Stated more concisely, to write to sell, or not to write to sell are the horns of the dilemma between which many a literary career is falling into oblivion. At the outset the young writer with discernment enough to put an estimate upon his own work does not expect an early acceptance from the more important magazines. He must first be put through the five finger exercises of writing. The question resolves itself, therefore, into just how the period of apprenticeship should be spent.

According to Cabell, the literary artist writes to divert himself, playing with life, death, or with whatever idea interests him. But surely by one method or another the artist acquires his art. Toward the end of Straws and Prayerbooks the Author of Jergen is visited by the spirit of his youth — a twenty-two year old spirit who has just sold three stories to distinctly popular magazines and who is planning a novel along rather conventional lines. Therefore it may be assumed justly that while one literary artist was diverting himself he played with markets, as well as with ideas.

Still the group of writers must be reckoned with who, spurning commercialism, advocate piling up myriads of unsalable manuscripts, until finally a piece of work is produced which will reach the requirements of the purely literary periodicals. Since these very writers, moreover, are lured into selling

after the center of the literary bull's eye has been pierced old and doubtfully meritorious pieces of work, it must be suggested that between their school and that of the frankly commercial soul, the difference is more in argument than in practice. Here, indeed, among the artists, are to be found, also, the dilettantes and the blue stockings to whom only a Molière can do justice. Even the somewhat serious of these do not work with diligence and seldom upon the variety of themes and situations necessary to give that competence and facility that means sustained achievement a fact that can easily be explained by the human need for encouragement. Authorship of a story or two appearing in a good magazine or even of one that finds. place in a year's collection of short stories is attainment too meager to prove the soundness of a method. In addition, the example of a genius who has done thus and so can be of no value to the average young writer. Is it not true that success, according to the standards of any age, is not measured by an occasional flash in the pan but by the continual finding of gold as pan after pan is dipped and examined?

Doubtless in the South there are more devotees of the old and purely literary method than exist in any other section of the country. Truly here as elsewhere commercialism has encroached upon the most sacred precincts. Yet there are still unsoiled Victorian ladies who gather their long and full skirts about unmentionable nether limbs and speak of the sin committed against art when writing is considered in terms of sales. With these one need not argue, but there is a younger generation of writers anxious to know the best route by which success and its mundane dollars and cents may be attained.

Unforunate perhaps, but nevertheless true it is, that most of us must consider the economic problem. Either we must earn money for ourselves or dependents or we desire to earn for the sheer pleasure of earning. There are contemporary writers who because of inherited wealth or wealth attached by

marriage may polish their literary products through the years and wait for the rewards that may be in specie later on. Most writers, however, do not come from this group. The average man has a family to support. A woman unattached to a supporting male probably has to earn her living; or, if married to the average American man, she feels that she should contribute to the family income either by productive work outside the home or by work within which would otherwise be paid for. Years of unproductive writing to which valuable time is devoted bring down upon the offending head of the woman writer such a deluge of ridicule as sometimes to cripple her, sometimes to cause her to give up writing altogether. We are paying the price demanded of us by an age that measures work according to its monetary returns.

To the person ambitious to write and earn at the same time two courses are open: he may secure remunerative work other than writing or he may write to sell to the less exacting editors. If he choose the former of the alternatives, he must bring to his writing a tired mind harassed by matters alien to the profession he loves. Nevertheless, from the man of affairs who wrote the Canterbury Tales, through the days when Charles Lamb returned from the India House to spend his evenings with his quill, to the lawyer who contributes to the Cosmopolitan and the doctor who writes love lyrics, men representing various other callings have been successful writers.

If, however, the young author decide to serve his apprenticeship as a commercial writer, there is for him some salaried form of journalism or free lance writing. Of course success does come from either route. Newspaper work is the form of journalism most easily secured and the one to which the beginner is most likely to turn. A writers' club recently spent several unprofitable hours arguing the question of journalism as a stepping stone for the ambitious young writer. An irrefutable answer, of course, is to be found in the number of writers who have at

one time worked on newspapers. Running over the distinguished American authors who have served journalistic apprenticeships in reportorial, editorial or contributing capacities, one thinks at once of Poe, Bret Harte, O. Henry, Howells, Walt Whitman, Bayard Taylor, Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, and dozens of our distinguished contemporaries. Of the English novelists of the nineteenth century one recalls at once that Dickens, Thackeray, Scott and George Eliot were actively employed in practical journalism. It is surely needless to bring a greater cloud of witnesses to prove that newspaper work at least does not stand in the way of the highest literary attainments. The necessity to write even if the mood is lacking, the habit of seeing a story in the ordinary events of life, the rapid thinking a time limit prescribes, the tremendous volume of work that must be turned out each day, all bring a facility that can not come until many words are written. On the other hand, when the reporter turns to fiction, he finds that certain things must be overcome. The reportorial style is too incisive; the story is too clear-cut; character analysis and emotional reactions are not within the scope of his experience. He has known people of many types, however, and he can learn to make them live upon the pages of fiction.

BUT the writer who free-lances for magazines and syndicates that use fiction of varying sorts is working steadily toward his goal. If he draws his characters from life, visualizes them, studies their backgrounds, probes their sub-conscious minds and analyzes their conscious emotions, it matters not at all whether he is writing the syndicate tabloid, the adventure yarn, the detective tale, the sex story, the Gothic romance, the melodrama, or the horror story; he is learning the use of his tools. It follows as the night the day that if he does not lose sight of his ultimate ambition, he will climb surely and steadily. He should not, however, let his style fall below the best of which he is capable. I do not mean that he should pattern after the stilted

phrasing of the Victorians or that he may not be as informal as he chooses. I do mean that he should not violate what he knows to be the permanent standards of good speaking and writing. If the magazine that pays well for the type of story he is writing require a style he is unwilling to use, let him abandon that market. There are others.

Although a sound academic background is an essential of good writing, the young college graduate who sets out to write finds it desperately hard to determine where the path should be cut. The chances are that he is familiar with only the magazines of the Quality Group. For these he begins to write fiction, not realizing how limited is the space and how keen the competition. So he starts his melancholy collection of rejection slips. He can see that his work lacks something, but perhaps he does not know that he has attempted a Bach fugue before practicing long enough on the scales. He is therefore unable to release that which he feels to be within him, to make use of the knowledge crammed during college days and since. Yet somewhere are stored all the experiences of his life, all his emotions, all he has seen, read, or felt. He is still so conscious of his tools that the vistas of the unconscious are by those tools securely locked. One who operates a train, or an automobile or an aeroplane is not a safe driver until he works automatically. One can not compose on the typewriter until his fingers find the keys without conscious effort. So the writer does not rise to his capabilities until words come readily, forming themselves into clear sentences and coherent paragraphs without a strain upon the feeble conscious mind, until character portrayal, plot development and all the whatnots of writing have been so mastered that the tricks of the trade are forgotten. A practical psychologist refers to the necessity of "harnessing the sub-conscious" before the highest potentialities are attainable. Writers can harness the sub-conscious only by much writing.

Granting, therefore, the human necessity

for some sort of recognition, why should not the beginner study the requirements of the less rigid markets and while learning to write also sell? In every case, he can take as patterns stories by masters of the type the magazine represents. For example, for the weird tale there are Poe's tales; for the syndicated tabloid there are the O. Henry stories; for the detective story Conan Doyle's and others; for the sex story contemporary masters of that much condemned form, and so on. The young writer should of course make each story as good as in the present stage of his development he can.

Perhaps it will be argued that the plan involves imitation. For every art, however, there must be models. Only by standing on the shoulders of the past can the race advance. Neither our brains nor our bodies are superior to those of the Greeks. Our advantage consists only in the wealth of race experience obtainable through written records. An examination of the clear and informing words of King Alfred the Great, who wrote in a language unenriched by softer tongues, leaves us in no doubt concerning the high mentality of the chronicler but glad that the centuries have made us capable of a more sophisticated style. For instance-"Olthere said to his lord, Alfred, the king, that he of all Northmen farthest north dwelt. He said that he dwelt in that land northward on the West Sea. He said that that land is very long to the north "And so on, translated literally, do we find good English to be sure, but centuries of linguists removed from the polished phrases of Cabell. The plan suggested involves, moreover, the study of such diverse types as to prevent imitation. Eventually the young writer will evolve his own style, enriched by the rigid training he has given himself.

The writer who outwits his nerves and remains at the typewriter a regular number of hours each day is naturally criticized by the old school who wait for the inspiration and when it comes have not the capacity for work necessary to get the most out of it. Having

always written by laborious long hand, they do not understand how much more rapid is composition at the typewriter. When the commercialist speaks of having turned off a large volume of work, they are aghast. Such work, they argue, must be too hurriedly done. They do not understand the modern use of tools. They scorn as a grating sound the unmusical word efficiency. Still efficiency was not invented in the twentieth century. Shakspere wrote his plays rapidly for a theatre-mad Elizabethan public; Scott turned out his romances to pay for Abbotsford; Stevenson wrote TREASURE ISLAND for a boys' magazine at a penny a word; and Dickens' novels were contracted for before they were written and handed over serially as the magazine needed them. Much writing and good writing have through the ages gone side by side. The greatest writers are also prolific. A graph intended to reveal the excellence of their work shows a steadily rising

line with of course occasional high spots and depressions. Shakspere is indeed the supreme example of a man whose sub-conscious mind was his servant. In no other way can the miracle of his genius be explained.

Some artists may be satisfied to leave one Elegy as sole monument, while others prefer to amass volumes equal to

"Etruscan Cassius' stream of song,

Which flowed, men say, so copious and strong That when he died, his kinsfolk simply laid His works in order and his pyre was made."

After all, why be so sure that one method or one school has cornered all of truth? If the writer has within him the stuff that art is made of, it matters not in what way he chooses to release his powers; and if he has within him stuff of another sort, still it matters not. So with much ado about little, the unumpired battle rages.

ITH Freud and his compeers popularizing psychology, more and more people outside the universities are trying to probe the realm of human motivation, hoping thus to form more accurate concepts of the causes behind the sometimes odd and at all times interesting actions of themselves and those about them. Since the science of psychology, as yet, remains impure, devoid of that complete accuracy which a pure science must necessarily reveal, and consisting for the most part of catalogued confusion, these unacademic attempts at psychological analysis are not without their value. True, they may never attain the goal set by those who have given their lives to scientific research, but they should and do give the average person

a better understanding of what lies behind the actions of his fellows and himself.

Especially is this the case when the person is interested in writing. For writing must always remain to a great extent an analysis of men and moods of men. But, like all other undertakings of the busy modern, practical psychology must be based on some fabric of system, more for the sake of saving time than because of any unmethodical tendencies on the part of the person himself. So this series is an attempt to present such a system, a system, however, which is so very simple as hardly to merit the name.

From time to time a particular emotion will be studied, not in any text book fashion, but rather by means of an informal review