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A MONTHLY MAGAZINE TO INTEREST AND HELP ALL LITERARY WORKERS.

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Literary Partner

Dr. H. Erich

SLIPS, INSTEAD OF CARDS, FOR NOTES. George Iles.
THE HONESTy of the ReLIGIOUS PRESS. J. F. Cowan.
PUNCTUATION THAT INforms. G: Iles.
EDITORIAL.

The Possibility of Instruction in Literary Art, 140Schools of Journalism, 141 - Advantages of Editing.

THE SCRAP BASKET.

BOOK REVIEWS.

HELPFUL HINTS AND SUGGESTIONS.

Ironing Manuscript, 144 - Finding the Page. LITERARY ARTICLES IN PERIODICALS.

NEWS AND NOTES.

"DOWNRIGHT ENGLISH."

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It is "devoutly to be wished" that our critics, guides, philosophers, and friends shared the feeling of the "Holy Clerk of Copmanhurst." “A ballad,” said he, “against all the ocs and ouis of France. Downright English am I, sir knight,-downright English alone shall be sung in this cell."

Why cannot an American writer say what he has to say in plain English? "The charm of a quotation is lost in a translation "; that is true. Then give a quotation in the original, by all means. But in common, every-day phrases why must French words be so frequently called into service?

A New England reader asks, Why cannot a

No. 7.

certain novelist refer to the slender figure of her heroine without the use of the word svelte? why cannot another mention the tender expression of the heroine's large blue eyes without calling them "her grands yeux bleus"? does a mention of a nose of upward tendency require the word retroussé? If originality is at fault, has not the poet given us

"tip-tilted like a flower"?

Is it of necessity that a certain proposition known to all men "goes without saying"? The use of such words, too often, is not the result of a familiarity with a foreign tongue so much as a lack of knowledge of the resources of our own.

Old English phrases are sometimes far more graceful and expressive than any foreign equivalent. Our grandmothers placed among the garments laid away in their "chests of drawers" a little bag filled with some fragrant powder. This was called a "sweet-bag "; a pretty name and easily understood. The article presents itself to the present generation as a 66 sachet." In the speech of many who know only the French of "the scole of Stratford-atte-Bowe," the consonants are often made to change places, and bewildered listeners ask why a scent-bag should be called "chassez." "What has it to do with taking steps?"

Others call it a "sachet bag." Perhaps this was the habit of the editor of a well-known "home" magazine, who, giving counsel concerning that perplexing subject, "giving Christmas presents to gentlemen," mentions one who received a "mouchoir-case." A reader asked, 'Why not a handkerchief-case?" and was further surprised to learn that the article "smelt very strong of sachet "!!

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Homely New England speakers have been heard to complain that their "forethought

Copyright, 1893, by WILLIAM H. HILLS. All rights reserved.

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There are hundreds of newspaper women in the United States who are looking toward New York as their journalistic Mecca, a paradise, where a maximum of wages is paid for a minimum of work. There are no plums for the unknown writer anywhere, and, whatever may be the impression to the contrary, no women in the country work so hard as the New York newspaper women. Neither are their salaries so large as is popularly believed. The woman who, a year ago, did the best work on a leading, if not the leading, metropolitan journal, and whose matter was more widely copied than that of any other active newspaper writer in the United States, was paid a salary of forty dollars a week. Since then she has been compelled to give up writing on account of nervous prostration, brought on by overwork. Most of the New York newspapers pay space rates ranging from five to eight dollars a column. In an expensive city like New York, forty dollars a week is not much more than equivalent to twenty dollars in inland cities.

I, too, once had the New York fever. I was just past my majority, had had two years' journalistic experience in a city of 400,000 people, and, spoiled by the well-meant, but mistaken, praises of friends, sighed for new worlds to conquer. So last summer I packed my trunk and went on a visit to New York, but with the

ulterior motive of looking up a position. I had letters of introduction, among others one to the editor of a New York paper whose name is known from Dan to Bathsheba. He gave me some advice which I have found so good that other dissatisfied women may profit by it:

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"So you want to come to New York as a newspaper writer," said he. 'Well, let me give you some advice. Can you afford to come here and work six months without earning enough to support you, and then, in case of failure, have you something to fall back on, friends to whom you can return, or a position open to you? No, I don't know that you will fail; but only one woman out of a thousand succeeds. If you have an assured income behind you, I might say, Come; otherwise I could not conscientiously do otherwise than warn you. Why? Because you are a stranger in the city. It would take six months for you to learn the city, the people, and the ways of doing business. There are hundreds of clever women, born and bred in New York, who are clamoring for just such a chance as you want. Do you know that there is, and has been for several years, a great contest going on between the papers of this city? The competition is something fearful. You might be engaged and work satisfactorily for weeks, months, or a year. Some day a woman might come along asking for your position, a woman with more experience, reputa

tion, or influence than yourself, and you would be discharged without a moment's warning. Go back to your own paper. It may be distasteful work writing society items, but persuade your managing editor to give you occasional chances at something else, and prove to him you can do it better than any one else on the force. Get him to send you to the state capital, if you are fond of excitement and politics, then aim for Washington.

"You can write for the syndicates as well at home as here. Cultivate a clear, breezy style and avoid gush. Watch the public mind, and make your articles timely and to the public taste. Don't turn yourself into a literary modiste or a cosmetic quack; enough women

are writing such trash now, and it is not the road to reputation.

"Most women's departments are libels on the intellect of their readers. If you run a woman's column, always try to remember that you are writing for intelligent, self-respecting beings. Women like to read about women; there is a great field in women's work and progress that is still untouched. Somebody is going to make a fortune some day out of a model women's newspaper.

"To my mind, Kate Field is the model news paper woman, and, if you recollect, her talent found recognition without her coming to New York to market it." Beatrice Campbell. CLEVELAND, O.

METHODS OF AUTHORS.

Goethe, Dickens, Schiller, and Scott. Goethe was a believer in the pleasant doctrine that the highest and freest work can be done under the healthiest conditions of fresh air, early hours, daylight, and temperance which does not mean abstinence. He and Balzac are at precisely opposite pales in their method of working. Here is the account of Goethe's days at Weimar, according to G. H. Lewes He rose at seven. Till eleven he worked without interruption. A cup of chocolate was then brought, and he worked on again till one. At two he dined. His appetite was immense. Even on the days when he complained of not being hungry, he ate much more than most men. He sat a long while over his wine, chatting gayly; for he never dined alone. He was fond of wine, and drank daily his two or three bottles. There was no dessert Balzac's principal meal - nor coffee. Then he went to the theatre, where a glass of punch was brought to him at six, or else he received friends at home. By ten o'clock he was in bed, where he slept soundly. Like Thorwaldsen, he had a talent for sleeping.

No man of business or dictionary maker could make a more healthy arrangement of his hours. The five or six hours of regular morning work, which left the rest of the day open for society and recreation, the early habits, the full allowance of sleep, and the rational use of food are in glaring contrast to Balzac's short and broken slumbers, his night work, and his bodily starvation. Goethe differed from almost every other great poet in not doing his greatest work at a white heat; and not only so, but he differed also in constantly balancing his reasoning against his creative faculties. Those long mornings of early work were not always spent in the fever of creation. He was a physiologist, a botanist, a critic; and the longer he lived, the more of a savant he became, if not less of a poet. His imagination was most fertile before he settled down into these regular ways, but not before he settled down into a full appreciation of wine. Balzac would write the draft of a whole novel at a sitting, and then develop it on the margins of proofs, revises, and rerevises. Goethe acted as if while art is long, life were long also. Till the contrary is proved,

we must consistently hold that Goethe was the philosopher before dinner-time, and the poet in the theatre, or during those long afterdinner hours over his two or three bottles of wine. That these later hours were often spent socially proves nothing, one way or the other.. Some men need such active influences as their form of mental stimulus. Alfieri found, or made, his ideas while listening to music or galloping on horseback. Instances are common in every-day life of men who cannot think to good purpose when shut up in a room with a pen, and who find their best inspiration in wandering about the streets and hearing what they want in the rattle of cabs and the seething of life around them, like the scholar of Padua, whose conditions of work are given by Montaigne as a curiosity: "I lately found one of the most learned men in France studying in the corner of a room, cut off by a screen, surrounded by a lot of riotous servants. He told and Seneca says much the same himself that he worked all the better for this uproar, as, if overpowered by noise, he was obliged to withdraw all the more closely into himself for contemplation, while the storm of voices drove his thoughts inward. When at Padua he had lodged so long over the clattering of the traffic and the tumult of the streets, that he had been trained not only to be indifferent to noise, but even to require it for the prosecution of his studies."

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his walks, be it observed, were frequently what Balzac's always were at night; so that, in the matter of hours, he must be taken as having conformed in some important respects to Balzac's hygiene. Now, Goethe was also an essentially out-of-doors man by nature not one to let his pen do his imagining for him. He was no slave of the ink-bottle, as some are, who cannot think without the feather of a goose in their hands, by way of a sometimes appropriate talisman. There is a well-known passage in one of the Roman elegies to the effect that inspiration is to be sought more directly than within the four walls of a study, and that the rhythm of the hexameter is not best drummed with the fingers on a wooden table; and if it is true, as the author tells, that "youth is drunkenness without wine," it seems to follow, according to his experience, that those two or three bottles of wine are not altogether needless as an aid to inspiration when youth is gone by.

Schiller could never leave off talking about his poetical projects, and thus he discussed with Goethe all his best pieces, scene after scene. On the other hand, it was contrary to Goethe's nature, as he told Eckermann, to talk over his poetic plans with anybody - even with Schiller. He carried everything about with him in silence, and usually nothing of what he was doing was known to any one until the whole was completed.

Sir Walter Scott was one of the most industrious of writers. He rose early, and accomplished a good day's literary work before half the world was out of bed. Even when he was busiest, he seldom worked as late as noon. His romances were composed with amazing rapidity; and it is an astonishing fact, that in less than two weeks after his bankruptcy, Scott wrote an entire volume of Woodstock." His literary labors yielded him $50,000 a year. Two thousand copies of "The Lady of the Lake were sold within a few months.

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Many of the more energetic descriptions in "Marmion," and particularly that of the battle of Flodden, were struck off, according to Mr. Skene's account, while Scott was out with his cavalry, in the autumn of 1807. In the intervals of drilling, we are told, Scott used to delight"in walking his powerful black steed up

and down by himself upon the Portobello sands, within the beating of the surge; and now and then you would see him plunge in his spurs, and go off as if at the charge, with the spray dashing about him. As we rode back to Musselburgh, he often came and placed himself beside me, to repeat the verses that he had been composing during these pauses of our exercise."

In after years, Mr. Cadell, then a guest at Abbotsford, observing how his host was harrassed by lion-hunters, and what a number of hours he spent daily in the company of his work-people, expressed his wonder that Scott should ever be able to work at all while in the country. "Oh," said Sir Walter, "I lie simmering over things for an hour or so before I get up; and there's the time I'm dressing to overhaul my half-sleeping, half-waking projet de chapitre, and when I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty easily. Besides, I often take a doze in the plantations, and while Tom [Purdie] marks out a dyke or a drain as I have directed, one's fancy may be running its ain rigs in some other world."

By far the greater portion of "The Bride of Lammermoor," the whole of "The Legend of Montrose," and almost the whole of "Ivanhoe " were dictated under the terrible stimulus of physical pain, which wrung groans from the author between the words. The very two novels wherein the creative power of the archmaster of romance shows itself most strongly were composed in the midst of literal birththroes. Laidlaw would often beseech Sir Walter affectionately to stop dictating, when his audible suffering filled every pause. It was then he made that grimmest of all bad puns: "Nay, Willie," addressing Laidlaw, who wrote for him and implored him to rest, "only see that the doors are fast. I would fain keep all the cry, as well as all the wool, to ourselves; but as to giving over work, that can be done only when I am in woollen." John Ballantyne, his other faithful amanuensis, after the first day, took care to have always a dozen of pens made before he seated himself opposite the sofa on which Scott lay, the sufferer usually continuing his sentence in the same breath, though he often turned himself on his pillow with a groan

of anguish. "But when a dialogue of peculiar animation was in progress, spirit seemed to triumph altogether over matter: he arose from his couch and walked up and down the room, raising and lowering his voice, and, as it were, acting the parts."

In this last particular we are reminded of the celebrated Russian author, Gogol, whose practice it is said to have been in composing a dialogue to recite all the different speeches in character before committing them to paper, to assure himself of their being in complete consonance with what the character and situation required.

So far from affording any argument to the contrary, the history of the years during which Sir Walter's hand was losing its cunning seems to illustrate the penalty of trying to reconcile two irreconcilable things-the exercise of the imagination to its fullest extent, and the observance of conditions that are too healthy to nourish a fever. Apropos of his review of Ritson's "Caledonian Annals," he himself says: "No one that has not labored as I have done on imag. inary topics can judge of the comfort afforded by walking on all-fours, and being grave and dull." There spoke the man who habitually, and with out artificial help, drew upon his imagination at the hours when instinct has told others they should be employing, not their fancy, but their reason. The privilege of being healthily dull before breakfast must have been an intense relief to one who compelled himself to do unhealthy or abnormal work without the congenial help of abnormal conditions. Herder, in like manner, is accused by De Quincey, in direct terms, of having broken down prematurely because he "led a life of most exemplary temperance. Surely, if he had been a drunkard or an opium-eater, he might have contrived to weather the point of sixty years." This is putting things pretty strongly; but it is said of a man of great imaginative power by a man of great imaginative power, and may, therefore, be taken as the opinion of an expert, all the more honest because he is prejudiced. A need must be strongly felt to be expressed with such daring contempt for popular axioms.

The true working-life of Scott, who helped nature by no artificial means, lasted for no

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