themes. I looked about for a subject which would be interesting and conceived the idea of writing a history of the Confederacy. But before I could write that history, I became interested in writing about General Lee. His success in the South led me off into writing a book called 'Lee, the American.' This was followed later by 'Confederate Portraits' and 'Union Portraits."" "How do you go about writing your portraits?" I asked Mr. Bradford. "In writing my biographies, I generally go at it as you would in life. You meet persons casually at first; then you come gradually into their innermost lives. I examine the secondary books which have been written about my character. Then I work back to this material again from actual contact with the person himself. Sometimes I have to rely on the records of the people who have known him and who have had direct personal contact with him. But I find that the letters and diaries written by the person himself are on the whole the best material. You get at the immediate life of the subject best in this way. "Memoirs," continued Mr. Bradford, "are not as good as diaries or letters. They are written in old age and are almost sure to portray a man as he would like to have been. But if you take diaries that are written from day to day, there you have the immediate and pretty unconscious record of the subject. "Ludwig, Strachey, and others, all write chronologically. I simply try to see my character as a combination of characteristic traits and then develop those qualities one by one. It is a matter of arrangement. In making my plan and studying my character, I arrange my portrait in order to get the greatest effect of climax. This makes a method of structure I have sometimes called psychography. The process is different from ordinary biography. "I spend a great deal of time in planning my portraits and then when I sit down to write, I write with extreme rapidity. Even when composing, I sometimes write a thousand words an hour. And I do very little correcting afterwards." "Why is it," I asked Mr. Bradford, "that biography is so much more popular than formerly?" "Because it used to be written as an example for the young," he answered. "This naturally produced an effect of artificiality which was not popular. Now biography has changed to the scientific attitude. "In modern biography, we are reading about ourselves, because the basis of all human life is pretty much the same. Always there is the fact that everybody's life has the same elements in it, the same experiences, the same desires, the same struggles, and the same diappointments. Hence people turn naturally to this modern method of presenting biographical portraits." "Have you been particularly drawn to any one character you portrayed?" I inquired. "Though I have written about more than sixty people, my interest is so general in humanity at large that I don't think I feel very strongly that sense of attraction or repulsion," he replied. "To be sure, figures differ in their approachability. With some, their letters seem to be merely a screen and you have to penetrate through the veils. But this only serves to intensify your interest in the man or woman you are portraying. "A little while ago, André Maurois in an article in the Yale Review, stated that the first essential in dealing with biography is that you should pick out a subject with whom you are sympathetic. I believe that you should be sympathetic with everybody. I have done a vast number of studies always with unfailing sympathy. General human interest, I would say, is the greatest qualification for any biographer. "In studying my different portraits," he continued, "it is interesting to note the part that women have played in their husband's lives. In almost every case, they account for a good deal in their husband's lives. For instance, Mrs. Jefferson was a forceful, energetic soul and was of great help to her hus band; whereas, Mrs. Abraham Lincoln was a decided handicap." "Which have been your most successful portraits," I asked him, "the men or the women?" "My own feeling," he confessed, "is that the most successful portraits I have written are those which have dealt with women. My books 'Portraits of Women' and 'Portraits of American Women,' have been the most read and the most popular. These and 'Damaged Souls' seem to have created the greatest interest. "I am working now on a book about a T group of women which will be rather like 'Damaged Souls.' The book will contain portraits of Catherine II of Russia, George Sand, Sarah Bernhardt, Ninon de L'Enclos, Marquise de Maintenon, and Madame Guyon. "I devote about two months to doing each portrait, though of course some take much more time than others because some individuals have had so much more written about them and have themselves written so much. The material, for instance, in regard to George Sand is enormous. My new book will not be finished for a year and a half or two years." The Life of the Creative Artist THIS section is quoted from a chapter in Gamaliel Bradford's latest HE life of the creative artist is not all rapture and ecstasy. There are the days. and months of patient labor, both for preparation and for perfecting. This labor differs of course with the different arts. He who would paint great pictures has to spend years in acquiring the elements, before he can begin to create at all. So with music. The successful performer has his innumerable hours of drudgery, which are not only indispensable at first, but have to be persisted in to the end. The composer must study the great creations of the past and probe all their secrets before he can attempt to parallel them with even slighter efforts of his own. On the other hand, the worker in words is too apt to think that in his art very little preparation is necessary. He is using the instruments that he was almost born to use, that he is employing daily in the commonest intercourse of life. All he has to do is to put these instruments at the service of his mighty, active thoughts, and the thing is done. Not quite perhaps. It is the fatal facility that floods us with so many poets and novelists and work "I ers in all literary lines. It is the facility that makes the amateur poet the jest of the newspapers. But to do great work that will endure, in literature, as in music, there must be profound, persistent labor somewhere. grudge no pains, so that I may be but a famous poet," writes Cowper. The pains must be taken, sooner or later, though even enormous pains do not always ensure the result. Only the labor may be extensive or intensive. There are those who toil long patient hours, to produce a comparatively insignificant bit of work, insignificant in appearance at any rate. There are others who seem to get out their product easily and with a minimum of effort. But in these latter cases there is apt to be an immense concentration of power, and as always with such concentration, there follows a corresponding nervous fatigue and even disgust and despair. And besides the labor, there are innumerable other difficulties and drawbacks that beset the I when it would affirm itself in beauty. Voltaire was one of the most triumphantly successful of authors; yet he said that if he had a son who wished to be a writer, he “would wring his neck out of sheer paternal tenderness." When boys and girls write to me, saying that they are determined to pursue a literary career, and ask advice, I quote to them this saying of Voltaire, at the same time pointing out that no such saying ever deterred the born artist from his appointed task. The I will not be conquered by any such experience of others. There are the external difficulties, for instance the interruptions and disturbances. You want solitude and seclusion with your own thoughts. You feel sure that the great work would come, if you had only leisure and quiet to achieve. But friends intrude, necessary business distracts, trifles will dissipate the intense concentration on the ideal hope. Lady Byron once looked in on Lord Byron, when he was writing verses. "Do I interrupt?" she said. "You do, most damnably." It was not polite, and it led, with some other matters, to domestic dissension. But many wives, with the best meaning in the world, evoke the same state of mind, if it is not always expressed. And less important things will scatter inspiration and make it hopelessly far away. As Flaubert puts it: "A window shade askew, a fly that buzzes, the noise of a cart passing, and my fancy is off at once.' And he sums up the whole matter of disturbance in one passionate phrase: "To accomplish anything I must have the impossibility of being disturbed, even if I wished it." Then there are the critics, who can set up the greatest disturbance of all. Some people, the wisest, avoid and neglect them, and some laugh at them, or pretend to do so. But most feel the bite of the gnats even when it is contemned. And artists generally act on the exact reverse of the advice given in the clever French comedy: "We should respect the critics; we should not pay the slightest attention to them, but we should respect them." The stupidity of the critic provokes, his perfect ineptitude, his emphasis on the wrong thing and complete misunderstanding of all your aim and effort. And if his injustice stings, his justice stings even more. What he says that is kindly you discount as empty compliment. But when he lays his finger on what you know to be the weak points, you wither and shrink, and it seems as if all the creative impulse had gone out of you; for, after all, there is no criticism that really counts except the haunting, persistent criticism of yourself. And so there are the internal difficulties, even more hampering, and certainly more inescapable, than the external. There is the utter failure of inspiration, as suggested in the extreme case of Gray: The power of achievement, he says, "is the result (I suppose) of a certain disposition of mind, which does not depend on oneself, and which I have not felt this long time." And Gray accepted the blank in his leisured, melancholy indolence. But others are less content, and seek, and strive, and hope for the spark from heaven, until their impatience calls it down. Or again, when you are doing your work, and doing it well enough, you are afflicted by the vast doubt as to whether it is worth doing at all. The world is full of masterpieces, which no one has time to consider or appreciate. Why should you wither your soul and blight all your capacity for common joy, laboring to give it more which it will pass by with equal contempt? And further, you mistrust your gifts, fear that your powers may fail you, that you have done your best and last work, and that if you persist, when the inspiration is gone, you will become a laughing-stock in the end. I myself have kept at a very minor sort of literary art for thirty years, and have had a moderate success, which might seem at least sufficient to establish a certain confidence. But I never sit down at my typewriter of a morning without the haunting fear that the words will not come. For a few moments the fear is almost paralyzing, then it fades and is forgotten, and the fingers and the keys fly as fast as ever. Only, some day! Also, the best and greatest artists fail, all artists do, no matter what their skill or the |