Any man of any time who has ever written with vigor has
been immeasurably nearer to the dunghill on which he sank
his talons while crowing than to all literary ancestors.
A great deal of chronicle writing that makes no pretense
at being belles-lettres is really superior literature to much
that is so classified. I will vote three times a day and all night
for John C. Duval's _Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace_, Charlie
Siringo's _Riata and Spurs_, James B. Gillett's _Six Years with
the Texas Rangers_, and dozens of other straightaway chronicles
of the Southwest in preference to "The Culprit Fay" and
much other watery "literature" with which anthologies
representing the earlier stages of American writing are padded.
Ike Fridge's pamphlet story of his ridings for John Chisum--
chief provider of cattle for Billy the Kid to steal--has more
of the juice of reality in it and, therefore, more of literary
virtue than some of James Fenimore Cooper's novels, and
than some of James Russell Lowell's odes.
The one thing essential to writing if it is to be read, to art
if it is to be looked at, is vitality. No critic or professor can
be hired to pump vitality into any kind of human expression,
but professors and critics have taken it out of many a human
being who in his attempts to say something decided to be
correct at the expense of being himself--being natural,
being alive.
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