story-writing, there wasn't a single story in French, long or short, which I considered at all perfectly designed.
My practice taught me that the most important thing in a story is the speed of narration; no one wants his reader to skip passages or to feel that this or that part is too long. Most writers think that they can avoid being tedious by jumping from one part of the story to another; but this habit is apt to distract attention. The true art consists in so graduating the speed of the narration that the reader feels that he is being carried along faster and faster to an inevitable conclusion, much as if he were caught in the rapids of Niagara above the falls. And in order to be able to graduate the speed, the introduction of the characters should be deliberate and slow in exact proportion to the length of the story. For as soon as the characters are all known to the readers and the trend of the story is indicated, then the pace should begin to quicken, and chapter by chapter the speed should increase and should be felt to be increasing, so that skipping or tedium should be absolutely impossible. I can understand using telegraphese at the end of a story to prevent any suspicion of dragging.
In time, with a great deal of practice, I learned many things about the art of story-writing, which I shall perhaps tell about in a future volume.
In the meantime, I had no journal; the South African war was going on, English defeats growing more and more frequent, every one disappointed and dejected. A sad close to a wonderful period! My old enemy, bronchitis, had seized me in October and I couldn't shake it off. I was in bed with it in a little country house I had outside London when I read of Oscar Wilde's death.
The world went greyer to me.
The news from the front continued to get worse and worse. It seemed to me that the South African war marked the decadence of England. I thought and said it showed a lack of understanding, a lack of all high qualities of heart as well as of head, so grave that I couldn't see any possibility of England standing in the future side by side with the United States. The English had spent a thousand millions of money on that unspeakably silly South African war, whereas, if they had spent half that sum in settling up the central plateau of Africa, even from the north of the Transvaal to the Zambesi with their own unemployed, they might have laid the foundations of a greater empire than even the one they had lost in North America.
Now, after many years, I wonder still whether it is too late for them to recover, but their policy since the Great War is exactly the same as it was in the South African War-a policy of petty grocers much more intent on getting than on giving-and greedy of small immediate gains. Fancy disputing with the miners about an eight hours' day. The miner has to go to his work and return and wash from head to foot in warm water, and on the average this costs him, at least, two hours more; ten hours a day of meanest labor for eight hours pay is bad enough for anyone. The workers in England are always vilely treated.
Another evil is that the aristocrat always supports the employers and exploiters of labor as against the workingmen, although his conduct to his own servants and dependents is usually excellent; consequently, the strife in England between the employer and the workman becomes keener and keener: the employer wishes to pay as little as he can, and naturally under these circumstances, the workman tries to do as little as he can. The chief result is that though the mining conditions in England are more favorable than they are anywhere else in the world, for in South Wales and elsewhere they have coal quite close to the sea, yet coal can be produced in America and shipped from Virginia, four hundred miles to the sea, and sold to compete with English prices in the London markets. The English employers continually seek to make their money by grinding the workmen, instead of using their own brains in new labor saving appliances and inventions-and now in this year, 1927, they are bringing in a law to make a general strike criminal and so reduce the workmen to practical slavery. Nothing has been done in twenty years to develop the central plateau of Africa-the noblest field for colonization in the world! I harp on this because of its extraordinary importance: I wish all good things for England, for I know well her chivalrous and honorable side, enskied by beauty and sainted by noble deeds, a side realized in her poetry, the finest in the world's literature. But if she ever wins again to financial power it will be through her colonies, and she possesses no colony that can compare with that Central African plateau.
But if England doesn't care to use her power wisely, what must be said of America? The United States Government has never even shown an inkling of its highest function. Already she is by far the strongest power in the world, strong enough to disband her army and navy and make the chief navies of the world a mere police force and insurance against piracy and privateering; and the money she now spends on armaments could be used to spiritualize her people. By putting an end to war, she may inaugurate that reign of peace upon earth and universal good will to men which is, so to speak, the first recognition by the soul of the new commandment given to us by Christ.
The money rewards of work are far larger in America than anywhere else in the world, and so artists and thinkers and writers of all sorts are swept into the struggle for money and carried away by success. Of course, this fact should have led the governors to increase at any cost the spiritualization of the people. Conservatories of music and opera houses should have been founded by the state in every city of fifty-thousand inhabitants. Long ago America should have had municipal theatres, too, as well as municipal opera houses, and even municipal schools of chemistry and physics for original research, after the German fashion, but nothing of this sort has been done.
America, I am afraid, is becoming more and more a mere weapon of the rich to plunder the poor. Yet something great in America drew me always; my love of Professor Smith, who had been my earliest teacher in Kansas, taught me that there was an ideal there higher than anywhere else on earth, because kinder. Every revelation of English snobbishness led me back to the democratic feeling in America with intense pleasure. I always knew that all snobbishness was a love of unreal superiorities, and always loathed the vice; as Emerson said, it dwarfs the dignity of manhood, and prevents one feeling at home with the best in every country.
Let me tell a story to show this. When I was a student in Lawrence, Kansas, there was a wastrel in the town who pretended to have been a pal of Ulysses Grant, the President. This wastrel was always hanging round the bar of the Eldridge House, or some other saloon, and if he had ever met you in any company always called you afterwards by your Christian name and proposed a drink. His tipple was what he called port wine, a most awful concoction of sugar, logwood and raw alcohol that had no more relation to Oporto than the wastrel had to civilization.
I have forgotten his name, but we youths were more or less interested in him and his stories. He told us how President Grant in his youth used to drink a great deal more than was good for him. We often wondered whether he was telling the truth or merely inventing.
Suddenly, it was announced that President Grant was coming to Lawrence.
He was to dine at the Eldridge House on a certain day, accompanied by the governor and two or three senators and the mayor of the town.
We boys thought our time had come, so we got the old wastrel, primed him up with a drink or two of his port wine, and took him to the Eldridge House five minutes before the President was expected to arrive.
In due course the President's carriage drew up at the entrance. The governor got out, helped the President out, and the mayor and various other dignitaries brought up the rear. Just as Grant got to the door of the hotel in the full glare of the light, we pushed the old wastrel forward in front of him, and he stood with a deprecating smile, holding out his hand, saying, Ulysses, Ulysses.'
Grant's grim face did not relax. He looked at the human wreck with sharp, little gray-blue eyes, taking him all in, the dirty thread-bare clothes, frayed trousers, shabby boots and hat-everything-but not a gleam of recognition.
The wastrel was ludicrous-pathetic. 'You hain't forgot Hap,' he said, grinning.
Suddenly Grant's hard face changed. 'Are you So and So?' he said.
'Sure,' quavered the wastrel, 'sure. I knew you'd remember me.'
'Of course I do,' said the President, holding out his hand; 'of course I do. Yet it is twenty or more years since I saw you. You must come in and dine.'
The wastrel's face quivered like jelly and he looked down at his clothes and hands.
'What matter?' Grant went on heartily. 'Come right in; these gentlemen will forgive your dress.' And in they all went, to our amazement, the President and the drunken wastrel in the lead.
It was said afterwards that no one had ever heard Grant talk so much as at that dinner. He spoke on three or four different occasions to the wastrel-a thing unheard of. But when we boys turned away, I remember it struck me that there was something noble in Grant's recognition and cordiality- something unthinkable almost to the European.
I remember trying once to persuade Arthur Balfour, after telling him this incident, that this feeling of equality,
