ompilation of the experience of men eminent in their respective
departments will be a useful guide to the amateur in authorship or the
novice in publication.

THE AUTHOR

By George W. Cable.

In a certain fine and true sense books of imaginative writing--and the
present writer cannot undertake to speak of any others--are not built,
but born. Nevertheless, there has always been an unlucky tendency on
the part both of writers and readers to overstate this non-mechanical
nature of poetic works, whether in prose or verse, and to give the
processes of this production that air of mystery--not to say
miracle--in which art is always tempted to veil its methods. There is
an anatomy of the book, which is not its life, but is just as real as
its life, and only less essential. There is an architecture awaiting
the book while it is still in its author's brain; and for want of due
regard to this architecture's laws, for want of a sound and shapely
anatomy, many a book misses the success--not commercial only, but
spiritual as well--which the amount of toil and talent spent on it
ought to earn. And now that reading has become so democratic that the
fortunes of a book of the imagination are largely in the hands of the
Crowd, which cares nothing and feels nothing as to grace of form and
tone in what it reads, the commercial risk in the physical deformities
of a book is not so great as the risk of its spiritual failure. Now,
too, that the magazines have made it so very desirable to the author
that his work should be printed first in them, their mechanical
limitations, which are legion, bear upon the author and often seem to
him (and his personal friends) to bear cruelly. This difficulty is not
a flattering or gentle discipline, nor are its discriminations always
good or always bad. It works almost as crudely as that of the stage
works on the theatrical dramatist. A cunning subservience to it covers
a multitude of sins, and often achieves for the literary craftsman
place and preference over the truer artist, if he overlooks the need
of being also a craftsman. Yet it is the hard demand, not of the
magazines alone, but of every highest interest, that the cure for this
injustice be found in the truest artist making himself also the
cunningest craftsman. "He that would be first among you let him be the
servant of all."

Well, then, what are some of these mechanical rules of construction?
The space here allowed--see there, for inst