Again, there are many trades that are not in the best of taste—swindling, forgery, sandbagging, and so forth; an occasional story using one of these might do little harm, and even some good, inasmuch as it might enlarge the scope of one or two readers, but a journal that began to show favour to such doubtful, and even unpopular, industries would soon lose its hold. Other occupations, while free from the objections urged above, must be regarded as useless for our purpose, because they do not appear to offer sufficient room for a really determined hero; they are cramped, confined, and show no tempting horizons; the trade of ferryman, of programme-seller, of liftman, to name only a few, must be passed over for this reason. Moreover, the selected trade or profession must be the subject of a correspondence course or the hero can make no headway; a correspondence course is essential. Now, although our correspondence schools are daily quickened by the spirit of enterprise, there are still many occupations that they have left untouched; most of the trades we have already dismissed would have to be rejected again on this count, while there are many others, such as that of torturer, milkman, astrologer, or acrobat, that we imagine to be still without correspondence courses. It is clear then that the choice of a suitable trade has difficulties, and that a mere writer of fiction should be glad to accept the proffered advice of the expert, his editor.
There is, however, another reason that more than justifies the editor’s wisdom in offering to indicate ‘preferred trades or professions.’ Some authors, knowing more about such things than most of their fellows, might very well choose entirely suitable trades even if they were left to themselves; but there is more in the question than this mere choice, for each story must not only be acceptable in itself, but it must also be good when it is considered in its relation to the other stories that it follows or precedes. As we have seen, the tales themselves have unity, but within that unity there must be variety. The cunning arrangement of literary matter so that one item contrasts with another, the effect of both thus being heightened, is the very mark of good editing. Are the readers of Ambition, any more than any other readers, to be denied this variety, this beguiling blend of light and shadow, this dazzling counterpoint of literature? By no means. Our editor very wisely makes use of variety and contrast by apportioning out the trades and professions himself. Otherwise, there is no telling what would happen. Four consecutive numbers of the journal might each contain the life story of a successful young gasfitter, and there would probably be some grumbling and even a falling off in circulation. As it is, our editor can make the most of his material; one number, we will say, gives us the history of a young man who learns accountancy by correspondence, a brainy occupation, but perhaps a trifle prosaic and needing an indoor setting; in the very next number the balance is restored by a tale of a smart young correspondence school pupil who turns bee-keeper, which brings in a flavour of the open air and sunlit gardens, and is not without a touch of poetry; while in the following number we return once more to the city, with all its romantic bustle, and breathlessly follow the swelling fortunes of a square-jawed young plumber; and so it goes on.
By such means our editor has taken care to achieve both unity and variety in the stories at his disposal. What we thought at first restrictions pressing somewhat heavily upon the story-teller are now seen to be hints for his guidance, aids without which he cannot expect to be successful in this kind of fiction. If there are men of more than ordinary talent, born story-tellers, among us waiting for an opening, let them take leave of the stuff they have been writing, worn-out romance and so forth, all tears and tatters or mere coloured foppery, let them keep pace with the times, for here in the pages of Ambition is opportunity indeed. While they are pushing hero after hero along the road to success they can surely make shift to advance themselves ‘in position and earnings.’
A MAD SHEPHERD
THE world is at once saner and yet more given to lunacy than it used to be, for the people outside asylums are saner than their grandfathers were, yet there are greater numbers under some sort of treatment, or at least under lock and key, for madness. I do not know whether it is because there is increasing harbourage for lunatics in our time, or because it is merely becoming more difficult, every year, in the face of specialists whose own sanity is never questioned, to prove that one is not yet ready for the madhouse; but it is clear that the eccentrics and half-wits who chuckled and grimaced in our older literature, through the long tales of our grandparents, are fast disappearing. A host of notable figures in Shakespeare, from Hamlet to Petruchio, would not be suffered to walk abroad these days unless they piped in a lower key. It is a great pity that all the crack-brained, whimsical fellows are leaving us; we need a little variety in our experiments with existence, for there is a danger that we are all crazed and have only decided for unanimity, that we are Mad Hatters who will not suffer a March Hare; and these others, extravagant but harmless, have their own visions of life and we cannot prove them wrong, but can only point to the majority—a trick unworthy of us.
These bold experimentalists, the crack-brained, are now so few and so precious, that I travel with one eye open for them; for a man is as well, if not better, occupied collecting eccentric essays in life, as he is casting about for ancient coins or earthenware. Remote towns or villages make the most promising hunting-grounds, and only a short time ago, my search was well rewarded in a certain small market town. I had been in the place several days, and had come to know most of its prominent figures well by sight, when one fellow, whom I was always seeing, here, there, and everywhere, began to excite my curiosity. He was an oldish man, with a close-shaven, tanned face, and always dressed in gaiters and what seemed to be a long smock, with a curiously-shaped cap, of the same material as his smock, pressed down upon his head. These and other particulars I noted with interest, but what intrigued me most was a long pole, roughly shaped like a shepherd’s crook, which he always carried in his hand, and which seemed to be some implement of his trade. But what his trade was, I could not guess; I never saw him employed in any way, never caught him piloting beasts towards the market or making any kind of use of the mysterious pole. Yet whenever I ran across him, which I did frequently, he always seemed to be fully occupied, neither rushing heedlessly nor yet loitering, but resolutely pressing forward to some important piece of business—a sober man of affairs. Even in a little market town, there are many ways of earning bread and beer that fall outside the scope of a stranger’s knowledge, tiny trades that are commonplaces in one shire and unknown in the next, and I might easily have contented myself with assuming that my man was thus engaged. But the archaic costume and the quaintly fashioned pole, now so familiar, were too provocative, and led me to question my landlady, whose talk was fluent and full of good matter, though rather obscure. I had scarcely begun my description of the man before she had snatched the subject from me and panted forth the whole tale.
In spite of his quaint figure, I had set my man down