Raw Material

I don’t know who is responsible for this rather odd book, but I lay it to the earlier generations of my family. My clergyman grandfather always said that he never enjoyed any sermons so much as the ones he preached to himself sitting under another clergyman’s pulpit. When the text was given out, his mind seized on it with a vivid fresh interest and, running rapidly away from the intrusive sound of the other preacher’s voice, wove a tissue of clear, strong, and fascinatingly interesting reasonings and exhortations. Grandfather used to say that such sermons preached to himself were in the nature of things much better than any he could ever deliver in church. “I don’t have to keep a wary eye out for stupid old Mrs. Ellsworth, who never understands anything light or fanciful; I don’t have to remember to thunder occasionally at stolid Mr. Peters to wake him up. I don’t have to remember to keep my voice raised so that deaf old Senator Peaseley can hear me. I am not obliged to hold the wandering attention of their muddled heads by a series of foolish little rhetorical tricks or by a prodigious effort of my personality. I can just make my sermon what it ought to be.”

My father, who did a great deal of public speaking, though not in pulpits, took up this habit in his turn. When a speaker began an address, he always fell into a trance-like condition, his eyes fixed steadily on the other orator, apparently giving him the most profound attention, but in reality making in his mind, on the theme suggested by the audible speaker, a fluent, impassioned address of his own. He used to say that he came to himself after one of these auto-addresses infinitely exhilarated and refreshed by the experience of having been speaking to an audience which instantly caught his every point, and which, although entirely sympathetic, was stimulatingly quick to find the weak spots in his argument and eager to keep him up to his best. Afterwards he dreaded an ordinary audience with its limping comprehension, its wandering attention, its ill-timed laughter and applause.

After I began to read for myself I found the same habit of mind familiar to many authors. The Stevensons walked up and down the porch at Saranac, talking at the tops of their voices, on fire with enthusiasm for their first conception of “The Wrecker.” There never was, there never could be (so they found out afterwards) a story half so fine as that tale seemed to them in those glorious moments when they saw it as they would have liked to make it. I nodded my head understandingly over this episode. Yes, that was what, in their plain way, my grandfather and father had done. I recognized the process. It was evidently a universal one. And when in “Cousine Bette” I encountered Wencelas Steinbock, I recognized him from afar. “To muse, to dream, to conceive of fine works, is a delightful occupation. The work then floats in all the grace of infancy, in the mad joy of conception, with the fragrant beauty of a flower, and the aromatic juice of a fruit enjoyed in anticipation.”