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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Young Contributor, by Howells
+#33 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: The Young Contributor
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3386]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Young Contributor, by Howells
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+
+
+
+
+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--The Young Contributor
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+THE EDITOR'S RELATIONS WITH THE YOUNG CONTRIBUTOR
+
+
+One of the trustiest jokes of the humorous paragrapher is that the editor
+is in great and constant dread of the young contributor; but neither my
+experience nor my observation bears out his theory of the case.
+
+Of course one must not say anything to encourage a young person to
+abandon an honest industry in the vain hope of early honor and profit
+from literature; but there have been and there will be literary men and
+women always, and these in the beginning have nearly always been young;
+and I cannot see that there is risk of any serious harm in saying that it
+is to the young contributor the editor looks for rescue from the old
+contributor, or from his failing force and charm.
+
+The chances, naturally, are against the young contributor, and vastly
+against him; but if any periodical is to live, and to live long, it is by
+the infusion of new blood; and nobody knows this better than the editor,
+who may seem so unfriendly and uncareful to the young contributor.  The
+strange voice, the novel scene, the odor of fresh woods and pastures new,
+the breath of morning, the dawn of tomorrow--these are what the editor is
+eager for, if he is fit to be an editor at all; and these are what the
+young contributor alone can give him.
+
+A man does not draw near the sixties without wishing people to believe
+that he is as young as ever, and he has not written almost as many books
+as he has lived years without persuading himself that each new work of
+his has all the surprise of spring; but possibly there are wonted traits
+and familiar airs and graces in it which forbid him to persuade others.
+I do not say these characteristics are not charming; I am very far from
+wishing to say that; but I do say and must say that after the fiftieth
+time they do not charm for the first time; and this is where the
+advantage of the new contributor lies, if he happens to charm at all.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+The new contributor who does charm can have little notion how much he
+charms his first reader, who is the editor.  That functionary may bide
+his pleasure in a short, stiff note of acceptance, or he may mask his joy
+in a check of slender figure; but the contributor may be sure that he has
+missed no merit in his work, and that he has felt, perhaps far more than
+the public will feel, such delight as it can give.
+
+The contributor may take the acceptance as a token that his efforts have
+not been neglected, and that his achievements will always be warmly
+welcomed; that even his failures will be leniently and reluctantly
+recognized as failures, and that he must persist long in failure before
+the friend he has made will finally forsake him.
+
+I do not wish to paint the situation wholly rose color; the editor will
+have his moods, when he will not see so clearly or judge so justly as at
+other times; when he will seem exacting and fastidious, and will want
+this or that mistaken thing done to the story, or poem, or sketch, which
+the author knows to be simply perfect as it stands; but he is worth
+bearing with, and he will be constant to the new contributor as long as
+there is the least hope of him.
+
+The contributor may be the man or the woman of one story, one poem, one
+sketch, for there are such; but the editor will wait the evidence of
+indefinite failure to this effect.  His hope always is that he or she is
+the man or the woman of many stories, many poems, many sketches, all as
+good as the first.
+
+From my own long experience as a magazine editor, I may say that the
+editor is more doubtful of failure in one who has once done well than of
+a second success.  After all, the writer who can do but one good thing is
+rarer than people are apt to think in their love of the improbable; but
+the real danger with a young contributor is that he may become his own
+rival.
+
+What would have been quite good enough from him in the first instance is
+not good enough in the second, because he has himself fixed his standard
+so high.  His only hope is to surpass himself, and not begin resting on
+his laurels too soon; perhaps it is never well, soon or late, to rest
+upon one's laurels.  It is well for one to make one's self scarce, and
+the best way to do this is to be more and more jealous of perfection in
+one's work.
+
+The editor's conditions are that having found a good thing he must get as
+much of it as he can, and the chances are that he will be less exacting
+than the contributor imagines.  It is for the contributor to be exacting,
+and to let nothing go to the editor as long as there is the possibility
+of making it better.  He need not be afraid of being forgotten because he
+does not keep sending; the editor's memory is simply relentless; he could
+not forget the writer who has pleased him if he would, for such writers
+are few.
+
+I do not believe that in my editorial service on the Atlantic Monthly,
+which lasted fifteen years in all, I forgot the name or the
+characteristic quality, or even the handwriting, of a contributor who had
+pleased me, and I forgot thousands who did not.  I never lost faith in a
+contributor who had done a good thing; to the end I expected another good
+thing from him.  I think I was always at least as patient with him as he
+was with me, though he may not have known it.
+
+At the time I was connected with that periodical it had almost a monopoly
+of the work of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Mrs. Stowe,
+Parkman, Higginson, Aldrich, Stedman, and many others not so well known,
+but still well known.  These distinguished writers were frequent
+contributors, and they could be counted upon to respond to almost any
+appeal of the magazine; yet the constant effort of the editors was to
+discover new talent, and their wish was to welcome it.
+
+I know that, so far as I was concerned, the success of a young
+contributor was as precious as if I had myself written his paper or poem,
+and I doubt if it gave him more pleasure.  The editor is, in fact, a sort
+of second self for the contributor, equally eager that he should stand
+well with the public, and able to promote his triumphs without egotism
+and share them without vanity.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+In fact, my curious experience was that if the public seemed not to feel
+my delight in a contribution I thought good, my vexation and
+disappointment were as great as if the work hod been my own.  It was even
+greater, for if I had really written it I might have had my misgivings of
+its merit, but in the case of another I could not console myself with
+this doubt.  The sentiment was at the same time one which I could not
+cherish for the work of an old contributor; such a one stood more upon
+his own feet; and the young contributor may be sure that the editor's
+pride, self-interest, and sense of editorial infallibility will all
+prompt him to stand by the author whom he has introduced to the public,
+and whom he has vouched for.
+
+I hope I am not giving the young contributor too high an estimate of his
+value to the editor.  After all, he must remember that he is but one of a
+great many others, and that the editor's affections, if constant, are
+necessarily divided.  It is good for the literary aspirant to realize
+very early that he is but one of many; for the vice of our comparatively
+virtuous craft is that it tends to make each of us imagine himself
+central, if not sole.
+
+As a matter of fact, however, the universe does not revolve around any
+one of us; we make our circuit of the sun along with the other
+inhabitants of the earth, a planet of inferior magnitude.  The thing we
+strive for is recognition, but when this comes it is apt to turn our
+heads.  I should say, then, that it was better it should not come in a
+great glare and aloud shout, all at once, but should steal slowly upon
+us, ray by ray, breath by breath.
+
+In the mean time, if this happens, we shall have several chances of
+reflection, and can ask ourselves whether we are really so great as we
+seem to other people, or seem to seem.
+
+The prime condition of good work is that we shall get ourselves out of
+our minds.  Sympathy we need, of course, and encouragement; but I am not
+sure that the lack of these is not a very good thing, too.  Praise
+enervates, flattery poisons; but a smart, brisk snub is always rather
+wholesome.
+
+I should say that it was not at all a bad thing for a young contributor
+to get his manuscript back, even after a first acceptance, and even a
+general newspaper proclamation that he is one to make the immortals
+tremble for their wreaths of asphodel--or is it amaranth?  I am never
+sure which.
+
+Of course one must have one's hour, or day, or week, of disabling the
+editor's judgment, of calling him to one's self fool, and rogue, and
+wretch; but after that, if one is worth while at all, one puts the
+rejected thing by, or sends it off to some other magazine, and sets about
+the capture of the erring editor with something better, or at least
+something else.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+I think it a great pity that editors ever deal other than frankly with
+young contributors, or put them off with smooth generalities of excuse,
+instead of saying they do not like this thing or that offered them.  It
+is impossible to make a criticism of all rejected manuscripts, but in the
+case of those which show promise I think it is quite possible; and if I
+were to sin my sins over again, I think I should sin a little more on the
+side of candid severity.  I am sure I should do more good in that way,
+and I am sure that when I used to dissemble my real mind I did harm to
+those whose feelings I wished to spare.  There ought not, in fact, to be
+question of feeling in the editor's mind.
+
+I know from much suffering of my own that it is terrible to get back a
+manuscript, but it is not fatal, or I should have been dead a great many
+times before I was thirty, when the thing mostly ceased for me.  One
+survives it again and again, and one ought to make the reflection that it
+is not the first business of a periodical to print contributions of this
+one or of that, but that its first business is to amuse and instruct its
+readers.
+
+To do this it is necessary to print contributions, but whose they are, or
+how the writer will feel if they are not printed, cannot be considered.
+The editor can consider only what they are, and the young contributor
+will do well to consider that, although the editor may not be an
+infallible judge, or quite a good judge, it is his business to judge, and
+to judge without mercy.  Mercy ought no more to qualify judgment in an
+artistic result than in a mathematical result.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+I suppose, since I used to have it myself, that there is a superstition
+with most young contributors concerning their geographical position.  I
+used to think that it was a disadvantage to send a thing from a small or
+unknown place, and that it doubled my insignificance to do so.  I
+believed that if my envelope had borne the postmark of New York, or
+Boston, or some other city of literary distinction, it would have arrived
+on the editor's table with a great deal more authority.  But I am sure
+this was a mistake from the first, and when I came to be an editor myself
+I constantly verified the fact from my own dealings with contributors.
+A contribution from a remote and obscure place at once piqued my
+curiosity, and I soon learned that the fresh things, the original things,
+were apt to come from such places, and not from the literary centres.
+One of the most interesting facts concerning the arts of all kinds is
+that those who wish to give their lives to them do not appear where the
+appliances for instruction in them exist.  An artistic atmosphere does
+not create artists a literary atmosphere does not create literators;
+poets and painters spring up where there was never a verse made or a
+picture seen.
+
+This suggests that God is no more idle now than He was at the beginning,
+but that He is still and forever shaping the human chaos into the
+instruments and means of beauty.  It may also suggest to that scholar-
+pride, that vanity of technique, which is so apt to vaunt itself in the
+teacher, that the best he can do, after all, is to let the pupil teach
+himself.  If he comes with divine authority to the thing he attempts, he
+will know how to use the appliances, of which the teacher is only the
+first.
+
+The editor, if he does not consciously perceive the truth, will
+instinctively feel it, and will expect the acceptable young contributor
+from the country, the village, the small town, and he will look eagerly
+at anything that promises literature from Montana or Texas, for he will
+know that it also promises novelty.
+
+If he is a wise editor, he will wish to hold his hand as much as
+possible; he will think twice before he asks the contributor to change
+this or correct that; he will leave him as much to himself as he can.
+The young contributor; on his part, will do well to realize this, and to
+receive all the editorial suggestions, which are veiled commands in most
+cases, as meekly and as imaginatively as possible.
+
+The editor cannot always give his reasons; however strongly he may feel
+them, but the contributor, if sufficiently docile, can always divine
+them.  It behooves him to be docile at all times, for this is merely the
+willingness to learn; and whether he learns that he is wrong, or that the
+editor is wrong, still he gains knowledge.
+
+A great deal of knowledge comes simply from doing, and a great deal more
+from doing over, and this is what the editor generally means.
+
+I think that every author who is honest with himself must own that his
+work would be twice as good if it were done twice.  I was once so
+fortunately circumstanced that I was able entirely to rewrite one of my
+novels, and I have always thought it the best written, or at least
+indefinitely better than it would have been with a single writing.  As a
+matter of fact, nearly all of them have been rewritten in a certain way.
+They have not actually been rewritten throughout, as in the case I speak
+of, but they have been gone over so often in manuscript and in proof that
+the effect has been much the same.
+
+Unless you are sensible of some strong frame within your work, something
+vertebral, it is best to renounce it, and attempt something else in which
+you can feel it.  If you are secure of the frame you must observe the
+quality and character of everything you build about it; you must touch,
+you must almost taste, you must certainly test, every material you
+employ; every bit of decoration must undergo the same scrutiny as the
+structure.
+
+It will be some vague perception of the want of this vigilance in the
+young contributor's work which causes the editor to return it to him for
+revision, with those suggestions which he will do well to make the most
+of; for when the editor once finds a contributor he can trust, he
+rejoices in him with a fondness which the contributor will never perhaps
+understand.
+
+It will not do to write for the editor alone; the wise editor understands
+this, and averts his countenance from the contributor who writes at him;
+but if he feels that the contributor conceives the situation, and will
+conform to the conditions which his periodical has invented for itself,
+arid will transgress none of its unwritten laws; if he perceives that he
+has put artistic conscience in every general and detail, and though he
+has not done the best, has done the best that he can do, he will begin to
+liberate him from every trammel except those he must wear himself, and
+will be only too glad to leave him free.  He understands, if he is at all
+fit for his place, that a writer can do well only what he likes to do,
+and his wish is to leave him to himself as soon as possible.
+
+
+V.
+
+In my own case, I noticed that the contributors who could be best left to
+themselves were those who were most amenable to suggestion and even
+correction, who took the blue pencil with a smile, and bowed gladly to
+the rod of the proof-reader.  Those who were on the alert for offence,
+who resented a marginal note as a slight, and bumptiously demanded that
+their work should be printed just as they had written it, were commonly
+not much more desired by the reader than by the editor.
+
+Of course the contributor naturally feels that the public is the test of
+his excellence, but he must not forget that the editor is the beginning
+of the public; and I believe he is a faithfuller and kinder critic than
+the writer will ever find again.
+
+Since my time there is a new tradition of editing, which I do not think
+so favorable to the young contributor as the old.  Formerly the magazines
+were made up of volunteer contributions in much greater measure than they
+are now.  At present most of the material is invited and even engaged; it
+is arranged for a long while beforehand, and the space that can be given
+to the aspirant, the unknown good, the potential excellence, grows
+constantly less and less.
+
+A great deal can be said for either tradition; perhaps some editor will
+yet imagine a return to the earlier method.  In the mean time we must
+deal with the thing that is, and submit to it until it is changed.  The
+moral to the young contributor is to be better than ever, to leave
+nothing undone that shall enhance his small chances of acceptance.
+If he takes care to be so good that the editor must accept him in spite
+of all the pressure upon his pages, he will not only be serving-himself
+best, but may be helping the editor to a conception of his duty that
+shall be more hospitable to all other young contributors.  As it is,
+however, it must be owned that their hope of acceptance is very, very
+small, and they will do well to make sure that they love literature so
+much that they can suffer long and often repeated disappointment in its
+cause.
+
+The love of it is the great and only test of fitness for it.  It is
+really inconceivable how any one should attempt it without this, but
+apparently a great many do.  It is evident to every editor that a vast
+number of those who write the things he looks at so faithfully, and reads
+more or less, have no artistic motive.
+
+People write because they wish to be known, or because they have heard
+that money is easily made in that way, or because they think they will
+chance that among a number of other things.  The ignorance of technique
+which they often show is not nearly so disheartening as the palpable
+factitiousness of their product.  It is something that they have made; it
+is not anything that has grown out of their lives.
+
+I should think it would profit the young contributor, before he puts pen
+to paper, to ask himself why he does so, and, if he finds that he has no
+motive in the love of the thing, to forbear.
+
+Am I interested in what I am going to write about?  Do I feel it
+strongly?  Do I know it thoroughly?  Do I imagine it clearly?  The young
+contributor had better ask himself all these questions, and as many more
+like them as he can think of.  Perhaps he will end by not being a young
+contributor.
+
+But if he is able to answer them satisfactorily to his own conscience, by
+all means let him begin.  He may at once put aside all anxiety about
+style; that is a thing that will take care of itself; it will be added
+unto him if he really has something to say; for style is only a man's way
+of saying a thing.
+
+If he has not much to say, or if he has nothing to say, perhaps he will
+try to say it in some other man's way, or to hide his own vacuity with
+rags of rhetoric and tags and fringes of manner, borrowed from this
+author and that.  He will fancy that in this disguise his work will be
+more literary, and that there is somehow a quality, a grace, imparted to
+it which will charm in spite of the inward hollowness.  His vain hope
+would be pitiful if it were not so shameful, but it is destined to suffer
+defeat at the first glance of the editorial eye.
+
+If he really has something to say, however, about something he knows and
+loves, he is in the best possible case to say it well.  Still, from time
+to time he may advantageously call a halt, and consider whether he is
+saying the thing clearly and simply.
+
+If he has a good ear he will say it gracefully, and musically; and I
+would by no means have him aim to say it barely or sparely.  It is not so
+that people talk, who talk well, and literature is only the thought of
+the writer flowing from the pen instead of the tongue.
+
+To aim at succinctness and brevity merely, as some teach, is to practice
+a kind of quackery almost as offensive as the charlatanry of rhetoric.
+In either case the life goes out of the subject.
+
+To please one's self, honestly and thoroughly, is the only way to please
+others in matters of art.  I do not mean to say that if you please
+yourself you will always please others, but that unless you please
+yourself you will please no one else.  It is the sweet and sacred
+privilege of work done artistically to delight the doer.  Art is the
+highest joy, but any work done in the love of it is art, in a kind, and
+it strikes the note of happiness as nothing else can.
+
+We hear much of drudgery, but any sort of work that is slighted becomes
+drudgery; poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, acting, architecture, if
+you do not do your best by them, turn to drudgery sore as digging
+ditches, hewing wood, or drawing water; and these, by the same blessings
+of God, become arts if they are done with conscience and the sense of
+beauty.
+
+The young contributor may test his work before the editor assays it, if
+he will, and he may know by a rule that is pretty infallible whether it
+is good or not, from his own experience in doing it.  Did it give him
+pleasure?  Did he love it as it grew under his hand?  Was he glad and
+willing with it?  Or did he force himself to it, and did it hang heavy
+upon him?
+
+There is nothing mystical in all this; it is a matter of plain, every-day
+experience, and I think nearly every artist will say the same thing about
+it, if he examines himself faithfully.
+
+If the young contributor finds that he has no delight in the thing he has
+attempted, he may very well give it up, for no one else will delight in
+it.  But he need not give it up at once; perhaps his mood is bad; let him
+wait for a better, and try it again.  He may not have learned how to do
+it well, and therefore he cannot love it, but perhaps he can learn to do
+it well.
+
+The wonder and glory of art is that it is without formulas.  Or, rather,
+each new piece of work requires the invention of new formulas, which will
+not serve again for another.  You must apprentice yourself afresh at
+every fresh undertaking, and our mastery is always a victory over certain
+unexpected difficulties, and not a dominion of difficulties overcome
+before.
+
+I believe, in other words, that mastery is merely the strength that comes
+of overcoming and is never a sovereign power that smooths the path of all
+obstacles.  The combinations in art are infinite, and almost never the
+same; you must make your key and fit it to each, and the key that unlocks
+one combination will not unlock another.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+There is no royal road to excellence in literature, but the young
+contributor need not be dismayed at that.  Royal roads are the ways that
+kings travel, and kings are mostly dull fellows, and rarely have a good
+time.  They do not go along singing; the spring that trickles into the
+mossy log is not for them, nor
+
+               "The wildwood flower that simply blows."
+
+But the traveller on the country road may stop for each of these; and it
+is not a bad condition of his progress that he must move so slowly that
+he can learn every detail of the landscape, both earth and sky, by heart.
+
+The trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind, or
+apart.  The successful writer especially is in danger of becoming
+isolated from the realities that nurtured in him the strength to win
+success.  When he becomes famous, he becomes precious to criticism, to
+society, to all the things that do not exist from themselves, or have not
+the root of the matter in them.
+
+Therefore, I think that a young writer's upward course should be slow and
+beset with many obstacles, even hardships.  Not that I believe in
+hardships as having inherent virtues; I think it is stupid to regard them
+in that way; but they oftener bring out the virtues inherent in the
+sufferer from them than what I may call the 'softships'; and at least
+they stop him, and give him time to think.
+
+This is the great matter, for if we prosper forward rapidly, we have no
+time for anything but prospering forward rapidly.  We have no time for
+art, even the art by which we prosper.
+
+I would have the young contributor above all things realize that success
+is not his concern.  Good work, true work, beautiful work is his affair,
+and nothing else.  If he does this, success will take care of itself.
+
+He has no business to think of the thing that will take.  It is the
+editor's business to think of that, and it is the contributor's business
+to think of the thing that he can do with pleasure, the high pleasure
+that comes from the sense of worth in the thing done.  Let him do the
+best he can, and trust the editor to decide whether it will take.
+
+It will take far oftener than anything he attempts perfunctorily; and
+even if the editor thinks it will not take, and feels obliged to return
+it for that reason, he will return it with a real regret, with the honor
+and affection which we cannot help feeling for any one who has done a
+piece of good work, and with the will and the hope to get something from
+him that will take the next time, or the next, or the next.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+An artistic atmosphere does not create artists . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Any sort of work that is slighted becomes drudgery . . . . . . . . . . .
+Put aside all anxiety about style. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Should sin a little more on the side of candid severity. . . . . . . . .
+Trouble with success is that it is apt to leave life behind. . . . . . .
+Work would be twice as good if it were done twice. . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Young Contributor,
+by William Dean Howells
+