Mervin James Curl

“ But the essayist does not stop with the creations in nature; he goes on to the works of man. He sees the exquisite beauty of a deftly guided mathematical problem, the answer marshaled to its post in order, he feels the exultation of a majestic pumping station, he knows the wonder of the inspiration of artists. As you pass the steel skeleton of the skyscraper, or see the liner gliding up the harbor, or thrill to the locomotive that paws off across the miles, or stand in awe and watch the uncanny linotype machine at its weird mysteries, you may find your subject all ready for the expression. ”

“ A reader without a good steadying sense of balance, a shrewd determination to weigh what he reads and judge of its value for himself is as helpless as a man in a whirlpool. You need not be too stiff-necked toward a book, need not deny for the mere sake of denial, but you do need to stand off and regard every book with reasonable caution. Sometimes you can see for yourself that what is said is not true. Sometimes you can at once feel that the spirit of the book is unsafe, wild, unthinking. Sometimes you will detect at once a blinding prejudice. ”

“ The true biographer never takes the point of view of the philosopher who said, "Most men and women are merely one couple more." Rather he knows that, however slight in the sweeping cycle of time a stick of striped candy may be, to the child who drops it into the gutter it is of more weight than a royal scepter. He knows, too, that the ordinary, respectable citizen, one of the "common people," though he never is subject to scandal like a villain and never molds kingdoms like the great figures of history, is nevertheless, in his quiet sphere, a fit hero for biography. ”

“ Conservatism is more candid to behold another's worth; reform more disposed to maintain and increase its own. Conservatism makes no poetry, breathes no prayer, has no invention; it is all memory. Reform has no gratitude, no prudence, no husbandry. It makes a great difference to your figure and your thought whether your foot is advancing or receding. Conservatism never puts the foot forward; in the hour when it does that, it is not establishment, but reform. Conservatism tends to universal seeming and treachery, believes in a negative fate; believes that men's temper governs them ”

“ He looks out on life with a mingled scorn and pity—scorn for its passionate strivings for the unattainable, pity for its meanness and squalor. He does not know the reading of the riddle, but he knows that all ends in failure and disillusion. Ever the rosy dawn of youth and hope fades away into the sadness of evening and the blackness of night, and out of that blackness comes no flash of revelation, no message of cheer. ”

“ That is, we may, for example, criticize the roads of New York State on the basis of what a road is for and how well these roads serve their purpose, or we may take as basis the inspiration, the keen ecstasy that we feel as we skim over the smooth boulevard. So long as our notions of good roads are sound, so long as we react sensibly, with balance, to the smooth rounding way, we make good criticism, we judge the worth of the subject of criticism and find it either good or bad. ”

“ But these dead-tinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life—very much of it—is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers. [40]
Informal analysis is not only less complete, but also less strict in adherence to pure analysis alone. ”

“ Conservatism stands on man's confessed limitations, reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance, liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonair and social, reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in the spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night. Reform is affirmative, conservatism negative; conservatism goes for comfort, reform for truth. ”

“ It is, moreover, peculiarly interesting to observe national traits on a march: the French, with their exuberant élan, throwing kisses to the women as they pass; our own Tommies, who have surprised the world with their gayety, and keep up a constant ragging intercourse with the crowd and cannot cease from singing; the Indians, who pass like a splendidly carved frieze; the Canadians, who move with a free and independent swing and grin in a friendly way; the Scotch, who carry it off better than any one. But I had never seen American troops, and I was anxious to see how they behaved. ”

“ To discover the problem, really to understand it, requires as your chief tool imaginative sympathy. Without this your writing will leave your hero as flat and shiny as any conscientiously laundered piece of linen. You are to picture him in relief, in the round, to make him live again, step down from his pedestal, and put his shoulder alongside ours and speak to us. We read in a history that faces the necessity of condensation how William the Conqueror "consolidated his domains"—and it means nothing at all to us of stimulating individual value. ”

“ On what basis is the following analysis of the farmer's life made? Do you discover any overlapping of parts? Is the analysis so incomplete as to be of slight value? At what point can you draw the line between analysis and mere "remarks" about a subject?
Over and above the hardiness which the farm engenders, and of a far higher quality, is the moral courage it calls into play. Courage is the elemental virtue, for life has been and will forever be a fight. A farmer's life is one incessant fight. Think what he dares! He dares to try to control the face of this planet. ”

“ Finally, this balance, this passion for the truth, will lead the critic to strive always for open-mindedness. "I would rather be a man of disinterested taste and liberal feeling," wrote Hazlitt, "to see and acknowledge truth and beauty wherever I found it, than a man of greater and more original genius, to hate, envy, and deny all excellence but my own...." And he was right when he said it: the willingness to accept a new idea or object if it is worthy, whether it go against the critic's personal desires or not, is one of the great qualities that he will find indispensable. ”

“ This is as true in writings that aim at light, frivolous effects as in those that stir the deeper emotions, in writing that aims at the understanding almost alone as in that which strives not only to make clear but to infuse with deathless appeal to the heart. A treatise on the fourth dimension must bear, in every stroke, toward the complete satisfaction of the reader's intellectual curiosity; a comedy must lay down each word in the intention of liberating the silver laughter of humor ”

“ All the facts of personality, the hints and gleams and shadows, bewilder us at times with our friends, and we regret the lack of perspective that reveals the central life-problem. But when we turn to Julius Cæsar, to Jeanne d'Arc, to George Washington, or to some humble dweller of past days, we can see the life whole, can discover the heredity, the natural endowment, the surroundings, the changing deeds and the shifting acquaintances and friends that determined for the hero what the life-problem should be. ”

“ Life is eight parts cards and two parts play; the unseen world is made manifest to us in the play. Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts. Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country. Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of both. ”

“ Then when your hero grows up, what are his interests? To what profession or kind of work does he turn? Where does he find the satisfaction for his energy that searches an outlet? Does he, like Thomas Carlyle, try one and another profession only to fail and be driven, finally, into the one work in which he could find the answer to the life-problem that his personality presents? When his profession is chosen, what are his interests? ”

“ True college spirit is found in the man whose heart has warmed to the love of his college, whose eyes have caught the vision of the ideals that the college possesses, whose brain has thought over and understood these ideals until they have become very fibre of his being. This man will yell not for the selfish pleasure of wallowing in sentimentality, but for the solid glory of his college ”

“ Johnson said, speaking of Goldsmith to Boswell, with his great, wise benevolence and noble mercifulness of heart,—"Dr. Goldsmith was wild, sir; but he is no more." Ah! if we pity the good and weak man who suffers undeservedly, let us deal very gently with him from whom misery extorts not only tears but shame; let us think humbly and charitably of the human nature that suffers so sadly and falls so low. Whose turn may it be to-morrow? What weak heart, confident before trial, may not succumb under temptation invincible? Cover the good man who has been vanquished,—cover his face and pass on. ”

“ If you violently believe in woman-suffrage—as you well may—so that you can be only dead-serious about it, do not write an informal essay. For the essay aims at the spirit as well as the intellect, hopes to create a glow in the reader as well as to convince him of a truth. You should write an informal essay when you are in the mood of Sir Roger de Coverley as he remarked, "There is much to be said on both sides." This does not mean that you should write spinelessly—not in the least; it means only that you should be an artist rather than a blind reformer. ”

“ THE INFORMAL ESSAY
It is a fine thing to be serious, to draw one's self up to a formal task of explaining a machine or analyzing an idea or criticizing a novel; and it is just as fine, and often more pleasurable, to banish the grim seriousness of business and take on pliancy, smile at Life—even though there be tears—and chuckle at Care. Life is more than mere toil ”

“ Had he lived but a few years more, his public fame would have been as great as his private reputation, and he might have enjoyed alive part of that esteem which his country has ever since paid to the vivid and versatile genius who has touched on almost every subject of literature, and touched nothing that he did not adorn. Except in rare instances, a man is known in our profession and esteemed as a skilful workman years before the lucky hit which trebles his usual gains, and stamps him a popular author. ”

“ Set him in the midst of the hurly-burly of a young nation as doubtful of itself as youth, as eager, as impetuous, as contradictory, with the forces of the Old World pitted against it and with many traitors in its fold. Then conceive the problem of forming wise conjunction between vision and accomplishment, between desire and restraint, and the life of the man is at once unified, centered, illuminated, and made significant. ”