[In the following essay, Pendennis interviews Cobb, discussing with him the inspiration for his characters. ]

Looking like Cyrano de Bergerac, in white flannels; hovering like a lazy bumble-bee over the honey-pots of literature, on a dreamy morning in August, Cobb prolonged his reputation for being the best newspaper man in the country.

Cyrano de Bergerac, as you remember, was a poet with a gift for wit in seeing life and a gallantry for believing well of his fellow-men. He should have been a Southerner. There was in him that slumbering soul of the rebel, slow to be roused, outwardly calm as the smooth face of the Mississippi, but deep and wide and threatening.

Irvin S. Cobb was born in Paducah, Ky., and although Illinois was just across the river, that did not inspire Paducah. When Cobb was a small boy, Judge "Billie" Bishop was the legal oracle of that community. In hundreds of southern towns there were judges to whom the people went for wisdom and good liquor. "Billie" Bishop was typical of most of them. A tall, portly, slow-moving human being, who always carried a huge cotton umbrella, wore a well educated goatee, and white duck suits in summer. Bald-headed, florid, poor, with the independence and the courage of a lion, he appeared sometimes childish, sometimes masterful, always kind.

He died fifteen years ago, in Paducah, before he became really distinguished in the world as the much loved Judge Priest, as Cobb re-christened him, calling him Priest because, as his name was Bishop, it seemed appropriate. He was a real man whose individuality sank deep into the heart and mind of little eight-year-old Cobb. At eight one does not expect one to be studying types for fiction. Obviously it behooves us to be cautious in the presence of our children; they may be spying into our hearts deeper than we can suspect.

Judge Priest comes to mind as the most definitely clear type of character that Cobb has given us. He abounds in the grandeur of simplicity, in the romance of Kentucky sentiment. In the years that have intervened since that young reporter first saw a story in him, the Judge has lain in all the glory of his remembrance, undisturbed in the heart of the writer who found him. So he has become an unconscious contribution to literature, where he belongs so perfectly.

To-day, in a diminutive Swiss chalet, gracefully set down on the edge of a miniature pond, Cobb communes with his typewriter. Faithful friend of intellectual stress and struggle, it has collaborated valiantly. It has come into its own. It rests now in that sylvan surrounding which many typewriters hope for, but rarely attain. It is safe among the hills that guard the Hudson, on its own estate of sixty acres. It has no doubt written the name for its retreat, since it is called Rebel Ridge, wherever in active duty of reconstruction its sphynx-like keyboard silently obeys the master's touch. It now has emerged from the atmosphere of haste and the noise of a newspaper where it worked so much more for so much less. Where it once upon a time turned out a thousand words for a paltry sum, now it hammers out words that are worth their weight in gold. Hence the lordly retreat, the surrounding peace, the music of the rustling leaves and the song of the birds to soften the click-clack of its own voice.

Cobb is a huge man. He towers upward and spreads out like a mature oak tree. He has been shedding acorns forty years, perhaps less than that. He began reeling off words in Paducah as a cub reporter. Then he came to New York and got a little more for them than in Paducah. Finally he became a "star" reporter and accumulated so much star dust that he turned into a comet, and the editors can't stay his soaring prices. His esteem for the reporter is his literary creed. He includes such creditable reporters as Balzac, Thackeray, Dickens, Wells, DeFoe, in that system. To be sure Arnold Bennett, Robert Hichens, and Henry James were not to be forgotten among the distinguished staff of literary posterity, but they were the editorial writers, not quite in tune with the words and music of those fellows who knew how to see a good story in the daily events about them. There was nothing said about genius, and that favorite word, technique, so gracefully used by the literary idler, was contemptuously ignored.

It is just as easy for him to write a story of twenty thousand words as it is for your stenographer to write a letter which you thought you dictated. It is not the length of a novel that has prevented him from writing it; it is the stretching of types. And then, like most thoroughbred characters, he has a weakness that upsets the classic mood, he bristles at the sound of a fire alarm. He might be in the third stanza of an ode to the Confederacy, but if a fire alarm sounded he would rush out into the thick of the smoke. If there were no smoke, no fire, he would feel that he had done his duty as a reporter, that he had "covered it." I gather this from the source of all fact about a family man, his wife. He did not deny it; he did not condone it; he confirmed it in his analysis of types, his types.

It is barely six years since Cobb wrote his first short-story. It was written after he had reported the trial of a celebrated financier, and had seen him sentenced to the penitentiary at Atlanta. He recalled its nativity, briefly:

Nothing could stop that man's mental poise, his grip of men. He was unscrupulous, cold, self-controlled, gigantic in management of men to do his own purpose. He could have revolutionized the finest jail system in the world. He did not stay in Atlanta long. I began wondering what could beat him. That was the theme of my first story. I made him escape from the detective on the train and get away in the woods. The train from which he escapes is wrecked. He finds a newspaper in which he reads that his body has been identified. He has only to communicate with his lawyer, hide for a while, and freedom is his, except for the handcuffs. At last they beat him. He wanders into a village and gives himself up. The handcuffs have beaten him.

Here was a type from which the source of many stories might flow; the one Cobb wrote about it was only a single phase of the character. His stories are usually studies of types, not editorial arguments about them, but incidents that reveal them. He explains it this way:

There are two kinds of short-story writers—those who editorialize, who lead you into the mental state of the characters under pressure, and those who tell you the happenings to them in dramatic form. I think the reader likes to do his own thinking; therefore I favor the latter, the descriptive story of character in action.

To see well, that is the chief thing, I think. Putting it down on paper can be acquired, but the vision is inherent. Not the editorial vision that argues with you, but the reporter's vision that tells you so that you can see as well as he.

"The literary photograph, which after all is the good reporter's impressions, is the best kind of a story," he added by way of explaining how he wrote his own.

Thackeray had style, but he was a finely tempered reporter, a high-class newspaper man, with taste and discretion, a keen student of human nature. I pride myself upon being a good newspaper man, above all things. If I once focus on a man, I can remember every button on or off his coat, its size, its color. The man's accent, his voice, his words, his quality, his presence are all ineffaceable. In short I have his type. A sketch of him, however, is not sufficient; that alone does not conform to the needs of a story. I must know him years before, measure him with the yardstick of time, to place him in the proper atmosphere of dramatic value, or shall we say fiction value. There is always the mysterious moulding process in the mind from which a type in fiction springs into being in after life. He blooms from the seed planted unconsciously in the past, the never-to-be-forgotten past. I suppose our boyhood belongs to that period. The first theatrical form of dramatic appeal I remember, was at St. Claire Hall, the Opr'y House of Paducah. There I thrilled to the terrors of "The Black Flag," "The Old Homestead," and other successes of that day. There was a curtain in the hall which represented a scene in Venice. I did not know it was Venice at the time, but I didn't care so much about where it was. There were some Venetian ladies and gentlemen very lightly clad coming down marble steps to get into a gondola or two. I recall that I was astonished at the light sort of clothing they were wearing, because in Paducah we sometimes had floods, and the river front was no place to go unless you were dressed for it. Years later I returned to my home town and drew a sketch of that curtain, which was accounted as being correct, even to the marble steps. This convinces one that the memory of a newspaper man is the best asset for a fiction writer. But the trouble is that most young writers never seem to consider their own actual experiences in life as sufficiently important to talk about. They will take sail in fancy to South Africa or to Hong Kong for local color, where they have never been. The reader is the first to resent this, because he will feel that the story is not written by a reporter who has been there. You can't read Balzac and fail to know that he is talking about something he has seen or absorbed from the vivid warmth of the human heart. He was a fine reporter, and his color is true to the spirit and passions of men and women. DeFoe was a good reporter, too, because he told of a new type, Robinson Crusoe, and he missed no incident of human interest in his story of him. If DeFoe had covered the Thaw trial he would have been writing about it yet. Stevenson was a fair reporter, although he had a literary taste that superimposed his narrative. He stopped to draw fine conclusions in the mood of the essayist. Stevenson would probably have written a good fire story that would have been rejected by a city editor, but would have been a masterpiece, none the less. Hichens writes too long to get the point, beautifully as he always does get to it. Of course, we all know what a complex reporter Henry James would have made, and what a difficult task the editors would have had with a story by Arnold Bennett—brilliant writers but lacking the brevity of the newspaper man's training.

I often receive requests from young writers to define the skill of technique. The word is in the dictionary, and that's all I know about it. The style of a man's work is chiefly a matter of good taste, I should think. His sentiment is a governing factor, but his judgment of what to say and what not to say is materially guided by his experience in writing for newspapers. The best technique I know of is to be had in that kind of work. To begin with, it simplifies a man's style, teaches him the difference between a fact and a dream, which is quite important when you begin to tell a story.

The personal element which enters into every good bit of literature I have ever read is found as constantly in the newspaper story as it is in fiction. How many readers do you suppose after reading a particularly well-written story in a newspaper think of the writer? A very large majority, I believe.

While all this may sound incompatible with our preconceived ideas of literary quality, Cobb has demonstrated only his own methods, his own way of writing a story, and he has gained a very large audience. His devotion to the newspaper as the foundation of literary success is a distinctly new note in literary expectation. There is much more to the making of a good short-story writer than merely the experience of reporting, which he claims as his chief instruction. There is the selection of types, and the assurance with which he places them in the lights and shadows of their own world. And there is the gift of humor that always underlies the life-like quality of Cobb's characters. Of this he said:

Humor for the sake of the laugh, like the cartoon born for the test of the popular mood, has no lasting value. We will speak of Mark Twain as our greatest humorist, but we have received some of the greatest human messages in philosophy from him, some of the gems of literary thought. It was his deep and definite judgment of character that has given him posterity. Other men of lesser fame have written, perhaps, better humor, but it had no substance, no fine valor of feeling, no uplifting purpose. There must always be a serious, deep sincerity behind the best literature that distinguishes it from mere literary craftsmanship. There are a great many stories written to-day for a certain class of readers. Not that I think there should be such readers, because they too enjoy other stories when they are universally true, but they seem to require a certain sort of story, which is written particularly for them. The action is forced, the characters are dragged from the stock room of older romances when the world was groping in oil-lighted streets at night, and when every man carried a sword. The situations are improbable, the movement is jerky and forced.

Such types are familiar, shopworn. The adventuress with a wicked French accent will have to go. The innocuous heroine who improved so rapidly on buttermilk and love will also have to fade into the oblivion from whence she came. But all these dummies of fiction still have their following, and they still appear in new clothes, up to their old tricks. These are no literary figures because they are old pretenders frankly dragged from the middle ages or the cavalier days, and sent to a department store for a ready-made outfit of language, style, and clothes. After all, it is what is unseen of the writer's nature that gives a story its value. We should find our types in our hearts, not in melancholy mood but smilingly, happily and faithfully.

One's faith in human nature is an important factor in writing. Dickens had an endless source of kindliness. His humor was exactly the form that is found among the poor, who have that splendid bravery of turning their misfortunes into harmless fun. Dickens gave us practical Christianity. Thackeray looked at his types with the blinking shrewdness of sly humor. I do not think that his satire was ever biting; it was too faithful to the balance of life for that. And, too, his characters were drawn with sympathy.

It is noticeable that one never could imitate literary masters. Their style, their feeling, their quality belonged to them exclusively. Every great writer has made his mark by writing not what he thought about life, but what he saw. His eyes were in his heart; his pen stirred as he felt. Above all things the literary masters bestowed upon us the blessing of seeing life hopefully. Even if, as in Edgar Allan Poe's case, we were thrilled by some horror, we still retained the flavor of superb poetry, of splendid imagination to which we all are heirs.

There is a limit to the scope of imagination that most trained writers discover in time. When we enter the secret chamber of our imaginations we are on hallowed ground. We should never enter alone; we should lead our type into it with us. Since we chose him or her from the selected ones of our memory, we clothe that type appropriately in the imaginative faculty of fanciful incident. The incidents, however, must be life-like, not a riot of action, but a sequence of natural events. We should, I think, be very intimate with our types, and very friendly. Even if we are compelled to betray the weaknesses of our types, we need not do so viciously. Ill feeling has no place in literary effort, any more than it should have a place in daily life.

There is no kind of work known, so hard, so exacting, requiring such gifts of artistic and accurate knowledge. Besides, successful writers are not born; they occur. There is probably a large undiscovered census of men and women who ought to be writers instead of what they are. Writing has always been regarded as a haphazard sort of business, preferably adopted by unknown genius. I have known of cases where young people have been forbidden to write under threat of being cut off in the parental will. No work exposes one to such suspicion as writing. Men have been shot for it, and many have not. Women have neglected their knitting to become magazine contributors, and the editors have helped them. It is often a business beset with disgrace and misunderstanding. Still, in spite of these drawbacks it is an occupation that is even coveted. Those who covet it most, however, need claim no special birthright for it. Painful as it may seem to those who cling to the long-haired tradition that it requires genius to write, I am convinced there are more short-haired men in pursuit of fireside comfort, who write well, than is suspected.

The shapeliness of an author has nothing to do with the shape of his work. He has to learn it, after he has discovered that he can write. The best moment of discovery is when a friend, an unselfish friend, asks him why he hasn't written that story about his own experience in a Harlem flat, or in a lawyer's office, or when he worked in a factory, instead of stories of wild adventures in a wilder world than ours.

A very successful writer had that experience. He began to write to increase his income, which was small, thanks to the liberality of a lawyer, whose sense of justice was always on the side of his own case. He wrote stories about dreadful things that were supposed to happen, that never happened, and sold them for modest sums. One day a friend suggested to him that he write about the people who came into the office during the day. He did, and so well that he became author of those internationally famous tales about "Potash and Perlmutter." Of course you may insist that a man who does that must have genius. I insist that he had industry and a photographic mind.

It is a peculiar fact among newspaper men that when they develop into the magazine story field they lose all interest in names. I remember when I was commissioned to go to the war zones in Europe, I discovered this. Just what use a war correspondent could be who was totally incompetent to advise the Admirals and Generals what to do in a strategic difficulty of the war, I did not know. Having no military knowledge, no army training, no chance of occupying a safe hill from which to see the armies at work, I had little hope of success at the front in the capacity of a war correspondent.

I pinned my faith for usefulness, however, upon one thing I knew I could do, to see well and find types that crystallize great facts in great moments. Their names did not matter. When we were being conveyed through Germany as prisoners, I said to one of our party: "You remember the names of the stations through which we pass, and when you name them to me I will remember all the types, the incidents, the dramas we saw in that region." Taking notes was forbidden, but the habit of memory, which is the key to good newspaper work, stood by me. Long after that journey ended, the mention of the name of a station brought back the memory of the spy we saw shot, or the despair of the woman who had her geese taken away from her by the soldiers, or many other facts.

That is how Cobb gets the types we all know.

The artist's vision, as Irvin Cobb has found it, is not the traditional dream of emotions, but an accurate, interesting, human story about men and women he has seen and known. His types are Americans, faithfully and sympathetically drawn. He has literally grafted the souls of men to the Americanism of his own feeling and good taste. His newspaper work was good because he met the world as he found it, not as he wished it could be. His types in fiction are among real people he has met. They are chiefly New Yorkers because he has lived in New York for twelve years, and known them best. It would seem, however, as though the reminiscent memories of his boyhood in Paducah had mellowed into literary fruition of greater depth and finer instinct than his types of more recent influence, and this in spite of the fact that he knows Washington in all its intricate subtleties and official life, and New York is the most vital experience of his life.