The Ruling Passion [0]
The Ruling Passion
by Henry van Dyke
A WRITER'S REQUEST OF HIS MASTER
Let me never tag a moral to a story, nor tell a story without a
meaning. Make me respect my material so much that I dare not slight
my work. Help me to deal very honestly with words and with people
because they are both alive. Show me that as in a river, so in a
writing, clearness is the best quality, and a little that is pure is
worth more than much that is mixed. Teach me to see the local
colour without being blind to the inner light. Give me an ideal
that will stand the strain of weaving into human stuff on the loom
of the real. Keep me from caring more for books than for folks, for
art than for life. Steady me to do my full stint of work as well as
I can: and when that is done, stop me, pay what wages Thou wilt, and
help me to say, from a quiet heart, a grateful AMEN.
PREFACE
In every life worth writing about there is a ruling passion,--"the
very pulse of the machine." Unless you touch that, you are groping
around outside of reality.
Sometimes it is romantic love: Natures masterpiece of interested
benevolence. In almost all lives this passion has its season of
empire. Therefore, and rightly, it is the favourite theme of the
storyteller. Romantic love interests almost everybody, because
almost everybody knows something about it, or would like to know.
But there are other passions, no less real, which also have their
place and power in human life. Some of them come earlier, and
sometimes they last longer, than romantic love. They play alongside
of it and are mixed up with it, now checking it, now advancing its
flow and tingeing it with their own colour.
Just because love is so universal, it is often to one of the other
passions that we must look for the distinctive hue, the individual
quality of a life-story. Granted, if you will, that everybody must
fall in love, or ought to fall in love, How will he do it? And what
will he do afterwards? These are questions not without interest to
one who watches the human drama as a friend. The answers depend
upon those hidden and durable desires, affections, and impulses to
which men and women give themselves up for rule and guidance.
Music, nature, children, honour, strife, revenge, money, pride,
friendship, loyalty, duty,--to these objects and others like them
the secret power of personal passion often turns, and the life
unconsciously follows it, as the tides in the sea follow the moon in
the sky.
When circumstances cross the ruling passion, when rocks lie in the
way and winds are contrary, then things happen, characters emerge,
slight events are significant, mere adventures are transformed into
a real plot. What care I how many "hair-breadth 'scapes" and
"moving accidents" your hero may pass through, unless I know him for
a man? He is but a puppet strung on wires. His kisses are wooden
and his wounds bleed sawdust. There is nothing about him to
remember except his name, and perhaps a bit of dialect. Kill him or
crown him,--what difference does it make?
But go the other way about your work:
"Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
Look at his head and heart, find how and why
He differs from his fellows utterly,"--
and now there is something to tell, with a meaning.
If you tell it at length, it is a novel,--a painting. If you tell
it in brief, it is a short story,--an etching. But the subject is
always the same: the unseen, mysterious, ruling passion weaving the
stuff of human nature into patterns wherein the soul is imaged and
revealed.
To tell about some of these ruling passions, simply, clearly, and
concretely, is what I want to do in this book. The characters are
chosen, for the most part, among plain people, because their
feelings are expressed