Essays from the Chap-Book. Various
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confidingly send into this machine the tenderly nourished children of their brains, dressed with natural affection in all the frills and ruffles of rhetoric, and receive them home again with ornaments torn away, laid in a strait-jacket which has been cut with rigid uniformity, and made with mathematical precision—and yet they kiss the rod that turned the natural children of their brains into wretched little automatons.
I would not judge all revision bureaus by one; but I must give my experience at the hands of a very reputable one. I had written four books of more than average sale, and had been ever commended by the press for my grammatical construction, when I sent to a bureau for criticism a short magazine-paper. It was returned to me full of very large and legible corrections—or rather alterations such as these: Where I wrote of my heroine being dressed in, etc., my reviser placed gowned in; where I wrote the little child, the reviser altered to the young babe; where I said nothing happened after this, to my horror, in heroic blue-pencilled letters, I read my pet aversion, nothing transpired. Where a compound sentence contained several clauses with verbs in the past tense, all dependent clauses were made participial in form; not always to the advantage in elegance, never of moment or indeed of real difference in grammatical construction.
I must confess that I did not send to this bureau my real name, as palpably too well known to men of literary ilk. My three dollars’ worth of advice was contained in a single sentence: “Your style is fair, but commonplace; if you practise literary composition you may succeed; but this article is, in our judgment, not salable.”
I had the pleasure of sending the paper immediately to a well-known magazine and receiving therefrom in payment a check for fifty dollars.
Mr. Meredith and his Aminta
By Lewis E. Gates
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