Talks on Writing English

It is the development of the personality of the writer which saves a composition from becoming mechanical. In the first of these talks I quoted the instructions which Flaubert gave to Guy de Maupassant, in which he said: —

Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it; only one verb to animate it, only one adjective to qualify it. It is essential to search for this word, for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and to be satisfied with nothing else.

This I commended to you as sound and necessary advice. From our present point of view, however, it is to be seen that this is the attitude of a student rather than that of an artist. In other words it is rather the way to learn to write than the way to write. So painfully minute a method as that which Flaubert recommended to his pupil would bring to an end all spontaneous or impassioned writing. The mind should be trained by these severe and careful methods until exactness of expression becomes a second nature. Then for good or for bad one must write as one is impelled to write at the particular moment. In revision the most strict requirements may be held to, so long as there is kept in mind the danger of revising the life out of imaginative writing and of refining until spontaneity is lost. Work should be revised with patient, with inexhaustible care; but it must be revised delicately. No formal correctness, no perfection of epithet or propriety of diction, can atone for the sacrifice of the intangible qualities which in the original form express the mood of the writer, and are to a composition what the personality is to a human being.

In all the talks which preceded this we have been considering work as that of the student who is preparing to write rather than as that of the author who is actually producing. When we talk of style we are dealing with the production of literature. The student who has not mastered details in the most painfully minute manner has not fitted himself for that perception of a subject on broad lines which is the condition of successful production. William Blake has said: “In order to know what is enough, it is necessary to know what is more than enough.” The student must have acquired thoroughly the highest degree of elaboration possible in order that he may be able to judge what is proper and effective in any given case. He cannot fairly judge how far it is safe to go, unless he is keenly aware of what it is to go too far.

In considering a literary work as a whole and in treating it as an expression of his own particular and peculiar individuality, it is well for a writer to bear in mind a phrase of Mr. George Saintsbury, the English critic. “The first rule of literature,” he says, “is that what is presented shall be presented not merely as it is, but transformed, and, if I may say so, disrealized.” This is easily and obviously true of fiction. It is manifestly impossible to give a realized picture of life as it actually exists, to tell everything which must have happened to characters, how they eat and sleep, shiver when getting into their baths in the morning, find their egg too much or too little cooked at breakfast, get out of breath in hurrying to catch a street-car, and all the rest of the innumerable trifles which make up the bulk of life. On this plan the simplest story would be expanded into as many volumes as “Clarissa Harlowe.” The same principle of selection and departure from reality is no less true of everything which is written. The thoughts which a philosopher weaves into a profound system do not come to him in sequence, beautifully arranged. If he followed the actual order of nature, he would put down a heterogeneous mass of reflections, good and bad mingled together, with no system apparent in them except after a painful study which no reader would be at all likely to give to the confused and confusing pages. Art is not nature. It is not the reproduction of nature. It is the invention of man to produce at will and to enshrine in permanent form those impressions, those emotions which come to him in rare and fleeting instants when his own consciousness reaches for a quick moment to the secret of that life which informs nature. Remember that the object of writing is not to reproduce the actual; that it is not even wholly that very different thing, to produce an impression of the actual; it is to embody and to make evident the truth which actualities express. Whoever takes up his pen to produce literature undertakes to make clearer the relation of man to nature and to life. He sets out to say in all sincerity what some fact of existence means to him. If he is content to be a mere scribe, simply an artisan of letters, he may deal with words in a mechanical fashion, and manufacture composition as one makes a deal table. This is honest work enough, but it is not the production of literature. It is the work of the hack-writer; of the reporter of life and not of the interpreter of life. To produce literature there must be an earnest attempt to embody the writer’s conception of some phase of existence. There must be that expression of his convictions and character which is what we mean when we use the word style in its higher meaning.

It is of style in this sense that Goethe was thinking, when he said: —

It is not language in itself and independently which is accurate, vigorous, lucid, or graceful, but the spirit which is embodied in it; and so it is not in the power of every one to give to his work the good qualities of expression that should belong to it. The question is whether nature has given to the writer intellectual and moral qualities which demand and shape out for themselves such an embodiment [as he has given them] – intellectual powers of intuition and penetration; and not less moral power, that he may be able to resist the evil demons who would hinder him in the unswerving loyalty that he must pay to truth. – Goethe: Natur-Aphorismen, iv.

There is no better way of testing what one has written than by comparing it with the work of great writers. See wherein their work excels yours. Do not thereupon say to yourself, “Oh, of course I am not to be expected to do as well as they.” Say rather: “In so far as my work has fallen short of the best that has been done, it has fallen short of what has been shown to be possible. Let me see how far I can bring it nearer to the standard.”

In the second of his “Discourses on Art,” Sir Joshua Reynolds says to his students of painting:

Comparing your own efforts with those of some great master is indeed a severe and mortifying task, to which none will submit but such as have great views, with fortitude sufficient to forego the gratifications of present vanity for future honor. When the student has succeeded in some measure to his own satisfaction, and has felicitated himself on his success, to go voluntarily to a tribunal where he knows his vanity must be humbled, and all self-approbation must vanish, requires not only great resolution but great humility. To him, however, who has the ambition to be a real master, the solid satisfaction which proceeds from a consciousness of his advancement (of which seeing his own faults is the first step) will very abundantly compensate for present disappointment.

This need not be said differently to apply to the student of literature.

There is one thing of which he who desires to write literature may be sure, and that is that the unpardonable sin in this as in all art is flippancy. Flippancy is the prevailing literary vice of the age. The periodicals are perhaps more largely to blame for this than any other single cause, but newspapers and magazines by no means have the whole responsibility in this matter. The desire for amusement has eaten us up. The overworked and nerve-shaken public desires entertainment which shall make no call on the intellect and as little as possible on the perception. The man who could devise the means of amusing his fellows without their being obliged even to take the trouble to be aware of it would almost be deified by this age. The modern imagination is harder to awaken than the Sleeping Beauty. An audience at the theatre to-day cannot be persuaded to do anything for itself. In the days of Shakespeare a placard on the stage transferred all the beholders into the Forest of Arden or to the enchanted isle of Prospero. To-day it is difficult to induce the spectators to second the most elaborate devices which have been contrived by scene-painter and carpenter to assist their sluggish fancy. There is even a large class apparently so completely atrophied mentally as to be unable to follow a simple plot on the stage. “Variety shows” to-day take the place which real plays held once; short stories with only so much substance as admits of their being beaten up like the white of egg on a custard are languidly read by the million; and we have even replaced criticism by a sort of shallow flippancy for which no other name seems to me so appropriate as literary skirt-dancing. To be clever in the most superficial sense of that word, to be vulgarly glib, to reverence nothing, and above all to be smart and amusing, seems to be the sum and substance of the creed of writers who practice this art. They substitute adroitness for depth, scoffing for sentiment, and rapidity for brilliancy. Their one aim is to entertain the idle mind, and to win from astonishment the applause which they have not the wit to gain from approbation. The literary gymnastics of writers of these flippant pseudo-criticisms are hardly more intellectual than the supple evolutions of the ballet girl, and it is to be doubted if the dance is not the more moral and less debasing of the two.

This may sound extravagant, but when the influence upon young readers and young writers is considered it hardly seems possible to state the matter too strongly. It is true that these writers profess, so far as they profess anything, allegiance to all the highest virtues, both moral and intellectual. Their books are distinctly amusing – to those whose taste is not offended by the tone of flippancy which pervades them; and what they write is often eminently clever. Their fault is that they do not take life seriously; that they are as devoid of reverence as a stone is of blood; that their temper is as fatal to idealism, to enthusiasm, to aspiration, as carbonic acid gas is to animal life. Even the cynicism with which they are flavored is as sham as is the tint of a glass ruby. For a young writer to fall under this influence seems to me as great a literary misfortune as it would be a physical calamity for him to become crippled. If one wishes to earn a trumpery wage by writing smartly, these are his models; but if he is in love with literature, he must turn his back. The young writer should strive always to be serious before he is smart, sincere before he is clever, and to flee flippancy as he would flee the pestilence that stalketh at noonday.

By serious, I do not necessarily mean grave, and still less do I mean solemn. It is as true for the writer of humorous literature that he should take his art seriously as it is for the writer of history or of sermons. No man ever took literature more seriously than Charles Lamb, yet he remains one of the most deliciously humorous writers of all time. He was gay and whimsical and droll, but he never for a moment failed of a high and noble respect for literature; he was apparently freakish, but he did not for a line become flippant. It would have been impossible for him to be vulgar. His taste always prevented his going too far. Even in the wildest excesses of humorous literature it is still absolutely needful to preserve a serious attitude toward literature and toward life. It is not that this feeling is to be obtruded. It is not meant that the jest shall be made with the sour visage of a Puritan. It is that the author himself shall never lose this inner respect and reverence for the dignities of life and for the truth. If these are a part of his character he cannot write otherwise than with them as it were forming a background to his work; and no literature is of lasting value or even fame which lacks this.

One of the most striking examples of what I mean is furnished by the poet François Villon, thief, house-breaker, and scape-gallows. He believed not in man, woman, or God, but he did hold to faith in literary art. Life as a matter of every-day existence he took flippantly enough, but literature as an expression of life he still regarded seriously, – and thus it happens that his poems live to-day, and that they are part of permanent literature.

Life is after all a serious matter to the lightest human being. However it is embroidered over with joys and jocund devices, with merriment or frivolity, every man knows its solemnity. There are for the most careless of men moments in which the real gravity of his situation, as he stands insecurely for a moment between the cradle and the grave, forces itself upon him. The only universal human experience is pain. To most men comes hope, and to most comes love in some degree of intensity. Joy, ambition, hate, and jealousy, are common to perhaps the great majority of mankind, and the writer who touches strongly and skillfully upon any one of these is sure of appealing to most readers. Only he who portrays sorrow and suffering is dealing with an experience so universal that he is sure that no man can fail of some appreciation of the theme. Such being the case, it is only the author who by his fundamental seriousness implies – remotely, it may be, but surely – that he has a share in the universal heritage, who can long or deeply command the attention of mankind. To be flippant is to be inhuman; and although the world may not analyze this, it is sure to feel it. Style is the unconscious revelation of the writer’s attitude toward life, and if this be not serious all good gifts and graces of technical skill and mental cleverness, all adroitness of wit and strength of intellectual perception, even all vividness of imagination, will fail of making work great and permanently effective.

Volumes might be written upon style and its relations to authorship, but in the end it would still be necessary to acknowledge that the finest essence of literature is too subtle to be seized or analyzed. The aim of these talks was to consider the practical side of composition, and it is therefore aside from the purpose to attempt to discuss further the elusive æsthetic quality. Individual temperament and individual purpose must in the end determine what shall be the quality and style of all work; so that the secrets of this branch of literary art cannot be discovered until man is able to trace the nature and the working of those twin halves of the highest human consciousness, individuality and imagination.

1

In this chapter and the next three I am so greatly indebted to Professor Barrett Wendell’s “English Composition” that this part of my book might almost be called a summary of his, although I have of course omitted much and have introduced some things upon which he has barely touched.

2

Disraeli: Lothair. Quoted by Professor Hill.

3

Professor Hill’s definition of Persuasion seems to me to make it an argument which appeals to selfish prejudices or emotions.

4

A droll incident happened in connection with this illustration when these lectures were first delivered. As the audience left the hall one lady said to another, a stranger: “I beg your pardon, but could you tell me the name of the third book that was given, – the one that the lecturer said we should forget?” This was of course conclusive of nothing, but it was amusingly to the point.

5

A pleasant if a little exaggerated illustration of the way in which pictures are made up from materials in the mind is afforded by this account of the vision of Rome which a boy conjured up in his mind: “Rome! … I tried to imagine what it would be like when I got there. The Coliseum I knew, of course, from a woodcut in the history-book; so to begin with I plumped that down in the middle. The rest had to be patched up from the little gray market-town where twice a year we went to have our hair cut; hence, in the result, Vespasian’s amphitheatre was approached by muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the Blue Boar, with Somebody’s Entire along their front, and “Commercial Room” on their windows; the doctor’s house, of substantial red brick; and the façade of the New Wesleyan Chapel, which we thought very fine, were the chief architectural ornaments; while the Roman populace pottered about in smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of the Roman calves and inviting each other to beer in musical Wessex.” – Kenneth Graham: The Golden Age.

6

Sic.

7

Sic.