Talks on Writing English

One thing should be kept constantly in mind in writing criticisms, and that is that the critic must appreciate and hold to the point of view of the author criticised. The great point is to know what the author tried to do, and to judge how far he has succeeded in doing it. If a book is written for the general public, for instance, it is manifestly unfair to complain that it does not meet the needs of the specialists; and equally would it be unfair to find fault with the volume carefully prepared for the specialist for not being adapted to the average reader. Be sure that in writing a criticism you are clear in regard to what it is proper to expect from a given book, and in regard also to what the work is or is not as judged by the standard thus established. Criticism must first of all things be definite.

One of the powers first to be called into play in forming an estimate of any work is that of analysis. It is impossible to compare the qualities of a composition with the standard in our mind, without separating those qualities from each other. We must be able to say that this passage has Force, that that has Elegance; to see that the work as a whole possesses Force but lacks Clearness; and so on for any and all the characteristics which may be found. It is necessary to study the effect which a work produces, and again to be able to tell upon what means those effects depend. In no other way can we put ourselves in a position to estimate fairly and conclusively the value and the lasting merit of that which we criticise.

I have more than once reminded you that literary work that is worth the name is a severe labor. It has never seemed to me worth while to attempt to lure you on with delusive persuasions of easy roads to literary perfection. All literary work which is worth doing is laborious and long; and of all literature which is generally included under the head of belles-lettres it seems to me that criticism is intellectually the most severe. It is so largely a matter of pure intellect that it even seems more arduous than it is. In writing poetry or fiction, or indeed any purely creative work, the pleasure of creation arouses the emotions and kindles the fancy. One can now and then give the rein to his mind, so to say, and let the steeds of his imagination start off for a dash. In criticism the imagination has no office save that of being sympathetic and of entering into the mood of another. The strain on the attention and the judgment is constant; and that there are no more good critics is to be accounted for by the explanation – which is almost an excuse – that criticism is so difficult an art.

When all other qualifications for criticising have been considered, there remains that most elusive, most essential of all, – taste. Taste is a fine sense of the fitness of things; a perception of the proper proportion in work, and of the limits to which the expression of feeling or emotion can go. It is closely allied to a sense of humor in its quality. It is no less a delicate appreciation of the fitness of means to effect, and of the propriety of the ways by which an author has endeavored to impress his readers. Taste is the self-respect of the imagination. It determines the line beyond which the fancy cannot go with dignity.

It is that faculty by which we decide that one shade of incongruity is humorous and touching, yet that the shade but a trifle deeper is vulgar and repulsive. The knowledge how far things should be carried; sensitiveness to literary propriety; delicacy to finest differences of effect, are all dependent upon this faculty, which underlies all æsthetic perception. How to improve it, refine it, develop it, is the question of all culture. Goethe says: —

Taste should be educated by contemplation, not of the tolerably good, but of the truly excellent… The best … when you have fully apprehended, … you will have a standard, and will know how to value inferior performances without overrating them. —Conversations.

There is little that can be added to this. The best books well read will do all for the taste that definite outward cultivation can do. The rest is a matter of inner growth. No one is fitted to criticise work until he has learned to appreciate work. Even a felon may claim to be tried by his peers, and surely an author is fairly entitled to at least this grace. The peer of an author in this sense is the man who sympathetically is able to understand him; who is trained to perceive what is the aim of a book, and so is in a position to judge how far it has succeeded or failed. Until one is conscious of having attained to this he should at least be modest in his judgments; he should define his opinions for himself, but he will not claim that infallibility which belongs only to the critic of the highest rank and which is claimed only by those of the lowest.

All this has to do with criticism as it should be, and as it is at its best. This is what men like Sainte-Beuve, Leslie Stephen, Taine, Lowell, and those of their rank have made it. If the question is that of writing what are called criticisms for the press, and especially for the daily press, the matter is not entirely the same. A newspaper is a business enterprise. The publishers have not established it in the interest of abstract virtues, and they generally care neither more nor less for ideals, whether literary or otherwise, than the broker or the banker next door. They conduct their business very much as business which depends directly upon public support is conducted everywhere. They endeavor to learn what the largest number of buyers will like, and this they endeavor to supply. If too many newspapers of to-day are nothing more or less than mental dram-shops or bagnios, the men who have not too much principle or self-respect to keep them have at least the defense, such as it is, that they print what the public proves itself most eager to buy.

The general public is neither willing nor able to enjoy genuine criticism, and the publishers do not give it to them. Criticism as it is to-day practiced as a matter of literary work, is apt to mean the writing of perfunctory book-reviews, notices of plays and concerts and pictures, all to entertain the reader or to provoke him to buy. There are a great many persons, moreover, who either have no time to read, or no mind to read the books of the day, yet who wish to appear to have opinions in regard to them. It is for this class that the great bulk of book-reviews are written. The publisher of a newspaper is aware that by furnishing what will with the unthinking pass for opinions he can on the one hand please unintelligent subscribers and on the other gratify the book publishers from whom come advertisements. There are very many reviewers who are too honest to say a thing which they do not believe, yet who are aware that if they said all that they think they would not be able to hold their places for a day. I do not wish to be unjust to the newspapers. I am too lately out of an editorial chair myself to be in a position to reflect upon them too hardly. I must say, however, that it is the aim of every newspaper to please the publishers if it is possible, and that there are not half a dozen in the country – if there are any – which are not in their reviews influenced by other considerations besides the merit of the works noticed. I should as soon think of taking my political opinions from a paid stump-speaker as my literary judgments from the book-reviews in a newspaper. The intellectual furnishing of a mind which is guided by them is like the plenishings of a room supplied with second-hand furniture purchased on the installment plan and decorated with cigarette-advertising lithographs.

In its high and proper sense, however, criticism is not alone a matter of literature, but of life as well. Culture is mainly a matter of self-criticism. We do not really know unless we are fully aware what we know. In other words, the distinction between conscious knowledge and vague impression is the measure of development. The correctness of self-estimate marks the difference between the cultivated and the uncultivated mind. It might on first thought seem as if this confounded culture with self-consciousness. On the contrary it distinguishes it from that painful weakness. Self-consciousness arises from a doubt of the mind; an inability to tell what is one’s true value and one’s true place. Culture is a fair and reasonable appreciation at once of one’s mental merits and shortcomings; a knowledge of one’s intellectual rank. This fairness of estimate enables the possessor of this quality to take his intellectual place without false shame on the one hand or false pride on the other; two faults which are the warp and woof of self-consciousness. Education is not acquisition, but assimilation; and assimilation is impossible without that mental judgment which is the best and final form of criticism. Mental advancement is possible only by the establishment in the mind of well-defined standards, and the measuring by them of the thoughts, the ideas, the opinions; and to establish definite standards and to measure by them is criticism, the tonic of the mind.

XXII

STYLE

The question which these talks set out to consider was what one can do to learn to write well. I began by saying that there are two sorts of power which enter into literary production, the communicable and the incommunicable, that which may be taught and that which is inborn, the technical and the imaginative. Naturally we have discussed chiefly the power which may be learned, those details of structure and of quality which depend upon means which we are able to analyze. The subject of which I wish now to say a little is connected rather with those powers and qualities which can be directly neither acquired nor imparted. We cannot close without some consideration of Style, that thing most elusive and intangible in its elements, yet most definite and recognizable in its effects; and Style in its more exact sense is a matter which has to do less with the mechanics of literature than with the creative impulse of the mind. Regarded in its higher aspect it is closely linked with the imagination, that faculty which, if the figure were not too mathematical, one might call reason raised to the nth power.

The term style is commonly used rather indefinitely to indicate either technical finish or the more subtle qualities of literary expression. Of course as far as it is to be understood in the former sense, we have been discussing it from the very beginning of these talks. If we understand it to mean merely correctness or even elegance of language, the proper proportion of the different parts of a composition, the accurate choice of words and the judicious employment of figures and of ornaments, we may be said to have dealt with all this in the previous lectures.

If I were to attempt to sum up concisely the more important points of what I have said, hitherto, it would be possible to cover a large portion of the ground by saying that the secret of literary ease and finish lies in attention to details. In my youth and in the dame-school in which I began to learn to write it was the fashion to set down moral and improving sentiments in the copy-books, and one of them was the sententious maxim with which you are all familiar, – “Trifles make up perfection, but perfection is no trifle.” The hackneyed saying is a good deal nearer to being exact than are most didactic aphorisms. It is certainly true that though perfection is above all trifles yet a trifle may spoil it. The slightest touch breaks a bubble, and a single bad epithet will spoil a passage otherwise effective. To neglect details is to neglect the whole.

It is true that to consider only details is to deprive the work of all unity. It is like finishing carefully all the pieces which are to be set in a mosaic and neglecting to consider the design of the whole. I need not repeat here what has been said of the need of dealing with any literary work as a unit; but it is necessary to keep this in mind. Conceive a thing as broadly as possible. Look at it in the large; see it as clearly as you are able in its general outlines; and make it the aim of your labor to embody in words this broad conception firmly and clearly. When this is accomplished go over your work with a microscope to discover if there be anything in it which will prevent or injure the effect. Indeed, if you hope to be finished artists in words, it will be necessary that you see to it that every detail not only does not lessen the effect of the whole, but that it is a positive advantage and addition. It is only by such care in the management of trifling particulars that the finest results are to be obtained.

Going beyond all these largely mechanical matters, we come to the consideration of a more intangible, and yet a higher thing.

Suppose that you came upon these three passages in some book which did not give their authorship. Could you, although you had never seen them before, suppose that they had been written by the same author? —

Of this thing, however, be certain: wouldst thou plant for Eternity, then plant into the deep infinite faculties of man, his Fantasy and Heart; wouldst thou plant for a Year and Day, then plant into his shallow superficial faculties, his Self-love and Arithmetical Understanding, what will grow there. A Hierarch, therefore, and Pontiff of the World-will we called him, the Poet and inspired Maker; who, Prometheus-like, can shape new Symbols, and bring new Fire from Heaven to fix it there. —Sartor Resartus, iii. 3.

The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination, as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim as a resident here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor, – who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure, as a man of war and peace, – a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. —The Custom House.

An obese person, with his waistcoat in closer connection with his legs than is quite reconcilable with the established ideas of grace, with that cast of feature which is figuratively called a bottle-nose, and with a face covered all over with pimples. He had been a tender plant once upon a time, but, from constant blowing in the fat air of funerals, had run to seed. —Martin Chuzzlewit.

Whether the reader recognized in these passages the hand of Carlyle, of Hawthorne, and of Dickens would of course depend upon his experience; but if he had any susceptibility to literary expression, he would appreciate the fact that they are somehow different. He would feel the distinction which arises from those essential qualities, both of matter and of manner, which distinguish one piece of literature from every other composition whatever. To the sum of these qualities we give the name Style. Style in this sense is the individuality of a work. What personality is to a human being, that is style to a composition. Indeed, one would be doing no great violence to language who defined this quality as the “personal equation” of a work.

Style is the personal impress which a writer inevitably sets upon his production. It is that character in what is written which results from the fact that these thoughts and emotions have been those of the author rather than of any other human being. It is the expression of one man’s individuality, as sure and as unique as the sound of his voice, the look from his eye, or the imprint of his thumb. It is the quality which gives to the work of a master-mind, a mind in which the intellectual individuality is well developed, a flavor so unique that no man familiar with literary effects can mistake it for that of any other. It is style in this sense which is proof of authorship so conclusive that if we had authenticated and solemnly sworn declarations from both Shakespeare and Bacon that the latter wrote the plays attributed to the former, we should still know beyond all peradventure that this could not be. The final appeal in a case of doubt of authorship is the internal evidence. I do not mean to assert that mistakes may not arise here as in all other human affairs; but I do mean that it is inconceivable that any great imaginative work should be produced which should fail of bearing in it the incontestable mark of its author’s personality. We say that one writer imitates another’s style so cleverly that it is not possible for the counterfeit to be distinguished from the real. This may sometimes be true of the trifles of literature, though I doubt if even here the genuine expert could not detect the imposition. In those writings in which a genius has expressed his inner being, in which his imagination has unveiled itself, in which that true self that dwells in every human creature and with which we sometimes feel that we are hardly acquainted in our own case, – in these it is impossible that the stamp of his personality should not be impressed upon the work. It follows in the case mentioned that one thing of which a literary man is pretty likely to be sure is that whoever wrote the plays attributed to William Shakespeare, it is outside the limits of conceivable literary or human possibilities that they were written by the author of the poems and essays avowedly the work of Francis Bacon. There are those who would deny the truth of this illustration, I believe, but there is nobody who denies that an imaginative writer stamps the character of his mind upon his productions.

This matter of individualism is one of the most elusive and yet one of the most tangibly persuasive of all matters connected with literary art. Suppose two authors to be equally correct, equally well informed, well trained, and to write upon subjects in which we are equally interested. It will still be true that one will please us more than the other. There will be a certain quality, an almost intangible flavor about one book which is lacking in the other. One author will maintain a dignity in his attitude toward his subject, or he will possess a persuasive manner; in one way or another his individuality will charm us. We say that we are pleased with his style. We mean that the individual quality of what he writes has attracted us. To go back a little farther in analysis, what we say means practically that in the nature of the mind and the character of the author there is that which appeals to us as human beings or to us in particular as individuals. Here we touch upon an important principle which underlies this whole matter. The secret of charm in style lies in character. You have all heard innumerable times the saying that “Style is the man.” In other words, style as a matter of structure in composition is the indication of what a man can do; style as a matter of quality is an indication of what he is.

The ways in which individuality shows itself are numerous. Each writer, for instance, may be said to make his own vocabulary. He consciously increases his knowledge of words, deliberately chooses certain terms for particular uses, and carefully decides upon the especial term which in each case seems to him best adapted to convey his meaning. Besides this he unconsciously has a preference toward this word or that, he is influenced by association, by the suggestions which are aroused in his mind by this synonym or that, and is in every decision swayed in one direction or another by the fineness of his perceptions, the nature of his temperament, and by all those minute and mingled elements which make up what we know as character. All these conscious and all these unconscious causes help to bring it about that every writer shall make for himself what Walter Pater calls a “vocabulary faithful to the coloring of his own spirit;” and the same principle may easily be traced through all the divisions of the literary art, whether they be of structure or of quality.

It follows that to talk of style in the higher sense is to consider character in its broadest and deepest extent. It is impossible to discuss any question of human life to its farthest limits without finding that it rests upon an ethical basis. The best method of phrasing aspiration and passion in art cannot be determined until we have searched out the nature of passion and of aspiration; until we have fixed upon some theory of man’s relation to life and truth, and this is what is meant by ethics. If one examined far enough, it is probable that it would appear that the same is true of things which seem to us infinitely trivial. There is as truly a moral reason why children making mud pies in the gutter should not quarrel as there is that Dante’s “Divine Comedy” is an immortal work. If we search deep enough, the reason why the children are amused by their mud pies is as surely to be found in the relations of human beings to life as is the reason of the spiritual exaltation which may come from the appreciative reading of the poet. I said the other evening that it might seem that I had a tendency to speak of English Composition as if it involved the whole duty of man; we have now come to the place where it is evident that it does. We cannot go into so extensive an examination as the foundation of morals and the elements of character, so that I shall content myself with pointing this out, leaving each to make – or not to make, as he pleases – such reflections and such deductions as fit his own need and his own inclinations.

It is strictly in the line of literary work, however, to comment once more upon the use of books in intellectual development as applied to style. What a man reads affects what he writes indirectly by its effect upon what he is, as we have before seen that it has a direct and swift agency in shaping his methods of expression. What the company he keeps is to a man’s character, this to his style are the books he reads. A writer cannot accustom himself to the pages of the masters of literature and be content to write meanly and incorrectly. He may not consciously contrast his work with theirs, but the influence of their example is with him always. In very trying circumstances, I once said to a workman against whom falsehood seemed to be proved, “In spite of everything, I do believe that you have been telling me the truth.” He answered me with a simplicity which was nothing less than noble, “If you knew my wife, sir, you’d know that I couldn’t live with her and lie.” I learned afterward that this was the exact state of the case. His wife was a rather silent woman, and I do not believe that she had ever lectured her husband on truth-telling. It was simply that one could not live in her influence and be willing to be guilty of falsehood. In the same way one cannot live familiarly with good literature and knowingly write bad.

It is not that one imitates good authors. Any imitation is bad art, because there should always be in what is done the ring of genuine, personal conviction. The imitator is not giving expression to that within him which is so real and so strong that it will not be suppressed. He is trying to show that he can feel as some one else has felt, that he can write as somebody else has written. It is a sham, and the reader feels that it is a sham. Imitation, moreover, is at best but a reproduction of the more obvious peculiarities of work, while at worst it is a catching of tricks, mannerisms, and faults. It may be added, too, that it is oftener at its worst than at its best. Anybody can imitate the defects of a style, and few its virtues.

In these days nobody reads avowedly for style directly. There was once an idea that it was well to select an author of standing and deliberately attempt to catch his manner, or, as the phrase went, to “form one’s style on the master.” The idea was about as sensible as would be the notion that it were well for a young man not wholly satisfied with his features to “form” his nose after that of the Apollo Belvedere. Style is the expression of selfhood. No writer can embody his own individuality in the expression of the individuality of another. Learn from the masterpieces what is good use in diction, in construction, in arrangement; learn from them to be strenuous, persuasive, and sincere in whatever you do; but do not for a moment think of obtaining from them that personal flavor which can come only from the writer himself, and which is the thing which makes style in its highest sense.