FullReads

“Peace be with the soul of that charitable and Courteous Author who introduced the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing,” wrote Lord Shaftsbury in the opening paragraph of his “Miscellaneous Reflections.” Peace be with the souls of all those who, for the delight of the anointed, have practised that most debonair of all the arts, the ingenious way of miscellaneous writing! Now, as highly successful novelists always say nowadays when interviewed for highly successful newspapers, “I know very little about literature,” but I fancy this benign way of writing had its well-spring in those preposterous days, now long fled, when men of reading were content to give their best thoughts first to their friends and then–ten years or so afterwards–to the “publick.” Its period was the day of the “wits”–those beaux of the mind.

I guess the reason it has gone by the board is that it was what would be called “literary.” And there is nothing we are so scared of to-day as the literary. It was not those dons the critics, we are told on the subway cards, who made Dickens immortal–it was YOU. And our foremost magazines advertise the “un-literary essay.” “Literary expression,” that Addisonian English stuff, whose elegance pleasantly conceals the lack of ideas beneath, is taboo in these parts. What we want is writers who have something to say, and who say it naturally and without any beating about the bush.

While the spell of miscellaneous writing, for those who savour it, is the author’s joyous inability, it would seem, to get any “forrader,” to stick to the point, to carry anything with a rush. See the greatest miscellaneous writer who ever lived, as an admirable later miscellaneous writer the late (in a literary sense) Hon. Augustine Birrell calls him, the Rev. Laurence Sterne. See positively the most buoyant book in all the world; I mean, of course, “The Path to Rome,” by Hilaire Belloc. That glorious newspaper article, “Is Genius Conscious of Its Power?” starts off, indeed, with an allusion to the subject of genius. But the genius of this writer, of such unsurpassed and ingratiating savagery, soon turns to its true business of getting lost in the woods, and we take it from William Hazlitt that all in power are a lot of crooks.

So one born under the miscellaneous writer’s star who purposed to write on, say, bums he had known would quite likely begin with a disquisition upon the importance of a good shape of human ear, and very naturally would conclude, with some warmth, with a denunciation of tight trowsers. And he would, of course, wander by the way into pleasant reminiscences of his childhood–how, for instance, the child gets his idea of what a native is from the cuts in his geography book. I well remember the first time I was alluded to in my presence as a native. I was very indignant. I knew what natives looked like from the cuts I had pored over. They were a fine, spirited race, very picturesquely attired, mostly in bows and arrows, and as creatures of romance I admired them greatly. Persons such as I and my parents were generally depicted in this connection as fleeing from them. And it did strike me as an ignoramus kind of thing that I should be called a native. When I was reasoned with to the effect that I was a native of Indiana, my resentment but grew. There were no natives in Indiana.

Speaking of efficiency reminds me of the real estate business. I have recently come somewhat into contact with this business and I have observed certain outstanding facts about it which I have not seen commented upon before. To set up in the real estate business one thing above all else is necessary, that is uncommon familiarity with the word “imagination.” If you are thinking of buying a lot you will meet a tall, fair man, or a short, dark man (as the case may be), but in any case as unimaginative-looking a man as you could readily imagine. From this person you will learn that the thing at the bottom of every great fortune was imagination. If the location of the lot which you view strikes you as rather a desolate and barren-looking part of the world the trouble is not with the location but with you. Forty-second Street looked worse than that at one time. Thus, I imagine, if you have sufficient imagination you buy the lot.