Harvard Leads in Producing Authors Is Ellsworth Report

"Could Walt Whitman have spent four years at Harvard and then have written 'Leaves of Grass'? Impossible." Mr. William W. Ellsworth, veteran publisher and until a few years ago president of the Century Company, advanced this question and the emphatic answer to it in a recent interview with a CRIMSON reporter.

"What he learned at Harvard", continued the former head of the organization which publishes the 'Century' and 'St. Nicholas' magazines and the 'Century Dictionary', "would have prevented him from striking out in such an original vein as that. Nor would Mark Twain have dared to go against every canon of good taste in literature and turn out The Innocents Abrind if he had sat beneath the elms of good old Yale. Twain struck out for himself and his poor taste was so funny that it made a new kind of literature in which taste did not seem to enter at all.

Wendell Advised "Line a Day"

"There are very few people who would-not like to have the power to write," continued Mr. Ellsworth, "and to write so that other people would want to read them, as we want to read Mark Twain and Stevenson and H. G. Wells. How can you learn to do it? I asked Barrett Wendell once,--he was a professor of English literature at Harvard for a quarter of a century, if he knew a way, and this is what he wrote me:

"Years ago I had hope that by careful work our colleges might develop some such training in literary skill as is developed in musical conservatories. Experiment proved that this, at least to my mind, was impracticable. The only way to learn to write so that anyone will read it to write 'nulla dies sine linea' On the whole, the true school of literary production for the past century has been journalism. In the reporter's work there is reality unattainable academically. Taste is another matter and taste is the product of training. But after all nothing amounts to anything without a spark of what, when it appears in flame, we call genius. Charles Reade called 'nulla dies sine linea' the eleventh commandment.

Trollope a Facile Writer

"In his autobiography, Anthony Trollope quotes: 'The young writer need tie no wet towel around his head, nor sit for thirty hours at his desk without moving,--as men have sat, or said that they have sat.' And Anthony Trollope wrote many pages, many hours every day, and his books are still read and loved, and he earned $350,000 by his pen. A goodly sum for a writer in a life time.

"The young man or young woman who goes in for technical training," went on the pioneer publisher, "knows just what he wants, and gets it. And more and more young men are seeking assured professions for which they can get definite preparation. There are classes in different kinds of writing, but no schools of authorship. The college student, taking the regular academic course, learns to criticize, to tell the true in literature from the false, but is there anything in his teaching that will help him to create? General college culture doubtless increased the powers of a Lowell or a Long-fellow, but it might have been a positive draw back to the originality of Walt Mason, Mark Twain, or James Whitcomb Riley. At no time in their lives could those men have passed an examination for the freshman class of any American college. Think of the conditions that would be heaped today upon the head of William Shakespeare if he knocked at the gates of Oxford or Cambridge!

"As to the influence of college education on authorship, I once made up a list of the American authors who had won deserved fame in the hundred years between 1800 and 1900, from Noah Webster to Seton Thompson. I book it from Professor Brander Matthews' chronology of literature. There were 59 authors. Of these 28 went to college, 31 did not. Some of the collegians did not graduate, many of the early ones graduated very young, Emerson, Hawthorne and Motley at 18, Lowell at 19.

"Moreover in the old times there were no literary courses in college. Young men studied mathematics, ancient languages, logic, and natural philosophy. There was mental training in plenty, but not at all what our young people are getting today.

Now come down to the present time. The showing for collegians is a little better, but not much. Edward J. O'Brien of the Boston Transcript reads and judges every year the short stories that appear in the worth-while magazines. Going through one of his recent compilations. I find that he considers 63 stories of the year's output enduring. Forty six writers produced them, some wrote more than one. Katherine Fullerton Gerould, of Radcliffe, wrote five. Of the 46 writers, I am not sure of the education of four, but of the remaining 42, 26 went to college, 16 did not. Harvard leads in the number of graduates who have been successful in literature. Of the 28 collegians who were among the 59 leading American authors of the last century. Harvard furnished 12; 14 could have been half of them. Of the 26 college-educated short story writers in the list I speak of five came out of Harvard, two out of Radcliffe.

If creative writing cannot be taught, perhaps it may be inspired, and it is possible that such Harvard professors as Wendell himself, Briggs, Perry, Kittredge, Copeland, Neilson, now president of Smith College, and Baker have helped their students, helped richly to develop the seed which nature planted within some of them.

College Majority Among British

"A list of the popular English writers of the day would show more college men than non-collegians," declared Mr. Ellsworth, "but among the latter are many whose books we like: Arnold Bennett, Gilbert Chesterton, William Black, Joseph Conrad, Rider Haggard, John Masefield, George More, Eden Phillotts, Israel Zangwell, and Bernard Shaw. H. G. Wells took honors in zoology in a college of science; Robert Hichens attended a college of music; Thomas Hardy acquired an education at evening classes in King's College, London; Kipling went to the United Service College, not an institution famous for turning out literati George Bernard Shaw, a poor scholar, left school at fifteen, and plunged into the literary world through the medium of a real-estate office.

College Attracted Howells

"Some of the writers who earned no college degree wish they had. Mr. Howells, most sweet-natured and modest of men, wrote me, not long before his death: 'I would fain have been schooled, for I think it would have saved me time, and I have always thought the average of my ignorance would have been less.' Mr. Howells, working in a printing office, mastered Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish before he was twenty-one. He would hardly have been allowed to take as many languages as that in college.

"Arnold Bennett, who did not go to college, is in favor of a college education for authors. Robert Hichens wrote me: 'I nearly went to Oxford, and my two brothers were there. I wonder if I ought to regret not having gone. Chi lo sa?'

"Professor Richard Burton believes that college sometimes helps, but often hinders.' Professor William Lyon Phelps feels that 'colleges of course do not make geniuses, nor can they frustrate them.' And he adds, 'in teaching my drama course, I tell them I haven't the slightest idea of making dramatists out of them, but I hope to make them intelligent, appreciative and therefore happy auditors.'

"It was Robert G. Ingersoll, you know, who made the heterodox statement that for the most part colleges are places where the pebbles are polished and the diamonds are dimmed. But so many of us are pebbles and so few diamonds that we may well take the chance. College education, certainly, increases our happiness.

"And if one stays away from college he must work all the harder, and indeed in that very effort may sometimes lie the germ of successful authorship. Mark Twain was a student all his life, a great reader and an absorber of history. I remember when he became interested in a certain memory system which I was trying to master at the same time. It is said that while experimenting with it he committed to memory the front page of the New York Sun on a train between New York and Hartford, and recited it to his wife on his arrival. He was always training his mind. No young person need stay away from college with the idea of saying time and taking a short cut to literary achievement. The way may be even longer."