Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/31

 peal, to a large number of people, and among any large number of people there will be Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, believers in the Garden of Eden, Darwinians, suburban housewives in large numbers, puritans, moralists, all kinds of people with all kinds of notions of the good and bad.

Very well then—if you are a writer intent on catching and holding the fancy of the crowd you have got to have a technique. You have got to become the artful dodger, have got to invent or learn the trick of creating in the mind of your audience the sensations of terror, delight, amusement, suspense, without in any way actually touching the reality of lives.

At the county fairs back in Ohio when I was a boy there used to be a kind of faker who went about with a machine. Into this machine he put a pound of sugar and started it going. It whirled