Chapter II: How to Write Exposition (2)

As a matter of fact, in writing of such subjects a writer finds that words _will be_ emotional, whether he will have them so or not, that they take sides, are charged with tendency and fly toward or away from an emotional quality with all the power of electricity. Now, this emotional quality, when it is uncontrolled, is dangerous. Words that show tendency must be guided with the firm hand lest they lead the reader into wrong impressions and into the confusion that comes from counter emotions, the strong impression of disunion. It is only by relating these cross-tendencies to a guiding idea that they can be made to serve the author's purpose. To choose wisely a controlling purpose that recognizes and handles the inherent emotions of words is merely to organize inescapable material. In the following selection from Emerson's "Fate" we find the emotional quality both high and well-organized. Such a paragraph might easily be made to confuse a reader hopelessly, but Emerson drives the chargers of his thought straight to his goal, intellectual and emotional, and holds tight his reins:

Nature is no sentimentalist,--does not cosset or pamper us.
We must see that the world is rough and surly, and will not mind
drowning a man or a woman, but swallows your ship like a grain
of dust. The cold, inconsiderate of persons, tingles your blood,
benumbs your feet, freezes a man like an apple. The diseases, the
elements, fortune, gravity, lightning, respect no persons. The way
of Providence is a little rude. The habit of snake and spider, the
snap of the tiger and other leapers and bloody jumpers, the crackle
of the bones of his prey in the coil of the anaconda,--these are
in the system, and our habits are like theirs. You have just
dined, and however the slaughter-house is concealed in the graceful
distance of miles, there is complicity, expensive races--race
living at the expense of race. The planet is liable to shocks from
comets, perturbations from planets, rendings from earthquake and
volcano, alterations of climate, precessions of equinoxes. Rivers
dry up by opening of the forest. The sea changes its bed. Towns
and counties fall into it. At Lisbon an earthquake killed men like
flies. At Naples three years ago ten thousand persons were crushed
in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea, the sword of the climate in
the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off
men like a massacre. Our western prairies shake with fever and
ague. The cholera, the small-pox, have proved as mortal to some
tribes as a frost to crickets, which, having filled the summer with
noise, are silenced by the fall of the temperature of one night.
Without uncovering what does not concern us, or counting how many
species of parasites hang on a bombyx, or groping after intestinal
parasites or infusory biters, or the obscurities of alternate
generation,--the forms of the shark, the _labrus_, the jaw of the
sea-wolf paved with crushing teeth, the weapons of the grampus,
and other warriors hidden in the sea, are hints of ferocity in the
interior of nature. Let us not deny it up and down. Providence has
a wild, rough, incalculable road to its end, and it is of no use to
try to whitewash its huge, mixed instrumentalities, or to dress up
that terrific benefactor in a clean shirt and white neck-cloth of a
student in divinity.[6]

[6] Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Fate," _The Conduct of Life_. Houghton
Mifflin Company, publishers, Boston.

Now this controlling purpose, including both the appeal to the understanding and that to the emotions, should be stated, clearly, before the author begins his actual writing, in one sentence. The value of this is at once apparent: our minds tend all too much to wander from subject to subject, browsing here and there, without any really directed feeding. Now such procedure, though difficult to avoid, is nevertheless harmful to our writing. The edge of the writing is never so keen, the telling of the message, whatever it may be, is never so well done, until we thoroughly organize and direct all that we are to say. In phrasing the controlling purpose in one sentence, we make just such an organization. And we have one which is most easily handled, most easily remembered, least likely to allow us to escape into empty wandering. Even in a long work this should be done, this unifying knot should be tied in the writer's mind. Those readers who rise from the last pages of a long historical work, covering several volumes and hundreds or thousands of pages, with a clear central conception of the whole work are profoundly grateful to the author. It is safe to say that such a conception could not have been given to the reader had not the writer, before he wrote a word, formulated in a few words the goal, the aim of his writing. This sentence should include the emotional appeal either as stated in a separate clause or phrase, or as expressed in the choice of words to present the facts.

The amount of machinery that seems to be required for using the controlling purpose may appear too much for practical purposes in one short lifetime. The truth is that the actual finding of the purpose will require much less time, often, than the explanation of the process here has needed. In a short theme you will often be able to scan the subject itself, to estimate your own reaction to the subject, and to determine upon your reader with remarkable quickness. More frequently you will find difficulty in determining the emotional quality of the material and your desires. But a little practice will enable you to do the preliminary thinking with rapidity and comfort. But if your subject is difficult, and if the effect is of great importance, by no means allow yourself to be swerved from determination to find the real object which you are seeking, but even at the expense of time and trouble state the center of your intentions as related to the subject, yourself, and your reader.

Practical Use of the Controlling Purpose

We have yet to answer the practical question: when I sit down to write, of just what value will the controlling purpose be to me in the actual task of expressing my ideas? How can it really serve me in my writing? The answer is clear: the controlling purpose is of the utmost strategic value in helping to select and arrange material for attack upon the objective, which is the effect to be created in the reader's mind. Now the best strategy always combines the line of greatest advantage to the writer, the line of least resistance from the reader, and the necessities of the subject. In other words, what point can I attack easiest, where is my opponent weakest, what demands of the ground--gullies, hills, swamps, etc.--must I allow for? Sometimes these three are more or less mutually antagonistic; sometimes they unite with the greatest helpfulness, as we shall see.

_Selection of Material_

The first question is, What, and how many, forces shall I choose for the attack? Remember, we do not now merely attack in general, wherever we find an enemy. Instead, we decide that our objective is, perhaps, a hill ten miles across the enemy's frontier. The taking of that hill is our controlling purpose. It would be easiest for us to use several regiments of fresh young troops. But the terrain is strewn with gullies and hillocks, with boulders and tangled timber. So we shall use two regiments of veteran troops who are accustomed to rough country, and follow these with some fresh youngsters who are endowed with sense and a desire to outdo the veterans. Since the enemy has a strong battery, we shall use heavy artillery. And since the enemy lacks machine guns, we shall use many of them and catch him where he is weak and may be terrified. We could easily send thirty camp kitchens to the fighting lines, but strategy demands that they be kept back.

In exactly the same way Mr. Burroughs plans the essay which follows this discussion. His controlling purpose is obviously to make the reader understand the process of bee-hunting in such a way as to be attracted to it as a delightful sport. The nature of the subject demands that the several steps in the process be explained. Well, that suits Mr. Burroughs, because he knows these steps. The easiest method for him is to narrate his own experiences. Of course he could investigate the authorities on bee-hunting, and write a treatise, but that would be more difficult, and moreover, it would not meet the line of least resistance from the reader. To be successful, the essay must overcome the reader's inertia and make him feel that he is actually sharing in things that he enjoys. The selection is thus determined. From his personal experience, as giving the writer the greatest advantage, Mr. Burroughs chooses. He selects details about the beauty of nature because a reader would prefer to have fine surroundings. He mentions traits of the bee that are interesting or necessary to know. He narrates two special experiences of his own for added attractiveness. And all the while, lest inertia raise its head, he lures the reader with the glimpses of pails full of rich golden honey. In other words, keeping his eye for his controlling purpose, Mr. Burroughs can easily select the things that will accomplish that purpose to his own greatest advantage, the reader's greatest ease, and according to the demands of the subject.

You do not find in the essay a discussion of the lucrative value of bees, nor of the complicated life of the hive, nor of the present standing of the science of bee-keeping. These topics, however interesting, are not useful to the controlling purpose. The standard is, not connection, but usefulness. "Any road," says Carlyle, "this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the world," and if you follow mere connection with your subjects, you will find yourself at the end of the world. The practical helpfulness of the controlling purpose is seen when you ask yourself the question, "Does the matter that I am putting in this paragraph, this sentence, actually advance my reader in thought or emotion or both, nearer the point to which I wish to lead him?" Thus the question of selection is answered.

_The Ordering of the Material_

If we could have our own sweet will in attacking the hill ten miles beyond the border, we should ask the enemy to stack his arms, and then, with trumpet and drum and flag we should sweep in and take possession. But our sweet will must give way to necessity. Since unscalable crags lie ahead, we shall have to go round to the rear of the hill. Since we must cross a swamp, engineers must precede and build a road. Though we should like to crawl up a wide valley on the other side, we must choose a smaller one, because the enemy could wither us away in the larger one. And, to trick the enemy, we shall perhaps open fire far off on the left, while we are stealing out to the right, and thus we may take him off his guard. Our purpose of securing that hill makes these things necessary.

Similarly, in writing, we may sometimes employ the order of greatest advantage, but more often we must modify this order to meet the requirements of the subject and to rouse the least resistance from the reader. In Stevenson's essay, "Pulvis et Umbra," part of which follows the essay by Mr. Burroughs, the author used the method of greatest advantage. His object is to thrill the reader at the thought that mankind constantly strives in spite of all his failures. Several orders are possible: he could treat of the striving alone, neglecting the failure; he could treat the striving first and then the failure, or vice versa, and so on. He saw that he would gain his purpose best if he treated failure first, until he had fairly overwhelmed the reader, and then suddenly shifted and showed that in spite of all this failure man still strives. He had to run the risk of offending the reader at the beginning by his insistence upon failure, and thus rousing the reader's possible great resistance. For we do not like to read unpleasant things. But he took the chance, knowing that if, by skillful use of words he could persuade the reader through the first part, he could easily thrill him with the reaction. For it makes a great difference whether we say, "In spite of striving, man always fails," or "In spite of failure, man always strives." The selection from the essay which appears here is taken from the middle. It is interesting to note that the first two sentences of the essay read: "We look for some reward of our endeavors and are disappointed; not success, not happiness, not even peace of conscience, crowns our ineffectual efforts to do well. Our frailties are invincible, our virtues barren; the battle goes sore against us to the going down of the sun." And the words of the final sentence of the essay are: "Let it be enough for faith, that the whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable constancy: surely not all in vain."

In the essay by Mr. Burroughs the author's advantage and the reader's acquiescence largely coincide, so that the author can at once begin with remarks about the attractiveness of the hunt, the delights of its successful conclusion. To discuss at once the possibility of being stung would have been unwise, because unpleasant, and the controlling purpose of the essay is to attract. Later, this topic can safely be tucked in.

Mr. Wilson's war messages showed a combination of the lines of greatest advantage and of least resistance with the nature of the historical events. These messages began with a series of facts which, obviously true, would rouse no resistance and would at the same time insert some resentment against Germany, the very thing that the author wished to do. Then they followed the strict chronological order, as if the author were pursuing a course already mapped for him--which, of course, he was not doing. With the controlling purpose of showing that America's entrance into the war was occasioned entirely by Germany's actions, he then proceeded to base the proposals of the messages upon the very facts that the readers had already accepted in accordance with his ultimate point of view. Such skillful manipulation deserved the success that the messages met.

All three of these examples gain their point, their objective. They do this largely because the authors knew exactly what they wished to do, what their controlling purposes were, and then marshaled their material so as to accomplish this end. Some of the topics that are subordinated, such, for example, as the possibility of being stung, are as important as others which are magnified, such as the beauty of nature--that is, they are as important in an impersonal way. As soon as the controlling purpose is known, however, they immediately become dangerous unless so placed as to bring the reader nearer the goal and not to push him from it. The point is that knowing the controlling purpose, that is, having thought out beforehand exactly what you wish to do with subject and reader, you are at once aware of both helps and obstacles, and can make use of the one, avoid the other.

Thus you will consider both the reader's ease and his prejudices. If you are to write of abstruse matters, of some question in philosophy or ethics or religion, in order to carry your reader with you you will begin with things that he can understand, and thus pave a highway into the misty lands where you desire to take him. Failure of some eminent philosophers to receive recognition has been due to their lack of a comprehensive controlling purpose, to their restricting attention to the subject alone regardless of the reader. In setting forth the principle of the machinery that digs tunnels under rivers Mr. Brooks in _The Web-foot Engineer_ first shows how a boy digs a tunnel into a sand bank, and then proceeds, with the reader's understanding assured, to the more complex but still similar operation under the river. In explaining inductive reasoning, with the controlling purpose of making it seem both frequent and natural, Huxley showed first how we reason practically about the nature of apples in a basket at the grocer's. The reader's resistance is thus avoided and the writer's advantage is increased.

A shrewd controlling purpose also makes allowance for the reader's prejudices. You ought to take as much care to cajole your reader into following you as the cook does to make us happy to the final morsel. After ices and cakes and coffee a roast or a soup is positively offensive; the cook wisely wins the battle of the spit and the dripping pan while the epicure is still receptive. So, if you are to explain democracy in a state where the recall of judges is practiced to an aristocrat who distrusts the "common herd" and is easily ruffled, you will do well to preface discussion of this recall with words about the general excellence of life in the state and then, when your reader is in a mood of acceptance, pass to the possibly offensive topic. Without knowing just what you wish to accomplish, you are likely to write in what may seem a dogged, defiant mood that intends to strike right and left, hoping to wallow through to victory.

If between us and the enemy's fort is a stream which needs pontoons for crossing, and we blindly start out marching up toward victory with no pontoons, we shall perhaps sail away to sea, but shall also probably not win the fort. If we insist upon keeping our platoon as rigidly straight, even while we climb hills through the woods, as ever a line was kept at West Point, we shall come to grief. So, if the logic of the subject has imperious demands, the controlling purpose must make count of them. William James in his essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War," saw that before a reader could understand how civic work could be a moral equivalent, he must see what the morality of war is. The subject demands this. In an account of the United States Government it might be logically necessary to state and explain first the theory of checks and balances before the relations of executive, legislative, and judicial branches could be properly estimated. Wisely chosen, the controlling purpose of such an account would make this fact at once evident.

Constantly keeping in mind, in planning and composing an article, what the objective is, makes even the individual paragraphs and sentences more successful. If you will examine the paragraphs in "Pulvis et Umbra," you will observe, pretty uniformly, at the beginning and end of each, a strong statement of the message of the paragraph, sentences of high emotional value. Each paragraph definitely advances the cause of the controlling purpose. Even the sentences--an example of a sentence uncontrolled occurs in Mr. Hamlin Garland's book, _A Son of the Middle Border_: "It stood on the bank of a wide river and had all the value of a seaport to me, for in summer-time great hoarsely bellowing steam-boats came and went from its quay, and all about it rose high wooded hills." The final item about the hills is in no way necessary, does not even help to give the feeling of a seaport, which more often than not lacks high hills. A sentence from Stevenson is in contrast: "The sun upon my shoulders warmed me to the heart, and I stooped forward and plunged into the sea." In this sentence facts, rhythm, even the sound of the words drive in one direction.

Without being too dogmatic--for every problem in writing is new and not infrequently a law to itself--you may be sure that if you have a definite controlling purpose, and know well what it is, you will be more likely to attain success with subject and with reader when you come to the ordering of your material.

Finally, since strategy suggests that we attack the weakest places in the enemy's defense, we shall do well, unless the logic of the subject or the reader's prejudice demand otherwise, to make our strongest blows when the enemy, the reader, is least prepared, that is, at the beginning and the end. Success in writing depends so much upon the freshness of the reader's mind, that an _attaque brusque_ at first to insert important things, and a strong reinforcement at the end, when the reader is pricking up his ears at the coming final period, form a wise strategy. If, in order to understand one point, another is necessary, or to avoid irritation, a roundabout method is advisable, the path is plain. When these accidents do not obtain, the reader's understanding will be most easily won at the beginning and the end. At these points you must see to it that the reader is guided, with the first word, toward the emotional tone that your controlling purpose demands, and toward some important idea that bolsters this purpose, even if, as we have seen Stevenson do, you seem to be at first flying away from the purpose which we later discover. Thus Mr. Taft, in an article entitled "Present Relations of the Learned Professions to Political Government," places the ministry at the beginning and the law at the end. His controlling purpose is to make the reader believe that every profession offers large chance for the conscientious man to be of use to the political government. Consequently he chooses the two that he thinks most important, and of these places the less important at the beginning and the more important at the end. In this way he succeeds at once in turning the reader as he wishes, and leaves him also with the strongest possible bias toward belief. And since these two professions offer the greatest chance for victory for his controlling purpose, he gives them much more space than to the others, almost three times as much to law, for instance, as to teaching.

Moreover, since the emotions are affected in much writing, the skilled strategist will instantly bear in mind just what emotion he wishes to rouse, and will see that the ideas of greater moving value receive larger development. Mr. Burroughs gives much more space to the sections that deal with the excitement and the joy of bee-hunting than to those that deal with the less pleasant side. To the difficulty of detecting the flight of a bee he gives the single sentence: "Sometimes one's head will swim following it, and often one's eyes are put out by the sun." To the interesting actions of the bee when it is caught he gives at least ten times as much space. In this way he guides the reader's emotions in the way he wishes them to go--and makes successful writing.

The chief strategic problem in exposition, then, is that of so choosing and arranging the material that the point of the writing is made with the proper emphasis. For the accomplishment of this purpose the writer must be able to answer the question, "_What do I wish to do in this piece of writing?_" Then he must bring all the material and its expression to bear upon the reader's mind so that the desired end may be inevitable. To determine what his purpose is the writer must consult the subject itself, his own personality, and the reader. He must also bear in mind the reader's intellect and his emotions. And he must unify the approach to both intellect and emotions. The firmly held conception of what his purpose is will determine what material he is to choose--what is useful and what is not--and also how to arrange this material and how to proportion the space that different sections shall have. He will arrange the material for the greatest advantage to himself and the least resistance from the reader. In other words, to make his writing successful in the sense of accomplishing its end, the writer must, before he sets down a single word, decide upon what his controlling purpose is to be and just how he intends to make material and expression--even in the individual sentence--unite to drive in the one direction of that controlling purpose.

AN IDYL OF THE HONEY-BEE[7]

_John Burroughs_

[7] John Burroughs: _Pepacton_. Houghton Mifflin Company, publishers,
Boston.

One looks upon the woods with a new interest when he suspects
they hold a colony of bees. What a pleasing secret it is; a tree
with a heart of comb-honey, a decayed oak or maple with a bit of
Sicily or Mount Hymettus stowed away in its trunk or branches;
secret chambers where lies hidden the wealth of ten thousand little
free-booters, great nuggets and wedges of precious ore gathered
with risk and labor from every field and wood about.

But if you would know the delights of bee-hunting, and how
many sweets such a trip yields beside honey, come with me some
bright, warm, late September or early October day. It is the golden
season of the year, and any errand or pursuit that takes us abroad
upon the hills or by the painted woods and along the amber colored
streams at such a time is enough. So, with haversacks filled with
grapes and peaches and apples and a bottle of milk,--for we shall
not be home to dinner,--and armed with a compass, a hatchet, a
pail, and a box with a piece of comb-honey neatly fitted into
it--any box the size of your hand with a lid will do nearly as
well as the elaborate and ingenious contrivance of the regular
bee-hunter--we sally forth. Our course at first lies along the
highway, under great chestnut-trees whose nuts are just dropping,
then through an orchard and across a little creek, thence gently
rising through a long series of cultivated fields toward some high,
uplying land, behind which rises a rugged wooded ridge or mountain,
the most sightly point in all this section. Behind this ridge for
several miles the country is wild, wooded, and rocky, and is no
doubt the home of many wild swarms of bees.

After a refreshing walk of a couple of miles we reach a point
where we will make our first trial--a high stone wall that runs
parallel with the wooded ridge referred to, and separated from it
by a broad field. There are bees at work there on that goldenrod,
and it requires but little manoeuvring to sweep one into our
box. Almost any other creature rudely and suddenly arrested in
its career and clapped into a cage in this way would show great
confusion and alarm. The bee is alarmed for a moment, but the bee
has a passion stronger than its love of life or fear of death,
namely, desire for honey, not simply to eat, but to carry home as
booty. "Such rage of honey in their bosom beats," says Virgil. It
is quick to catch the scent of honey in the box, and as quick to
fall to filling itself. We now set the box down upon the wall and
gently remove the cover. The bee is head and shoulders in one of
the half-filled cells, and is oblivious to everything else about
it. Come rack, come ruin, it will die at work. We step back a few
paces, and sit down upon the ground so as to bring the box against
the blue sky as a background. In two or three minutes the bee is
seen rising slowly and heavily from the box. It seems loath to
leave so much honey behind and it marks the place well. It mounts
aloft in a rapidly increasing spiral, surveying the near and minute
objects first, then the larger and more distant, till having
circled about the spot five or six times and taken all its bearings
it darts away for home. It is a good eye that holds fast to the bee
till it is fairly off. Sometimes one's head will swim following it,
and often one's eyes are put out by the sun. This bee gradually
drifts down the hill, then strikes away toward a farm-house half
a mile away, where I know bees are kept. Then we try another and
another, and the third bee, much to our satisfaction, goes straight
toward the woods. We could see the brown speck against the darker
background for many yards.

A bee will usually make three or four trips from the hunter's
box before it brings back a companion. I suspect the bee does not
tell its fellows what it has found, but that they smell out the
secret; it doubtless bears some evidence with it upon its feet or
proboscis that it has been upon honey-comb and not upon flowers,
and its companions take the hint and follow, arriving always many
seconds behind. Then the quantity and quality of the booty would
also betray it. No doubt, also, there are plenty of gossips about
a hive that note and tell everything. "Oh, did you see that?
Peggy Mel came in a few moments ago in great haste, and one of
the up-stairs packers says she was loaded till she groaned with
apple-blossom honey which she deposited, and then rushed off again
like mad. Apple blossom honey in October! Fee, fi, fo, fum! I smell
something! Let's after."

In about half an hour we have three well-defined lines of bees
established--two to farm-houses and one to the woods, and our box
is being rapidly depleted of its honey. About every fourth bee goes
to the woods, and now that they have learned the way thoroughly
they do not make the long preliminary whirl above the box, but
start directly from it. The woods are rough and dense and the hill
steep, and we do not like to follow the line of bees until we
have tried at least to settle the problem as to the distance they
go into the woods--whether the tree is on this side of the ridge
or in the depth of the forest on the other side. So we shut up
the box when it is full of bees and carry it about three hundred
yards along the wall from which we are operating. When liberated,
the bees, as they always will in such cases, go off in the same
directions they have been going; they do not seem to know that
they have been moved. But other bees have followed our scent,
and it is not many minutes before a second line to the woods is
established. This is called cross-lining the bees. The new line
makes a sharp angle with the other line, and we know at once that
the tree is only a few rods into the woods. The two lines we have
established form two sides of a triangle of which the wall is the
base; at the apex of the triangle, or where the two lines meet in
the woods, we are sure to find the trees. We quickly follow up
these lines, and where they cross each other on the side of the
hill we scan every tree closely. I pause at the foot of an oak and
examine a hole near the root; now the bees are in this tree and
their entrance is on the upper side near the ground, not two feet
from the hole I peer into, and yet so quiet and secret is their
going and coming that I fail to discover them and pass on up the
hill. Failing in this direction, I return to the oak again, and
then perceive the bees going out in a small crack in the tree. The
bees do not know they are found out and that the game is in our
hands, and are as oblivious of our presence as if we were ants
or crickets. The indications are that the swarm is a small one,
and the store of honey trifling. In "taking up" a bee-tree it is
usual first to kill or stupefy the bees with the fumes of burning
sulphur or with tobacco smoke. But this course is impracticable on
the present occasion, so we boldly and ruthlessly assault the tree
with an axe we have procured. At the first blow the bees set up
a loud buzzing, but we have no mercy, and the side of the cavity
is soon cut away and the interior with its white-yellow mass of
comb-honey is exposed, and not a bee strikes a blow in defense of
its all. This may seem singular, but it has nearly always been my
experience. When a swarm of bees are thus rudely assaulted with an
axe, they evidently think the end of the world has come, and, like
true misers as they are, each one seizes as much of the treasure as
it can hold; in other words, they all fall to and gorge themselves
with honey, and calmly await the issue. When in this condition they
make no defense and will not sting unless taken hold of. In fact
they are as harmless as flies. Bees are always to be managed with
boldness and decision.

Any halfway measures, any timid poking about, any feeble
attempts to reach their honey, are sure to be quickly resented. The
popular notion that bees have a special antipathy toward certain
persons and a liking for certain others has only this fact at the
bottom of it; they will sting a person who is afraid of them and
goes skulking and dodging about, and they will not sting a person
who faces them boldly and has no dread of them. They are like dogs.
The way to disarm a vicious dog is to show him you do not fear
him; it is his turn to be afraid then. I never had any dread of
bees and am seldom stung by them. I have climbed up into a large
chestnut that contained a swarm in one of its cavities and chopped
them out with an axe, being obliged at times to pause and brush the
bewildered bees from my hands and face, and not been stung once. I
have chopped a swarm out of an apple-tree in June and taken out the
cards of honey and arranged them in a hive, and then dipped out the
bees with a dipper, and taken the whole home with me in pretty good
condition, with scarcely any opposition on the part of the bees. In
reaching your hand into the cavity to detach and remove the comb
you are pretty sure to get stung, for when you touch the "business
end" of a bee, it will sting even though its head be off. But the
bee carries the antidote to its own poison. The best remedy for bee
sting is honey, and when your hands are besmeared with honey, as
they are sure to be on such occasions, the wound is scarcely more
painful than the prick of a pin.

When a bee-tree is thus "taken up" in the middle of the day,
of course a good many bees are away from home and have not heard
the news. When they return and find the ground flowing with honey,
and piles of bleeding combs lying about, they apparently do not
recognize the place, and their first instinct is to fall to and
fill themselves; this done, their next thought is to carry it home,
so they rise up slowly through the branches of the trees till they
have attained an altitude that enables them to survey the scene,
when they seem to say, "Why, _this_ is home" and down they come
again; beholding the wreck and ruins once more they still think
there is some mistake, and get up a second or a third time and
then drop back pitifully as before. It is the most pathetic sight
of all, the surviving and bewildered bees struggling to save a few
drops of their wasted treasures.

Presently, if there is another swarm in the woods, robber-bees
appear. You may know them by their saucy, chiding, devil-may-care
hum. It is an ill-wind that blows nobody good, and they make the
most of the misfortune of their neighbors; and thereby pave the way
for their own ruin. The hunter marks their course and the next day
looks them up. On this occasion the day was hot and the honey very
fragrant, and a line of bees was soon established S.S.W. Though
there was much refuse honey in the old stub, and though little
golden rills trickled down the hill from it, and the near branches
and saplings were besmeared with it where we wiped our murderous
hands, yet not a drop was wasted. It was a feast to which not only
honey-bees came, but bumble-bees, wasps, hornets, flies, ants. The
bumble-bees, which at this season are hungry vagrants with no fixed
place of abode, would gorge themselves, then creep beneath the bits
of empty comb or fragment of bark and pass the night, and renew the
feast next day. The bumble-bee is an insect of which the bee-hunter
sees much. There are all sorts and sizes of them. They are dull
and clumsy compared with the honey-bee. Attracted in the fields by
the bee-hunter's box, they will come up the wind on the scent and
blunder into it in the most stupid, lubberly fashion.

The honey-bee that licked up our leavings on the old stub
belonged to a swarm, as it proved, about half a mile farther down
the ridge, and a few days afterward fate overtook them, and their
stores in turn became the prey of another swarm in the vicinity,
which also tempted Providence and were overwhelmed. The first
mentioned swarm I had lined from several points, and was following
up the clue over rocks and through gulleys, when I came to where
a large hemlock had been felled a few years before and a swarm
taken from a cavity near the top of it; fragments of the old comb
were yet to be seen. A few yards away stood another short, squatty
hemlock, and I said my bees ought to be there. As I paused near it
I noticed where the tree had been wounded with an axe a couple of
feet from the ground many years before. The wound had partially
grown over, but there was an opening there that I did not see at
the first glance. I was about to pass on when a bee passed me
making that peculiar shrill, discordant hum that a bee makes when
besmeared with honey. I saw it alight in the partially closed
wound and crawl home; then came others and others, little bands
and squads of them heavily freighted with honey from the box. The
tree was about twenty inches through and hollow at the butt, or
from the axe mark down. This space the bees had completely filled
with honey. With an axe we cut away the outer ring of live wood and
exposed the treasure. Despite the utmost care, we wounded the comb
so that little rills of the golden liquid issued from the root of
the tree and trickled down the hill.

The other bee-tree in the vicinity, to which I have referred,
we found one warm November day in less than half an hour after
entering the woods. It also was a hemlock, that stood in a niche
in a wall of hoary, moss-covered rocks thirty feet high. The tree
hardly reached to the top of the precipice. The bees entered a
small hole at the root, which was seven or eight feet from the
ground. The position was a striking one. Never did apiary have a
finer outlook or more rugged surroundings. A black, wood-embraced
lake lay at our feet; the long panorama of the Catskills filled the
far distance, and the more broken outlines of the Shawangunk range
filled the near. On every hand were precipices and a wild confusion
of rocks and trees.

The cavity occupied by the bees was about three feet and a
half long and eight or ten inches in diameter. With an axe we cut
away one side of the tree and laid bare its curiously wrought
heart of honey. It was a most pleasing sight. What winding and
devious ways the bees had through their palace! What great masses
and blocks of snow-white comb there were! Where it was sealed up,
presenting that slightly dented, uneven surface, it looked like
some precious ore. When we carried a large pail of it out of the
woods, it seemed still more like ore.

In lining bees through the woods, the tactics of the hunter
are to pause every twenty or thirty rods, lop away the branches or
cut down the trees, and set the bees to work again. If they still
go forward, he goes forward also and repeats his observations till
the tree is found or till the bees turn and come back upon the
trail. Then he knows he has passed the tree, and he retraces his
steps to a convenient distance and tries again, and thus quickly
reduces the space to be looked over till the swarm is traced home.
On one occasion, in a wild rocky wood, where the surface alternated
between deep gulfs and chasms filled with thick, heavy growths of
timber and sharp, precipitous, rocky ridges like a tempest-tossed
sea, I carried my bees directly under their tree, and set them to
work from a high, exposed ledge of rocks not thirty feet distant.
One would have expected them under such circumstances to have gone
straight home, as there were but few branches intervening, but they
did not; they labored up through the trees and attained an altitude
above the woods as if they had miles to travel, and thus baffled
me for hours. Bees will always do this. They are acquainted with
the woods only from the top side, and from the air above; they
recognize home only by landmarks here, and in every instance they
rise aloft to take their bearings. Think how familiar to them the
topography of the forest summits must be--an umbrageous sea or
plain where every mark and point is known.

Another curious fact is that generally you will get track of a
bee-tree sooner when you are half a mile from it than when you are
only a few yards. Bees, like us human insects, have little faith in
the near at hand; they expect to make their fortune in a distant
field, they are lured by the remote and the difficult, and hence
overlook the flower and the sweet at their very door. On several
occasions I have unwittingly set my box within a few paces of a
bee-tree and waited long for bees without getting them, when, on
removing to a distant field or opening in the woods I have got a
clue at once.

Bees, like the milkman, like to be near a spring. They do
water their honey, especially in a dry time. The liquid is then
of course thicker and sweeter, and will bear diluting. Hence, old
bee-hunters look for bee-trees along creeks and near spring runs
in the woods. I once found a tree a long distance from any water,
and the honey had a peculiar bitter flavor imparted to it, I was
convinced, by rain water sucked from the decayed and spongy hemlock
tree, in which the swarm was found. In cutting into the tree,
the north side of it was found to be saturated with water like a
spring, which ran out in big drops, and had a bitter flavor. The
bees had thus found a spring or a cistern in their own house.

Wild honey is as near like tame as wild bees are like their
brothers in the hive. The only difference is that wild honey
is flavored with your adventure, which makes it a little more
delectable than the domestic article.

PULVIS ET UMBRA[8]

_Robert Louis Stevenson_

[8] R. L. Stevenson: _Across the Plains_. Copyright, 1892, by Charles
Scribner's Sons, New York City.

What a monstrous specter is this man, the disease of the
agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with
slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies
of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes
that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children
screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows
know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for
so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so
incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely
descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives:
who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny
and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead
filled with imperfect virtues, infinitely childish, often admirably
valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary
life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity;
rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out
his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in
pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch
the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to
the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something
owing to himself, to his neighbor, to his God; an ideal of decency,
to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below
which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most
men is one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it
transcends itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with
independence; but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought.
It sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come
second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears
are conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks
from the reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all
but the most cowardly stand amidst the risks of war; and the more
noble, having strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal,
affront and embrace death. Strange enough if, with their singular
origin and perverted practice, they think they are to be rewarded
in some future life: stranger still, if they are persuaded of the
contrary, and think this blow, which they solicit, will strike
them senseless for eternity. I shall be reminded what a tragedy of
misconception and misconduct man at large presents: of organized
injustice, cowardly violence, and treacherous crime; and of the
damning imperfections of the best. They cannot be too darkly drawn.
Man is indeed marked for failure in his efforts to do right. But
where the best consistently miscarry, how tenfold more remarkable
that all should continue to strive; and surely we should find it
both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from which success
is banished, our race should not cease to labor.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory
isle, be a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this
nearer sight he startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters
not where we look, under what climate we observe him, in what
stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burthened with what
erroneous morality; by campfires in Assiniboia, the snow powdering
his shoulders, the wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing
the ceremonial calumet and uttering his grave opinions like a
Roman senator; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and vile
pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he for all that simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others; in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted
perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps long-suffering
with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman this time)
kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears as she drowns her
child in the sacred river; in the brothel, the discard of society,
living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool, a thief,
the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of honor
and the touch of pity, often repaying the world's scorn with
service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,
rejecting riches: everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,
everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, everywhere the
ensign of man's ineffectual goodness:--ah! if I could show you
this! if I could show you these men and women, all the world over,
in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under every
circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging, in the brothel or on the scaffold, to some rag of honor,
the poor jewel of their souls!

OUTLINES

The Value of Outlines

It has been thought that the old Scotchman who said, "A man's years are three score and ten, or maybe by good hap he'll get ten more, but _it's a weary wrastle all the way through_!" came to his final words as the result of writing outlines. If this be true, surely it is unfortunate, for the writing of outlines brings exceeding great reward. An outline is not an ancient form of blind discipline, but rather a helping hand across the bogland of facts and ideas. It is a most useful instrument toward good writing; its justification is its practical usefulness. This usefulness, helpfulness, is double in its value--to the writer and to the instructor, when there is one.

As to the value of an outline for the writer--without an outline you face in your writing a complicated problem, more complicated, in fact, than is justifiable. At one and the same time you must make your thinking logical and your expression adequate--distinguished if possible. Either of these tasks is sufficient to demand all your powers; together, they offer a really overwhelming problem. Stevenson, to whom style was of the greatest importance, as bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the writing, wrote to a friend, "Problems of style are (as yet) dirt under my feet; my problem is architectural, creative--to get this stuff joined and moving." It was only after he had fitted his material together that he felt able to devote himself to making the beautiful prose that is so much admired. A noted Frenchman is quoted as exclaiming, when first he beheld the famous Brooklyn Bridge, "How beautiful it is!", then, "How well made it is!" and finally, after a moment's reflection, "How well planned it is!" A good piece of writing should have the same comments made; but they cannot be made, usually, without the carefully planned outline.

You face the problem, without an outline, of answering the two questions about every detail that presents itself for treatment: first, shall I include or exclude this detail; and secondly, how shall I make this detail help the general flow of my writing, and how shall I express it so that it shall contribute to the proper tone of the work? And while you thus judge each small detail, you must also keep your critical faculties active to estimate your total course, whether you are cleaving your way clearly, steadily, and with sufficient directness to your goal, whether the work as a whole is answering your desires.

Now to ask the unaided brain, unless it has had long years of training, to perform all this critical work during the actual process of expression, is nothing short of cruel--and almost sure of failure. For in any writing which enlists from you even a spark of interest the fervor of creative work, the stimulating effect of seeing the work grow under your pen, tends often to unseat the critical powers, to destroy perspective, to make a detail seem more valuable or less valuable than it should, on the whim of the momentary interest or repulsion. Thus the logic of the writing is impaired, for details are included which should not enter, and others are excluded which ought to be welcomed, and proportions are bad. And the expression is so liable to unevenness as to be less worthy than it should be. Bad logic and uneven expression beget failure.