the language is still ours, the birthright of our noble English tongue.
Simply, we do not dare to let ourselves go. We seem tortured with the
modern blight of self-consciousness; and while the cheaper magazines are
almost blatant in their unblushing self-puffery, they are none the less
cravenly submissive to what they deem popular demand, and turn their
backs on literature, on style, as something abhorrent to a race which
has been fed on the English Bible for three hundred years. Their ideal
of a prose style now seems to consist of a series of staccato yips. It
really cannot be described in any other way. The 'triumphantly
intricate' sentence celebrated by Walter Pater would give many a modern
editor a shiver of terror. He would visualize it as mowing down the
circulation of the magazine like a machine gun. Rhythm and beauty of
style can hardly be achieved by staccato yips. The modern magazine
writer, trying to be rhetorically effective, trying to rise to the
demands of heightened thought or emotional appeal, reminds one of that
enthusiastic German tympanist who wrote an entire symphonic poem for
kettle-drums.
I read one of the autumn crop of new novels the other day. Curiously
enough, it was written by a music critic who, in his reviews of music,
is constantly insisting on the primal importance of melody and harmony,
who is an arch foe of the modern programme school and the whole-tone
scale of Debussy. But the prose of his novel was utterly devoid of these
prized elements, melody and harmony. A heavy, or sometimes turgid,
journalistic commonplaceness sat upon it. I will not be unfair and tear
an illustration from some passage of rightly simple narration. I will
take the closing sentences from one of the climactic chapters, when the
mood had supposedly risen to intensity, and, if ever, the prose would
have been justified in rising to reinforce the emotion.
The house was aroused to extravagant demonstrations. Across the
footlights it looked like a brilliantly realistic piece of acting, and
the audience was astonished at the vigor of the hitherto cold Americano.
'But Nagy was not deceived. Crushed, dishevelled, breathless, she knew
that her dominion over him was gone forever. She had tried to show him
his soul and he had begun to see the light.'
Now, an ear attuned to the melodies of English prose must surely find
this commonplace, and the closing sentence of all actually as harsh as
the tonalities of Strauss or Debussy seem to the writer. Let us, even if
a little unfairly, set it beside a passage from _Henry Esmond_, again a
climactic passage, but one where the style is climactic, also, rising to
the mood.
'"You will please, sir, to remember," he continued, "that our family
hath ruined itself by fidelity to yours: that my grandfather spent his
estate, and gave his blood and his son to die for your service; that my
dear lord's grandfather (for lord you are now, Frank, by right and title
too) died for the same cause; that my poor kinswoman, my father's second
wife, after giving away her honor to your wicked perjured race, sent all
her wealth to the King; and got in return that precious title that lies
in ashes, and this inestimable yard of blue ribbon. I lay this at your
feet and stamp upon it; I draw this sword, and break it and deny you;
and had you completed the wrong you designed us, by Heaven I would have
driven it through your heart, and no more pardoned you than your father
pardoned Monmouth. Frank will do the same, won't you, cousin?"'
This justly famous passage, be it noted, is dialogue. To-day we
especially do not dare to rise above a conversational level in dialogue.
We should be accused of being 'unnatural.' Does no one speak beautifully
any more, then, even in real life? Are the nerve-centres so shattered in
the modern anatomy that no connection is established between emotions
and the musical sense? Does an exquisite mood no longer reflect itself
in our voice, in our vocabulary? Does no lover rise to eloquence in the
presence of his Adored? If that is the case, surely we now speak
unnaturally, and it should be the duty of literature to restore our
health! Nor need such speech in fiction float clear away from solid
ground. Notice how Thackeray in his closing sentence--'Frank will do the
same, won't you, cousin?'--anchors his rhetoric to the earth.
We are, let it be said again, in the grasp of realism, and realism but
imperfectly understood. Just as our drama aims to reproduce exactly a
'solid' room upon the stage, and to set actors to talking therein the
exact speech of every day, so our oratory, so-called, is the
reproduction of a one-sided conversation, and our novels (when they are
worthy of consideration) are reproductions of patiently accumulated
details, set forth in impatiently assembled sentences. But all this does
not of necessity constitute realism, because its effect is not of
necessity the creation of illusion, however truthful the artist's
purpose. Of what avail, in the drama, for example, are solid rooms and
conversational vernacular if the characters do not come to life in our
imaginations, so that we share their joys and sorrows? Of what effect
are the realistic details of a novel, whether of incident or language,
if we do not re-live its story as we read? Surely, the answer is plain,
and therefore any literary devices which heighten the mood for us are
perfectly justifiable weapons of the realist, even as they are of the
romanticist. One of these devices is consciously wrought prose. For the
present we plead for its employment on no higher ground than this of
practical expediency.
But how, you may ask,--no, not you, dear reader, who understand, but
some other chap, a poor dog of an author, perhaps,--can consciously
wrought prose aid in the creation of illusion? How can it be more than
pretty?
Let us turn for answer to Sir Thomas Browne, to 'The Garden of Cyrus,'
to the closing numbers:--
'Besides, Hippocrates hath spoke so little, and the oneirocritical
masters have left such frigid interpretations from plants, that there is
little encouragement to dream of paradise itself. Nor will the sweetest
delight of gardens afford much comfort in sleep, wherein the dulness of
that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the bed of
Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a rose.'
That is archaic, perhaps, and not without a certain taint of quaintness
to modern ears. But how drowsy it is, how minor its harmonies, how
subtly soothing its languid melody! It tells, surely, in what manner
consciously wrought prose may aid in the creation of illusion. The mood
of sleep was here to be evoked, and lo! it comes from the very music of
the sentences, from the drowsy lullaby of selected syllables.
We might choose a quite different example, from a seemingly most
unlikely source, from the plays of George Bernard Shaw. One hardly
thinks of Mr. Shaw with a style, but rather with a stiletto. His
prefaces have been too disputative, his plays too epigrammatic, for the
cultivation of prose rhythms. Yet his prose is almost never without a
certain crisp accuracy of conversational cadence; his ear almost never
betrays him into sloppiness; and when the occasion demands, his style
can rise to meet it. The truth is, Mr. Shaw is seldom emotional, so that
his crisp accuracy of speech is most often the fitting garment for his
thought. But in _John Bull's Other Island_ his emotions are stirred, and
when Larry Doyle breaks out into an impassioned description of Ireland
the effect on the imagination of the heightened prose, when a good actor
speaks it, is almost startling.
'No, no; the climate is different. Here, if the life is dull, you can
be dull too, and no great harm done. (_Going off into a passionate
dream._) But your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those
white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those
hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colors in
the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings.
Oh, the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding,
never-satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming! (_Savagely._)
No debauchery that ever coarsened and brutalized an Englishman can take
the worth and usefulness out of him like that dreaming. An Irishman's
imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies
him; but it makes him so that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor
handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and
(_bitterly, at Broadbent_) be "agreeable to strangers," like a
good-for-nothing woman on the streets.'
This, to be sure, is prose to be spoken, not prose to be read. Different
laws prevail, for different effects are sought. But the principle of
cadence calculated to fit the mood, and by its melodic, or, as here, its
percussive character to heighten the emotional appeal, remains the same.
But beyond the argument for cadenced prose as an aid to illusion,
employed in the proper places,--that is, where intensity of imagery or
feeling can benefit by it,--is the higher plea for sheer lingual beauty
for its own sake. Shall realism preclude all other effects of artistic
creation? Because the men on our streets, the women in our homes, talk
sloppily, shall all our books be written in their idiom, all our stage
characters reproduce their commonplaceness, nearly all our magazines and
newspapers give no attention to the graces of style? I am pleading for
no Newman of the news story, nor am I seeking to arm our muck-rakers
with the pen of Sir Thomas Browne. I would not send Walter Pater to
report a football game (though Stevenson could doubtless improve on most
of the 'sporting editors'), nor ask that Emerson write our editorials.
But there is a poor way, and there is a fine way, to write everything,
and inevitably the man who has an ear for the rhythms of prose, who has
been trained and encouraged to write his very best, will fit his style
appropriately to his subject. He will not seek to cadence his sentences
in bald narration or in exposition, but he will, nevertheless, keep them
capable of natural and pleasant phrasing, he will avoid monotony,
jarring syllables, false stress, and ugly or tripping terminations which
throw the voice as one's feet are thrown by an unseen obstacle in the
path. His paragraphs, too, will group naturally, as falls his thought.
But when the subject he has in hand rises to invective, to exhortation,
to the dignity of any passion or the sweep of any vision, then if his
ear be tuned and his courage does not fail him he must inevitably write
in cadenced periods, the effectiveness of his work depending on the
adjustment of these cadences to the mood of the moment, on his skill as
an artist in prose.
And just now the courage of our young men fails. The unrestrained
abandonment of all art to realism, of every sort of printed page to bald
colloquialism, has dulled the natural ear in all of us for comely prose,
and made us deaf to more stately measures. The complete democratizing of
literature has put the fear of plebeian ridicule in our hearts, and the
wider a magazine's circulation, it would seem, the more harm it does to
English prose, because in direct ratio to its sale are its pages given
over to the Philistines, and the dignity and refinement of thought which
could stimulate dignity and refinement of expression are unknown to its
contributors, or kept carefully undisclosed.
I have often fancied, in penitential moments, a day of judgment for us
who write, when we shall stand in flushed array before the Ultimate
Critic and answer the awful question, 'What have you done with your
language?' There shall be searchings of soul that morning, and
searchings of forgotten pages of magazines and 'best sellers' and books
of every sort, for the cadence that may bring salvation. But many shall
seek and few shall find, and the goats shall be sorted out in droves,
condemned to an eternity of torture, none other than the everlasting
task of listening to their own prose read aloud.
'What have you done with your language?' It is a solemn question for all
of us, for you who speak as well as for us who write. Our language is a
priceless heritage. It has been the ladder of life up which we climbed;
with it we have bridged the sundering flood that forever rolls between
man and man; through its aid have come to us the treasures of the past,
the world's store of experience; by means of it our poets have wrought
their measures, our philosophers their dreams. Bit by bit, precious
mosaic after precious mosaic, the great body of English literature has
been built up, in verse and prose, the crown of that division of
language we call our own. Consciously finding itself three centuries
ago, our English prose blossomed at once into the solemn splendors of
the King James Bible and then into the long-drawn, ornate magnificence
of Sir Thomas Browne, never again till our day to lose consciousness of
its power, to forget its high and holy task, the task of maintaining our
language at full tide and ministering to style and beauty. There were
fluxes in the fashions, naturally; little of Browne's music being found
in the almost conversational fluency (but not laxness) of Addison, even
as the suave Mr. Addison himself has vanished in the tempestuous
torrents of Carlyle. But there always was an Addison, a Carlyle, a
Newman, a Walter Pater, whose work loomed large in popular regard, whose
influence was mighty in shaping a taste for prose style. Who now, we may
ask, looking around us in America, looms large in popular regard as a
writer of ample vision, amply and beautifully clothed in speech, and
whose influence is mighty in shaping a taste for prose style? It is not
enough to have the worthies of the past upon our shelves. Each age must
have its own inspiration. Again we hear the solemn question, 'What have
you done with your language?' Only Ireland may answer, 'We have our
George Moore, and we had our Synge not long ago--but we stoned his
plays.'
We have stifled our language, we have debased it, we have been afraid of
it. But some day it will reassert itself, for it is stronger than we,
alike our overlord and avatar. Deep in the soul of man dwells the lyric
impulse, and when his song cannot be the song of the poet it will shape
itself in rhythmic prose, that it may still be cadenced and modulated to
change with the changing thought and sound an obligato to the moods of
the author's spirit. How wonderful has been our prose,--grave and
chastely rich when Hooker wrote it, striding triumphant over the pages
of Gibbon on tireless feet, ringing like a trumpet from Emerson's white
house in Concord, modulated like soft organ-music heard afar in Newman's
lyric moods, clanging and clamorous in Carlyle, in Walter Pater but as
the soft fall of water in a marble fountain while exquisite odors flood
the Roman twilight and late bees are murmurous, a little of all,
perhaps, in Stevenson! We, too, we little fellows of to-day, could
write as they wrote, consciously, rhythmically, if we only cared, if we
only dared. We ask for the opportunity, the encouragement. Alas! that
also means a more liberal choice of graver subjects, and a more
extensive employment of the essay form. Milton could hardly have been
Miltonic on a lesser theme than the Fall of the Angels, and Walter Pater
wrote of the Mona Lisa, not Lizzie Smith of Davenport, Iowa. It is
doubtless of interest to learn about Lizzie, but she hardly inspires us
to rhythmic prose.
In the Chair
By Ralph Bergengren
About once in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with
contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a
voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his
neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with
all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time
being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-assessor: an
irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a canteloupe,
with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends and
acquaintances have advised him. His identity vanishes.
As a rule the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he
has given it to the barber, and the barber will do as he pleases with
it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother,
that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because
the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also
because the weakest woman under such circumstances has strong
convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him
to see the haircut, cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man
in a thousand--nay, in ten thousand--would dare express himself as
dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no
barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man, returning home
with a new haircut, who was compelled to turn round again and take what
his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut
was more happily finished. But that was exceptional. And it happened to
that man but once.
The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors.
Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,'
a euphemism indicating a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the
barber's, and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is
most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered by
keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a
period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is
admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never
satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has
the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must
grow steadily--count on it for that!--until for a brief period it is
'just right,' æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut
of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long
again.
Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must
go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.'
But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.
When he goes, he goes suddenly.
There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones
a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with
the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul
cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never
entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal.
Probably it converses on subjects remote from our bodily consciousness
with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting until the barbers
finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.
Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never
at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip
Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is
why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last
hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from
dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent
condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the
rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep
them from attaining it, a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on
the ground that business is business. To escape the haircut one must be
quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is
the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the
Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their
heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished
shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a
weakness. The back of the head had to be shaven, and the fashion
doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One
simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of
sitting up straight.
Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think,
and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are
losing our curls. Then habit accustoms us to it. Yet it is significant
that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of
hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other
refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less
refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in
and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in
pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this
kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with,
plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal
soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city
that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
I remember a barber--he was the only one available in a small town--who
cut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was
a pretty little cut, he said--filling it with alum--and reminded him of
another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the same
place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now doing.
Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!' said the
barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I didn't nip
him again in just the same place!'
A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum.
Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation, although, as I
have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition
was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the
human mind at that time in the morning. Here therefore a man can refuse
the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen
apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their
noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the
other--that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a
'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once made an
apparatus--a kind of helmet with multitudinous little scissors inside
it--which he hopefully believed would solve the problem; but what became
of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he tried it himself
and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps he committed
suicide, for one can easily imagine that a man who thought he had found
a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't would be thrown
into a suicidal depression. There is the possibility that he succeeded
in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put away,' where nobody
could see him but the hardened attendants, by his sensitive family. The
important fact is that the invention never got on the market. Until some
other investigator succeeds to more practical purpose, the rest of us
must go periodically to the barber. We must put on the bib--
Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are
bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of
satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the
newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still
intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons
of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretend to
be deeply interested in the _Illustrated London News_. The patrons of
the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear--I cannot see the place,
but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since
grown again--had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed
awkwardly to hold the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the
_Police Gazette_ without attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature
of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier--until my
ear was cut--to forget my position in the examination of this journal
than in the examination of the _Illustrated London News_. The pictures,
strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but
there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always
wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest. Otherwise
you may get to looking in the mirror.
Do not do that.
For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it
all off!
'Oh, barber, spare that hair!
Leave some upon my brow!
For months it's sheltered me!
And I'll protect it now!