Adventure story

“ This spirit of adventure that makes men willing to face danger, and even death, to get some new experience or to render some service, the spirit that makes some men explore strange places, or seek for the South Pole, or fight in great battles—this spirit of adventure never dies. Sometimes the story is of a knight clad in armor, and sometimes it is about a man in khaki who died the other day that his fellows might live—the spirit is the same. ”

“ Incident succeeds incident, and adventure is piled upon adventure, and at the end the reader, be he boy or man, will have experienced breathless enjoyment in this romantic story describing many adventures in the Rockies and among the Indians. ”

“ In such stories as “Boris” and “Eben’s Cows” and “The Sky Scraper,” I have made experimental attempts to give children a sense of adventure by presenting social relations in this new way.
The cultured world has yet another answer to the question, “How shall we give our children adventure?” It points to the wealth of classical myths, of Iliads, sagas, of fairy-stories which are practically folk-lore, semi-magic, semi-allegorical, semi-moral tales which express the ideals and experiences of a different and younger world than ours of today. ”

“ A few of these we call adventures because they are out of the ordinary. If, however, one is keen and alert, every experience is a fresh adventure. And excitement galore can be had by reading about the doings of other people. It is no longer necessary to hunt lions or to be adrift on an ice sheet to get the thrill of those who have experienced these things. Books, pictures, and theaters afford us ample means of enjoying in comfort the hour of high adventure of the other person. ”

“ It is such things which inspire the poetry of life. Nothing furnishes such stimulus to the imagination as the camp fire. It calls into play all the mystery and mysticism of the human mind; it discovers the hidden wellsprings of romance, legend and adventure; it inspires the art of the story-teller as nothing else can do and furnishes a perfect stage setting for the dramatic tale which unobtrusively carries its own moral. It is here that the raconteur can weave his tale from the warp of adventure and the woof of romance until the resulting mantle of heroism fits every boyish auditor. ”

“ But the interesting adventures which he experienced, and the interesting style in which he told them, aroused universal attention, which was perhaps increased by the fact that his journey was undertaken purely from love of adventure and discovery. ”

“ You must imagine exciting things. Many of your own experiences have just missed being astounding. Add what-might-have-been, and you have a story of the type we are discussing. You catch the bear or the bear catches you. You swim across a turbulent river. You spend the night on an iceberg. You coast down the frightful curves of the twenty-five miles of the Benguet road with the steering gear of your automobile entirely useless. Remember, though, that the adventure must [257] seem real, however much you have drawn on your reading and imagination. ”

“ For out of them we have been able to reconstruct the story of Trianon in many tiny details, the truth of which we have had to discover for ourselves.
18. We are constantly asked why we, of all people, should have had such an adventure? We are equally puzzled; and have come to think that it may not be so unusual as it seems. ”

“ Adventure narratives are essentially boys' stories—the grammar and high school boys who are past the "foolishness" of fairy tales and even of Oriental wonder stories, but are not yet appreciative of realism, [256] the quiet reflection of humdrum life. For many decades The Youth's Companion has furnished among its other good things excellent stories of adventure probable and actual. Stevenson's masterpiece is, of course, one of the two top-notches of excellence in the extended form of this type of story. ”

“ But children of the age we are considering,—who have left the narrowly personal and predominantly play period demand something higher in the scale of adventure. To them are offered the great variety of tales of adventure and danger of which the boy scout is the latest example. Every child in reading these becomes a hero. ”

“ As these poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in its long evolution. ”

“ A new generation of wild things had been born. It was a season of Youth, with tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of little children of the wild playing their first play, learning their first lessons, growing up swiftly to face the menace and doom of their first winter. ”

“ It is the short form of this type that we are dealing with at present.
Definition
Stories of probable adventure are narratives of exciting and extraordinary events that, though really fictitious, might have happened. We can tell many of them from true adventures only by the testimony of the authors. "Captain Singleton's Tour Across Africa," critics have said, seems to the general reader quite as true an account as Stanley's; while the "Memoirs of a Cavalier," which records the adventures of a soldier in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, was long mistaken for autobiography. ”

“ In these volumes the word adventure has been used in its broadest sense to cover not only strange happenings in strange places but also love and life and death—all things that have to do with the great adventure of living. ”

“ Tales of actual adventure differ from the other true narratives in the fact of the necessary presence of an exciting occurrence. Danger at hand and overcome is the keynote of the action. The happening may be slight or tremendous, or serious or humorous; but in every case it acquires a certain amount of dignity from the possible disaster.
The narration is usually in the first person, though not necessarily. In the "Library of Universal Adventure," compiled by William Dean Howells and Thomas Sergeant Perry eighteen years ago, the larger number of the stories are autobiographic in form. ”

“ In order to get a subject, suppose you think of what you consider the bravest physical act; then build up around it a swift, crisp narrative. You may use technical terms once in a while, such as a nervous story-teller would be likely to fling off and then explain; only be sure they are intelligible very soon.
An ordinary imagination supplemented by a "Baedeker" will enable any one to construct an acceptable probable adventure. Superior excellence will lie in the diction and style. ”

“ In books of adventure the dividing line would fall between, on the one side, those stories where the hero is actuated by pure love of adventure or where the adventure is worth while in itself—as in "Foul play" ”

“ You know what a powerful attraction strange adventures have for me, how I adore everything out of the common course, extravagant and dangerous, and with what avidity I devour novels and tales of travel; I doubt if there is on this earth a madder, more vagabond fancy than mine; and yet, by some curious fatality or other, I have never had an adventure, I have never made a journey. So far as I am concerned, the tour of the world means the tour of the town in which I live; I touch my horizon on every side; I am elbow to elbow with reality. ”

“ He had bitten his teeth all his life on the despair of adventure, but now it came upon him that life itself is the great adventure, and love the crown of it. Say he, loving a woman, went out to fight the dragons of the way. ”

“ The books of travel and discovery which I loved to read, had filled my mind with those stories of adventure which attend the explorer of unknown lands,—the wonders of scenery, and the strange pictures of life and people. There was in the career itself that blending of heroism and philanthropy, that mingled courage and humanity, which appealed to my heart by its very strongest sympathies; and I felt for these noble and devoted adventurers not less admiration than love. ”

“ And out of this newly found affinity with the Nature forces, the love of adventure thrills into being, together with the fine scorn of danger and the resolve to do that which we set out to do no matter what the cost or the peril. ”

“ There are holy saints and scoundrels among adventurers, but all the thousands I have known were fools of the romantic temperament, dealing with life as an artist does with canvas, to color it with fierce and vivid feeling, deep shade and radiant light, exulting in the passions of the sea, the terrors of the wilderness, the splendors of sunshine and starlight, the exaltation of battle, fire and hurricane. ”

“ This you would do unless you are one of the blessed few in whom the pure spirit of adventure is not dead.
True adventurers have never been plentiful. They who are set down in print as such have been mostly business men with newly invented methods. They have been out after the things they wanted—golden fleeces, holy grails, lady loves, treasure, crowns and fame. The true adventurer goes forth aimless and uncalculating to meet and greet unknown fate. ”

“ It is the love of adventure, of excitement, a restlessness for something new, a desire for change. This impulse is controlled, shaped by circumstances of early life, by education and association; but the foundation of it at last is the thirst for excitement, the love of adventure. ”

“ On the basis of form and of the attitude of the teller, narratives of actual events fall into three groups. The first set has five types: incident, anecdote, eye-witness account, traveler's sketch, and the tale of actual [xxv] adventure. The second set includes journal and diary, autobiography and memoirs, biography. The third set is composed of annals, and chronicles and true relations. ”

“ Only the spirit of adventure had led him at twenty-one into the wild places of the world, where he saw existence from many angles, and in a rough outdoor life had brought to perfection physical powers which had been remarkable even in boyhood. ”

“ But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space. ”

“ Why of adventures more than of green spectacles? He mentions a category of impossible things, and among them he places “fiction without adventure.” Why without adventure, more than without matrimony, or celibacy, or parturition, or cholera, or hydropathy, or Jansenism? This seems to me to bring the novel back to the hapless little rôle of being an artificial, ingenious thing—bring it down from its large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life. ”

“ Steadily hath the wanderer held on day after day, through fair and foul, into the dark waste, alone, like some atom upon the surface, and still breasting the wave, as if eternity was before her in those rolling seas.
Strange that the spirit of adventure should sustain men in such a hopeless-looking wilderness! That the desire of finding new worlds, or their greed after gold, should take them from all they hold dear in their own land. ”

“ Few in number are the persons who will not gladly escape from humdrum routine by losing themselves in an exciting tale of adventure. The thrilling exploits in real life of the engineer, the explorer, the soldier of fortune, the pioneer in any field, hold us spellbound. Even more commonplace experiences are not without an element of the adventurous, for life itself is a great adventure. Many special feature stories in narrative form have much the same interest that is created by the fictitious tale of adventure. ”

“ That is why tales of actual adventure, such as the records of explorers, hunters, and the like, are so worth while for boys. They feed the imagination while, at the same time, keeping touch with the real. ”

“ It represents, among other things, a hunting pattern of interest. “Adventure” is what the young boy wants, and stories of adventure. Hunting trips are enticing; they are the survival of natural life. All sports are of the hunting pattern; there is a contest of skill, daring, and cunning. ”

“ While the thirst of adventure, the master-passion of the middle ages, prompted to any change of scene and circumstances, imagination portrayed the land in view with all that adventitious splendour which none—of all the many betrayers of the human mind—so well knows how to bestow as hope. ”

“ My wild life, if it had made me feel older than my years, had given a hardihood and enterprise to my character, which heightened for me the enjoyment of every bold adventure, and made me feel a kind of ecstasy in every emergency, where danger and difficulty were present. I longed to be the skipper of my own craft, sweeping the seas at my own will ”

“ It seems to beckon us to leave the monotonous in habits, people and things in general, and seek renewed youthfulness, the thrill of novelty, the promise of romance amid lands and people far, far away. And we all of us hope that we may not die before we have had one real adventure. Adventure, I suppose, always comes to the really adventurous, but so many people are only half-adventurous; they have all the yearning and the longing, but Nature has bereft them of the power to act. ”

“ Surely life is haphazard and death inconsequent?"
He shook his head. "You say you have read my book? I believe every life is formed as a complete wheel, of which the end closes up with the start, and the axis is some special adventure. Only so few are conscious of the shape ... they assume that adventure must of necessity be joyous adventure—loud clarion-calls—the D.S.O.... My round adventure was to be superfluous—the onlooker at other people's adventures—never One of Them.... ”

“ It can be easily understood that they must have had a glorious time on that trip, viewed from the standpoint of an eager, adventure-loving boy. But the story is set down in full in the third volume, and you can read it for yourselves in "The Outdoor Chums in the Forest ”