, and Frank Reade, and I would
buy, if I could find it anywhere, a certain paper-backed volume
dealing with the life of the James boys--not Henry and William,
but Jesse and Frank--which I read ever so long ago; and I would
confer the whole lot of them upon that offspring of mine and I
would say to him:
"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift.
Read these volumes openly. Never mind the crude style in which
most of them are written. It can't be any worse than the stilted
and artificial style in which your school reader is written; and,
anyhow, if you are ever going to be a writer, style is a thing
which you laboriously must learn, and then having acquired added
wisdom you will forget part of it and chuck the rest of it out
of the window and acquire a style of your own, which merely is
another way of saying that if you have good taste to start with
you will have what is called style in writing, and if you haven't
that sense of good taste you won't have a style and nothing can
give it to you.
"Read them for the thrills that are in them. Read them, remembering
that if this country had not had a pioneer breed of Buckskin Sams
and Deadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime
novelists.
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