66 
THE GUIDE TO NATURE 
lesson that has followed me for life, 
that grace of manner and ability of ex- 
pression have a strong and active 
enemy in self-consciousness and for- 
mality. I have often queried, “What 
was that man afraid of? Was it his 
own brother, the only one who had 
entered the room since his eloquent 
oration, or was it the secretary’s calling 
of the meeting to order?” 
The answer is simple. His sin of 
awkwardness, like any other personal 
sin, was wholly a matter of his own 
self. Get one’s own personality right 
and everything that follows will be 
right. 
I once read the jocose reply of an 
editor to a correspondent who asked 
how oratorical ability is to be obtained. 
The editor replied that the speaker 
must think of every member of his au- 
dience as a cabbage head. Psycho- 
logically the editor was only partly 
right. If he had told that would-be 
orator to think of himself as a cabbage 
head and be as completely oblivious qf 
the members of his audience as is & 
cabbage in the garden to the other cab- 
bages, then he would have expressed 
the gist of the matter. 
I once attended a series of lessons in 
a famous school of oratory and I heard 
reiterated this statement as the secret 
of good reading or reciting: “You must 
get wholly into the spirit of your au- 
thor.” I at once made the deduction or 
corollary: it must be equally true that 
to be eloquent in originality one must 
get wholly into the spirit of one’s self 
and be oblivious to the thoughts of any- 
one else. 
To be shut up like a clam, paradoxi- 
cal as it may appear at first thought, is 
one of the essentials of self-expression. 
Why is it, as Richard Grant White 
says, that a letter from a servant girl 
to her lover may be more eloquent than 
an elaborate and learned essay? Simply 
because the girl is thinking only of her 
love, and out of her heart she is self- 
expressive, while the pedant is thinking 
more of his learned language than of 
letting himself loose. 
Thirty years as an editor has brought 
to my desk a great variety of self-ex- 
pressions, and some of the most charm- 
ing have come from very young folks 
who were not old enough, or I should 
say not self-conscious enough, to make 
the mistake of thinking that the editor 
is especially in love with language that 
flows from a dictionary or an encyclo- 
pedia. 
For years I was taught, I learned 
and I taught that the best way to ex- 
press an idea was like the fish in that 
old story of how to cook a fish. You 
must first catch the fish. That philoso- 
phy is not correct. One does not catch 
fish until one has learned to dangle a 
hook and line and to know a good many 
things that will not frighten the fish. 
That is the grace of the fisherman and 
I am more and more convinced, in 
establishing my new philosophy of self- 
expression, that using a mental writing 
machine or one’s own talking machine 
is much like using a typewriter. The 
first thing is to get freedom of action. 
When a woman buys a sewing ma- 
chine she is not instructed by the 
skilled dealer to get a pretty pattern 
and an expensive piece of cloth and she 
will then acquire the ability to run the 
machine. No, he first shows how to 
operate the treadle : he puts on the belt 
and runs the machine, then he takes 
any piece of cloth and shows her how 
she must get a motion that must not be 
jerky and jumpy but smooth, easy and 
steady. In other words, the more the 
self-consciousness of the operator gets 
into that machine the more jumpy and 
jerky and ridiculous will be the result. 
The farmer with his new mowing 
machine does not strike at once into 
his heaviest field of herd’s grass. He 
drives up and down the road, throwing 
the machine into gear to have the 
horses get used fo it and to be sure 
that he himself knows how to handle 
the lever and throw the cutting arm 
over the stones. When he has mas- 
tered the machine he is ready to cut the 
hay and not until then. The dealer that 
sold the machine may be an expert of 
the highest order and may have sold 
machines the country over, yet he 
logically knows that the first thing is 
to run the machine before it can be set 
to work. 
In my method of teaching self-ex- 
pression to girls and young women I 
follow common sense business meth- 
ods, which in this respect are exactly 
the opposite of that time-honored state- 
ment, “Get the idea first.” If 1 could 
get the young people to obtain first- 
