ON ENGLISH COMPOSITION

Introductory Lectures given at Queen's College, London, 1848.

An introductory lecture on English composition is, I think, as much

needed as one on any other subject taught in this College. For in

the first place, I am not sure whether we all mean the same thing

when we speak of English composition; and in the next place, I

believe that pupils themselves are very often best able to tell their

teachers what sort of instruction they require. I purpose therefore

to-day, not only to explain freely my intentions with regard to this

course of lectures, but to ask you to explain freely your own wants.

I must suppose, however, that the ladies who attend here wish to be

taught how to write English better. Now the art of writing English

is, I should say, the art of speaking English, and speech may be used

for any one of three purposes: to conceal thought, as the French

diplomatist defined its use; to conceal the want of thought, as the

majority of popular writers and orators seem nowadays to employ it;

or, again, to express thought, which would seem to have been the

original destination of the gift of language. I am therefore, I

suppose, in duty bound to take for granted that you come here to be

taught to express your thoughts better.

The whole matter then will very much depend on what thoughts you have

to express. For the form of the symbol must depend on the form of

the thing symbolised, as the medal does upon its die; and thus style

and language are the sacraments of thoughts, the outward and visible

signs of the inward and spiritual grace, or want of grace, in the

writer. And even where language is employed to conceal either

thought, or want thereof, it generally tells a truer tale than it was

meant to do. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth must speak,

and the hollowness or foolishness of the spirit will show itself, in

spite of all cunning sleights, in unconscious peculiarities or

defects of style.

Hence I say style, as the expression of thought, will depend entirely

on what there is within to be expressed, on the character of the

writer's mind and heart. We all allow this implicitly in the

epithets which we apply to different styles. We talk of a vigorous,

a soft, a weak, a frigid, an obscure style, not meaning that the

words and sentences in themselves are vigorous, soft, weak, or even

obscure (for the words and their arrangement may be simple enough all

the while). No, you speak of the quality of the thoughts conveyed in

the words; that a style is powerful, because the writer is feeling

and thinking strongly and clearly; weak or frigid, because his

feelings on the subject have been weak or cold; obscure to you,

because his thoughts have been obscure to himself--because, in short,

he has not clearly imagined to himself the notion which he wishes to

embody. The meaning of the very words "expression" and "composition"

prove the truth of my assertion. Expression is literally the

pressing out into palpable form that which is already within us, and

composition, in the same way, is the composing or putting together of

materials already existing--the form and method of the composition

depend mainly on the form and quality of the materials. You cannot

compose a rope of sand, or a round globe of square stones--and my

friend Mr. Strettell will tell you, in his lectures on grammar, that

words are just as stubborn and intractable materials as sand or

stone, and that we cannot alter their meaning or value a single

shade, for they derive that meaning from a higher fountain than the

soul of man, from the Word of God, the fount of utterance, who

inspires all true and noble thought and speech--who vindicated

language as His own gift, and man's invention, in that miracle of the

day of Pentecost. And I am bound to follow up Mr. Strettell's

teaching by telling you that what holds true of words, and of their

grammatic and logical composition, holds true also of their aesthetic

and artistic composition, of style, of rhythm, of poetry, and

oratory. Every principle of these which is true and good, that is,

which produces beauty, is to be taken as an inspiration from above,

as depending not on the will of man but of God; not on any abstract

rules, of pedant's invention, but on the eternal necessities and

harmony, on the being of God Himself.

These may seem lofty words, but I do not think they are likely to

make us lofty-minded. I think that the belief of them will tend to

make us all more reverent and earnest in examining the utterances of

others, more simple and truthful in giving vent to our own, fearing

equally all prejudiced and hasty criticism, all self-willed

mannerism, all display of fine words, as sins against the divine

dignity of language. From these assertions I think we may conclude

what is the true method of studying style. The critical examination

of good authors, looking at language as an inspiration, and its laws

as things independent of us, eternal and divine, we must search into

them as we would into any other set of facts, in nature, or the

Bible, by patient induction. We must not be content with any

traditional maxims, or abstract rules, such as have been put forth in

Blair and Lord Kaimes, for these are merely worked out by the head,

and can give us no insight into the magic which touches the heart.

All abstract rules of criticism, indeed, are very barren. We may

read whole folios of them without getting one step farther than we

were at first, viz. that what is beautiful is beautiful. Indeed,

these abstract rules generally tend to narrow our notions of what is

beautiful, in their attempt to explain spiritual things by the carnal

understanding. All they do is to explain them away, and so those who

depend on them are tempted to deny the beauty of every thing which

cannot be thus analysed and explained away, according to the

established rule and method. I shall have to point out this again to

you, when we come to speak of the Pope and Johnson school of critics,

and the way in which they wrote whole folios on Shakespeare, without

ever penetrating a single step deeper towards the secret of his

sublimity. It was just this idolatry of abstract rules which made

Johnson call Bishop Percy's invaluable collection of ancient ballads

"stuff and nonsense." It was this which made Voltaire talk of

"Hamlet" as the ravings of a drunken savage, because forsooth it

could not be crammed into the artificial rules of French tragedy. It

is this which, even at this day, makes some men of highly-cultivated

taste declare that they can see no poetry in the writings of Mr.

Tennyson; the cause, little as they are aware of it, simply being

that neither his excellences nor his faults are after the model of

the Etonian classical school which reigned in England fifty years

ago. When these critics speak of that with which they sympathise

they are admirable. They become childish only when they resolve to

bind all by maxims which may suit themselves.

We must then, I think, absolutely eschew any abstract rules as

starting-points. What rules we may require, we must neither borrow

nor invent, but discover, during the course of our reading. We must

take passages whose power and beauty is universally acknowledged, and

try by reverently and patiently dissecting them to see into the

secret of their charm, to see why and how they are the best possible

expressions of the author's mind. Then for the wider laws of art, we

may proceed to examine whole works, single elegies, essays, and

dramas.

In carrying out all this, it will be safest, as always, to follow the

course of nature, and begin where God begins with us. For as every

one of us is truly a microcosm, a whole miniature world within

ourselves, so is the history of each individual more or less the

history of the whole human race, and there are few of us but pass

through the same course of intellectual growth, through which the

whole English nation has passed, with an exactness and perfection

proportionate, of course, to the richness and vigour of each person's

character. Now as in the nation, so in the individual, poetry

springs up before prose. Look at the history of English literature,

how completely it is the history of our own childhood and

adolescence, in its successive fashions. First, fairy tales--then

ballads of adventure, love, and war--then a new tinge of foreign

thought and feeling, generally French, as it was with the English

nation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--then elegiac and

reflective poetry--then classic art begins to influence our ripening

youth, as it did the youth of our nation in the sixteenth century,

and delight in dramatic poetry follows as a natural consequence--and

last, but not least, as the fruit of all these changes, a vigorous

and matured prose. For indeed, as elocution is the highest melody,

so is true prose the highest poetry. Consider how in an air, the

melody is limited to a few arbitrary notes, and recurs at arbitrary

periods, while the more scientific the melody becomes, the more

numerous and nearly allied are the notes employed, and the more

complex and uncertain is their recurrence--in short, the nearer does

the melody of the air approach to the melody of elocution, in which

the notes of the voice ought continually to be passing into each

other, by imperceptible gradations, and their recurrence to depend

entirely on the emotions conveyed in the subject words. Just so,

poetry employs a confined and arbitrary metre, and a periodic

recurrence of sounds which disappear gradually in its higher forms of

the ode and the drama, till the poetry at last passes into prose, a

free and ever-shifting flow of every imaginable rhythm and metre,

determined by no arbitrary rules, but only by the spiritual intent of

the subject. The same will hold good of whole prose compositions,

when compared with whole poems.

Prose then is highest. To write a perfect prose must be your

ultimate object in attending these lectures; but we must walk before

we can run, and walk with leading-strings before we can walk alone,

and such leading-strings are verse and rhyme. Some tradition of this

is still kept up in the practice of making boys write Latin and Greek

verses at school, which is of real service to the intellect, even

when most carelessly employed, and which, when earnestly carried out,

is one great cause of the public school and University man's

superiority in style to most self-educated authors. And why should

women's writings be in any respect inferior to that of men, if they

are only willing to follow out the same method of self-education?

Do not fancy, when I say that we must learn poetry before we learn

prose, that I am only advancing a paradox; mere talking is no more

prose than mere rhyme is poetry. Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's

comedy, makes, I suspect, a very great mistake, when he tells his

master: "If that means prose, I've been talking prose all my life."

I fancy the good man had been no more talking prose, than an awkward

country boy has been really walking all his life, because he has been

contriving somehow to put one leg before the other. To see what

walking is, we must look at the perfectly-drilled soldier, or at the

perfectly-accomplished lady, who has been taught to dance in order

that she may know how to walk. Dancing has been well called the

poetry of motion; but the tender grace, the easy dignity in every

gesture of daily life which the perfect dancer exhibits answers

exactly to that highly-organised prose which ought to be the

offspring of a critical acquaintance with poetry. Milton's matchless

prose style, for instance, grows naturally from his matchless power

over rhyme and metre. Practice in versification might be unnecessary

if we were all born world-geniuses; so would practice in dancing, if

every lady had the figure of a Venus and the garden of Eden for a

playground. But even the ancient Greeks amid every advantage of

climate, dress, and physical beauty, considered a thorough

instruction in all athletic and graceful exercises as indispensably

necessary, not only to a boy's but also to a girl's education, and in

like manner, I think the exquisite models of prose with which English

literature abounds will not supersede the necessity of a careful

training in versification, nay, will rather make such a training all

the more requisite for those who wish to imitate such excellence.

Pray understand me: by using the word "imitate," I do not mean that

I wish you to ape the style of any favourite author. Your aim will

not be to write like this man or that woman, but to write like

yourselves, being of course responsible for what yourselves are like.

Do not be afraid to let the peculiarities of your different

characters show yourselves in your styles. Your prose may be the

rougher for it, but it will be at least honest; and all mannerism is

dishonesty, an attempt to gain beauty at the expense of truthful

expression which invariably defeats its own ends, and produces an

unpleasing effect, so necessarily one are truth and beauty. So far

then from wishing to foster in you any artificial mannerism,

mannerism is that foul enchanter from whom, above all others, I am

sworn "en preux chevalier" to deliver you. As Professor Maurice

warned me when I undertook this lectureship, my object in teaching

you about "styles" should be that you may have no style at all. But

mannerism can be only avoided by the most thorough practice and

knowledge. Half-educated writers are always mannerists; while, as

the ancient canon says, "the perfection of art is to conceal art"--to

depart from uncultivated and therefore defective nature, to rise

again through art to a more organised and therefore more simple

naturalness. Just as, to carry on the analogy which I employed just

now, it is only the perfect dancer who arrives at that height of art

at which her movements seem dictated not by conscious science, but

unconscious nature.

I do hope then that the study, and still more the practice of

versification, may produce in you the same good effects which they do

in young men; that they may give you a habit of portioning out your

thoughts distinctly and authentically in a more simple, condensed,

and expressive style; that they may teach you what elevation of

language, what class of sounds, what flow of words may best suit your

tone of thought and feeling, that they may prevent in you that

tendency to monotonous repetition, and vain wordiness, which is the

bosom sin of most uneducated prose writers, not only of the ladies of

the nineteenth century, but of the Middle Age monks, who, having in

general no poetry on which to form their taste, except the effeminate

and bombastic productions of the dying Roman empire, fell into a

certain washy prolixity, which has made monk Latin a byword, and puts

one sadly in mind of what is too truly called "young ladies'

English."

I should like then to begin with two or three of the early ballads,

and carefully analyse them with you. I am convinced that in them we

may discover many of the great primary laws of composition, as well

as the secrets of sublimity and pathos in their very simplest

manifestations. It may be that there are some here to whom the study

of old ballads may be a little distasteful, who are in an age when

the only poetry which has charms is the subjective and self-conscious

"poetry of the heart"--to whom a stanza of "Childe Harolde" may seem

worth all the ballads that ever were written: but let me remind them

that woman is by her sex an educator, that every one here must

expect, ay hope, to be employed at some time or other in training the

minds of children; then let me ask them to recall the years in which

objective poems, those which dealt with events, ballads, fairy tales,

down to nursery rhymes, were their favourite intellectual food, and

let me ask them whether it will not be worth while, for the sake of

the children whom they may hereafter influence, to bestow a little

thought on this earlier form of verse.

I must add too, that without some understanding of these same

ballads, we shall never arrive at a critical appreciation of

Shakespeare. For the English drama springs from an intermarriage

between this same ballad poetry, the poetry of incidents, and that

subjective elegiac poetry which deals with the feelings and

consciousnesses of man. They are the two poles, by whose union our

drama is formed, and some critical knowledge of both of them will be,

as I said, necessary before we can study it.

After the ballads, we ought, I think, to know a little about the

early Norman poetry, whose fusion with the pure north Saxon ballad

school produced Chaucer and the poets previous to the Reformation.

We shall proceed to Chaucer himself; then to the rise of the drama;

then to the poets of the Elizabethan age. I shall analyse a few of

Shakespeare's masterpieces; then speak of Milton and Spenser; thence

pass to the prose of Sidney, Hooker, Bacon, Taylor, and our later

great authors. Thus our Composition lectures will follow an

historical method, parallel with, and I hope illustrative of, the

lectures on English History.

But it will not be enough, I am afraid, to study the style of others

without attempting something yourselves. No criticism teaches so

much as the criticism of our own works. And I hope therefore that

you will not think that I ask too much of you when I propose that

weekly prose and verse compositions, on set subjects, be sent in by

the class. To the examination of these the latter half of each

lecture may be devoted, and the first half-hour to the study of

various authors: and in order that I may be able to speak my mind

freely on them I should propose that they be anonymous. I hope that

you will all trust me when I tell you that those who have themselves

experienced what labour attends the task of composition, are

generally most tender and charitable in judging of the work of

others, and that whatever remarks I may make will be such only as a

man has a right to make on a woman's composition.

And if I may seem to be asking anything new or troublesome, I beg you

to remember, that it is the primary idea of this College to vindicate

women's right to an education in all points equal to that of men; the

difference between them being determined not by any fancied

inferiority of mind, but simply by the distinct offices and character

of the sexes. And surely when you recollect the long drudgery at

Greek and Latin verses which is required of every highly-educated

man, and the high importance which has attached to them for centuries

in the opinion of Englishmen, you cannot think that I am too exigeant

in asking you for a few sets of English verses. Believe me, that you

ought to find their beneficial effect in producing, as I said before,

a measured deliberate style of expression, a habit of calling up

clear and distinct images on all subjects, a power of condensing and

arranging your thoughts, such as no practice in prose themes can ever

give. If you are disappointed of these results it will not be the

fault of this long-proved method of teaching, but of my own inability

to carry it out. Indeed I cannot too strongly confess my own

ignorance or fear my own inability. I stand aghast when I compare my

means and my idea, but I believe that "by teaching thou shalt learn,"

is a rule of which I too shall take the benefit, and having begun

these lectures in the name of Him who is The Word, and with the firm

intention of asserting throughout His claims as the inspirer of all

language and of all art, I may perhaps hope for the fulfilment of His

own promise: "Be not anxious what you shall speak, for it shall be

given you in that day and in that hour what you shall speak."