Class JEM5XL8 Book ■ 55 . Go^rigMF. CDPOUGWr DEPOSm PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES A NEW METHOD OF TESTING AND TRAINING THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION BY EDWIN E. SLOSSON, Ph.D. EDITOR OF SCIENCE SERVICE, WASHINGTON, FORMERLY LITERARY EDITOR OF "THE INDEPENDENT,' ' NEW YORK, AND ASSOCIATE IN THE COLUMBIA SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM. AUTHOR OF "CREATIVE CHEMISTRY," "MAJOR PROPHETS OF TO- DAY," "GREAT AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES, ' ' "THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN EDUCATION," ETC. AND JUNE E. pOWNEY, Ph.D. PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, AUTHOR OF "GRAPHOLOGY AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAND- WRITING," "THE HEAVENLY DIKES," "WILL- ETC. NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1922 •'s Copyright, 1922, by The Century Co. Printed in U. S. A. t S> M -3 IS22 ©CI.A674421 ^ T CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. How the Book Came to Be Written and What It Is "About 3 II. How to Use the Personals in Testing the Imagination 7 III. The Interpretation of a Personal 26 IV. Training the Literary Imagination 43 V. Names and Clothes as Literary Accessories . . 59 VI. Tricks of the Literary Imagination 74 VII. What Kind of Mind the Novelist Needs ... 86 VIII. Where the Writer Gets His Plots and Person- alities 103 IX. The Problem of the Plot 127 X. Character-Creation 141 XI. Plot-Making as a Safety-Valve 164 XII. The Case-System of Literary Training .... 179 XIII. Putting a Foot-Rule on the Imagination . . . 208 XIV. Miscellaneous Personals 226 XV. Personals in Continuities 232 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES CHAPTER I HOW THE BOOK CAME TO BE WRITTEN AND WHAT IT IS ABOUT For seventeen years I was hired to read the London " Times" every day. The " Times' ' presents an unprom- ising exterior. The front page, instead of the shrieking head-lines of an American paper, designed to give the impression that this is the first day of the Apocalypse, is one gray mass of minor advertisements. But running down the middle of the page is a column of more general interest although it is headed ' ' Personal. ' ' I have often found myself fascinated by these Personal advertise- ments when I should have been digging out facts about foreign affairs in the pages beyond. Here was a part of the paper where the authors paid for permission to print instead of being paid to write. They wrote what they pleased, not what the editor wanted them to write. They were intensely earnest for the most part, often in dire distress. This section of the paper is with good reason called the " agony column," for here is real tragedy intermingled with comedy and co m mercialism. These advertisements are human docu- 3 4 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES merits of the first order, all put in tabloid form as is now the fashion. Why wade through pages of sentimental slush when here you can get the essence of a plot in four lines with the personalities sufficiently outlined so that any one with an imagination can develop the situation to suit himself? When a lady asked Disraeli to recom- mend her a good novel he replied: "Madam, whenever I want to read a good novel nowadays I have to write one." I found these germ stories more interesting than the diluted fiction of the magazines. When an author has to pay by the word instead of being paid by the word he takes more pains to make every word count. With a few Personals from the "Times" in my pocket I was secure from boredom on the subway and need not waste my eyesight and my money on magazines. Next I tried them out on my friends. But the re- action I got was curious. Some took to the idea at sight, and having much more vivid imaginations than I, evolved most exciting situations and fascinating charac- ters. Others found the Personals silly or worse and obviously thought the same of me for my interest in them. Then too the same name and message would be interpreted in the most varied ways by different people and I discovered that I could find out a great deal about the disposition and habit of mind of a person, even of a stranger, by what he or she made out of one of these anonymous fragments of feeling. It was great fun to pass a Personal around a company and ask them alj to write down or to tell at once what they saw in it. Some- times a latent talent for story-telling would be revealed, much to the delight of the person and the rest of us. THE GAME OF PERSONAL 5 With the Personals pasted on cards one could make a novel and interesting game. I soon got more delight ont of seeing what my friends would do with them than in what I could make of them myself. Professor "Walter B. Pitkin of the Columbia School of Journalism found these Personals so useful as exercises in plot development that he put two pages of them in his course .on ' ' How to Write Stories^" published by the Independent Cor- poration. It seemed then that I had hit upon a new form of psycho-analysis comparable to dream interpretation, reverie, association-time, and the like. Here also was a test of the creative imagination which might do for this faculty what the new intelligence tests developed out of the Binet-Simon method did for determining alertness, accuracy, memory, judgment, etc. Possibly, it appeared to me, the scheme might be used not merely for testing the native power of imagination but also for developing and training it. It might serve as a form of vocational guidance and nip in the bud the aspirations of the young people who wanted to write fiction but lacked the funda- mental qualification for it; that is, the ability to seize upon a hint of a plot and expand it into a thrilling and convincing novel. If these thousands of ambitious but incapable writers could be headed in some other direction the lot of the literary editor would be alleviated. The best person that I knew of to try out the possi- bilities of such a plan was Dr. June Downey of the University of Wyoming, who had for years been making a study of the psychology of esthetics, especially of literary composition. I sent her a set of clippings from 6 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES the " Times' ' and she used them in her classes at the University of Chicago as well as Wyoming with remark- able results. Some of these were published in the "Independent'' of 1921 in an article entitled "Have You Any Imagination?" and this together with an article by me in the "Independent" of March 6, 1920, on "A Game of Personalities" aroused such an interest not only among teachers of composition and psychology but also among literary aspirants and other persons who for various reasons found the idea stimulating that it seemed worth while to get out a book that would contain a wide selection of the Personals and other suggestive clippings with directions how to use them for testing and developing the creative imagination. To this book Professor Downey has contributed some chapters giving in untechnical language the results of her researches on plot-making and character-construc- tion and I some chapters on the fictional faculty and its use based upon my long experience as literary editor. In this partnership volume we have not attempted to eliminate all divergence of view or even an occasional contradiction, but that need not worry the reader any more than it does us for we have initialed our own sections. The object of the book is not to impose our ideas upon the reader but to stimulate him to germinate ideas of his own. For that reason we have put at the end a lot of "Times" Personals as well as head-lines from American newspapers. If the reader gets as much fun out of them as we have we shall be well paid for our trouble in preparing the book. E. e. s. CHAPTER II HOW TO USE THE PERSONALS IN TESTING THE IMAGINATION Measuring what the college-boy describes as "the void above the eyes" has become a fashionable pastime. The use of Binet puzzles, Thorndike examinations, and in- formation-tests has multiplied since the military psy- chologists used them "to sort out major-generals from mere privates. ' ' "Where the thing will end no one knows. I have heard of a family where discussions between husband and wife are terminated by her meek conclu- sion, "Your I. Q. [short for intelligence quotient] is higher than mine, so of course you 're right — always!" — a remark which, oddly enough, so exasperates the in- telligent gentleman that he sometimes reverses himself. But among intelligence-tests, tests of the imagination have been conspicuously absent. This book is to break territory in the latter field. Since the imagination is intelligence at play, one may approach the task in holi- day spirit. Not to waste a moment of your vacationing — from more serious pursuits — I am going to start you off at once. Test 1. Below you will find a message sent via the personal column of the London "Times" by Sweetie to Jasper. You will be given five minutes in which 7 8 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES to write a characterization and description of Jasper and Sweetie. JASPER.— Tick-tock, Tick-tock.— Sweetie. Time 's up. Put aside what you have written and try another. Test 2. This also is an item from the personal column of the London " Times.' ' It is addressed to Feathers by Skeine. Please work out a short-story plot from the message. Time-limit, ten minutes. TpEATHERS.— One on the left.— Skeine. Time 's up. Pencils down ! Let us now proceed to your dissection of yourself, dear reader. And we beg of you to keep your temper even though you don't agree with our diagnosis, for remember there are more things in heaven and earth than story-writers, and that if you can't write a novel you may be living one, which on the whole is much nicer. Please classify your imagination under one of the following heads after you feel from study of the samples presented and the comments that you understand the distinctions. The divisions are as follows : (1) The Inert Imagination. (2) The Stereotyped Imagination. *(3) The Melodramatic Imagination. (4) The Generalizing Imagination. (5) The Particularizing Imagination. (a) Reminiscential. THE INERT IMAGINATION 9 (b) Creative. (c) Dramatic. (6) The Ingenious or Inventive Imagination. The question of fertility and range of imagination we will discuss later. 1. Of the inert imagination, the most hopeless variety- is that of the individual whose narrow sympathies pre- clude the possibility of an insight into characters or situations outside the range of his own experiences. Invention stumbles along, continually hampered by the narrow skirts of custom and etiquette. Read the following production as an example of what I mean: Newspaper personals are usually disguised statements understood only by the parties concerned. It would be impossible for me to form any idea of the above as I have never had any interest in such ads. Always had a quiet notion that they were most disreputable, veiled messages, perhaps between thieves or other undesirables. There is apparently no necessity for code messages be- tween ordinary persons. Or this: Any such items in newspapers always appeal to me as sentimental and foolishly so. I noticed that the mes- sage was signed "Sweetie" and addressed to a man, so immediately put it in this class. The very fact of using a newspaper column as a means of correspondence shows her lack of self-respect and restraint. I am not inter- ested enough to have a visual image of her. 10 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES You will perceive we are getting characterizations, but not of Sweetie and Jasper. Of course, inactive fantasy shows itself sometimes by its puzzled rather than unsympathetic attitude. It stares helplessly at such a message. i 'I can't think what it means!" Or, "No plot. 'One on the left' suggests buying a theater-ticket." A very distinctive reaction is given by the literal- minded individual, those dear friends of ours who walk in comfortable house-slippers and continually stir our sense of humor in the cleverest sort of way without in the least meaning to. I can not refrain from illustrating this reaction by quotation of what I received when I used the following personal : SIR WALTER RAWLEIGH.— On Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, I will be in exactly the same spot as you saw me last Easter Monday evening. — Queen Bess. I asked for a characterization of Queen Bess and got it! Queen Bess has dark hair and eyes. She is very sedate in her manner and always on time. When she makes a promise she keeps it. If she were n'ta queen I think she would be a good housekeeper, clean and neat, every- thing just so. And take this one of Valerie who writes to Wal: TyAL.— In this case two and three do not make five. — Valerie. THE STEREOTYPED IMAGINATION 11 Valerie is a person rather inclined to say and do funny things, sometimes taking them very seriously. He is educated, thinks of the hypothesis of numbers, and says two and three do not make five. He is hasty in making decisions. Another form of the unimaginative reaction gives us words, words, words! Jasper is a working-boy who is in love with a certain working-girl and has been corresponding with her. I should say he is of average intelligence but at present concerned in a somewhat affected love-affair. Probably he has not been or probably he has been at college. "When a character is in love it is difficult to tell just how much he does know. Jasper is a young man of the city and possesses the knowledge which the city man neces- sarily must have of amorous affairs. The rest developed by the thought which arose from the knowledge of cer- tain observations of the ways of the world. If now you belong to the household of the unimagina- tive either because of crippled sympathies, baffled wits, honest literal-mindedness, or utter inanity, the proba- bility is you 're wasting your time in literary pursuits. 2. Let us turn next to the stereotyped conventional- ized imagination which always hits upon the bromidic interpretation, just that which will occur to ninety-nine out of one hundred. As our psychological friends say, the coefficient of commonplaceness will run high and normality is guaranteed. And obviously there are ad- vantages in such reactions, for the ninety and nine will understand you without effort and you will find their motives easy to follow. If you write stories there will 12 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES be nothing cryptic about them, nothing fantastic or strange that would deny them entrance into " Popular Tales.'' Confess now, when you read the Jasper-Sweetie item, did n 't you figure it out something like this : Sweetie is a pretty, fluffy, doll-like, cream-puff creature with golden hair, blue eyes, and too much saccharinity. Very likely you dressed her in sky-pink, gave her a large hat and a parasol, and possibly a stick of gum. You thought her sufficiently silly. But you rather liked Jasper. You pictured him as gentle, slow, steadfast, with brown eyes, and much imposed upon by the frivolous and very young lady calling herself Sweetie. "Tick-took" is some sort of love-message of course. "Time flies/ ' or "I 'm counting the moments until you return," or "Really, dear Jasper, you are very slow," or "Let us meet under the big clock." I have read so many interpretations of this message thus or similarly phrased that I am quite convinced that Jasper and Sweetie are a sentimental couple and that Sweetie takes too much initiative for a well-bred young lady. I am almost convinced by the repeated suggestion that she is a "perfect blond." And of course I have never questioned the assumption that Jasper was a man and Sweetie a woman. 3. But let us now go a step further and inspect the hackneyed imagination in gala dress. Behold the melo- dramatic, the yellow- journal imagination! Let us see what we can get out of Valerie's message to Wal, "In this case two and three do not make five." THE MELODRAMATIC IMAGINATION 13 Valerie, of French descent, a face clear-cut as a cameo and of the same delicate tints, framed with masses of burnished brown ringlets! She dresses, usually, in lavender with white near her pure Grecian profile. She is so tiny and delicate that no one would suspect her of great strength of character but think her a plaything to be loved and petted until one gazed into her eyes, lus- trous deep pools of violet. She looked out on life with eyes that saw and understood. "Wal, her second cousin, dark, quick-tempered, im- petuous, trying to sweep the world off its feet by his painting ! He lives in the gay capital of France among the artistic set of upper Bohemia. His devil-may-care air elects him leader of a set that makes even the blase gasp and take notice. Consequently his art suffers. Coming home for a brief visit he chanced to see the lovely Valerie and fell desperately in love. She did not return his advances and he wrote her a poetic letter in which he says destiny came out in mathematical terms, since she had beauty and wealth and he had love and hope and genius. The sum was five. But alas ! Valerie answers, ' ' In this case two and three do not make five. ' ' The encouraging thing about the sensational imagina- tion is that though pruning is suggested, there is really something there to prune. Let us cite two more ex- amples from a young romanticist to whom facts (includ- ing those of orthography!) are stranger than fiction. Let us give her an exchange of messages between Sybil and Leonard, thus: SYBIL. — Fantastic dreams disturb my rest; my mind is tortured by visions of gaunt and grisly specters; you alone possess the philter that will charm away these wraiths. — Leonard. 14 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES LEONARD.— It is strange that you should be tortured so ; nevertheless, even If I can charm away the ogres. I do not know that you deserve it. — Sybil. The Man — Tall, slender, deep-blue eyes; high fore- head, from which is combed back waivy light brown hair. Leonard is yet young; and has not learned the ways of the many people in this world. He still goes to school, and it is at a dance that he has met the charming butterfly Sybil. Naturally like many young people he thinks all she has told him is true ; he has willed himself to fall madly in love with the fair damsel. He is extremely dramatic, high-minded, and in future years will be a benefit to society. But as yet his education is not set, and he rather wishes to show that he can be above the average ; he is well read and intelligent but has not learned the ways of girls. The Girl — Sybil; dressed in a pale pink evening- gown, her slender figure is very attractive ; her soft rosey cheeks are surrounded by beautiful fluffy well-curled- and-puffed blonde hair; her baby-blue eyes are bright and sparkling, giving her a much brighter look than she really deserves. Her baby-way, merry ringing laugh, constant flatter- ing, ever changing way of talking makes her very siren- ish. It is not Sybil's intention to be a faithful sweet- heart to one particular man ; she enjoys herself with all ; and blames herself not when some poor unwise fellow like Leonard takes seriously her thoughtless words. She, like the rest of the girls of to-day, is very modern. 4. The Generalizing Imagination. The inclination to deal in thought with the general, the type, instead of the particular or the individual, is a mental trait which has had momentous consequences in the development of THE MATHEMATICAL IMAGINATION 15 intelligence, since it has resulted in capacity to handle classes rather than specific instances, to think concep- tually instead of always in terms of individuals. In science, in philosophy, in business, it has enabled us to label things and then react quickly as suggested by the label. This is a case of scarlet fever, hence an occasion for establishing quarantine, writing out a certain pre- scription, giving disagreeable orders without being side- tracked by one's sympathies for the pretty girl whose complexion is under suspicion. All X is Y, all Y is Z, all X is Z, chants the logician, and of course he is right. All doctors are men, all men are fallible, all doctors are fallible, only we dislike put- ting Dr. Tom, Dick, and Henry together so undiscrim- inatingly. The most persistently generalizing types among men are the philosopher and the mathematician. It is im- possible to individualize a mathematical formula, so long as it stays in a text-book, minutely enough to tell the color of its hair or the length of its mustache. But when it has succeeded in escaping from the monograph we know exactly what Mr. A 2 + B 2 looks like ! The generalizing type of mind, however valuable in the workaday and scientific spheres, is not the most promising type for the maker of stories. Eemember Flaubert 's teaching of Maupassant. ' ' Having impressed upon me the fact that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two insects, two hands, or two noses absolutely alike, he forced me to describe a being or an object in such a manner as to individualize it clearly, to distinguish it from all other objects of the same kind." 16 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES If you find yourself inclined to classify Sweetie as "just any shop-girl," Skeine as the "usual crook," Sybil as the ' ' every-day flirt, ' ' take yourself in hand and train yourself, as Flaubert trained Maupassant, to see individuals, not types. 5. The Particularizing Imagination. This is the imagination that the successful writer of stories must have, that is, if he has the right kind! For one may particularize in the wrong way and be the reminiscen- tial individual, all whose imaginations are, so to speak, mere memories. Thus: My procedure in getting characters for Jasper and Sweetie was as follows: Whenever I hear names I in- stantly review my list of acquaintances and see them clearly if they have a similar name. Jasper I have de- scribed exactly as I saw him in reality ; in like manner came the girl-image Sweetie. I saw her the moment I saw the name just as she appeared when I worked in the same place with her. One may actually be so fettered by one's own past that he thinks it dishonest to make a good story better by changing the time, the place, or the girl. One should, of course, borrow from Life all that one can persuade Life to loan, but then one should put this capital out at interest. Never let your conscience interfere with literary profiteering. The individualizing imagination seeks to create a character or incident which shall be one of its kind: Jasper is standing by a table. He is dressed in a large black and white-checked suit. He has a high forehead, THE INVENTIVE IMAGINATION 17 not intellectually conditioned but due to the baldness which, is encroaching upon cerebral territory. He has dancy brown eyes and a foolish large mouth. He does not stand steadily upon his feet and is holding something too daintily between his fat thumb and forefinger. Or take this reaction to the item : THE AMALGAMATED AGONY ASSO- x CIATION will soon be wound up. Happy results expected shortly. — Terror. Billie Blowbummell, thirty-four years old, impatient, intractable, and changeable, has learned that his divorce proceedings will soon give him his freedom. He is at- tempting to communicate with Mrs. Billie No. 2, via press. Cautious, as well as impetuous, he would like to be discreetly indiscreet. He is large, fat, slow with a slight limp in one leg, which hesitancy of action is car- ried to his mental indecision and lands him in predica- ments in spite of his caution. He is proud owner of a peanut-stand, in his lucider intervals. If, in addition to individualizing characters, you find that your characters appear with a background and that they are doing something, you may feel greatly en- couraged. 6. The Inventive Imagination. One other trait be- sides that of the particularizing touch is essential to the literary imagination. There must be some measure of mental flexibility, * some possibility of invention, of striking out new combinations. Let us return to Jasper and Sweetie. Of two score individuals who characterized Jasper and Sweetie for me, only three departed from the conventional sex- 18 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES suggestion conveyed in the names and read something into the item other than a flirtation. Possibly success in characterization is more a matter of the creative individualizing touch, success in plot, of ingenuity and invention. Let us therefore turn to the message sent by Skeine to Feathers and gage the orig- inality of our returns. This message demands more invention to handle it at all and it is therefore not sur- prising to find that more reject it as unmeaning and declare themselves incapable of weaving a plot around it. Yet even here we find much community of ideas. The most common interpretation is one of communication between accomplices in crime, the prevailing idea being that a robbery is incubating. "One on the left" desig- nates the house or the box or the man who is to be victimized. Next in favor is the theater story. Feathers now becomes the vampish chorus-girl, in the garb of a pea- cock or skirted with ostrich-plumes, and Skeine is com- municating to her the one to be watched, either the domestic encumbrance in the box "on the left" or the fatuous millionaire to the left of the cold-blooded Dives. Other interpretations include an auction story in which the object that is to be bid in is the "One on the left"; or the story of a man-milliner's attempt to sell to the fabulously rich lady the hat "on the left"; or a business story and the purchase of the oil-well on the left. A humorous story — rara avis — is suggested; an assault by Feathers on Skeine 's enemy on the left. But Feathers' sense of direction is confused by his ap- proach to the scene and he beats up the wrong man! THE SOUND OF A NAME 19 Again, since the girl walks on the left, this cryptic mes- sage refers to the girl in the case, who is in the wrong, but the man gets left, a suggestion which in turn needs interpretation. Of course plausibility as well as originality needs to be graded in these reactions. Originality without plausi- bility lands us in the fantastic, just as plausibility with- out originality lands us in an amplification of the obvious. As a side-light upon how your imagination functions, it is well worth your while determining where your characters and plots come from, by what working of association they are called out. "Feathers," one of my collaborators writes, "a float- ing bit of material, consequently one not held down to regular work or by conventions. ' ' "Skeine, a continuous thread, often tangled in un- winding, suggests deceit.' ' Experiment shows that there are individuals so sensi- tive to the tiny arabesque of curves and angles or phonetic values that make up a name, that they actually have suggestive power. Only — and here 's the rub in application — there is little agreement even among those keenly sensitive to the facial profile of a word. Pre- occupation with word-physiognomy is evidenced in the report I am now quoting: My process of reaction is as follows : The sound of the names suggests the pictures. Sweetie and Jasper are both light-headed, the long "e" .sound of the former suggesting greater degree of near-imbecility than the short "a" of Jasper. The single syllable (nearly) of )5 20 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES the first name suggests a short figure ; the delayed enun- ciation of the second a taller one (just as it takes longer to raise eyes to a tall figure). No. 1 is impetuous; No. 2 is conservative, even-tempered (name is almost spondaic) and has depth (production of "a" in throat and "p by lips), therefore wide change — gives character a sort of second dimension. One question can only be stated here, but it is worthy of thoroughgoing investigation. I refer to the distinc- tion between spontaneous and deliberate invention and to the question whether the former is a mark of the creative imagination. With the evidence at hand it is, I think, very rash to conclude that the floating into consciousness of plots or the sudden introduction to lively characters is the only guarantee of an imagination worth working. Apparently some imaginations do most of their work below the threshold of consciousness and others do their drudgery in full daylight awareness, and the only thing that counts from the literary point of view is the results. In any case there can be no question that plot-making and character-making grow by practice and that one can acquire the habit of having inspirations. It is as an aid in the acquisition of such a good habit that we are appending a number of Personals, with suggestions as to the various uses to put them to. You can do your mental gymnastics and conduct your self-examination at the same time. (1) First of all, you should discover whether you more naturally go from characters to plot or from plot to char- acters. Do you start from the names and their suggest TRY IT YOURSELF 21 tion of personalities or from the message with its sugges- tion of incident? Plot-making and character-feeling draw their vitality from somewhat different roots, and knowing which tendency is the stronger in yourself you are better able to use your talent effectively. (2) To test the fertility of your imagination it is well to determine how many plots you can get out of one and the same message, or how many Personals you can find plots for in a given time. (3) By working over the messages as a group-exercise or pastime, it is possible to get a notion of one 's common- placeness or originality in invention. We have already suggested that nine out of ten hit upon the obvious in- terpretation. What do you do ? Undoubtedly there are times when the obvious interpretation gives one the most interesting story of all. Never to catch the hint that is conveyed to the average reader might put in question one's rapport with human nature. Common- sense realism has a big place in literature and too fantastic invention might well land one in manifest absurdity. (4) Ingenuity may be further stimulated by weaving a plot about several messages taken together. They may or may not be connected on the face of it. Here are two that are : FRED. — Any soap, any candles? — San- aa EAR LITTLE FRIEND.— Does Omar U XXXII state the position 21st March, 920?— A. P- MAR XXXII.— I don't think it does somehow. — Pauline. Of course you hasten to pull out your Omar and find that Verse XXXII reads: There was the Door to which I found no Key, There was the Veil through which I might not see; Some little talk a while of Me and Thee There was — and then no more of Thee and Me. (5) To exercise the imagination in controlled inven- tion one may give the message with a particular sugges- tion, ' * Get a tragedy out of this ; a comedy out of that. ' ' Or ' ' Let this Personal he the introduction or the climax of a short-story." The giving of negative suggestion is another way of stimulating the imagination. Thus ' ' This is not a detec- tive-story " ; ' ' This is not a flirtatious message " \ ' ' Don 't look for a code in the message." The late Professor Royce of Harvard University once reported a most interesting experiment on the psychology of invention, in the course of which he used what he called the " stimulus of the unlike." He asked for a design as unlike the copy as possible. Invention proved to be definitely fertilized just by the attempt to be different. New schools in their effort to be different have sometimes produced extremely bizarre and fantastic NEGATIVE SUGGESTION 23 works of art which have nevertheless fertilized the con- ventional art of their epoch. So our Personalities may be used with some such negative suggestion. Choose a very obvious item as "So it was only a wonderful dream after all," and ask for a story in which plot and characters shall depart as far as possible from the one suggested. To show what reactions one of these Personals may arouse in a group I add one of the letters received in response to the first publication of the method: San Francisco. Dear Dr. Downey: I want to tell you how much I enjoyed your article in the "Independent" of May 20, 1921. Last evening I recalled some of the ads at the dinner-table and decided to try one of them on the group assembled. I selected the most promising fellow (at least the one I thought would be most promising) and said, "Charles! I want to test your power of imagination. The following ad appeared in the personal column of a London paper : 'Jasper. — Tick-tock, tick-tock. — Sweetie.' Tell me about Jasper and Sweetie, and give me the story connected with the ad." I had scarcely finished speaking when Charles began : "Jasper is a man about thirty-five years of age. If he were younger, Sweetie would have called him * Jaspie' or 'Jasp.' Sweetie is nineteen, rather adventurous and the daughter of a well-to-do man who strenuously objects to his daughter receiving attentions from any men. He in fact keeps her so closely guarded that she has great difficulty in leaving the house. "The house in which the girl lives with her father is an old-fashioned rambling dwelling with a heavy paneled oak door and a large, rather dark hall with a 24 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES grandfather's clock in one end of it. Access to the father's study can be gained through a narrow passage- way leading off the hall. An inlaid oak floor covers both the hall and passageway. In front of the grandfather's clock is a rug. The girl is in the habit of spending the long evenings curled up in a cozy nook of the hall, reading. ' ' Sweetie met Jasper at some school-girl function, but I omit his explanation here. He went on : "It was Sweetie's idea that at half -past seven each night Jasper should noiselessly slip through the front door into the hall, to meet her, and should her father approach Jasper was to jump into the grandfather's clock and there remain until called out by her gentle call, l Tick-tock, tick-tock. ' The plan worked admirably, and the lovers were always warned of the approach of the father by his heavy footfalls on the inlaid flooring of the passageway. "One night the couple quarreled and Sweetie told Jasper that she never wished to see or speak to him again. Two long days tortured their way through life, and on the morning of the third day, while shopping, she called at the office of the newspaper and inserted the ad. Jasper saw it and at seven-thirty, etc., etc." Some one else, a lady of about forty, spoke up after Charles had finished, and said : ' ' That 's a very clever imagination you have, but I think there is no doubt as to the correct interpretation of the ad. ' Tick-tock, tick- tock,' certainly means two o'clock, and the people con- cerned were two very ordinary people who had agreed upon that plan of telling each other when they would meet. The place was always the same." Two of the boarders agreed with this speaker, one JASPER AND SWEETIE 25 emphasizing the explanation by saying that it certainly was the logical solution of the " problem.' ' I want to thank you for having furnished a most enjoyable dinner. I intend to try it out on others later. How would you class Chariest J. E. D. CHAPTER ni THE INTEBPRETATION OF A PERSONAL There are two ways of working out the meaning of a "Times" Personal: (1) the impressionistic, (2) the analytical. The impressionistic mind may catch the hint from the names and wording and work out the idea according to his own fancy regardless of the probability of its correctness. The analytical mind will endeavor to deduce the actual facts from the clues contained in the item itself. The impressionistic mind needs no prompting, so let us consider the method of analysis. The first point that arouses one's curiosity is why the advertisement was published at all. The minimum charge for an insertion in the Personal column of the "Times" is ten shillings. This is for two lines, and each additional line costs five shillings. This at the normal rate of exchange means nearly $2.50 at the least and perhaps $3.75 or more. Now a letter can be sent for a penny and a telegram for sixpence, and a conversation costs nothing. A London telephone is highly inconvenient but can be used in an emergency. So why advertise? Evidently because the ordinary channels of communication are closed. This opens various avenues of speculation. One possibility would be that the said party of the first part does not 26 LOST ADDRESSES 27 know the address of the said party of the second part. .That is obviously the case with the following: HHODDY. — If you are anywhere in this - 1 - wide, wide world write immediately to game address you left. — Jamie. DX\[ T -Toronto. No letter— Please write. — Dad A A — Come home at once; urgent.- Mother CYNTHIE, dearest, your absence is dis- tressing us; write to us immediately, that we may know you are well. — Mother. pYNTHIE.— You will be sorry by and by, ^ and then it will be too late to remedy things ; be honest with yourself now, and look facts squarely in the face. — Sidney. JOB.- Communicate with me. — Fred. -REGENT'S PARK, Sunday last, white - L * / gloves and violets. Will tall, fair lady enter Regent's Park Sunday next, same hour, same gate, to meet worshiper of beauty? If impossible, kindly fix other flay and hour, signing street where first met.— Tophat. T ADD IE. — Come home at once, you fool- ±J ish boy ; we don't want to spend an unhappy Xmas. — Pater and Mater. If it is a message of affection we may surmise that the lover has been forbidden the house and the stern father, acting on the authority conferred by British law, inter- cepts his letter. Or it may be the lady returns his 28 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES letters unopened and he hopes to catch her eye involun- tarily. Sometimes a lover who has left for parts un- known is appealed to by the girl he left behind him. If it is necessary to advertise why choose the " Times"? It is the most expensive of English dailies and has not the widest circulation. On the other hand it is the best-known and highly esteemed and is to be found in every British club and in reading-rooms all over the world. Its selection as a medium of communi- cation implies a certain class standing in the hierarchy of British society for the two parties coming into com- munication. Then, too, the Personal column in the front page of the " Times" is a unique and historic institution. It is without a rival though it has many imitators. A prominent New York paper some years ago started a Personal column of this sort but it was suppressed by the police because it was used for immoral purposes. The London " Times 's" column is carefully guarded. This was especially the case during the war. The Ger- mans took particular pride in keeping the London " Times" on display in the cafes and news-stands, when it could be procured, as a contrast to the British and American policy of suppressing German papers. Here was an obvious channel of communication with enemy countries by code, and many patriotic Britishers wrote to the editor or to the Government demanding the sup- pression of the Personals. These indignant protests must have been amusing to the British Intelligence Office which was using the column as a bait to German spies and ran down every unauthenticated person who offered an advertisement. On the other hand the " Times" was CODES AND CRYPTOGRAMS 29 extensively used by parents in communicating with their boys in the trenches and it often happened that a mes- sage published in the Personal column reached the soldier more quickly and surely than a letter or telegram. In time of peace there is no objection to code adver- tisements, and if we want to find out what a particular Personal really means we must consider the possibility of it« being a blind. The most romantic item may cover a commercial transaction. For instance: "TVAMOZEL. — Bver longing for news. - L/ Won't you write? Ever true: lore; merry Xmw. — Baby. may be a notification to a chain of apothecary-shops throughout the United Kingdom to raise the price of soap. Or this quotation from " Mother Goose'': WAGGLES.— "The little dog laughed to see such sport." — Bernard. may be the instructions of a broker to his agents to sell Marconi short. But such cryptograms need not bother us if we do not care to find out the truth but only to arrive at a plausible and interesting surmise. Let us then consider the conditions under which this newspaper correspondence is conducted. Here are two people who want to communicate with each other — or at least one person who wants to communicate with another — and the ordinary channels of speech, post and tele- graph are for some mysterious reason unusable. They must therefore send a private message through a public medium. It is as though they were imprisoned in second-story rooms on opposite sides of the street and 30 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES had to shout their secrets over the heads of the passers- by. The message then must be so worded that it will be intelligible only to one person out of the thousands who may see it. How shall it be addressed? Initials are often used but have the disadvantage that several other persons may have the same letters and so the advertiser gets what in the telephone exchange is called the l ' wrong number." Occasionally we find in the Personal column a frantic protest that the message of, say, W. S. B. to C. E. was answered by a wrong C. E. and needs to be contradicted. The use of Christian names is almost as ambiguous. For instance : t ACK. — Please remember your promise last November. Very ill. — Rosy. More than one Jack may have forgotten his promise of last November and neglected his Rosy. Let us hope that they are all conscience-stricken by this piteous appeal. When a Silent Worshiper appealed to a Shy Lady for permission to approach, no less than three shy ladies asked for particulars, two of these advertisements ap- pearing in the same issue of the ''Times": SILENT WORSHIPER.— Was shy lady in members' friends' pavilion at Lord's on Monday and Tuesday? WHERE did Silent Worshiper meet Shy »» Tnrtv last timp? WILL Silent Worshiper give date of last meeting? Uncertain identity. — S. L. THE WIGHT IN GRAY 31 It is evident from the following that there were more than one pair of Laughing Eyes directed at some Wight in Gray : T ArGHING EYES.— Oh! bmr could y»n?| Wight in Gray. THE WIGHT IN GRAY thanks the ier- A eral pairs of Langhinz- -7r= :':r their manifest interest in him, but regrets that his absence in the country for a few days prevents Tittp from re - : ■:::■:■?. Apparently the Wight in Gray was so mneh tickled by the various bites at his hook that he tried it again with a new bait : \fISS BI*UB MIST.— I, in mT garret all - LlLL forlorn, think of my ladye fayxe, and wenld wonder if she thinks of me. and wonder if she cares. — The Wight in Gray. Doubtless this plea softened the hearts of various ladies in gauzy-blue garments toward their gray-clothed ad- mirers. Messages addressed to Sweetheart, Dearest, or their French equivalent can hardly be classed as " Personal " since they may be accepted by many others than the one to whom they were intended. Such ambiguous addresses lead to complications like the following : ° aWKHTHBABT mine. Loving kisses. Ever thine. 32 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES EVER GRATEFULLY.— Was the message to SWEETHEART on the 10th from you, cheri? I did not reply before because I cannot be sure. But should it have been, then I understand, for that explains; and I do believe and will willingly forgive you everything. Only you must learn never to distrust me any more; it hurts us both, and you know you have always found that you were wrong. Promise me; and don't be afraid of anything. — Yours. CHERI.— If you will only own the truth, dear, then believe me everything will come out right. There is nothing to fear, for I do understand, though it may not an so. If you doubt me again because of what has happened remember it alters nothing of what I have already told you. Circumstance drove me, but I have never really doubted you. Will you not end this misunderstanding without waiting any more? The days we never can recall are slipping so fast. — Cherie. CHERI.— I wonder if my Mr. Man. What initials? If correct, will write.— Red Rose. SILENCE not mine entirely, have written, which you ignored. Shall not write again. If you care, write Box H. 805, The Times. E. C. 4.— Cheri. DEAREST.— How can I write to you, knowing neither your name nor ad- dress ? — Cheri. Often the communication must be kept secret, not only from the public but from the family or associates of the person addressed, and in such cases the use of real names, initials, or known nicknames is impossible. But here advantage may be taken of the curious fact that in cases of intimacy and affection secret nicknames are likely to come into use. Brothers and sisters, school BABY TALK 33 chums, lovers and married couples, parent and child, any two persons who are much together and love one another may acquire pet names that are somehow regarded as too sacred to be revealed to the outside world. In folk- lore such secret names play a prominent part, and in certain savage tribes young men who have sworn brother- hood adopt private names that they alone know. Sometimes two friends gradually develop what is vir- tually a code language of their own out of their common experiences and constant intercommunication of thought. But long association is not necessary to acquire nick- names or a set of catchwords that only the two know. They may have merely met and exchanged badinage for half an hour and yet have felt that sudden sense of intimacy and mutual understanding which in extreme cases ii called "love at first sight/ ' If then they are separated they might easily communicate through the public press without having arranged a formal code. A large proportion of the private names disclosed in these Personals are diminutives or pet names, the sort that one would apply to a child. This is based on the psychological law that strong emotion is likely to find expression in infantile forms of speech. A violent shock or emotional crisis may drive one momentarily into in- fantile babbling. Lovers are likely to resort to " baby- talk' ' in conversation or correspondence. This is not a sign of weak-mindedness as the unsympathetic eaves- dropper may infer. Dean Swift's love-letters are full of baby-talk and he was not weak-minded. A man is inclined to take a paternal attitude toward his sweet- heart and she finds delight in "mothering" her "big 34 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES boy." A fascinating lady of my acquaintance, who has been much bothered by being made love to by all sorts and conditions of men, once explained to me how she knew when they were becoming serious: "I don't mind what they say until they begin to call me 'little woman'; then I put a stop to it." A very few samples will suffice, for somehow such baby-talk does not sound so charming to the outsider as to the participants: JANE.— Oi do loike oo. T INDA.— Now haughty, then coy, what '■ ±J a poor fellow to do-o-o? — Jack-in-the- Green. TyTAUD.— Your big baby asks.— H. Mere analysis of the names may give us a clue or set our imagination going. But even pet names are not so original and exclusive as their inventors suppose: MOUSIE— Too bad of you; shall try th« More than one dominant male has called his sweet- heart "Mousie." SPHINX, your riddle is nearinr solution. — M. L. K. Any woman is a sphinx to the opposite sex. ONYX AND YOU 35 O NYX. — Thanks sweet note. It was like a dream and I never felt happier. ONYX. — Very many thanks, dear; need your lore and confidence more than ever. Don't write till I let you know; all my love always. YOU. — Received all your letters. You fix your date and I will do utmost ar- range. Let me know soon. Delighted. — Dear. YOU.- ful. With you always. Suspense fear- Was message Onyx yours? — M. YOU.— Delighted. Will meet you, all be- ing well, at station. Thanks two let- ters. — Dear. ONYX. — You are a dear to send such sweet notes. I shall never change be- cause you are wonderful and make me very happy. I wonder if my day will really come. — A. M. L. Here evidently the wires crossed owing to the fact that "onyx" is not a rare stone with either sex and many a "dear" has found no name so adequate for the loved one as "you." There was once a popular song with the refrain: "You ask me why I love you? Because you 're you," which is about as near as anybody could come to analyzing this intangible attraction. Books afford a convenient code of communication. Literature holds a mirror up to life, and later lovers than Paolo and Francesca have found themselves re- 36 PLOTS AND PEKSONALITIES fleeted in a book. From the following it is evident that some folks still read Dickens, Du Maurier, Omar Khay- yam, and Miss Alcott, as well as Shelley and Shakspere : LITTLE WOMEN.— Meet me Holborn Empire any afternoon, 2:15, to see- Twins. — Meg and John. O RLANDO — Yes.— Miranda. DICK.— Hail to thee, blythe spirit, bird thou never wert! — Chuckie. CHORT— Need not be in vain if you do ° that which is right.— Codlin. T ITTLE BILLEE — You tease me, to try ■" me, but T shall be found watching and waiting.— Trilby. TRILBY. — A noble resolve; may you have strength to carry it out. — Little Billee. TRILBY. — Somehow or other, the wheels won't go round. — Little Billee. SEPTEMBER.— Yes, dear; I think Omar ~ 37 quite right. — April. __ CHESHIRE.— Why will you fly from m© and misunderstand my letter? Read Omar LXXIII. For I have loved you from April to September. EIDDLES FROM THE RUBAIYAT 37 T— DEAR: Read O. 73. It CAN be done! • Our "sorry scheme" is but a tangle of misunderstandings. I can explain every- thing that 's nuzzled you, if you '11 give me a real chance. I 'm to blame for much ; but truly I 've never meant to let you down. I think the beginning of all this was the omission of the accent from "pass6" and all my consequent stupid mis- reading. Forgive, dear, will you? But in using the "Rubaiyat" as a code-book it is necessary to see that the two have the same edition. The stanza referred to is XCIX in my Vedder-Fitzgerald. Also when you write in French look out for your ac- cents, otherwise you may be endowed with an unwar- ranted "past." Some of these Personals are decidedly personal and reveal the emotions and character of the advertiser with great clarity : T BT IT BE KNOWN TO THE LADIES 1 - i (?) with ugly lap-dog in Haymarket, 11:20 Dec. 1st, that the mere man who, through being entangled in Marcus's lead, causing the "little dear" pain, got home safely, with the aid of some pins, kindly given him by some of their better bred fellow creatures. THE art of "scrounging" apparently still exists, but the Cinema Commissionaire who took the Army officer's hat in mistake for his own at the Junior Turf Club last week will save the advertiser a lot of em- barrassment if he will write to Box X, 372, The Times, E. C. 4. VT\ —You may consider it very smart •-*--'• to interfere in other people's af- fairs, but one of these times somebody's big brother will appear on the scene, and then look out for squalls. — F. 38 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES — I know now why I was made to look • foolish ; that inane vanity would have driven you to do such a despicable thing, I should never have believed had I not witnessed it myself. They say once bitten twice shy, and I shall take my lesson to heart. — Good-by. — PL Here is a paragraph with punch to it TO the smirking, top-hatted rogue who departed with my hard-earned win- nings at Epsom on Friday. I have a good memory for a face and usually get my penny back on the punching machine. In the following case even a reader with a very drill imagination will have no difficulty in getting a mental picture of the advertiser : WHY not a "FATTY"— (Englishman) ? I am over 20 stone. Would any one like to film me? If so, write to Box T, 292, The Times. The Personal puzzles are made more confusing and therefore more fascinating by the fact that they are fragmentary. Sometimes we have only one side of the correspondence, which is like overhearing a Personal at the telephone. One of the two may be able to write, but cannot receive letters. Sometimes an outsider cuts in on the correspondence, either by mistake or mischief. For instance: OLIVER.— Some knave spoke in thy name. — Praisp-l-h#»-T,r>rrt. The fundamental requisite of a story-teller is the habit of speculation about people. The people he PLOTS FROM STREET-CARS 39 on the street-cars — where one sees all sorts of people — who are they? What are they thinking about? What are they doing ? What would they do under other con- ceivable but curious circumstances ? What if the casual and incongruous couple sitting side by side on the oppo- site seat were thrown together on a desert island, or joined together in the bonds of matrimony? A frag- ment of a conversation overheard by chance haunts him till he thinks up a situation naturally involving it, just as an unresolved chord annoys the musical mind. As the elevated train speeds by a window he catches a stage-setting that makes him wonder what the rest of the drama may be. The * 'Times" Personals are like such window snapshots, tantalizing glimpses of real life, set up in secret code that adds to the fascination. There is a hundred-dollar short-story, salable to some one of our fiction magazines, in any of these two-line advertisements if one has the knack of unraveling its mystery : ■pRIDAY— So it was only a wonderful - 1 - dream after all. Good-by, dear. — B. What was the dream of Man Friday — or is it Woman Friday? GYfiT —Foiled again; we will yet make •''•the welkin ring with a joyous madrigal. — Sumatra. How was George Washington — if that is his name — foiled, and why should the Sumatran — I wonder what his color is — want to make the welkin ring with a madrigal ? 40 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES ARKANSAW — Poor Bear. Don't under- stand, but we 're one always — now and evermore. — A. L. What happened to the Arkansaw Traveler and what is it that A. L. does not understand ? pLINY. — Your quips and jests may seem - 1 - harmless enough to you, but recollect there are some to whom they are as a poisoned dart. "Why should that reputable Latin author be accused of malicious jesting? [T seems to me 'tis only noble to be good. — Laughing Eyes. NITA. — Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air. — Mooltan. Laughing Eyes and Mooltan appear to be familiar with Bartlett's " Quotations, ' ' but why do they adver- tise the fact? IF lady lunching, Midland, Birmingham, 23rd, afterwards 2:55 P.M., Paddington, in Black Musquash, Opossum collar, single pearl third finger right hand, mentioned names Adkins and Wilson, communicate Box V. 608, The Times, will receive some- thing her advantage. V. 608 must have stared hard at the lunching lady to describe her furs so accurately. 'THJLIP.— Don't get cold feet!— Nicholas. I should say a tulip was the last thing in the world to get cold feet. SKELETONS AND SAURIANS 41 DOUBLE, S. Kensington, morning- of 6th, much regrets his honesty. — Box V. 958, The Times. Apparently Mr. S. S. Kensington has found that honesty is not the best policy. WOULD any one POSSESSING SKELE- TON, and having no use for same, kindly LEND it to TWO STUDENTS who are unable to buy? Every one carries a concealed skeleton, not counting what he may have in his closet, but he is not likely to lend it to the two poor students so long as he lives. >1\TELIA.— Play a little music in the i-T-L hand — T>rvnr1 band. — Dryad. "Never heard such musical a discord, Such - sweet thunder. — Echo. But Echo does not echo his "Midsummer Night's Dream" as accurately as an echo should. GENUINE OFFER BRONTOSAURUS.— Four ex-infantry officers will UNDER- TAKE an EXPEDITION in SEARCH of the ABOVE REPTILE provided expenses are paid by wealthy interested person. — W. G., The Times. This was published when the papers were discussing the possibility of living specimens of prehistoric saurians being found in Africa. ELSIE.— Simply must resume Wester- marck. Not afraid of Marie or any- body like her. And Clara has a lily for you. — Edith. 42 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES The story of this Personal may be found in " Those About Trench," by Edwin Herbert Lewis. After you have worked out your own version, compare it with that of the novel. At the end of the book will be found other Personals for practice. e. e. s. CHAPTER IV TRAINING THE LITERARY IMAGINATION Some one once wrote a charming short-story of a professional writer whose days and nights were haunted by a panicky fear of his running some day out of story plots and starving in a garret. He became a miserly author and doled out his plots with a sparing hand, unaware that the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was especially addressed to those who do the work of the spirit and that he need only concern himself with gath- * ering up the fragments after each editorial dispen- sation. In literary invention the only way to acquire a capital is to put your talent out at interest. One must use the little he possesses if he would get more. In the pages that follow we purpose to give numerous gymnastic exercises for the imagination. My present purpose is to give some general advice and to point a few morals, as follows : Acquire the proper mental sets, even at the cost of / much practice. Get rid of your inhibitions, even though this require a number of visits to a modern mental surgeon or your best friend. 43 44 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Cultivate your emotions without undue fear of a broken heart or of lacerated vanity. Develop a self-conscious technie. Find out what starts your mind working ; learn where the electric but- f ton is located that turns on your mental illumination or explodes your sky-rockets. Capitalize your limitations. Experiment with social stimulation, not in the old fashion of boring any acquaintance by reading him your last effusion, but by writing something with him and defending with temper your adjective against his verb, your heroine against his hero. Let us amplify our good advice. Acquire the plot-making set of mind. Such a pattern- ing of consciousness may be very deliberately developed by proper exercise if one starts with a modicum of capacity. One may learn to expand the conversation overheard on the street-car into a whole novel ; one may acquire skill in persuading the story-book girl seen on the subway into returning to her home between cloth covers by issuing the invitation again and again. One may indeed acquire the habit of having inspirations as one cultivates a taste for olives by a little initial hero- ism. In a number of cases I have had a chance to watch the plot-making set develop in students, in spite of the Unfavorable conditions attendant upon a routine college course and limitations in the way of time. Usually Within two years one can begin to notice considerable increase in facility and fertility in plot-construction. What might be accomplished by further extension of time I do not know, since college authorities with their well-known wrong-headedness reverse the logical pro- GET RID OF SELF DISTRUST 45 cedure and invite the poor instead of the good student to repeat the course ! I have considerable faith in sheer exercise developing plot-invention but much less confidence in forcing char- acter-creation by deliberate effort. The latter is rooted so deeply in the instinctive life that its development cannot be directed rationally. At most, one can counsel a rich experience, the getting into contact with the greatest possible varieties of human personality. The Game of Personalities is therefore strongly recom- mended. The fact that its material is taken from life makes pondering the Personals and similar documents a real exercise in human motives. Inhibit Inhibitions. There is a possibility of the scientist carrying on some really valuable investigation for the literary man and determining experimentally what mental sets have an inhibitory effect one upon the other. If the attitude of suspended judgment and infinite caution inhibits confidence in one's inspirations let us recognize the dangers of scientific training for the poet. If psychologizing inhibits dramatizing, let us psychologize with discretion. If, on the other hand, inhi- bition of any particular mental set be due to ignorance of possibilities in the way of manipulating different sets of mind, let us discover the proper methods of manipula- tion. If necessary we may emulate "William Sharp and fuse our critical tendencies into one personality and our poetical into a Fiona MacLeod, or at least adopt a stimulating pen-name. One of the strongest forces inhibiting creative work is self -distrust. Few realize that just being one's self is 46 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES the likeliest way of achieving originality. Most of us lack nerve enough to be ourselves. We find it safer to live within inverted commas. How very great our unused possibilities are we may never realize until the brakes are thrown off by some strange accident of the spiritual life or by the momentary intoxication of wine or hypnotism or love. If we could discover a scientific and harmless method by which we could let ourselves go at will many of us might change from conventional every-day people into charming Patience Worths. If the ouija-board be the best method of manipulating such transformation, by all means let us adopt it as a training instrument for the literary imagination! James, apropos of his famous suspicions as to the range of human energies, has indicated in his delightful fashion the checking of activity by various forms of inhibition. Social conventions prevent us from telling the truth after the fashion of the heroes and heroines of Bernard Shaw. Our scientific respectability keeps us from exer- cising the mystical portions of our nature freely. Women especially suffer from the inhibitions imposed by social beliefs. The smile of polite incredulity that greets any claim of a woman's understanding mascu- line psychology accounts possibly for the failure of many women novelists in the creation of convincing men characters. They just haven't dared trust their own reading of their own dual nature. With men it has worked differently. The authorities on feminine LIE DOWN TO IT 47 psychology are all, or nearly all, men; and a great many women understand themselves only because they have been explained to themselves by their wise brothers, and lovers, and physicians. James suggests that we map out human possibilities, mental and physical, in every direction and then work out from biographical material the methods by which every type of man may be energized. The suggestion is worth following. Many of the minor eccentricities of genius appear to be the outcome of accidental discov- eries of ways of increasing brain activity. Rousseau and Shelley were given to exposing the bared head to the hottest of midday suns; and Whitman, says Dexter in "Weather Influences," wrote much of his "Leaves of Grass/ ' "while prone upon the white sands of a Long Island beach, with such a sun as only seems to blaze there/' The habit of writing in a reclining position is not uncommon. Such a position appears to have been fa- vored by Milton, Descartes, Leibnitz, Stevenson, Mark Twain, and others equally famous. Even the masculine propensity for elevating the feet above the head is shown to have an excellent reason back of it; the blood is kept where it is most needed. Many thinkers prefer a leisurely stroll to a Morris- chair, even though at times one must dismiss a com- panion in order to woo the muse, as Emerson did so politely; or drop one's ear-flaps as a gentle hint after Spencer's fashion. Walking one's thoughts not asleep but awake always calls to my mind Plato's description of Protagoras and his train of listeners. 48 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Nothing delighted me more than the precision of their movements ; they never got into his way at all ; but when he and those who were with him turned back, then the band of listeners divided into two parts on either side: he was always in front, and they wheeled round and took their places behind him in perfect order. Cultivate your emotions. Plato, Shakspere, Everyman are alike aware that the lover is kin not to the madman only but to the poet as well. He who sings no songs when under the influence of the passion of love will assuredly sing none at calmer moments. Certain geniuses appear to be as dependent upon love as stimu- lant to their creative activities as others are dependent upon drugs. Fear too may stimulate invention, as all of us can testify who have fled on a dark, lonely road from a fantastical monster that loped toward us from the shadows. The imaginative horrors of the future that worry can create are vividly realized by those of us who in spite of good advice from our neighbors persist in crossing bridges before we come to them. What we find on the other side does credit to our inventive capacity if not to our judgment. Anger may force our activities to the blossoming point. Rivalry — a mild form of the fighting instinct — is credited with much of the creative activity in business life. Art production is also an assertion of selfhood, an attempt to justify our having a place in the sun. Forced from one field of endeavor by native limitations we seek an outlet elsewhere. The boy whose physical weakness drives him from the foot-ball field may strive for mas- SELF-STARTERS 49 tery in the debate. The girl whose coquetry meets with a chilling response may substitute for it a flirtation on paper with an imaginary character. All this will be handled from another angle in the discussion of com- pensatory make-believe. The problem at present is how to develop emotional conflicts sufficient to furnish a driving force for creative work. A well-worn story-plot features the music-master who recommends a broken heart as a graduate course for the great prima donna. While recognizing the music- master's wisdom, I hesitate giving his advice to writers. There exists such a horde of the latter that the world might be drowned in tears as was Alice's famous "Wonderland. Moreover the details the method requires escape my imagination. Possibly the critic finds his function here. Locate your mind's electric button-. Many workers find their creative activity stimulated by excitement of the various sense-organs. The mind gives its chosen form to the material furnished by sensation. The rum- bling of a heavy train or the noises of a city street may translate themselves into music in the composer's con- sciousness; a cab rattling over cobble-stones was one composer's chosen stimulus. The humming of an aero- plane might well inspire a modern symphonist. Cloudy masses in the evening sky have blossomed into cherubs in the imagination of many a Raphael. Darwin found scientific reflections stimulated by music ; Wagner's sense of the dramatic was heightened by the presence of rich fabrics and colors. Schiller's inspirations were increased by the odor of rotten apples. 50 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES But it is not only the imagination of poets and artists and composers that is stimulated by sense-activity. We every-day mortals also have seen roses blossom in the glowing coals, golden cities shimmering in sunset skies, famous faces staring at us from picture-rocks. One of the duties of the motor-bus driver in the National Park tours is to exercise the tourist's imagination (and his neck) by mile-long admonition to behold crouching camels, skied cathedrals, Ford driving his car, Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation. The question that concerns us here is the possibility of handling such exercise systematically and developing a technic for scientific training of the imagination. For arousal of the visual imagination, I have found crystal-gazing valuable. The crystal-ball is widely used in occult circles as the medium for materializing sublim- inal knowledge, lost memories, and spirit-communica- tions. My employment is of course for a much more modest purpose, namely, to give substance and illusion- ary vividness to visual imagery. The ball is placed on a black background and the eyes focused steadily upon it. As attention fatigues, the ball grows nebulous and misty, and when the mists disperse visions appear. These visions arise from the deeps of one's own consciousness. They are an expres- sion of nothing supernatural except in so far as they reveal to us unknown possibilities in our nature. With the fatiguing of attention we are self -hypnotized and no longer hypercritical (which means death to our inspira- tions). An extended range is given to consciousness and images become hallucinatory. CRYSTAL GAZING 51 Personally I find the crystal an excellent device for obtaining landscape settings for imaginative work or for rendering visual memories more vivid. To cite an example from my experience: Desiring a fantastic image for a poem I gaze into the crystal and see there a great avenue with double rows of gigantic tapers stretch- ing through the night of an amazing jungle. The can- dles of civilization piercing dimly a strange and savage wilderness give me just the figure I desire. Shell-hearing emancipates some imaginations. It is similar in principle to crystal-gazing. The far-off mur- mur of the ocean becomes a stimulus for the auditory imagination which then gives it form as words or music. The following experiment, inadequately carried out, I report as suggesting a possible procedure : I chose as a subject a girl of great originality and strong auditory preoccupation to determine if possible whether she could be led to give poetic expression to her poetic ideas. Placing her in a comfortable position and instructing her to relax, I gave her a shell to hold at her ear and then read to her in a low voice poetry with an accentu- ated Swinburnian swing to it. My expectations were confirmed. After a while the vague murmur began to beat rhythmically in time with the poetry and occasion- ally the murmur shaped itself into words and phrases. When I ceased reading, the subject began to give in rhythmic form her reverie-ideas. The imagination may smell out inspiration. That odors are particularly potent in revival of emotional memories is a commonplace of popular psychology al- though experiment in the laboratory has failed to dis- 52 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES close any peculiar associative liveliness for odors. In literature, in any case, the use of odors as a means of summoning memories from the vasty deep has been used most effectively. The Sick-abed Lady recovers knowl- edge of her former life from a whiff of mingled ether and tobacco. A faint mignonette fragrance is the phan- tom presence in "The Witching Hour.' , The smell of blood haunts Lady Macbeth; and a loathsome odor al- most prohibits my reading of Kipling 's ' ' Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes." Zola is the great odorist of literature. He is said to characterize every personage by his smell. One is "like a great nosegay of strong scent"; another has a "good fresh perfume of autumn fruit." But do odors convey any definite suggestions of per- sonality or plot to the average person? I tried the following experiment : Two series of odors were selected with some care. The first series contained four odors chosen in the hope of effecting a humorous combination of smells. The second group was composed of three odors and thought by the experimenter to be a sentimental combination. The odors were numbered and presented to the subjects, one series at a time, in bottles uniform in size and shape. The instructions were as follows for each series: "Uncork each bottle in the order indicated by the num- bers. Inhale the odor passively. Allow it to suggest a personality. After getting a character suggestion from each odor, weave the personalities into a plot. ' ' Series I contained four odors as follows: (1) nitro- benzol; (2) mutton-tallow; (3) cloves; (4) asafetida. A MUTTON-TALLOW MAN 53 Dentistry, cosmetics, shoe-polish, candle and candy- making, and baking are associations called out by these odors ; hence by easy transition we get dentists, painted ladies, boot-blacks, and cooks in our odorous stories. Heavy and light odors, sickening and cooling ones suggest easy analogies with characters. A more subtle utilization of odors comes in the arousal of vague emo- tional suggestion. Mutton-Tallow is a hypochondriacal old man, rolled in cotton and clothes to protect himself from the weather, continually warming himself by the fire; or the owner of a candle-factory, wealthy but grouchy and heavy-set; or fat and wheezy. One can scarcely imagine Mutton-Tallow in a tight-fitting Nor- folk jacket ; he is bound to be formless because of excess of clothes or excess of flesh. Cloves appeals more to one's sense of comfort than to the eye. He is a busy producer of Life-Savers, careless of appearances, or a painless dentist. Interesting complications arise in bringing these com- monplace folk into a story-plot. One embryo writer does it as follows : No. 1 is a boot-black, with patched overalls, and dirty face ; No. 2 a wealthy, grouchy candle- manufacturer, fond of showing his authority; No. 3 an old-fashioned dentist ; No. 4 a stout woman, working in a pickle-factory, reduced, gingham-'clad. No. 1 is son of No. 4, run down* by No. 2 in his car near the office of No. 3, into which he is carried. No. 4 appearing on the scene of action threatens No. 2 with court action ; No. 2 reacts brutally and is skilfully anesthetized by No. 3, who sends for an officer and presents him with an enormous bundle. I pass over the plot-untangling. 54 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Series II was composed of the following odors: (1) faint heliotrope, (2) thyme, (3) bergamot. I considered it a sentimental series of odors and it actually did suggest to scentees the eternal triangular situation and somewhat similar developments. I had not erred in thinking Heliotrope and Bergamot were women. Helio- trope — delicately feminine, very fair, overly sweet, given to wearing flowered organdies and filigreed silver. Ber- gamot — a brunette, over-truthful and frank, who with cool candor confesses to No. 2 a past, delicately gray. Thyme — a very, very good man, hyperfastidious, affi- anced to No. 3 until her confession of school-girl flirta- tions and expurgated escapades estranges him and throws him into the arms of Heliotrope. The interesting outcome of the experiment with odors was the frequency with which Series I suggested humor- ous complications. Humorous stories are the rarest of varieties. Hence the suggestion is made that teachers of short-story writing try what they can do to stimulate humor by the use of odors. It would be perfectly pos- sible for directors of correspondence courses to send out as lesson-assignments scented powders wrapped in the immemorial powder fashion but to be taken mentally, instead of internally. Editors too might try the plan on their contributors. Who knows how much stimulation might be added to the already exciting check by having it scented? And rejection-slips, if properly perfumed, might suggest whole novels. Music hath charms that stir as well as soothe. That music frequently arouses the visual imagination is proved by many reports in scientific journals on its MUSICAL MOODS 55 potency in evoking lovely landscapes, dancing fairies, marching platoons. Moods may be summoned at will. Schumann said of one of Schubert's marches that it "brought visions of ancient Seville, with ladies and dons in high heels, with jeweled daggers, stepping in stiff, stately wise through the sunlit Spanish streets." Titles sometimes assist the halting musical imagination. But beware of mixing them. A young lady whose Vie- trola record carried, on one side "In a Clock Shop" and on the other "A Hunting Scene," frequently heard galloping steeds when she should have heard galloping clocks. But is music able to evoke stories and characterize personalities? Some auditors get linked episodes from music but the complications are simple ones, events being subordinated to mood and atmosphere. A few composers have written novels in measures or tried by motifs to suggest personalities. But, on the whole, music is only vaguely suggestive of individualized per- sonalities. It does not give you a bowing acquaintance with its dramatis personae. My students in fact usually stare at me blankly when I give them a musical phrase and ask for a personality in exchange. But for me the personality-suggestion in a musical phrase is very potent. Hum to yourself or play on the piano the following bars : You understand, I am sure, why the measures make me think of a garrulous lady who after a prolonged mono- 56 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES logue wonders why she is hoarse and on the verge of losing her voice. The indirect inspirational value of music in arousing creative activity is very great. Laboratory studies on stimulation of mental activity by music are in progress* encouraged by Mr. Edison, who is much interested in the psychology of music. Experiment with social stimulations. Stimulating the imagination by cooperative work is certainly worth try- ing. Many great art-products, notably cathedrals and dramas, are the outcome of composite creation. The Beaumont-Fletcher and Erckmann-Chatrian partner- ships are best known. But the teacher who wishes to develop a composite play or story should carefully think out the technic or procedure, otherwise the construction will fall like a house of cards at the first rude touch. The following points should be considered : How large may the group be that is to collaborate ? How should it be constituted ? What should be the plan of procedure? My own experience suggests limiting the number of collaborators to six or eight. Usually a few of the group will prove useful merely in fertilizing the inventive processes of one mind by those of another through the multiplication of associations and the general emotional stimulation due to social contact. The group will gradually decrease in size as work proceeds. In choosing the group in the first place one's subtlest knowledge of personalities must be employed. One is trying out a delicate sort of alchemy, getting individuals to work together. There are occasional individuals who cannot fuse their thoughts with those of others. Not that COOPERATIVE COMPOSITION 57 they are too original; only too individualistic. Their ideas may be too fantastic, too grotesque for others to follow. They should never be given a main part to write but may contribute an original bit here and there. Antagonistic personalities need not be shut out of this group. Often sparks fly when such personalities clash. One of the best composite stories I ever succeeded in getting written came from the conflict between a young man and woman who hated each other cordially. The plot developed tartly. The directing force throughout must be furnished by the leader, one with sufficient authority to keep the activity going and to direct it into other channels when it blocks in a given direction or flies off at too great a tangent. The leader should be able to fuse personalities and paragraphs, editing both as necessary. My procedure in composite play-writing is to get a group together and encourage the members of it simply to think aloud, give utterance to any plot-idea, however absurd it seems on the face of it, however foreign to any other. The first step is to get ideas flying abou«t in the fashion of social conversations. Social stimulation really avails in release of ideas. As leader in a group I entertain cordially each idea as it appears, attempting throughout to see how many of them may combine in a plot; how many of them merge naturally into a unit-scheme; which of them suggest distinctive characters; which of them suggest dramatic scenes. If the group is well known from the psychological side it is possible to solicit material from particular individuals in it. From one's visualist one 58 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES asks for suggestions as to setting, from one's humorist for humorous complications, and so on. After the first session the leader reduces the sugges- tions made to some sort of system; a plot is organized and read to the group for criticism, further suggestions, elaboration of characters, and the like. At this point members of the group begin to develop affection for different episodes or different characters that are in process of making and such preferences are noted. At this stage also some of the group drop out and only those whose interest is waxing go on with the work. The parceling out of the plot for development may be the next step or, possibly preceding it, the writing of character-sketches in order to fixate and render distinct the character-parts. Distinctive gifts and individual prepossessions must be considered in assigning plot- development — descriptive bits to one, dramatic scenes to another, transitional portions to a third, climaxes to a fourth. This mass of material goes finally to the leader for editing. Much of this work consists in blending mate- rial, erasing inconsistencies, adding necessary episodes, easing the shift from one style to another without losing the variety that gives charm to composite work, and in polishing paragraphs and ideas. The possibility of playing upon the creative activities of clever people and producing harmonious results is exceedingly fascinating. Very likely such social collab- oration accounts for many triumphs in the history of drama-writing which to-day we attribute to the solitary genius. j. e. d. CHAPTER V NAMES AND CLOTHES AS LITERARY ACCESSORIES If the fair Juliet had put her famous question "What 's in a name?" to the writers of " Times" Per- sonals she would have learned, as shown in a preceding chapter, that sometimes there is much — too much — in a name, and sometimes too little. Sometimes it gives you away when you don't want it to and sometimes it doesn't when you do. Even the modern psychologist could have pointed out the fallacy in Juliet's love-logic. He would have told her that neither Shakspere nor fate intended to conceal her lover when naming him. The wherefore of being Borneo is to be Borneo! A name is a focus of associations, hinting all manner of subtle relationships such as nationality, social level, professional affiliations, emotional symbolism, parents' hopes and ambitions and secret dreams. Consider the fine story of the Italian mother whose three sons were named Raphael, Angelo, and Leonardo. How inevitably that family nourished a famous sculptor! Or Robert Frost's poem "Maple" of a girl's and woman's hidden life centered around the parental secret symbolized by that most quaint of given names. A name is like a spot-light turned successively upon 60 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES each dramatic star in life's cast. In the hands of a skilful manipulator of stage effects it can work marvels. The individual who intends to achieve greatness should demand from his ancestors a name that sticks to the memory like a cockle-burr to a rough serge. For group- memory is as treacherous as is the memory of the indi- vidual and lets names slip from it after a casual intro- duction quite as unceremoniously. Therefore advertising devices must be applied to names of celebrities, just as they are to brands of breakfast-food or of preserved fruits. Those who hope to be much in the public eye must also consider the public's ear and seek the eupho- nious, the dignified, the rememberable name. It 's rather a pity that the advantage is given here to emancipated slaves, clever criminals, and quick-witted actresses who name themselves and that politicians and candidates for the Presidency may be penalized by their grandfathers. Yet Chance herself sometimes takes a hand in the game and gives a great candidate a name of traditional splendor or one with a twist to it that hooks the community memory. Industrial psychology has recently become interested in this matter of intriguing the public memory by choice of a name, say for a firm. Dr. Roback asks, for example, "If Smith and Stanft were to start business together, would it be more advantageous to have the names stand as they were just mentioned, or would it be more ad- visable to reverse the order and call the firm Stanft & Smith?" Feminists are asking similar questions about the naming of matrimonial firms. Experiment shows that with repetition the unfamiliar CHARACTER COGNOMENS 61 name becomes a more effective stimulus than a familiar one is; but that a familiar name may be used to keep the unfamiliar one in focus until repetition has had a chance to stamp in the latter. The investigator con- cluded "that a combination of names possesses a greater immediate memory-value if the more familiar component of the combination appears last, and the less familiar first." Stanft & Smith then is preferred by science to Smith & Stanft. From this long introduction it may be gathered that naming the children of one's fantasy is both an absorb- ing and an important matter. Not always, however, need writers go so far afield as Dickens with his Chuzzlewit, his Smangle, his Snevellici. Some interesting experiments have been carried out in the laboratory concerning this matter of naming charac- ters in fiction, but before reporting them let us call attention to some curious leads in the history of litera- ture, such for example as the Victorian use of skeleton- ized words in place of names, quite like an up-to-date mental test of the poor reader! In such novels Lady Gw-n-ver flirts with Lord La-ce-t or the Countess W — k condescends to the Tr-oad\-r. Royalty itself may be introduced into fiction in this discreet way with no danger of lese-majesty, and through the tattered dis- guise one may inspect the gold mantle and the purple hose. Our treatment of modern rulers is somewhat less gentle. Instead of skeletonizing them we pad them alphabetically with malice aforethought; we have our Vanderghouls and our Asiorbilts. Simple-hearted novelists have frequently indulged in 62 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES broad hints to their readers in naming a character. They have no desire to deceive us about Mr. Stout or Mr. Glum. Trollope, particularly, was a model of truthfulness. Meet Dr. Proudie and his magnificent lady, just recently become Bishop of Barchester. Of course Dr. Proudie was not the man to allow anything omitted that might be becoming to his new dignity; and of course Mrs. Proudie was "habitually authoritative." No need for Trollope to tell us — though he insists upon it — that Mrs. Quiverful has "fourteen unprovided babies' 7 ! We might have guessed so much though not perhaps so many. Particularly happy was Trollope 's christening of the great London doctors Sir Lambda Mewmew and Sir Omicron Pie. Something cryptic and intriguing be- longs by right to the letters of the Greek alphabet. So much every college student learns in college, and that too without taking the old-fashioned classical course. Only nowadays Lambda Mewmew suggests a different diagnostic method and Omicron Pie a more deadly form of surgery. The humorist, by intention or otherwise, has of course hit upon the device of misapplying names, using left- handed hints, as it were. The big lady is named Tiny; the little piccaninny christened George Washington Napoleon; the lively Spaniard miscalled MacPherson, Explanations are then in order and so one makes easy descent to the story. The "Times" Personals throw considerable light on the motives that operate in the unsophisticated when giving or assuming a name ; they are worth careful study NIBBLENUTS AND TWINKLETOES 63 from this point of view. Sometimes the time or the place is the very simple clue to identification. Thus a correspondent is addressed as Eiffel Tower or as June Roses, as Omaha or November. Or an article of apparel is stressed. Blue Collar may write to "White Gloves, or The Dark Lady in the Persian Lamb Coat be addressed. Correlative names may suggest personal relationships. Bigdog sends a message to Kitten ; May Fly a token to Squirrel ; B Major conveys a hint to B Minor ; or Ban- delero remonstrates with Signora. Delightful character-glimpses may be had through the key-hole of names as for example : NIBBLENUTS.— Greetings. Why no let- ter ? — Twinklptnps. I know just what Nibblenuts and Twinkletoes look like and how they would act. Ditto for the addressee of the following: MOST BEAUTIFUL BOBBIEDAZZLER. — May you one day learn to think of him, who ever thinks of you, as other than —The Bore. But I suspect that The Bore is able to assume a charac- ter as well as a name. The amount of strain he is willing to put on one comma is tantalizing. WILL-O'-THE-WISP.— 'Tis a merry hunt but worth every minute of the time spent. You have now two moves only. What an extraordinary escape. My reward is in sight. — Hunter. Of Will-0 '-The-Wisp I know everything except the sex. 64 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES "DLUE MOON. — Suggest your remarks ±J misunderstood ; might be inclined to discuss if way was opened up. — Dutch Oven. One gets character contrast here, the unimaginative and somewhat slow Dutch Oven failing to catch the drift of Blue Moon's cryptic remarks until some hours after the conversation was over. One meets men like that! Character revelations are apparent in the following: GWENNY. — Because I never rave nor rant are you so shallow as to dream that I feel nothing? — Laughing Cavalier. •INCE-NEZ. — Sorry I could not convey a fuller apology. — Galerie Bleu. pHOC— How's that? Be more explicit; y - > it is unbearable without you. Can you telephone? Memory of June always remains. — Boy Blue. QISEAU— 'Sawful.— Boy Blue. Surely the Laughing Cavalier, Boy Blue, and Pince- Nez need no further introduction, but I should require a letter of recommendation from the correspondents below : GREEN MAJOLICA. nish Clay. -Not as yet. — Cor- The laboratory investigation on the psychology of names previously referred to concerned two questions : CAN YOU SEE YOURSELF? 65 (1) Can the physiognomy or mere look of a name create a mental picture of a person? (2) Is it more likely to suggest a type of character rather than a visualization of an individual ? One of the most interesting chapters on seeing with the mind's eye is that which relates to the visualization of persons. Some seers possess most lifelike acquaint- ances. In realistic fashion they imagine their relatives, their friends, even themselves ! Others are born cartoon- ists, emphasizing or even exaggerating a particular feature. Sometimes a nose appears the only distinct landmark in their picturing of a bit of facial geography, or nothing may be present in their thought of another but a pair of curved eyebrows over very wide-open lidless eyes! But most curious of all are the images we form of persons whom we have never seen but whose acquaint- ance we have been led to anticipate or desire. Most of us have been startled when brought face to face with the reality. What a shock when the tall black-haired severe sehoolma'am of our anticipation is found to be small, blond, smiling shyly. Particularly do we visualize story-book characters so vividly that often our mental illustrations clash abruptly with those of the illustrator. Better to leave the portraiture wholly in the hands of the novelist who can accomplish strange marvels by subtle indirection. To return, however, to the laboratory. Does the novelist's magic go so far that he can suggest by a proper name not only a certain pattern of temperament but the very looks of a character? Were Dickens's 66 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES proper names coined, as has been suggested, with such intention? Were his curious word-physiognomies in- vented to mirror facial curves and angles or only angles of temper? Says Professor Claparede, discussing the representa- tion of unknown persons (quoted by English in the "American Journal of Psychology") : The physiognomy of the proper name certainly plays a part. The sound of the name has an affective tone which cooperates in the elaboration of its mental repre- sentation. Other things equal, names consisting of heavy or repeated syllables call forth images of fat, heavy-set, bloated, or slightly ridiculous individuals; a short and sonorous name, on the other hand, suggests slender and active persons, etc. Monsieur Patapoufard would evidently be of a type quite different from that of Monsieur Flic. ... It is not without intention that Daudet has created the name Tartarin, Dickens that of Pickwick, Flaubert those of Barnard and of Pecuchet. Claparede believed that the names cited would pro- duce "a similar effect upon all readers," but experi- ments carried out in the psychological laboratory at Cornell University indicated great diversity in the sug- gestive power of a particular name for different readers. One investigator writes: We conclude that the psychological response to un- known proper names is extremely variable. It depends not only upon imaginal type but also upon associative and attitudinal factors which differ widely in individual observers. GRIB AND GOLLIWOG 67 Highly responsive persons give, however, most inter- esting accounts of their reactions to proper names. Let me illustrate by the following report of how one psychol- ogist was affected by the name Grib : Had a feeling for him as quickly as I heard the word ; felt Grib myself, i. e., obstinate, persistent, muscular, common-sense ; as if I would fight for anything I thought mine; would be surprised if any one should rebel against my authority. Pictorial representations in response to proper names are, it appears, less common than notions of a type as illustrated above. But I find them common occurrences in my experience. The bare look of certain names in the Personals give me a photograph of certain individuals. T3UZFUZ. — Him no biff medicine man. — Woggles. Buzfuz I see plainly. He is young, large, gray-eyed, with tousled mouse-colored hair and clothes askew. This picture comes from the strategic position of the z's. The message to Buzfuz gives me a notion of his per- sonality. He is brilliant but lacking in self-confidence, and not long out of medical college. And now I notice his beautiful hands, those of the born surgeon. I under- stand why Woggles — cheerful sinner — is trying to buck him up by commenting on an already successful class- mate. LOLLIWOG— Breakers ahead.— Sundial. 68 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES The physiognomy of Golliwog is suggested by the look of the word, or if you are more sensitive to sounds than to sights, by the sound of it. Golliwog is — or ought to be — a regular grasshopper of a man, with sprawling movement and loose- jointed mind. He is always finding breakers ahead, stumbling over chairs and hairpins. SKEETER.— Too early for you: You ap- pear later. — Spiro. Always, too early for Skeeter, sharp-nosed, narrow- eyed blade of a man, whose stature is properly stated in inches ! TERRY.— The brilliancy of your notion leads me to think that you are of a xylophagous species. — Vi. You '11 get a perfectly definite picture of the xylopha- gous Terry, if you 11 look him up in the dictionary, as I did. Try it ! He 's there. In any case it behooves the novelist to take consider- able thought of the reader in naming his characters. Perhaps, of laboratory reports, that of Dr. Roback helps him most. He must somehow intrigue the public 's mem- ory by his choice of a name, and this he does by com- bining in one name something strange and arresting, something home-keeping and familiar. A name constitutes a garment of the spirit; other, more material, garments must also be provided. Dress- making on the fictional level has in fact much to com- mend itself to the individual luxurious in taste but straitened in purse or unskilful with needle. It is sur- COSTUMING THE CHARACTERS 69 prising that it is not more indulged in by frugal fabri- cators. Lady novelists occasionally succumb to temptation and present their heroines with wardrobe trunks filled to overflowing with delicious confections : lingerie froth- ing with filmy lace, mandarin coats rich in Oriental em- broideries, boudoir-gowns slashed and sashed with art- less art. Reading their pages is quite as stimulating as poring over a fashion- journal. Men novelists are more sketchy in description; their hints are less practical. They delight in silver chiffons and iridescent roses ; in irresistible slippers and delight- ful bonnets. Obviously their attention is too often diverted from the bonnet to the escaping curl ; from the pretty slipper to the prettier ankle. Conrad, after de- signing an intriguing gown of pale blue embroidered silk for his alluring lady of "The Arrow of Gold," adds "Within the extraordinary wide sleeve, lined with black silk, I could see the arm, very white with a pearly gleam in the shadow. ' ' Dressing a character properly may be an achievement of the historic, the racial, the religious imagination, as witness Hergesheimer's carefully wrought descriptions of Taou Yuen's elaborate toilettes, in "Java Head." For example : A long gown with wide sleeves of blue-black satin, embroidered in peach-colored flower petals and innu- merable minute sapphire and orange butterflies, a short sleeveless jacket of sage green caught with looped red jade buttons and threaded with silver and indigo high- soled slippers crusted and tasseled with pearls. Her 70 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES hair rose from the back in a smooth burnished loop. There were long pins of pink jade carved into blossoms, a quivering decoration of paper-thin gold leaves with moonstones in glistening drops, and a band of coral lotus buds. Pierced stone bracelets hung about her delicate wrists, fretted crystal balls swung from the lobes of her ears; and clasped on the ends of several fingers were long pointed filigrees of ivory. Usually it suffices to suggest sketchily the fashions of the day, for all readers follow fashion. But one may ask, not inappropriately, what fashion follows. The psychology of clothes — not to mention clothes philos- ophy, for which one must still go to Carlyle's " Sartor Resartus" — draws largely upon two branches of the science, namely, social psychology and the psychology of art. Social psychology makes much of prestige, that curi- ous psychic aura that envelops some personalities so notably and is just as notably absent from others. Pres- tige is conferred by great size, great wealth, social position; by worldly success, acknowledged character and reputation. In the absence of knowledge it is pretty largely determined by personal appearance, and per- sonal appearance is to a great degree a matter of clothes and of avoirdupois, so that fashion — unconsciously shrewd — rings changes upon a few notes only and seeks to create personal prestige by creating illusions of size, wealth, success, age, authority. Turn the leaves of the fashion-books of the centuries. How many are the devices for increasing height and apparent weight ! Note the high hats of the Normandy THE PRESTIGE OF ATTIRE 71 Belle and of Richard Harding Davis's favorite Van Bibber. Note the ample Roman toga, the Elizabethan ruff, the colonial peruke, the Victorian hoop-skirt and leg-o '-mutton sleeve, the Parisian hat of a thousand cherries. One can easily by taking thought and a few dollars add several inches to one 's stature. Prestige may be created also by symptoms of wealth. Here a diamond on the hand is worth several birds on the head, although even a decapitated peacock in the aforementioned situation is always a scream. Wealth creates leisure and such leisure is attested by wearing perishable and impractical clothes. High-heeled slip- pers and shoe-horn skirts are devised for stationary advertising. The prestige which depends upon authority and suc- cess may also be suggested by clothes. Bishop and hobo must dress the part. Military tactics depend greatly upon the uniform and upon official insignia; chevrons and epaulettes, oak-leaves and stars have inspired many a man in the rank and file. It has been suggested by Walter A. Dyer writing in "The Bookman" that authors too should wear distinguishing insignia — "two crossed quills, as being less complicated than a typewriter . . . one stripe on the sleeve might serve to indicate that the author had written a book that had sold 10,000 copies, two stripes 20,000, and so on, with gold braid for the six best sellers." In some epochs and localities age brings prestige, hence the powdered hair; when youth is the more prestigious, the powder is applied differently. We are willing enough to make capital out of prestige, 72 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES but it 's the last thing we sell over the counter, hence the pathos in some of the Personals. One does not like to think of Cinderella in Sackville Street poverty- stricken and advertising: ANEW ECONOMY.— EVENING SHOES RECOVERED in Satins and Brocades, by Cinderella. And here 's another that brings a mist to the eyes ; MAGNIFICENT SILK BROCADE FRINGED SHAWL given by Queen Victoria to owner's mother. Make lovely Court dress. lOOgns. There is, however, an art of clothes as well as a sociology. Old-time fashion books yield, occasionally, styles whose beauty is attested by their continued appeal to the eye. Lines simple and gracious as those of nature ; fabrics woven of summer clouds and dyed autumnally. Writers on esthetics have much to say of empathy, which is interpreted to mean our identification with objects and personalities in our environment because of subtle mimicry of their movements and postures. We are one with the ocean, the wind, the prairies, because we have ebbed and flowed with the tides, swept through undulating trees, followed long shadows to the far horizon. So too fabrics and fashions are delightful in so far as they make us one with delightful things, create illusions of freedom and ethereal lightness. Floating draperies charm us because we float in the breeze with them ; rich velvets because they anchor us right royally. The sociology and esthetics of clothes are obviously EMPATHY AND ESTHETICS 73 written from very different slants. It is difficult to reconcile art with -artifice, beauty with display. But the novelist has a better chance of doing this than the modiste has. He may trust much to the reader's imagi- nation, which will easily conjure up the most fashionable cut of wings for his angels, and of halos for his saints, and think them beautiful because a la mode. J. B. D. CHAPTER VI TRICKS OF THE LITERARY IMAGINATION The study by scientists of dream-personalities and the characters of folk mythologies has thrown much light upon certain devices of literary craftsmen, adopted by them quite innocently, with no sense of kinship to those shrewd imps of the subconscious life who manufacture dreams and religions. In dream fabrication two methods of character-making are especially noticeable ; namely, creating characters by fusion of real personalities known in the waking state, and creating them by splitting personalities into diverse traits which are then personified. In creation by fusion very unlike individualities may be amalgamated usually by virtue of some common pos- session, say red hair or a crooked smile. Fusion on the basis of a superficial resemblance may give us a most complex and incalculable character. Or in the fusion differences may be blurred and only common traits stand out, as in Dickens's Micawber, an amalgam of the novelist's father and Leigh Hunt. Composite photography of this sort is a favorite pas- time of the literary camera-man. It has given us the type-characters of the stage, the black-browed villain, the unsophisticated ingenue, the ladylike parson. Such 74 DUPLEX PERSONALITIES 75 characters are unfortunately at home only in conven- tional settings. They are too frail to stand a change in altitude. The splitting of a personality into two or more is as common in dreams and literature as it is infrequent in life. Sometimes it is done to emphasize a particular trait, sometimes to point a contrast. In mythology, ' l doubling ' ' of the principal characters is a common device. Says Dr. Ernest Jones in writing of this in the "American Journal of Psychology": The chief motive for its occurrence seems to be the desire to exalt the importance of these characters, and especially to glorify the hero by decoratively filling in the stage with lay figures of colorless copies whose neutral movements contrast with the vivid activities of the principals. Various constituent traits of the hero may be em- bodied in subordinate characters. Or the tyrannical father of the family romance splits into father and tyrant. Sometimes the split-off tyrant becomes the hero's grandfather as in the Greek legend of Perseus, or the hero's uncle, as in the Hamlet legend. A classic way of effecting a doubling is to imitate nature and to bring twins on the scene of action. The myth of the founding of Thebes gains in solemnity and dignity by the introduction of the twin founders, Am- phion and Zethos. So also the myth of the founding of Rome by Romulus and Remus. In literature "splitting" and "doubling" of person- alities are manipulated in a great variety of ways. 76 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Shadow personalities may follow the main characters so as to underscore or emphasize a given trait. Echo personalities are used to give repetition to the wise and witty sayings of the philosopher-hero. The personal servant was at one time an excellent mirror for master or mistress. One side of Portia and one of Bassanio is head-lined by the introduction of Nerissa and Gratiano, colored shadows of more complex personalities. The twin-motif has of course been used extensively to complicate the plot, to enlarge the hero's sphere of action, to play in comic fashion upon illusions of recog- nition. "The Comedy of Errors" gives both the twin- motif and the shadow-motif. Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse, shadowed each by his Dromio, are irresistibly laughable. Just why, one won- ders, is so deep a chord in one's nature stirred by bare repetition? Mrs. Micawber knew the appeal: "He is the parent of my children! He is the father of my twins! — I will ne-ver desert Mr. Micawber." Shakspere's delightful boy and girl twins, Sebastian and Viola of "Twelfth Night," would, alas, fail to pass the biological censor, who tells us twins are not always twins, and never are when of the opposite sex, and so therefore are not likely to be identical in appearance. But if repeating boy and girl twins must be ruled out of literature, not so reparteeing twins, which leaves us intact Shaw's irrepressible Dolly and Phil of "You Never Can Tell." "The Heavenly Twins," who created a furore in fiction in the last century, are not wholly forgotten, as witness the Personal: USEFUL TWINS 77 HOPE "Nunky" Rernus will come with a thunderstorm and not a few drops just to lay the dust. — The Heavenly Twins. In the popular mystery story the twin is a safety- •device for protecting the lovely and innocent lady who is able thus to keep the center of the stage all the time, reap the rewards of both virtue and lack of it, and marry the irreproachable hero in the final chapter. Twins are usually employed with comic motive and yet no tragedy in history holds grimmer possibilities than the Man in the Iron Mask, twin of the Grand Mon- arch, dead while yet alive. Something too of horror and unreality clings to Maeterlinck's use of repetition in the " Seven Princesses." It is as though one saw life in a bad mirror that distorts faces and figures, blurring and doubling them in nightmarish fashion. Often, of course, characters are mere plot-accessories. One by one the character traits are introduced that are needed to develop the story; then self-conscious logic does the rest and attempts to make them self -consistent — as though a real personality ever bothered about consistency ! More destructive still of individuality — both in books and out of them — are the social conventions of the day in which one lives and writes. A novelist's characters must conform to the social ideals of his period. A fragile fainting heroine, all feeling, no thought; a swashbuckler of a hero, sowing wild oats with lavish and insolent hand! Or an aggressive strong-minded suffragist to be wooed back into the paths of racial discretion by a long-suffering far-sighted male philos- 78 PLOTS AND PEKSONALITIES opher ! But this field of fashions in character Stephen Leacock has made so thoroughly his own in " Frenzied Fiction' ' and other essays that we need not advance into it. The preceding chapters have discussed invention with no appeal to a mysterious endowment called imagination. Psychologists in fact no longer subscribe to the doctrine of mental faculties neatly boxed off in separate compart- ments. Imagination means very simply that the whole mind is active in a certain way ; namely, in the breaking up of old experiences and the using of them in a novel fashion. The more old experience at its disposal in the form of memories, the richer the imagination. The more concrete the form assumed by memories as visual or auditory or olfactory images, the more vivid the imagination. The keener the sense of relationship, the more subtle the imagination. But the purpose of imagination is not to copy as does memory or imagery, nor to adjust to outer demands speedily and efficiently as intelligence does; it is defi- nitely constructive of new reality, expressive of a unique personality. One may find individuals of amazing in- formation, of extraordinarily vivid imagery, of super- fine intelligence who are not in the least imaginative. Imagination involves a freedom in the use of material for personal ends, a spontaneity in shaking wholes loose and recombining the elements into new wholes and, above all, an emotional set to consciousness that evokes all the powers of the mind in the service of a master' passion. WORD PAINTINGS 79 Memory is fond of dating mental objects, giving them a local habitation and a place on the calendar. She paints you a picture of San Francisco Bay as it ap- peared one lovely morning in May, 1915, and you say, "Oh, yes, the Golden Gate at Exposition time. How beautiful it was that Sunday morning ! ' ' But you read a description of the Bay of Naples, and you construct in obedience to the suggestion of the writer a picture of blue waters and enchanting grottoes, a scene resembling perhaps your memory of the Bay of Monterey and yet not intended to mean that bay but another one outside of your personal experience, and so you use with some freedom your mental capital. You put it to new uses. The old material may be slightly modified or greatly modified. Elements from a score of different experiences may be recombined so that the entrancing country of your dreamscape may be con- structed from bits of scenery from Alaska and bits from the Bermudas. Your imagined scene may be utterly unlike any ever actually experienced. The autumn wood through which you stray on your sandals of fancy is filled with the light that never was on land or sea, and its golden leaves have been burnished by no earthly frost. But, to repeat, however far we seem to wander from reality we never paint with colors other than those nature has spread on the palette of the spectrum. "We are limited to the original elements given us in the world that excites eye and ear and other organs of sense. We can recombine those elements almost infinitely into origi- nal symphonies of colors and sounds and odors but we 80 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES cannot create out of the void an absolutely new color nor call into being by sheer will a tone beyond the range of our hearing. Just as the man born blind must build his inner world out of sounds and odors and touches and no colors, so we must build our worlds from the elements given us by our senses. Concrete imagery of some sort is an aid to the imagina- tion but we should not use imaging and imagining as synonymous terms. Your imagery may be simply the form assumed by your memory of a particular event or situation. Very precise and detailed images are fre- quently reported by matter-of-fact unimaginative per- sons. Some of the most extraordinary visualizers I know are most literal-minded. They never get away from things as they experienced them. Imaginative work requires power to break up experi- ence, to shatter routine, to shake loose elements, to tease out of the closely woven fabric of life delicate threads for a new weaving. Devoid of imagination we are con- demned to move always in a limited and narrow world. But reorganization must follow analysis. The num- ber of elements that can be combined into a whole varies tremendously from one individual to another. Your greatest writer of the short-story may be helpless when confronted with the problem of organizing the life of a hero or of a community. We may learn to write in short-story or novel form but to a certain extent we are born short-story or long-story thinkers. Individual dif- ferences in the natural scope and rhythm of attention are basal to the kind of invention we find most suitable for expression. It is important that the embryo fictionist HOW DO YOU LIKE IRENE? 81 decide in what field his natural talents lie. Here again the Personals may be nsed as a tool for analysis. Does the " Story of Quatre-Vingt-Quatre " or "The Muleteer's Quest" as skeletonized in the games in the last part of the book stimulate you more than the Tick-tock item of Chapter II? If so, you 're probably sentenced to hard mechanical labor that your brother who specializes on the short-story avoids. Of course you have your reward, in anticipated royalties ! The two short sequences of Personals that follow sug- gest different possibilities of development. Which is best suited to your pen? Arthur and Irene suggest a snappy short-story. "Arthur and Irene" ARTHUR.— You are most distracting-.— Irene TRENE. — I suppose I am, but so are you. x Do write. It 's still cheaper. Pitch into me all you like. — Arthur. ARTHUR.— Pitch into you as much as I ■"■ like! I could shake you until your teeth rattled. — Irene. A RTHUR.— You idiot.— Irene. ARTHUR.— You don't deserve it, con- **■ sidering the wretched exhibition you made. — Irene. I ARTHUR. — Of course you would go and -"• do the silliest thing imaginable; now we are in a pickle. — Irene. 82 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES "The Beach-Comber/ ' on the contrary, outlines a novel best published in serial form, the author himself to be doubtful about the next complication until the day before copy is due. It suggests adventures ad libitum. "The Beachcomber" ICCANINNY — You run? Plenty soon catch up. — Beach-Comber. CAP. — I have heard the drum in the dis- tance ; you know what it portends.— The Beach-Comber. LRIGHT CAP.— The Beach-Comber. /^AP. — One of these days I shall get my ^ share, and then. — The Beach-Comber. The short-story writer need not handle numberless details as the novelist must but he should possess to an even higher degree power of selection. Crystallization of material must take place for both short-story and novel, but crystallization in the short-story must reach a higher degree of perfection. Crystallization is a miracle of the creative life. Per- haps it is to be understood only under a chemical analogy. It is an outcome of the saturation of the senses or of reflection. The artist who beholds the way- ward figures in a landscape suddenly cohere in a picture, fall into a pattern as do the bits of glass in a kaleido- scope; the musician who suddenly catches the melody that binds together vagrant phrases; the fictionist sud- CHARACTER CRYSTALLIZATION 83 denly confronted with the master-incident in his story, are alike aware of this curious fact of crystallization. One gets fine examples of crystallization in the Per- sonals. Possibly necessity is the mother of selection as well as of invention. Rambling costs too much. Some of the Personals are marvels of compression. Thus : ou ADAM? ALEXIS. — I am going to bang the big drum pRODIGAL SON.— Left or right? D AISY and Stan. — Sorry you did n't wait for the shoe. — Dad. QLAD E and He glad too. CYRIL. — The links are nearly rusted thrrmcrh through. TV/TELON. — Clubs are; for the rest, "na- poo." — Dido. Paulhan, the French psychologist, has classified the modes of invention under three heads. There are three forms of procedure: (1) development by evolution; (2) development by transformation; and (3) develop- ment by deviation. Sometimes invention moves along straight lines di- rectly towards an end which is so dominating as to sup- 84 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES press all tendencies toward digression. Selection in this case takes place without effort as a matter of logical sequence. The classic example of such a type of delib- erate invention, dominated by a clear-cut purpose, is Poe's construction of "The Raven/' of which he has given us such a detailed description in his "Philosophy of Composition. ' ' Sardou and Zola are other writers who moved systematically, without swerving, toward a predetermined goal. In fact, to Zola literary creation seemed so rational a process that he conceived the function of the novel to be identical with that of experi- mental science. It is only a step from such self-con- scious logical technic as Poe's or Sardou 's, with its steadfast fixation of attention, to what may be called instinctive invention, invention that moves as inevitably toward its goal but moves so rapidly that all deliberation is abbreviated, short-circuited. The process appears automatic, unconscious. In development by transformation there is a relative independence of the various elements, any one of which may become the core of accretion and finally usurp the place of the first idea. If too many elements insist upon independent development anarchy may result. But a shift in sentiment or purpose has its own charm. No less a genius than de Musset declared that invention that proceeded in too straight a line lacked the supple- ness and charm of the unexpected. "It is too logical," he complained, "it never loses its head. As for me I often change my route ... I set out for Madrid and I arrive at Constantinople. ' ' In development by deviation undue evolution of cer- THE CAMEO CHAIN 85 tain phases may lead to abortive invention or may- result in double monsters. The digressions may be longer than the main theme or story. Yet in develop- ment by deviation we find by-products often of inesti- mable value. Irrelevancies lead to new avenues of thought. The search for a riming word may enrich the poem by unexpected associations, and yet that search may take the poem far afield even into the precincts of a riming dictionary. Seemingly irrelevant Personals may be knit together into an entertaining whole. How many Cameos in the following items can you set in one design? PAMEO. — Volo, non valeo. — Nordwind. ^AMEO. — Can you call at H. S. on Tues.? * —Cliff. CAMEO.— A cruel mistake. The alliance was a disaster ; no one "would have imagined the anguish it has caused; we have made fools of ourselves. — Opal. CAMEO. — Loud but harmless; an empty barrel whose vaporings will soon evap- orate when met by Anemone. CAMEO.— Why try to split hairs? You recall Aug. 8th do you not? — W. CAMEO. — Why pass me by? Do you cut too big: a figure in your new sur- roundings ? — Pep. CAMEO. — Sorry to hear of distress : bear up for a time; the sun will soon shine again.— E. R. J. E. D, CHAPTER VII "WHAT KIND OP MIND THE NOVELIST NEEDS The fictionist is a fabricator. That is what the word means, the man who makes; the manufacturer, or since the work is done less with the hands than with the mind he had better be called the mentifacturer. The first fictionists were poets because writing was an unknown or rare art and verse is easier to remember than prose, especially when there is a tune to it. The word "poet" means the maker, the creator, one who produces some- thing new. There has been much theological discussion over the meaning of the verb "create" in the first chapter of Genesis, as to whether the world was made out of nothing or formed out of something that previously existed, a chaotic mass of matter. I do not know how that question was settled — if it was settled. But in the use of the word in relation to the world of literature, science, and art, there is no ambiguity. The creative genius is one who produces something new — a statue, a painting, a poem, a story, a plant, an invention, a piece of music, a dramatic role, a physical theory, a chemical compound, a type of architecture, a style in dress, a culinary confection, in short a new idea in whatever form or medium it may be expressed or embodied. 86 CAST OR CHISELED CHARACTERS 87 Where he got the material does not matter. The sculp- tor may chisel his statue out of Carrara marble or cast it out of Montana copper. The painter may hire models or induce his friends to sit for him or use a lay figure or combine the sketches or recollections of types he has seen. So the writer may copy his characters from his associates — which is very danger ous — or borrow them from the classics or piece together scattered observa- tions from his life and reading. Anyhow he does not make his story ' ' out of whole cloth, ' ' as the saying goes. Since a novel necessarily consists of a mixture of fact and fiction the question arises how much may the facts be Actionized ? Even the most imaginative of romancers, even a Poe, a Maeterlinck, or a Dunsany, must use earthly clay for the foundation of his fantastic fabrica- tions. A realistic novelist whose aim is to give the im- pression of actuality must make more plentiful use of ready-made material. The percentage of fact and fiction in the mixture does not matter so long as the whole is sufficiently fused together to make the mass homogene- ous. Almost all writers use in part real scenes, such as Broadway or the Strand, make reference to historic events, such as the Civil or the World War, and intro- duce actual personages, either public characters or acquaintances in disguise. On this point Oscar Wilde is, as usual, dogmatic, paradoxical, and fallacious. He says : To introduce real people is a sign of an unimaginative mind. . . . The only real people are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations and not boast of them as copies. 88 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES If the first statement were true we should have to rule out many of our foremost novelists as having * ' unimagi- native minds." But the advice that real personages should be sufficiently transfigured so as to be unrecog- nizable is sound — if only for fear of libel-suits. If a novelist introduces real people and places, actual events and historic characters, how far is he at liberty to go in falsifying them for artistic purposes ? The answer to this is — so far as he can without being found out. The amount of permissible distortion depends — if I may put it in scientific terms — inversely on the presumed intelligence of the reader and directly on the square of the distance in time and space. For instance, if you lay your scene in the Piazza di San Marco at Venice it would not be safe for you to put the Campanile on the other side of the Grand Canal because so many people have been to Venice. But you could take more liberties in the arrangement of the architecture of Mecca or Lhasa that are still out of the main line of the person- ally-conducted tours. Probably even these secret cities will soon be familiar to all of us through the movies and then the novelist will have to walk warily in them. The spread of elementary science has made it unsafe for him to see the new moon in the east as the older novelists did with perfect impunity. While an author wants to con- tribute to the pleasure of the reader he does not like to contribute the sort of pleasure that consists in pointing out his blunders. Then, too, some authors have a conscience and are very scrupulous about getting their facts right. Mrs. Humphry Ward is said to have sent over to a friend in MKS. WAED OUT OF DATE 89 Paris to count the lamp-posts on a certain Paris bridge that she wanted to refer to in one of her novels. Yet in spite of snch extreme precautions she was not impec- cable. Leslie Stephen, the great English critic, was delighted when he caught her bringing a pair of lovers to Kensington Gardens in the first week in October and making them take chairs, whereas by the providence of the Office of Works chairs are removed from Kensington Gardens on September 30. This question becomes serious only in the case of his- torical novels. Here the author has no right to falsify known facts about prominent personages and important events even for artistic effect. Kather should he take delight in weaving his fiction into the warp of fact with- out displacing a thread of it. When Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel he did not ask to have the vaulting changed to suit his painting. No, he fitted his prophets and sibyls into the spaces and with such ingenuity that people will stand and look at them until they get cricks in their necks. If an author will not take the trouble to conform to historical accuracy he would better follow the example set by Anthony Hope in "The Prisoner of Zenda, ' ' as so many writers have done, and set his scene in some artificial German principality or Balkan state. Sir Harry Johnston has, I think, gone farther in combining real and fictitious personages than any other author. In his novels he introduces characters from Dickens and Shaw, characters of his own creation, prominent men and himself. When we open his "Gay- Dombeys" we enter a reception-room where we meet Mr. and Mrs. Paid Dombey, Henry Irving, Miss Knip- 90 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES per-Totes, Arthur Balfour discussing theology with Mrs. Humphry Ward, Sir Arthur Sullivan playing "The Lost Chord," Frederick Chick, George* Du Maurier taking notes for a ' 'Punch' ' picture, Sir James and Lady Tudell, Oscar Wilde with a yellow carnation, Sir Barnet-Skettles, Arthur Pinero, and Lord Feenix. As we collect our wits and find out who 's who we realize that half of the guests have walked out of Dickens's novels and the other half out of real life. Even the highest creative imagination must have ma- terial to work on. If Shakspere and Michelangelo had been confined from babyhood in a bare room they could have produced no plays or pictures. How much the author adds to his material, how much constructive or reconstructive work he puts into it depends on circum- stances. He may merely shape it by eliminating the unessential, as the sculptor does in making a marble statue, or he may fuse the entire mass of material in the fiery furnace of his imagination and cast it at once into its final form like the sculptor working in bronze. In general I should say that the latter method showed the greater genius and produced the greater literature though the champions of the naturalistic school like Zola would dispute this. Of course in favoring the complete recasting of reality I do not mean that the result is best when most unreal. I do not regard the hundred-armed Siva or the three-headed Cerberus as the highest achieve-' ments of the creative imagination. To " imagine' ' means primarily to form an image of something not seen at the time, and not a mere memory- IMAGINING KEAL THINGS 91 picture. The thing pictured may not be " imaginary' ' in an absolute sense. It may be real in past or future or elsewhere. A historian may imagine life in ancient Athens and the more accurate and lifelike his depiction the better. The inventor may imagine a machine such as the world has never seen until he makes it actual. We all can imagine what goes on at home when we are away and the stronger our imagination the more suc- cessful we are in hitting the truth. Probably the best description of the San Francisco earthquake — I beg pardon, San Francisco fire — was written by Will Irwin in New York for the "Sun" from such fragmentary information as came over the wires and from his own intimate knowledge of the city. A person gifted with the creative imagination will construct a scene or a character from the slightest hint as a paleontologist will reconstruct a prehistoric animal from a single bone. The surmise of the scientist may be later confirmed or disproved by the discovery of this complete skeleton, but nobody cares whether the novelist is right or wrong so long as the characters he has created have sufficient verisimilitude to deceive us or to con- vince us. The inferior novelist combines incongruous traits in the same crude way as the primitive artist who devised the centaur, the mermaid, and the angel by combining part of a man with part of a horse, a fish, and a bird. The result is no more artistic than the drawings we used to make as children by drawing the head of some animal, folding over the paper and passing it on to another who 92 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES drew the body and then to a third who added the legs. The mature mind is amazed or disgusted with such monstrosities whatever the skill of the artist. Nature's method of constructing a character out of preexistent traits is more subtle. She provides each person with twenty-four chromosomes made from the fusion of forty-eight. Each chromosome carries with it the determinant of a host of characteristics handed down from the remotest ancestors. Thus a man may inherit his blue eyes from his mother and his strong chin from his father. His musical genius from one grandmother and his sharp temper from his other grandmother, his religion from one grandfather and his rheumatism from the other, but all so deftly combined as to make a single and more or less harmonious individual. The artistic author follows nature 's method and combines such char- acter-chromosomes as he can find with such skill as he can command to create a personality that may seem to us as real as any living person and may live much longer. Two kinds of ability, therefore, the novelist needs: (1) the power of acquisition and (2) the power of con- struction. Both processes may be more or less uncon- scious. His material multiplies miraculously as he uses it like the widow's cruse of oil. A friend of mine who wanted to write a great novel set out to earn enough money for his support while working on it. After carefully canvassing the field he came to the conclusion that the cheapest fiction would pay best, that he could make more money by writing for one or two cents a word than for the five or ten that he could have got by taking more pains and publishing in PLOT PEDDLING 93 the more limited field of the better class of magazines. He registered a vow to stop writing cheap stories at the end of one year, no matter how profitable he found the profession. He resigned his salaried position and launched out as a free lance with only three plots for stories in his drawer and some doubt in his mind as to whether he could think up enough to keep him running. He only used one of these, for better ideas came to him and at the end of the year he had a hundred unused plots left over and had earned five thousand dollars. He then wrote a first class novel. The manufacture of cheap fiction has, like other trades, become more efficient and profitable by organization and division of labor. A man who has to pound out five thousand words or more a day on his typewriter has no time to beat about the bush for higher ideas. Possibly, too, he may be deficient in inventive power although he is a fluent and versatile writer. On the other hand we all know of men who are fertile in invention, who can tell us "good stories" by the hour but could not write one of them, possibly from lack of literary training, possibly from lack of patience, possibly because of some inhibitory complex that paralyzes their imagination whenever they pick up a pen. A man who has this gift and incapacity may find occupation as a professional plotter. In New York City the plotter makes the rounds •of his circle of writers as a grocer calls on housewives to take orders. He displays his wares, consisting per- haps of a newspaper clipping, a novel idea, an ingenious complication, a quaint character, an unusual setting, a new theme, and the like. The writer picks out and pays 94 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES for any that take his fancy and the plot-peddler packs up the rest and takes them on to his next client. But the rapid writer may not only lack time, patience, or ability to invent or hunt up plots but also time, patience, or ability to polish up his stuff. So a third party may come into the combination, the finisher, who revises the English, puts in the proper punctuation, and prepares it for the press. Possibly the writer does not write at all but talks his stories into a dictaphone and leaves it to the typewriter girl to transcribe and finish up. Charles Phelps Cushing in his little handbook of advice to the free lance, "If You Don't Write Fiction,' ' says: "I know of several famous magazine-writers who never in their lives have got their material into print in the form in which it was originally submitted. They are what the trade calls ' go-getters. ' They deliver the story as best they can and a more skilful stylist completes the job." Of late it has been often found profitable to add a fourth party, the literary agent, who acts as salesman. An author may be temperamentally unsuited to drive a hard bargain for his own writings and anyhow he may waste as much time selling one story as would suffice him to write another. But the literary agent knows how much each periodical pays and what are the idiosyn- crasies of its editor. He therefore does not often waste postage on impossible periodicals or irritate their editors by bothering them with articles that they can not use. He watches the literary market and feels the public pulse like a stock-broker and so advises his clients, the authors, that it is useless for them to write, for instance, any more FACTOKY-MADE FICTION 95 war stories at present and they had better turn to home scenes, or that pessimism and muck-raking are on the decline and there is likely to be a brisk demand for optimism and uplift. In this way the literary agent may well earn his 10 per cent, commission. The motion-picture business, though younger than authorship, has carried systematization and specializa- tion still further. The plot or germinal idea is provided in the synopsis, which possibly may be less than a page and yet bring a high price. This is developed and written out, usually by some one else, in the scenario, and from this a third party prepares the complete continuity which corresponds to the prompt-book of a play. Besides this, several other persons, including the various state censors, may have a hand in the production before it finally appears on the screen. The process is like the production of the "genuine hand-painted oil paintings" that are thrown in at the price of the gilt frame. They are, I believe, painted simultaneously on a long strip of canvas, one artist putting in the clouds, another the trees and rocks, and a third the cows and people. This saves the time wasted in changing colors and cleaning brushes. Speed and' facility increase with practice. No one artist is equally apt at clouds and cows. Such cooperative production and division of labor, whether employed in painting, motion-pictures, stories, automobiles, or clothing, result in large, rapid, and cheap production of marketable wares but necessarily at a sacrifice of individual distinction. The output is stand- ardized and odd sizes are not kept in stock. The fiction 96 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES that follows a formula is more sure of a sale than that which strikes out a new style. Its place is all ready for it. Its audience is seated and waiting. It is freer from faults due to the inevitable deficiencies of an individual and from whatever qualities may offend the general public and interfere with its wide popularity. But the standardization process in removing idio- syncrasies rubs out originality. The peculiar taste and tang of the author's individuality has been boiled off and has left the residue flat. The prolonged consump- tion of such factory-made fiction or film induces distaste in the dullest mind and there is a revulsion in popular preference. Then the publisher or producer is left with a lot of material that is "just the same" as that which formerly caught the crowd and he is puzzled to know why it has lost its pulling power. He can not find any fault with its technic. The English is unexceptionable, the construction is correct, the photography better than ever. If the book or picture that now fails to arouse interest had been produced twenty years before it would have created a sensation and set a standard that would now be regarded with despairing admiration. If any one of the novelettes that fill the fifteen-cent magazines had been printed in the eighteenth century it would now be considered by critics to have been a work of genius, a marvel of vivacity, ingenuity and human interest, and it would be required reading as a classic for entrance to college. The critics would be quite right. Only a genius could have produced such works two hundred years ago but nowadays any diligent writer can turn them out by the FOR ALL HAVE GOT THE SEED 97 bale. In the fifteenth century only a genius in naviga- tion could cross the Atlantic but any common captain can do it now. Columbus has shown how to stand the egg on its end. An automobile would have been a miracle a century ago. It is as easy now to forge Kipling as to forge Corot. A skilful writer of no originality could write a story of Indian life that if it could have been inserted in that unique volume of " Plain Tales from the Hills" would not appear incongruous from inferiority. The reason why there is now an overproduction of the sort of fiction that once was a rarity is that writers have found out the formula. The reason why readers turn with sudden distaste from a form of fiction with which they have been overfed is because they too have found out the formula. The development of the plot proceeds along familiar lines and there is no surprise or suspense to excite their curiosity. But the sort of writing that has ceased to interest a sophisticated class may find an eager public on another level. The play that bores Broadway because its plot is trite, its characters conventional, and its stage effects familiar will rightly be welcomed with enthusiasm at Pumpkin Center where the opera-house is opened to a "talky" only once a year. A mother, hunting at Christmas for something nice and new for her children's presents, looked with dissatisfac- tion over the stock of dolls, tops, and whistles and com- plained to the shopkeeper: "But these toys are so old!" "Yes, ma'am," was the reply, "but the children are 98 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES There is always arising a new generation of readers to whom the old tales may be retold. Out-of-fashion clothing and books must find a place somewhere. The novels that were popular with our grandfathers still hold their own with the "best sellers" of the month; if not in the book-stores, at least in the libraries. The reviewers are preoccupied with the present. They scan the surface of the sea in search of strange craft and take little notice of what has sunk into the literary subconscious. One could not gather from their book talk what is really being read, any more than one could rely upon the fashion column headed "What Is Being Worn" as a guide to the current costumes of the mass of the Ameri- can people. It takes all sorts of people to make a world and only a small part of them get into print. I have mentioned the cooperative production of litera- ture not as a model system but to show how many different qualities the novelist needs. If he is to work independently he must be his own plotter, writer, typist, finisher, and salesman. If he is to be successful in every sense of the word he must be original in conception, ingenious in plot development, proficient in character drawing, quick to catch personal peculiarities of dia- logue, physiognomy, costume, and mannerisms, acquisi- tive of all sorts of information, rapid in writirig, patient in revision, submissive to correction, sensitive to the fluctuations of public taste, and acute at bargaining. Literature, like all the arts, is a manifestation of the play impulse. The difficulty the novelist has to solve is how to keep it play when he has to make it work. Play is essentially a release of the spirit from the trammels GOOD FICTION IS AUTOBIOGRAPHY 99 of compulsory labor. But play has its laws although they may not be in Hoyle. A man can not get away from himself by getting out of routine. On the contrary he has in spontaneous activity a chance to display his true self. Novels, like dreams, are often more self- revealing than the author realizes. Arnold Bennett is very frank about this, as he is about most things. He says: Whence and how does the novelist obtain the vital issue which must be his material? The answer is that he digs it out of himself. First-class fiction is, and must be, in the final resort autobiographical. What else should it be? The novelist may take notes of phenomena likely to be of use to him. And he may acquire the skill to invent very apposite illustrative incident. But he can not invent psychology. . . . When the real intimate work of creation has to be done — and it has to be done on every page — the novelist can only look within for effective aid. . . . Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colors of all mankind. The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction ac- counts for the creative repetition to which all novelists — including the most powerful — are reduced. They monot- onously yield again and again to the strongest predilec- tions of their own individuality. Again and again they think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character — and lo ! . . . when finished it is an old one — autobiographical psychology has triumphed! ... No creative artist ever repeated himself more brazenly or more successfully than Balzac. His miser, his vicious delightful actress, his vicious delightful duchess, his young-man-about-town, his virtuous young man, his heroic weeping virgin, his angelic wife and mother, his poor relation, and his faithful stupid servant — each is continually popping up with a new name in the Human 100 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Comedy. . . . Hamlet of Denmark was only the last and greatest of a series of Shaksperean Hamlets. The reason why the released fancy .of the fictionist reaches his readers is because their spirits are also in prison. Like the wives of Bluebeard in Maeterlinck's version of the story, they are waiting the arrival of Ariana with the key. Some of our best traits are etio- lated and atrophied for lack of air and exercise. Even our unsocial tendencies, quite properly confined, may safely be sublimated in romance. So pious people take to pirate stories. The most law-abiding citizen may like to travel in imagination the road to Mandalay " where there aren't no ten commandments 1 an' a man .can raise a thirst." The most tender-hearted lady of my acquaintance delights in reading herself to sleep on the gory Polish romances of Sienkiewicz. Professor Seashore in his "Introduction to Psy- chology" cites the case of a friend whose dreams before the war had always been of a conspicuously pugnacious character, in strong contrast to the working life of a staid professor. But while he was in the service, even in the midst of battle, his dreams were of a placid character. So in the spontaneous dreams of sleep, or in the personally-conducted dreams of novel reading, the imagination seeks relief in activities far removed from the customary trains of thought. This is in accordance with the rule of the gymnasium that in play one shall 1 1 never could understand this line for I was taught that the ten commandments originated "somewheres east of Suez." GETTING OUT OF A RUT 101 exercise those muscles that are not employed in one's occupation. But this is easier said than done. One can not say to one's fancies as the teacher says to the pupils at recess, "Now, children, run out and play." The mind is more plastic than elastic. It requires a jerk and a jolt to get it out of its accustomed groove as it does a wheel out of its rut. It would be vain for a teacher of English composition to say to his students, "Now be original," or, what is much the same thing and quite as difficult, "Now be yourself." They can find out what they are only by trying to be other people. It is therefore good practice for the neophyte author — or the veteran author — to at- tempt something very different from what he takes to naturally, even something distasteful and difficult, just as his physical director makes him do the exercises that are hardest for him. I once knew an artist, a fine painter, though his works were of a conventional type. When the futurist and cubist movements first appeared they excited him to furious indignation. He could find no language strong enough to denounce those who were fooling the public into accepting these absurdities as real art. He took an active part in the Fakers' Exhibition that attempted — with difficulty — to parody the new school*. To this he contributed a canvas on which he had drawn the most grotesque human forms he could imagine and splashed them with the crudest colors. When he got the canvas back he set it on the easel in his studio where it made an amusing contrast with the stately historical paintings that surrounded it. But as he looked at it it seemed 102 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES to him that something might be made of it so he began to paint it over into the semblance of real life and finally turned out a picture that he was proud to own. It was not at all in the modern manner that he hated, yet it was a new departure for him and more original than his previous work. The very effort to outdo the futurists in extravagance had broken the bonds that had bound him to the traditional forms and freed his genius to take its own course. Many a good poet has begun as a parodist. Kipling began his poem on the American spirit : If the led striker call it a strike Or the papers call it a war, They know not much what I am like, Nor what he is, my avatar. as a silly parody on Emerson's "Brahma": If the red slayer thinks he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep and pass and turn again. Yet before he got through with it he had put in some of the best lines he ever wrote. E. E. S. CHAPTER VIII WHERE THE WRITER GETS HIS PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES The mind of a novelist picks up ideas spontaneously and unconsciously wherever he goes, as an electrified glass rod attracts bits of paper and straws. Names, phrases, and incidents are stored away for future use in his head or notebook. Any literary biography will supply examples of this faculty. Dickens caught the name of Pickwick from a stage- coach running between Bath and London and then had the cheek to make Sam Weller accuse the proprietor of stealing the name from his hero: "Not content with writin , up 'Pickwick' they put 'Moses' afore it, vich I call addin' insult to injury, as the parrot said ven they not only took him from hiS native land but made him talk the English langwidge arterwards. — Ain 't nobody to be whopped for takin ' this here liberty, sir ? ' ' The appearance and attire of Mr. Pickwick were de- scribed and prescribed by the publisher, Mr. Chapman, who had seen such a looking man at Richmond. Dickens drew David Copperfield from himself. D. C. is really CD. 103 104 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES Two of the best American short stories, 0. Henry's "Springtime a la Carte' ' and Edna Ferber's "Roast- Beef Medium," came from the uninspiring items of a restaurant menu. Ethel Kelly, walking on Riverside Drive, saw a young girl elaborately dressed coming out of a handsome apartment-house. There was a sadness and aged expres- sion about her face that attracted the attention of Miss Kelly and she began to imagine a story that would account for it. She picked a name out of the telephone- directory and wrote "Beauty and Mary Blair." Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes in the course of his medical reading happened upon a case of a woman who had been bitten by a snake and was said to show reptilian charac- teristics every year. This gave him the plot for his gruesome tale of "Elsie Venner." But he did not handle the theme with the imagination of Hawthorne who built up "The Scarlet Letter" out of his musings over an old law case in which he happened to find a reference to an enactment of the Plymouth colony in 1658 reading as follows: It is enacted by the Court and the Authoritie thereof that whosoever shall commit Adultery shall be severely Punished by whipping . . . and likewise to were two Capital letters viz. A D cut out in cloth and sewed on their upermost garments on their arme or backe. As starting points for "The Marble Faun" Haw- thorne had the furry-eared statue by Praxiteles and a story of a Protestant who had been impelled to confess a crime to a priest. The notebooks in which Hawthorne BROWNING'S SOURCE-BOOK 105 records his gropings after "Dr. Gramshaw's Secret" are most instructive reading for the young writer. The most remarkable instance of the transmutation of crude fact into the pure gold of poetry is ' ' The Ring and the Book," for it gives both the theory and the result of the alchemical process. From a bookstall in the Piazza of San Lorenzo Browning bought for fifteen cents a dry-as-dust report of a Roman murder trial of 1689 and from this he evolved ten poems, each giving a different view of the case but all based upon the same fundamental facts. The "Old Yellow Book" was pub- lished in facsimile with critical notes by the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a translation is printed in Everyman's Library. A comparison of the case-book with the poem is well worth making by any one interested in the technic of literary construction for it shows how scrupulously Browning has used every scrap of infor- mation the documents contain, following closely his authorities in names, places, dates, and events, often incorporating passages almost literally. Only in one instance does he deviate from a date. This was in changing CapmsaccM's rescue of Pompilia from April 29 to 23. It is not art but the lack of art that causes some writers to stretch their poetic license to the utmost to cover careless juggling with historic facts. About twenty years ago, when Owen Wister's Wild West stories of "The Virginian" and "Lin McLean" were published, a literary club of Laramie, to which Miss Downey and I belonged, had the privilege of reading them in parallel with the notes by Dr. Amos W. Barber (Dr. Amory W. Barker of the stories) who had 106 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES furnished Wister with much of his material. 2 All the places, many of the characters, and most of the incidents were known to members of the club present. We knew the bishop who was "not only a good man but a man.' , He was Bishop Talbot, later of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. We knew the babies (there were really only two of them) whom the Virginian mixed up at the ball by changing their clothes. We had the original and un- expurgated version of the funeral at "Drybone" (old Fort Fetterman) and of the lynching of Cattle Kate. This miscellaneous collection of the crude stories that might be heard about any camp-fire where frontiersmen were gathered had been given coherence and added interest by grouping them about two well-defined charac- ters, although the reader will find in the first edition the marks of incomplete amalgamation. It was ex- tremely instructive to observe where and how the art of the novelist had been employed in putting this crude material into literary form, by what selections, con- densations, eliminations, and complications it had been made more dramatic and vivid. But even the slight deviations from the truth which Mr. Wister consciously or unconsciously made are suffi- cient to offend the literalist. A friend of mine, a man who had become eminent in his branch of science because he possessed in a marked degree what William James calls "the passion for veracity/ ' naturally had little tolerance for fiction in or out of books and it was only when he was sick and a I published a sort of a key to Owen Wister 's stories in the " Congregationalism ' in 1903. THE SCIENTIFIC CONSCIENCE 107 helpless that his wife took advantage of the occasion to read to him "The Virginian.' ' In the midst of the story of the honeymoon on the island where the Vir- ginian catches trout for snpper, she heard a groan from her husband. "What is the matter? Are you in pain?" she asked. "Why can't that man tell the truth?" came in de- spairing tones from the bed. "What has he said now that is wrong?" "Why, that stream was not stocked with trout till ten years later," was the answer of the man of science. Many years ago I met a lady from Simla and naturally began to talk of Kipling, over whom I, like all the young men of my time, was wildly enthusiastic. But she responded coldly, "We do not think much of Kipling in Simla." "Well," I admitted, "doubtless he would not be popular in Simla society but I suppose his descriptions of it are true to life." ".Indeed they are not," she responded indignantly. "I know many of the people and incidents he uses in his stories and they are altogether wrong. Some of the remarks that he ascribes to Mrs. HauJcsbee were really made by Mrs. Reiver and he has the Gadsbys and the Gayersons all mixed up." But although Kipling may, for obvious reasons, con- fuse the attributes of his models he is rarely guilty of "miscalling technicalities" as M' Andrews would say. I don't know whether he has "The Song of the Tonga- Bar" down right or not, but I know he is correct on the "Song of the Purple Emperor." I am not a judge 108 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES of the dialect of the Calcutta bazaar, but I can certify to the accuracy of that of the Kansas City roundhouse. In that marvelous ninth chapter of "Captains Cour- ageous' ' — which I can never read aloud because of tears in my eyes and a choke in my throat — he has done two things that no other author has ever done: he has told of the joy a man who can handle a time-table takes in routing a car, and he has described a transcontinental trip in flashes of scenery and sensations of noise, jar, and heat that combine to give the hurry of it. Some- body asked Kipling how he got the railroad route worked out so well and he replied, "I simply wrote to the general passenger agent at Chicago and asked what was the quickest way to get a special car from San Diego to Boston. " The fishermen's talk and technicalities he picked up mostly in a few days' lounging and listening on the Gloucester wharves and a trip to the cod banks. The rest is genius. Where Rudyard Kipling got the germinal thought of one of his greatest poems, ' ' M 'Andrew 's Hymn, ' ' is told in the letter prefaced to the poem when it was first published in "Scribner's Magazine," December, 1894: And the night we got in, sat up from twelve to four with the chief engineer, who could not get to sleep either — said the engines made him feel quite poetical at times, and told me things about his past life. He seems a pious old bird ; but I wish I had known him earlier in the voyage. 0. Henry, like Dante, got his characters from within a few blocks of where he lived. In his window over- FROM 0. HENRY'S WINDOW 109 looking Irving Place "he would sit for hours watching the world go by along the street, not gazing idly, but noting men and women with penetrating eyes, making guesses at what they did for a living, and what fun they got out of it when they had earned it." "But," said 0. Henry, "there never is a story where there seems to be one. That 's one rule I always work on." Caroline Francis Richardson, in telling 3 how 0. Henry found inspiration in the narrow dingy streets of the old French Quarter of New Orleans, remarks: But 0. Henry used his "copy" differently from other story-tellers who have found suggestion in New Orleans. In all his stories, wherever placed, he makes use of every detail that will add reality to a character or an occurrence. But he does not introduce localities and localisms merely for their intrinsic interest. This is an important point. An inferior writer will load up his story with local color merely because he has got it in his note-books and doesn't want to waste it. Henry James, suffering from toothache, felt a wicked impulse to harrow up the feelings of other people. The result was "The Turn of the Screw." "Jane Eyre" was done on a dare. Emily and Anne Bronte said that a heroine must be beautiful. Charlotte said she would write a novel in which the heroine should be small and plain as herself, and yet be interesting. And she did it. "Frankenstein" was written by Mrs. Shelley in com- 8 In Cl Waifs and Strays.' > 110 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES petition with Byron to pass away the time during a rainy week in Switzerland after they had been reading German ghost-stories. Hall Caine says he gets the plots of his stories out of the Bible. Kipling — well, he cites high precedent for his practice : "When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre, He 'd 'eard men sing by land and sea; An' what he thot 'e might require, 'E went and took — the same as me! Moliere had the same motto : " Je prends mon bien ou je le trouve." Or as Lowell put it: The thought is old and oft exprest 'Tis his at last who says it best. I '11 try my fortune with the rest. Maeterlinck was well named "the Belgian Shakspere." His first play, "La Princesse Maleine," was full of Shaksperean echoes. His "Monna Vanna" was inspired by Browning's "Luna," as Professor Phelps discovered, 4 and as the author willingly acknowledged. He took parts of his "Mary Magdalene" from Paul Heyse's play of the same name. To trace out the sources of Shakspere 's plots and per- sonalities has afforded occupation and given doctorates to innumerable students in English. As many more could find employment and gain degrees by finding out how many modern novelists and playwrights have bor- rowed from Shakspere. It is futile to pursue such 4 "Essays on Modern Dramatists, ' ' p. 183. LITERARY HEIRLOOMS 111 research to obtain proof of plagiarism or to support claims of priority, but these studies are of interest to the writer for they show where authors get their material, why they choose what they do, and what use they make of it. There are certain plots or situations which have been used by successive generations of romancers for twenty- five hundred years. The Greek legends still inspire our poets. "The Story of Two Brothers," first known to us in an Egyptian manuscript more than three thousand years old, has been traced through the literature of a dozen different countries from India to France. 5 One incident of it appears in Genesis, Chap. XXXIX, v. 6-20. It is not for laziness that authors follow the old lines. Nor is it, as is often said, because it is impossible to invent new plots. Any of us can invent new plots. The trouble with them is that they will not work so well as the old ones. The oldest plot you can find in litera- ture is the surest to make a hit with the newest magazine — if it is disguised in fresh clothes. If I were a motion- picture producer I would set my scenario writers to searching the classics for new material. For instance, "The Adventures of Leucippe and Clitophon," as told by Achilles Tatius of Alexandria, ought to make a hit on the screen. It is one long chase by land and sea with hair 's-breadth escapes at the end of each reel — I mean, book. Twice the heroine is killed and cut to pieces in sight of her pursuing lover, yet in the end they are 5 See "Les Coxites populaires de l'Egypte aneienne, ' ' by Maspero. 112 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES happily married, and no magic about it either — all mysteries explained to the satisfaction of the most skep- tical mind. The creative faculty, I suppose, exists in all of us to some degree. But it is suppressed at an early age in most of us and emerges later, if at all, with difficulty. As Saint-Beuve puts it: " There is in most men a poet who died young and whom the man survives. ' ' 6 The chief difference between the practised writer and the amateur is that the former has overcome the initiatory inhibition and is able to start off as soon as he sits down at his typewriter. The latter stands shivering on the shore, dreading the plunge. He is afraid to let himself think. It may be a trivial accidental thing that starts a man 's mind to working, a chance phrase, a newspaper head- line, one of these Personals, a name in a directory or on a signboard, a fragment of a forgotten dream, a figure on the wallpaper, a blot on the desk. Such an instigator the chemist calls a ' ' catalyst. ' ' A kettle may be full of inert chemicals, cold and still. He drops in a minute crystal or a bit of spongy metal and the whole mass boils up and something new comes into being. It acts like a spark to a barrel of gunpowder. It sets free sup- pressed energy. The character of the stimulus depends of course upon the person. Some imaginations are set off by visual sug- gestion, some by auditory, some by smells. Valery Lar- baud gets inspiration for his stories from playing with 8 II existe dans la plupart des hommes un po&te mort jeune a qui l'homme survit. HOW DOES MARY JANE LOOK? 113 the little pewter figures made by Ernst Heinrichsen of Niirnberg. Their costumes and chance attitudes on his desk suggest to him characters and adventures. Another French author. Ponson du Terrail, uses paper puppets in working out the plots of his numerous novels of adven- ture, taking the precaution to lay them down when they are dead to prevent their reappearing later in the story, as has happened with some of our own writers of this sort of fiction. Massenet composed his opera on the Alexandrian Thais while watching the manceuvers of his pet cat. Ibsen got inspiration for his satiric dramas by watching a scorpion sting himself in fury. A successful New York editor of a group of fiction magazines has employed an imagination test very similar to ours in weeding out the unpromising from the swarm of would-be writers who besieged his office. He writes a name on a card, say, "Mary Jane," and passes it across the desk to the applicant. He then puts to him a rapid-fire series of questions. "What is the color of her hair?" "How is she dressed?" "Where does she live ? " " What is her father 's occupation f " " What is her chief desire in life?" If the literary aspirant has no notion of any of these things the editor regards him as not worth trying to train into a story- writer. People vary widely in their susceptibility to the sug- gestion of names, but doubtless everyone is uncon- sciously influenced by personal associations, traditional connotation, or the subtle insinuation of the sound. An appropriate name for the hero or heroine, especially if it is also to serve as the title, will contribute much to the success or failure of a novel. It would be an inter- 114 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES esting task for some psychologist to work out the causes of our sense of appropriateness of the names of persons and of animals. Charles D. Stewart in his "Partners of Providence'' tells how fourteen-year-old Sam Daly was set ashore at New Orleans with only sixty cents between him and starvation. He spent thirty cents for a pet alligator to keep him company, but could not think up a name for him. So he called him ' ' George, ' ' which was, as he said, "the best I could do ... as I didn't know no alligator names. It 's mighty hard to name an alli- gator, because they don't take after anything." Samuel Butler of Erewhon found it hard to name even more familiar pets, for he says in his "Notebook" : They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kit- ten ? ' ' And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot. Try suggesting to a child a name for her doll and you will find that she has already very definite ideas of what is suitable. I once asked a friend of mine who was a prolific writer of stories and drove a dozen pseudonyms abreast if he was ever at a loss for an idea. He said, "Sometimes, but not for long," and he told me that once when he sat down at his typewriter he could not think of a thing. As he gazed idly out of the window his eye was caught by the glint of a gilded dome, and he wondered if it were real gold. If so it must be thicker than gold leaf or it would soon tarnish. But on the other hand if the plates are thick they might be stolen. But how could they be, in sight of the whole city ? Here was a problem and therefore a plot. So he wrote his story about how A NOVELISTS NOTEBOOK 115 such a theft was accomplished and how it was discovered. In a fertile mind the germ of an idea expands and grows spontaneously. To find out how a rapid-fire fictionist gets his plots and personalities I wrote to George Allan England to explain his methods, which he did with great frankness in " The Independent ' ' of March 27, 1913, as the follow- ing shows : :A— pa — pa — pa— pa — pagena. "17 AIR Mustache and spats, Hay- - 1 - market, 3:15, 11th.— My one regret is that I did not hare my riding-whip with me. — Old Fogey. TjiALCHION.— EYidently the tail [*• wags the dog. — Kay. Gnp — Does a gentleman wage • •*- • war on the mud that be- spatters him ? — Key. "DOSA. — You are a cheat; honor - L *' is not sacred to you; and it is poor wit to make me the butt of your raillery. — L. DRAGONFLY. — Treat them kindly, and they will yet feed out of your hand. — Peoni. "DOBERT— Let us know when, -"' that lictors may be in evi- dence to clear the way. — Pic. YC —Those that live in glass '&' houses should not throw stones. — X. A. BETTY.— When a maid is bold and gay, maiden may go hang-a. — Orpheus. • T OUIS A.— Wonderful to relate, 1 - J there were three spiders. — ROB. THHIS IS THE LAST TIME.— If x you have any just cause, &c, speak, or hold peace. VERXES.- You may laugh and sneer now, you braggart, but your coward knees will knock when face to face with your des- tiny. — 'Hilarion. BUSTY.— But it shows the cheese is ripe. — B. "TICKLERS" and suchlike - 1 - forms of "fun" are all very well, but the victims should be carefully selected. The writer had an expensive pair of eye- glasses smashed owing to the hilarity of the revelers on New Year Eve.— Bat. WILL any one give an ex- Major a JOB? Good all- round sportsman, keen golfer, ex-champion lawn tennis: good organizer and administrator; ex- cellent credentials. BLACK DRESS.— I enjoyed see- ing you. I wonder when I shall again? — Eiffel Towers PUSS. — Phenomenally poor pros- pects ; positive possession portends pitiless pitfall; possess patience. — Prudence. U.A. happy.- -Treat me as you do "Nigger" and I shall be -Sweet William. WIDOW TWANKAY.— Reflect upon it and we will see. — Ye Rustic. 228 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES rpOBY.— Manners maketh the J- man, not & fat cheqne-book. —Hilda. TWINKLE-TOES. — Tell me through Box D.579, The "Timea." Yseult. -Evidently a KITTEN.— thought. Every wish — Bigdog. and BIGDOG. — When and where did you see "Kitten"? Give some clue for identification. M >AH. — Which was it, or stars? — Dainty. snakes DAINTY.— If you had consulted your mirror on your return, you would have known. — M'ah. "I^ELICITE.— The bread and but- A ter was cut very thin.— Percy. DUX JUVENIS: Esne felix? Bellum gero contra inimi- cum suosque. Tecum semper, Nolo -Fortis. storkum. XTAUTCH GIRL. — Omar, ^ LXXIV.— Popinjay. CBERIE.— Did you call for wine, sir? Use the right bell, and the best that 's left is thine; no one more delighted than self to see you better again. — Cheri. CQUIRREL.— Frozen right out. O —Mflvflv. -Mayfly 'T'ELEPATHY.— Nothing would -■- induce me to return. It is a washout. — D. DLUB MOON.— Suggest your re- ±J marks misunderstood ; might be inclined to discuss if way was opened up. — Dutch Oven. TGNIS FATUUS.— Nous verrons A si vous etes homme de parole. —Les Elegantes. E keye to ye mystery can be procured if ye apply to ye concierge ft 38. TV/TANY applications to "ye con- **■*- cierge at 38" have failed to produce "ye keye." Want some- thing better.— W. W. WHEN distributing the frag- ments and the crumbs, don't forget the poor old Gold- fish. WEE PETER. — We know 1 enough to make you squirm, but we ain't a-goin' light. to tell.— Star- PERSONALS FOR PRACTICE 229 TMLOT. — Diamond cut diamond ho! ho! ho!— Wem. ORANGE.- Apple. -Agree to charges. VISITORS to LONDON are per- " haps unaware that it is not customary to offer gratuities of sweetmeats to policemen for serv- ices rendered. — Bow Bells. DON. — In future don't meddle with that which does not concern you. — Ella. -VTOUNG AMERICAN, hobby vio- - 1 lin, desires temporarily to join jazz-band for practice pur- THREE ANTI-JAZZERS, fed up with "holiday resorts," want HOME for August ; suggestions welcomed. LAVINIA. — Have heard dubbed you me "Knight of the Rueful Countenance" ; until I find you it will express truly my feelings; won't you divulge? — Hector. TEAN T.— Black 2, white ** white 3, blue 2.— Amos. BERT.— Idiot- why go tilting at windmills ? — Ttptip XI UGH.— Plenty of white ele- xx phants here. — P. always "if I do "if I do that"; I refuse ; don't pester me any more. — C. NOO.— "If!" this" or VI. — You cannot conceal your thoughts any longer, for I know them. Do not attempt to deny, deceiver that you are, that you regard J. L. as a shuttle- cock, to be sent hither and thither at your own capricious will. -Feathers unruffled ; calm VIII. ering with placidity. — Big 'Un. "P — Strangers henceforth. — J. A Short-winded man wishes that **■ 'bus-conductors were paid by results. He might then stand a chance of getting on the omni- bus that he generally misses by a few seconds.— R. G. B. CT* — I recognized you in spite ^ J- • of the "smoked windows" ; but don't worry, you have ad- dress if you care to make use of it, and remember that things are not as they were. — "Brown." ±j. -will, you will go away empty-handed. — Pippin. apAYRE LAD YE."— Deep in - 1 - this styx of Friars Black, Where soupy fog confounds one's track, Amidst the city's harrow- ing wrack, Thy loveliness up- holds me. — Lancelot. CROSSED WIRES 231 MT KNIGHT.— Wouldst have me sit at home at my spinning-wheel, like a maiden all forlorn, or answer the call of the chase when the huntsman winds hii horn? — Gwen. WEN.— Tell it the world !- Your Knight pRINCESS.— Where are you? A Pear not, the matter is set- tled^— Laughing Cavalier. OKEETER.— The sands of time ° have nearly run out, and you must make your intentions known. Any further secrecy and I am finished. — Omaha. SPHINX.— Letter received, but not the expected enclosures, the lack of which means further delay and worry ; can not you hurry them up ?— Glowworm. MANY glow-worms are neces- sary to cast sufficient light on the problem you state. M. -My thoughts are always of you, dear heart. pETE. — I feel you are unhappy. *■ Can I do anything? Am strong. — Soul Baby. CAMEO. — Why pass me by? Do you cut too big a figure in your new surroundings? — Pep. CAMEO.— Sorry to hear of dis- tress: bear up for a time; the sun will soon shine again. — R. R. Tdear; are these "M" mes- sages yours? I made so sure they were until three others I sent on Dec. 2nd, 10th, and 18th — after my reply to the last "M" one — met with no response. Look them up, and if the "Les temps passed" message was from you there is a letter waiting at the address you gave the "Times." End my suspense quickly, dear. — M. qX)DDLES.— I am like the poor ■■- soul who sat sighing by a green willow-tree. — Judy. TODDLES.— We miss you so much ; won't you cheer us with a line?— "Ben Alywin." GYPSY LOVE.— Coldstreamer's father has authority to in- sist that all correspondence this nature should cease. of w AT TYLER.— See and believe —Ella. T^LLA.— Many thanks. Will do •*-* so on appearance of a simi- lar opportunity. — Wat Tyler. WAT TYLER.— Have the rats deserted the foredoomed ship ?— Ella. CHAPTER XV PERSONALS IN CONTINUITIES The Story of Quatre-Yingt-Quatre "We are not confined to a single item for a clue, for sometimes a correspondence runs for months. The Gondolier and 84 must have spent several hundred dol- lars on "Times" advertisements in their efforts to clear up mutual misunderstandings although they were also in communication by letter, by telegram, and by meet- ings on the green. Here is a bunch of their messages clipped by chance and not arranged in chronological order : GONDOLIER.— Now that the New Year is here, wiU you not give me the opportunity to clear the air?— 84. 84 —Neither by entreaty nor by ' bribe. — The Gondolier. CO. Contemptible poltroon ! Yes, chuckle like the dy- ing miser who laughs his last on hearing his wealthy neighbor has become a bankrupt. — 84. GONDOLIER.— You seek to dis- arm me, to harass and per- plex me, with smooth and cun- ning words. I was foolish once, but now — you '11 find it a danger- ous enterprise. — Quatre-Vingt- Quatre. 84/ Important news at last; so important that there must be no misunderstanding as to the means of conveyance; what say yon ? — Gondolier. 232 GONDOLIER AND 84 233 qa -In the coming New Year, °^*» pray let your thoughts be more charitable to the Gondolier. Cf\ —"Those friends thou •*-*• hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel." Would I had learnt my lesson before. — Quatre-Vingt-Quatre. IF it means what I think, I agree, and shall certainly not be offended. — 84. qa -When will, .you comply? — The Gondolier. GONDOLIER. — Have reached the limit. Choose between now or never. Will no longer be insulted.— 84. qa —Your long silence causes me °* # furiously to think, and the more I think, the greater embar- rassed am I, trying to solve the problem as to wherein I have offended; let me hear speedily, that my mind may be set at rest. — The Gondolier. THE GONDOLIER.— You have not offended me. Cease thinking and act. Inquire G. P.O. for returned letter 271, April 12, 1920; also wire Nov. 2, 1920— message "Addressee said to have left that address two years ago." Then you will understand. — 84. qa —More mystified than ever; cv *» evidently you imagine that I expect others to act for me whilst I "recline at my ease." "Left two years ago." Have al- ways had a Wanderlust, so that indicates nothing. — Gondolier. (GONDOLIER.— Yours not to ^ reason why; en avant and do not hesitate. — 84. GONDOLIER.— So glad. Now will you say how receive it? Proves my theories correct. — 84. qa —Show a little pity. — Gondo- 0'« Iter. GONDOLIER.— Ho ! Ho ! Ho ! so now you know; choose your weapons. Shall it be coffee and pistols for two? — M. B. GONDOLIER.— Cannot return. Am kept away by letter, disconcerting, July 16, supposed written you. — 84. qa —July 16 not written by me; °* # am confused. — Gondolier. GONDOLIER.— Have a very important communication which will work wonders. How receive it? — 84. qa —It does not become us to °^** quarrel like two yokels at a fair. I promise you we shall go deeper into the matter another time. — The Gondolier. qa —Worse than ever; I know °^* # not whether I stand on my feet or my head. — Gondolier. GONDOLIER. — Thursday come to green, where you saw me last week, same time. Full ex- planation. — 84. 234 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES qa -Have faith in me when I °^** say that rumor is a lying jade, and those that are respon- sible will answer dearly in the end. — Gondolier. Cf\ —The hare, no doubt, feels .\J. very brave when he tugs at the dead lion's beard.— The Gondolier. CA —Thank you very much. •^« I am delighted to see the change of attitude. — 84. — First prove yourself wor- • thy to march beneath my 1 standard. — The Gondolier. qa —A direct question will re- °^' ceive a direct answer. In- sinuations will be ignored. qa —Here 's to your good health. °^*» — C. O. p ONDOLIER. — No possible ^J" doubt whatever.— Tessa. o-i —I want to find out; but I °*» am loth to offend.— C. O. 04^ —Would that you would °^** drink to me only with thine eyes, and I pledge you with mine.— C. O. The Wanderer and the Acorn If you find two lines too little to fire your imagination perhaps you will like the Wanderer-Acorn-Squirrel com- plex. Arrange the items as you please and interpret them as you must: A CORN.— Something *"*■ vnii are f»allincr! < tells me you are calling; dear one, if we could but meet but alas, this cannot be: nevertheless, I am still faithful and true. — Wan- derer. ACORN.— My Egypt, 'tis indeed you calling me, through an unknown agency at which many scoff; but we know my beloved Isis the joy and truth of such, and rejoice in our hearts, that though cruelly parted, we may continue with each other; The Wanderer lives for you alone. THOU wilt say the time is here. I placed an acorn. A Wan- derer may wish to water with one winter rain. — Squirrel. ACORN.— You can not hinder **■ it; neither can you clutch the wheel of Destiny and say to Time — "Turn Back" ; so yield to the inevitable and inexorable. — Wanderer. SQUIRREL AND ACORN 235 WANDERER.— If not I, then who can hope to save?— Acorn "CLEARED you were a cad. Now x quite sure of it. Finis. — Acorn. ACORN.— Yours received; what **■ has been done that such a judgment should be visited upon us? Oh! beloved, if you did but know the pain and remorse that I have endured, you would in- deed bear with me. — Wanderer. ACORN.— Forget me not, be- loved, for in the forthcoming ordeal I shall need your inspir- ing spirit to watch o'er me and succor me should adversity tem- porarily prevail. When girding on my armor I shall be animated with the thought that you are my strength.— The Wanderer. SQUIRREL.— One of these days you will be glad to feed out of my hand. — B. BETSY. — Requires freshening up with another coat of paint. — Wanderer. ACORN.— Have I offended— else ** why this awful silence? Certain it is that my hopes are not yet dashed to the ground, and I shall foil them yet; but your help is necessary to me, and I ask for your aid. — Wanderer. p —What appeals ?— Acorn. A CORN.— The storm is driving **• all before it, and I am in fear lest my poor wee one should be torn up and destroyed. I see it as in a vision. — Wanderer. A CORN.— When all was pleas- **■ ant and blooming you took part in my play ; now that storm-clouds darken the sky and the icy winds of dread fate threaten me, I am left to bear the burden along. — The Wan- derer. A CORN.— Follow a shadow, it -^ still flies you; seem to fly it, it will pursue. — W. WANDERER.— Where are you hiding yourself? I am longing to hear from you; the sooner I do, the more quickly shall I be able to facilitate the dispatch of the Ms. — Acorn. A CORN.— Do you then believe -^ that a still tongue maketh a wise head? Or is it a fit of the sulks? WANDERER.— How can you be so heartless to scorn me? Your cruel words demand a swift retribution. A CORN. — Dear heart, you know **■ you are my all-in-all ; why have you not responded ? I would that we could overcome the ob- stacles that are causing so much despair. Despair, did I say? Rather sorrow, at our separation. — Wanderer. 236 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES pLARISSIMA MIA. — You are ^ distracted by the ignoble actions of those whom you have so correctly described. We shall yet scourge them with scorpions and weather the storm-clouds that do now threaten us. My tenderest thoughts are for thee and thy happiness. — The Wan- derer. A CORN, dear. What obstacles? ■£*■ My life an open book. Any one can read who cares. w RITE to me.— Acorn. A CORN.— The fleeting days, ■"■ they pass on, and still noth- ing is said or done and no signs of anything either. — Wanderer. ACORN. — I am angry; but not envious : my dull life has been too full of such moments. Wanderer. Clarry and the Count The tripartite correspondence between Clarry and the Count and Poppa presents an interesting problem. Arrange the items in suitable sequence and analyze the situation : CLARRY. — Poppa knows, thanks to the precious policy of do- ing things by halves. — The Count. CLARRY.— Heard from Poppa; unfavorable ; seems as though we shall have to paddle our own canoe. — The Count. POPPA hopes that both The Count and Clarry have not burnt their fingers too much. CLARRY. — Poppa now realizes that experience is the most effective schoolmaster; but were n't the fees heavy? — The Count. THE COUNT and CLARRY.— -■- Zounds! I will crop your ears close to the pate, as the hangman shears the rogues' heads at the pillory. — Poppa. npHE COUNT.— Let him; we x shall laugh yet, for the waves now are not so boisterous. — Clarry. n LARRY AND THE COUNT.— ^ It has always been my proud boast that nothing should thwart my will, and now you young knaves have thrown down the gauntlet and I can not but ac- cept. — Poppa. MISSING LINKS 237 C LARRY. — Poppa hoists the signal of distress ; a wise old owl.— The Count. C LARRY.— Poppa is now left with a double balk.— The Count. C LARRY.— Poppa has made the amende honorable, so the in- cident is now closed.— The Count. SAN. — My son, ding, dong, ding, dong; may the bell ring out right merrily. — The Boys. POPPA. — Showing the white feather. — The Boys, POPPA. — Be Boys. a sport. — The T>OYS. — Yes! and knows how to *-* play it. — Poppa. LARRY AND THE COUNT.— Bitten off more than you can chew ? — Poppa. pODNT.— What a nerve, what ^ sangfroid ! — Clarry. pOPPA.— Cheerio ! We should ■■- n't like you to think we had forgotten you.— Clarry and The Count. CLARRY. — Poppa cannot crow now.— The Count. POPPA.— A cold douche ia an effective remedy. — Clarry. p LARRY AND THE COUNT.— ^ I am highly appreciative, and your ingenuity inclines me to be indulgent. — Poppa. CLARRY.— Poppa isn't having any.— The Count. The Muleteer's Quest The Personals given below, though only part of a series and not in the order of publication, are enough to supply material for an adventure novel in the style of Eichard Harding Davis or a movie scenario for Douglas Fairbanks. Possibly it has been so used and these ad- vertisements were contrived to whet public curiosity in advance. If so, all the better for our purpose. The varied characters, the picturesque setting, the mysterious messages, should serve to stimulate the most sluggish imagination. 238 PLOTS AND PERSONALITIES PSCURIAL.— Does the muleteer •" approve of the proposed pro- ceedings ? — Grandee of Aragon. TV/TANANA.— Muleteer. IA/TULETEER.— Your servant ■"J- awaits and is most atten- tive to command. — Hermes. MULETEER.— I am not a dolt to be alarmed; what you say will happen; I do not care a rap. — Mistletoe. G UERRA AL CUCHILLO.— The Muleteer. MADELLE. — At present the ■*•' cloud is no larger than a man's hand ; I fear that it will grow and then burst upon us with all the fury of a typhoon. — Escurial. MULETEER.— Shake off slum- ber and beware. Awake! Awake ! "FRIENDS. — The call-bell has ■*- rung and everything is set for the great act now impending. — Muleteer. TV/TULETEER.— What prudent - LV - L man would beard the lion in his den? — Mm, CHERE AMIE.— The popping of the corks made excellent music. — The Muleteer. WHITE MAN.— If Muleteer, in- »» nocent, proved, advt. time ago, "if you do not answer will divulge all I know." Same letter supposed to be in another's pos- session. Therefore letter taken to testify to false witness- White Woman. TXTULETEER.— Yes ! will do as • LVJ - suggested and our fortunes are made. — Napoli. p ^p —It is not for the pawn to v^ . x . argue ^th the fingers that move him from square to square. — The Muletaaf. MULETEER.— If I can.— An- ■"•*• elent Mariner. pHILIPPE.— It shall never be -■- said that I deserted my friends in time of peril; rely on me and all will be righted. — The Muleteer. A LL WERE CALLED, but few ■*■*■ responded to the call of the Muleteer; those that slight him may have cause to repent their folly later. T>LUE DEVIL.— You would like XJ to settle up at once and for all? You know not what you do when rousing the ire of The Muleteer. PITY OFFICE.— Would you ^ AGREE to PUBLISH "THE MULETEER'S QUEST" when written ? piTY OFFICE.— Your inhuman ^ insinuations are not worthy of an answer. — The Innocent Vic- tim. 16 78 ■ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 027 211 356 7