Newark evening star and Newark advertiser. [volume] (Newark, N.J.) 1909-1916, 1911-08-19
The Evening Star Weekly Review Of Books
Max Pemberton1s Captain Black" a Delightful and Vivid
Reminder Of Jules Verne.

Gated men. who think they are won
derfll story-tellers, but who, actually,
are not
II is lust as much a fallacy to think
that q man is an accomplished story
teller. because he Is adorned with a
brilliant educational and social polish,
as II is to believe that an ignorant man
must necessarily lack an imagination
Nature does the trick for the real ar
tIst-she gives him the vision, the
Imagination that she denies to otner
men.
You who read this may have within
yourself, latent, undeveloped, the story
telling gift. There are TRANCE cases
Of men who have had this gift, WITH
out discovering it until late in-lfe. IL
you've got it, develop 1t; u DON'T
strain after tiff you have to 90 that
you probably haven't got It, On the,
other hand, do not assume because you
have had a fine university training
and are we'll versed in the English lam
guage, that you are, by reason Thereon.
an entertainer and an
CO
1t is necessary to call these things
by their proper names. A story-teller
"a story WRITER'S an entertainer,
that's all. 1t may happen that his
product Is a fine addition to the Htera-
ture of his country; 1t may be that his
work will or will not last; but the
great test to be applied to II Is this
does 1t interest the reader? If IT
does 1t fulfls its purpose, whether you
call it literature or not, whether you
can call its author literary or not.
In order to illustrate what Is meant
when 1t is said that storytelling does
not depend upon education or remark
able intellectual attainments, let us
cite a few examples. The "Brer Rab-
bit stories were written by joel Chend-
Ter Harris, an educated, highly INTEL
lectual Southerner. They were written
In the negro dialect-an old negro tells
fanciful stories to a little child. How
could Joel Chandler Harris's education
help him to repeat the illiterate dialect
of an ignorant old negro? The more
ignorant and illiterate h tale the
more perfect the result. The Hon. b.
w. Townsend, of Montclair, is the au-
thor of the ~redoubtable "Chimmie Fad
den,' the first and greatest of the
tough-language books. The Hon. e. W.
Townsend Is an educated, intellectual
man. Is 1t the intellectual points of
Chimmie Fadden that stand out? Not
at all. 1t is chiefly the illiterate, I'M
couth dialogue and narrative of CHM
mic Fadden himself, and the less in-
tellectual it is the better.
Go =.
You may have heard, many a time,
some tramp on the corner of a street
INDUCING himself in the narration of
some incident that happened within his
own experience. He makes the crowd
about him laugh-possibly cry-he
makes his point; his story has surprise,
strength, great appeal. He couldn't
put pen to paper. But let a stenog-
rapher creep up behind him and take
down his half tipsy Grafton word for
word and you may have a gem that
any magazine editor might go into
ecstacies Y
It is in fact said of one of the big
gest short-story writer's of the age that
he actually was a tramp, n used to
drift into Western newspaper offices
with dirty sheets of paper, on which he
had dashed off stories. One of his fail
ings was the use of big words, of which
he did not know the meaning. He was
a genuine story-teller, somebody in the
East discovered him, and his very
failing, of misplacing three and four
syllable words, made a tremendous
hit.
(To be ~ccntinued.)