文档介绍：THE RULING PASSION
THE RULING PASSION
by Henry van Dyke
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THE RULING PASSION
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.
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THE RULING PASSION
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 e 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 w