The Ruling Passion | Page 3

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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