Produced by James Tenison
ON THE ART OF WRITING
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ON THE ART OF WRITING
LECTURES DELIVERED IN THE
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
1913-1914
BY
SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M.A.
Fellow of Jesus College
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature
Cambridge: at the University Press
1917
First Edition 1916
Reprinted 1916,1917
TO JOHN HAY LOBBAN
PREFACE
By recasting these lectures I might with pains have turned them into a
smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bating a very few
corrections and additions) as they were delivered. If, as the reader will
all too easily detect, they abound no less in repetitions than in
arguments dropped and left at loose ends--the whole bewraying a man
called unexpectedly to a post where in the act of adapting himself, of
learning that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his main purpose
and skirmish with difficulties--they will be the truer to life; and so
may experimentally enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing is a
living business.
Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps excuse certain small
vivacities, sallies that meet fools with their folly, masking the main
attack. _That_, we will see, is serious enough; and others will carry it
on, though my effort come to naught.
It amounts to this--Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; but
an Art, to be practised. Great as is our own literature, we must consider
it as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that potters with any glory of
its past, as a thing dead and done for, is to that extent renegade. If
that be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can excuse the
relaxation of an effort--however vain and hopeless--to better him, or
some part of him. If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage,
we persist in striving to write well, we can easily resign to other
nations all the secondary fame to be picked up by commentators.
Recent history has strengthened, with passion and scorn, the faith in
which I wrote the following pages.
ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH
November 1915
CONTENTS
LECTURE
I INAUGURAL
II THE PRACTICE OF WRITING
III ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VERSE AND PROSE
IV ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF VERSE
V INTERLUDE: ON JARGON
VI ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE
VII SOME PRINCIPLES REAFFIRMED
VIII ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (I)
IX ON THE LINEAGE OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (II)
X ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (I)
XI ENGLISH LITERATURE IN OUR UNIVERSITIES (II)
XII ON STYLE
INDEX
LECTURE I.
INAUGURAL
Wednesday, January 29, 1913
In all the long quarrel set between philosophy and poetry I know of
nothing finer, as of nothing more pathetically hopeless, than Plato's
return upon himself in his last dialogue 'The Laws.' There are who find
that dialogue (left unrevised) insufferably dull, as no doubt it is
without form and garrulous. But I think they will read it with a new
tolerance, may-be even with a touch of feeling, if upon second thoughts
they recognise in its twisting and turnings, its prolixities and
repetitions, the scruples of an old man who, knowing that his time in
this world is short, would not go out of it pretending to know more than
he does, and even in matters concerning which he was once very sure has
come to divine that, after all, as Renan says, 'La Verité consiste dans
les nuances.' Certainly 'the mind's dark cottage battered and decayed'
does in that last dialogue admit some wonderful flashes,
From Heaven descended to the low-roofed house
Of Socrates,
or rather to that noble 'banquet-hall deserted' which aforetime had
entertained Socrates.
Suffer me, Mr Vice-Chancellor and Gentlemen, before reaching my text, to
remind you of the characteristically beautiful setting. The place is
Crete, and the three interlocutors--Cleinias a Cretan, Megillus a
Lacedaemonian, and an Athenian stranger--have joined company on a
pilgrimage to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, first
lawgiver of the island, had reputedly derived not only his parentage but
much parental instruction. Now the day being hot, even scorching, and the
road from Cnossus to the Sacred Cave a long one, our three pilgrims, who
have foregathered as elderly men, take it at their leisure, and propose
to beguile it with talk upon Minos and his laws. 'Yes, and on the way,'
promises the Cretan, 'we shall come to cypress-groves exceedingly tall
and fair, and to green meadows, where we may repose ourselves and
converse.' 'Good,' assents the Athenian. 'Ay, very good indeed, and
better still when we arrive at them. Let us push on.'
So they proceed. I have said that all three are elderly men; that is, men
who have had their opportunities, earned their wages, and so nearly
earned their discharge that now, looking back on life, they can afford to
see Man for what he really is--at his best a noble plaything for the
gods. Yet they look forward, too, a little wistfully. They are of the
world, after all, and nowise so tired of it, albeit disillusioned, as to
have lost interest in the game or in the young who will carry it on. So
Minos and his laws soon get left behind, and the talk (as so often
befalls with Plato) is of the perfect citizen and how to train him--of
education, in short; and so, as ever with Plato, we are back at length
upon the old question which he could never get out of his way--What to do
with the poets?
It scarcely needs to be said that the Athenian has taken hold of the
conversation, and that the others are as wax in his hands. 'O Athenian
stranger,' Cleinias addresses him--'inhabitant of Attica I will not call
you, for you seem to deserve rather the name of Athene herself, because
you go back to first principles.' Thus complimented, the stranger lets
himself go. Yet somehow he would seem to have lost speculative nerve.
It was all very well in the 'Republic,' the ideal State, to be bold and
declare for banishing poetry altogether. But elderly men have given up
pursuing ideals; they have 'seen too many leaders of revolt.' Our
Athenian is driving now at practice (as we say), at a well-governed State
realisable on earth; and after all it is hard to chase out the poets,
especially if you yourself happen to be something of a poet at heart.
Hear, then, the terms on which, after allowing that comedies may be
performed, but only by slaves and hirelings, he proceeds to allow serious
poetry.
And if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, who write tragedy,
come to us and say--'O strangers, may we go to your city and country,
or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry? What is your will
about these matters?'--how shall we answer the divine men? I think that
our answer should be as follows:--
'Best of strangers,' we will say to them, 'we also, according to our
ability, are tragic poets, and our tragedy is the best and noblest: for
our whole state is an imitation of the best and noblest life.... You are
poets and we are poets, both makers of the same strains, rivals and
antagonists in the noblest of dramas, which true law alone can perfect,
as our hope is. Do not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow
you to erect your stage in the Agora, and introduce the fair voices of
your actors, speaking above our own, and permit you to harangue our
women and children and the common people in language other than our
own, and very often the opposite of our own. For a State would be mad
which gave you this license, until the magistrates had determined
whether your poetry might be recited and was fit for publication or
not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer Muses! first of all
show your songs to the Magistrates and let them compare them with our
own, and if they are the same or better, we will give you a chorus; but
if not, then, my friends, we cannot.'
Lame conclusion! Impotent compromise! How little applicable, at all
events, to our Commonwealth! though, to be sure (you may say) we possess
a relic of it in His Majesty's Licenser of Plays. As you know, there has
been so much heated talk of late over the composition of the County
Magistracy; yet I give you a countryman's word, Sir, that I have heard
many names proposed for the Commission of the Peace, and on many grounds,
but never one on the ground that its owner had a conservative taste in
verse!
Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with these poets somehow. It is
possible (though not, I think, likely) that in the ideal State there
would be no Literature, as it is certain there would be no Professors of
it; but since its invention men have never been able to rid themselves of
it for any length of time. _Tamen usque recurrit._ They may forbid
Apollo, but still he comes leading his choir, the Nine:--
[Greek: Akletos men egoge menoimi ken es de kaleunton
Tharsesas Moisaisi snu amepeaisin ikoiman.]
And he may challenge us English boldly! For since Chaucer, at any rate,
he and his train have never been [Greek: akletoi] to us--least of all
here in Cambridge.
Nay, we know that he should be welcome. Cardinal Newman, proposing the
idea of a University to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, lamented that the
English language had not, like the Greek, 'some definite words to
express, simply and generally, intellectual proficiency or perfection,
such as "health," as used with reference to the animal frame, and
"virtue," with reference to our moral nature.' Well, it is a reproach to
us that we do not possess the term: and perhaps again a reproach to us
that our attempts at it--the word 'culture' for instance--have been apt
to take on some soil of controversy, some connotative damage from
over-preaching on the one hand and impatience on the other. But we do
earnestly desire the thing. We do prize that grace of intellect which
sets So-and-so in our view as 'a scholar and a gentleman.' We do wish as
many sons of this University as may be to carry forth that lifelong stamp
from her precincts; and--this is my point--from our notion of such a man
the touch of literary grace cannot be excluded. I put to you for a test
Lucian's description of his friend Demonax--
His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was just
a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But his
discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither
disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on
the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to
more orderly, contented, hopeful lives.
I put it to you, Sir, that Lucian needs not to say another word, but we
know that Demonax had loved letters, and partly by aid of them had
arrived at being such a man. No; by consent of all, Literature is a nurse
of noble natures, and right reading makes a full man in a sense even
better than Bacon's; not replete, but complete rather, to the pattern for
which Heaven designed him. In this conviction, in this hope, public
spirited men endow Chairs in our Universities, sure that Literature is a
good thing if only we can bring it to operate on young minds.
That he has in him some power to guide such operation a man must believe
before accepting such a Chair as this. And now, Sir, the terrible moment
is come when your [Greek: xenos] must render some account--I will not say
of himself, for that cannot be attempted--but of his business here. Well,
first let me plead that while you have been infinitely kind to the
stranger, feasting him and casting a gown over him, one thing not all
your kindness has been able to do. With precedents, with traditions such
as other Professors enjoy, you could not furnish him. The Chair is a new
one, or almost new, and for the present would seem to float in the void,
like Mahomet's coffin. Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief Justice
Crewe's phrase) would 'take hold of a twig or twine-thread to uphold it';
being also prone (with Bacon) to believe that 'the counsels to which Time
hath not been called, Time will not ratify'; I do assure you that, had
any legacy of guidance been discovered among the papers left by my
predecessor, it would have been eagerly welcomed and as piously honoured.
O, trust me, Sir!--if any design for this Chair of English Literature had
been left by Dr Verrall, it is not I who would be setting up any new
stage in your agora! But in his papers--most kindly searched for me by
Mrs Verrall--no such design can be found. He was, in truth, a stricken
man when he came to the Chair, and of what he would have built we can
only be sure that, had it been this or had it been that, it would
infallibly have borne the impress of one of the most beautiful minds of
our generation. The gods saw otherwise; and for me, following him, I came
to a trench and stretched my hands to a shade.
For me, then, if you put questions concerning the work of this Chair, I
must take example from the artist in Don Quixote, who being asked what he
was painting, answered modestly, 'That is as it may turn out.' The course
is uncharted, and for sailing directions I have but these words of your
Ordinance:
It shall be the duty of the Professor to deliver courses of lectures
on English Literature from the age of Chaucer onwards, and otherwise
to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study in the
University of the subject of English Literature.
And I never even knew that English Literature had a 'subject'; or,
rather, supposed it to have several! To resume:
The Professor shall treat this subject on literary and critical
rather than on philological and linguistic lines:
--a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, large in itself, if not
comparatively, of the new Professor's ignorance. But I ask you to note
the phrase 'to promote, so far as may be in his power, the study'--not,
you will observe, 'to teach'; for this absolves me from raising at the
start a question of some delicacy for me, as Green launched his
"Prolegomena to Ethics" upon the remark that 'an author who seeks to gain
general confidence scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins
with asking whether there really is such a subject as that of which he
proposes to treat.' In spite of--mark, pray, that I say _in spite
of_--the activity of many learned Professors, some doubt does lurk in
the public mind if, after all, English Literature can, in any ordinary
sense, be taught, and if the attempts to teach it do not, after all,
justify (as Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) the
silence sapience of those old benefactors who abstained from endowing
any such Chairs.
But that the study of English Literature can be promoted in young minds
by an elder one, that their zeal may be encouraged, their tastes
directed, their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged--this, I take it, no
man of experience will deny. Nay, since our two oldest Universities have
a habit of marking one another with interest--an interest, indeed,
sometimes heightened by nervousness--I may point out that all this has
been done of late years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man you gave
to Oxford. This, then, Mr Vice-Chancellor--this or something like this,
Gentlemen--is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win your
confidence.
Let me, then, lay down two or three principles by which I propose to be
guided. (1) For the first principle of all I put to you that in studying
any work of genius we should begin by taking it _absolutely_; that is to
say, with minds intent on discovering just what the author's mind
intended; this being at once the obvious approach to its meaning (its
[Greek: to ti en einai], the 'thing it was to be'), and the merest duty
of politeness we owe to the great man addressing us. We should lay our
minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if what he has to tell be noble
and high and beautiful, we should surrender and let soak our minds in it.
Pray understand that in claiming, even insisting upon, the first place
for this _absolute_ study of a great work I use no disrespect towards
those learned scholars whose labours will help you, Gentlemen, to enjoy
it afterwards in other ways and from other aspects; since I hold there is
no surer sign of intellectual ill-breeding than to speak, even to feel,
slightingly of any knowledge oneself does not happen to possess. Still
less do I aim to persuade you that anyone should be able to earn a
Cambridge degree by the process (to borrow Macaulay's phrase) of reading
our great authors 'with his feet on the hob,' a posture I have not even
tried, to recommend it for a contemplative man's recreation. These
editors not only set us the priceless example of learning for learning's
sake: but even in practice they clear our texts for us, and
afterwards--when we go more minutely into our author's acquaintance,
wishing to learn all we can about him--by increasing our knowledge of
detail they enchance our delight. Nay, with certain early writers--say
Chaucer or Dunbar, as with certain highly allusive ones--Bacon, or
Milton, or Sir Thomas Browne--some apparatus must be supplied from the
start. But on the whole I think it a fair contention that such helps to
studying an author are secondary and subsidiary; that, for example, with
any author who by consent is less of his age than for all time, to study
the relation he bore to his age may be important indeed, and even highly
important, yet must in the nature of things be of secondary importance,
not of the first.
But let us examine this principle a little more attentively--for it is
the palmary one. As I conceive it, that understanding of literature which
we desire in our Euphues, our gracefully-minded youth, will include
knowledge in varying degree, yet is itself something distinct from
knowledge. Let us illustrate this upon Poetry, which the most of us will
allow to be the highest form of literary expression, if not of all
artistic expression. Of all the testimony paid to Poetry, none commands
better witness than this--that, as Johnson said of Gray's Elegy 'it
abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with
sentiments to which every heart returns an echo.' When George Eliot said,
'I never before met with so many of my own feelings expressed just as I
should like them,' she but repeated of Wordsworth (in homelier, more
familiar fashion) what Johnson said of Gray; and the same testimony lies
implicit in Emerson's fine remark that 'Universal history, the poets, the
romancers'--all good writers, in short--'do not anywhere make us feel
that we intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is true that, in
their greatest strokes, there we feel most at home.' The mass of
evidence, of which these are samples, may be summarised thus:--As we
dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered
Universe without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more
delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows--men whose minds have, as
it were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us
stray messages between these two mysteries, as modern telegraphy has
learnt to search out, snatch, gather home human messages astray over
waste waters of the Ocean.
If, then, the ordinary man be done this service by the poet, that (as Dr
Johnson defines it) 'he feels what he remembers to have felt before, but
he feels it _with a great increase of sensibility_'; or even if, though
the message be unfamiliar, it suggests to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to
'feel that we are greater than we know,' I submit that we respond to it
less by anything that usually passes for knowledge, than by an
improvement of sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's pitch;
so that the man we are proud to send forth from our Schools will be
remarkable less for something he can take out of his wallet and exhibit
for knowledge, than for _being_ something, and that 'something,' a man of
unmistakable intellectual breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust
to choose the better and reject the worse.
But since this refining of the critical judgment happens to be less easy
of practice than the memorising of much that passes for knowledge--of
what happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the soldier--and far less
easy to examine on, the pedagogic mind (which I implore you not to
suppose me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of trouble tends
all the while to dodge or obfuscate what is essential, piling up
accidents and irrelevancies before it until its very face is hidden. And
we should be the more watchful not to confuse the pedagogic mind with the
scholarly since it is from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends to
derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine commentators--be it a
Skeat or a Masson or (may I add for old reverence' sake?) an Aldis
Wright--fetching home bits of erudition, _non sua poma_, and announcing
'This _must_ be the true Sion, for we found it in a wood.'
Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates annually, all upside down
and wrong from beginning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts us, that
the English schoolboy starts with a false perspective of any given
masterpiece, his pedagogue urging, obtruding lesser things upon his
vision until what is really important, the poem or the play itself, is
seen in distorted glimpses, if not quite blocked out of view.
This same temptation--to remove a work of art from the category for which
the author designed it into another where it can be more conveniently
studied--reaches even above the schoolmaster to assail some very eminent
critics. I cite an example from a book of which I shall hereafter have to
speak with gratitude as I shall always name it with respect--"The History
of English Poetry," by Dr Courthope, sometime Professor of Poetry at
Oxford. In his fourth volume, and in his estimate of Fletcher as a
dramatist, I find this passage:--
But the crucial test of a play's quality is only applied when it is
read. So long as the illusion of the stage gives credit to the
action, and the words and gestures of the actor impose themselves on
the imagination of the spectator, the latter will pass over a
thousand imperfections, which reveal themselves to the reader, who,
as he has to satisfy himself with the drama of silent images, will
nor be content if this or that in any way fall short of his
conception of truth and nature,
--which seems equivalent to saying that the crucial test of the frieze of
the Parthenon is its adaptability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So long
as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to Pheidias' design, and the
sunlight of Attica imposed its delicate intended shadows edging the
reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be tricked; but the visitor to
the British Museum, as he has to satisfy himself with what happens
indoors in the atmosphere of the West Central Postal Division of London,
will not be content if Pheidias in any way fall short of _his_ conception
of truth and nature. Yet Fletcher (I take it) constructed his plays as
plays; the illusion of the stage, the persuasiveness of the actor's
voice, were conditions for which he wrought, and on which he had a right
to rely; and, in short, any critic behaves uncritically who, distrusting
his imagination to recreate the play as a play, elects to consider it in
the category of something else.
In sum, if the great authors never oppress us with airs of condescension,
but, like the great lords they are, put the meanest of us at our ease in
their presence, I see no reason why we should pay to any commentator a
servility not demanded by his master.
My next two principles may be more briefly stated.
(2) I propose next, then, that since our investigations will deal largely
with style, that curiously personal thing; and since (as I have said)
they cannot in their nature be readily brought to rule-of-thumb tests,
and may therefore so easily be suspected of evading all tests, of being
mere dilettantism; I propose (I say) that my pupils and I rebuke this
suspicion by constantly aiming at the concrete, at the study of such
definite beauties as we can see presented in print under our eyes; always
seeking the author's intention, but eschewing, for the present at any
rate, all general definitions and theories, through the sieve of which
the particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. And having
excluded them at first in prudence, I make little doubt we shall go on to
exclude them in pride. Definitions, formulæ (some would add, creeds) have
their use in any society in that they restrain the ordinary
unintellectual man from making himself a public nuisance with his private
opinions. But they go a very little way in helping the man who has a real
sense of prose or verse. In other words, they are good discipline for
some thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use for them. As
Thomas à Kempis 'would rather feel compunction than understand the
definition thereof,' so the initiated man will say of the 'Grand Style,'
for example--'Why define it for me?' When Viola says simply:
I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too,
or Macbeth demands of the Doctor
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow..?
or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of Hours, with
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered!
or when Milton tells of his dead friend how
Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd
Under the opening eyelids of the morn,
We drove afield,
or describes the battalions of Heaven
On they move
Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill,
Nor strait'ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide
Their perfect ranks,
or when Gray exalts the great commonplace
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour;
The paths of glory lead but to the grave,
or when Keats casually drops us such a line as
The journey homeward to habitual self,
or, to come down to our own times and to a living poet, when I open on a
page of William Watson and read
O ancient streams, O far descended woods,
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls!...
'why then (will say the initiated one), why worry me with any definition
of the Grand Style in English, when here, and here, and again here--in
all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or solemn--I recognise
and feel the _thing_?'
Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here.
Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be
applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal
persuasiveness, on the author's skill to give as on ours to receive.
(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato's
wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we
must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, I feel we must treat the
gifted Athenian stranger to a little manhandling. For did you not
observe--though Greek was a living language and to his metropolitan mind
the only language--how envious he showed himself to seal up the well, or
allow it to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: to treat all
innovation as suspect, even as, a hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical
Ballads were suspect?
But the very hope of this Chair, Sir (as I conceive it), relies on the
courage of the young. As Literature is an Art and therefore not to be
pondered only, but practised, so ours is a living language and therefore
to be kept alive, supple, active in all honourable use. The orator can
yet sway men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their lungs with
salutary laughter or purge their emotions by pity or terror.
The historian 'superinduces upon events the charm of order.'
The novelist--well, even the novelist has his uses; and I would warn you
against despising any form of art which is alive and pliant in the hands
of men. For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's "Peter Pan"
and the old bottles he renovated to hold that joyous wine, that even
Musical Comedy, in the hands of a master, might become a thing of
beauty. Of the Novel, at any rate--whether we like it or not--we have to
admit that it does hold a commanding position in the literature of our
times, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie was right the
other day when he claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study of
Thomas Hardy, that 'the right to such a position is not to be disputed;
for here, as elsewhere, the right to a position is no more than the
power to maintain it.' You may agree with that or you may not; you may
or may not deplore the forms that literature is choosing now-a-days; but
there is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive. And I would say
to you, Gentlemen, 'Believe, and be glad that Literature and the English
tongue are both alive.' Carlyle, in his explosive way, once demanded of
his countrymen, 'Shakespeare or India? If you had to surrender one to
retain the other, which would you choose?' Well, our Indian Empire is
yet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete and
purchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely _in pari
materia_; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble half
way. But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the
making, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise. In that alone you
have inherited something greater than Sparta. Let us strive, each in his
little way, to adorn it.
But here at the close of my hour, the double argument, that Literature is
an Art and English a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourth
principle, the plunge into which (though I foresaw it from the first) all
the coward in me rejoices at having to defer to another lecture. I
conclude then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, which very likely
have been shaping themselves in your minds. In the first place, you will
say, 'It is all very well for this man to talk about "cultivating an
increased sensibility," and the like; but we know what that leads to--to
quackery, to aesthetic chatter: "Isn't this pretty? Don't you admire
that?"' Well, I am not greatly frightened. To begin with, when we come to
particular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange it with you in plain
terms; a manner which (to quote Mr Robert Bridges' "Essay on Keats") 'I
prefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say definitely what he means,
it makes his mistakes easy to point out, and in this way the true
business of criticism is advanced.' But I have a second safeguard, more
to be trusted: that here in Cambridge, with all her traditions of austere
scholarship, anyone who indulges in loose distinct talk will be quickly
recalled to his tether. Though at the time Athene be not kind enough to
descend from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, yet the very
_genius loci_ will walk home with him from the lecture room, whispering
monitions, cruel to be kind.
'But,' you will say alternatively, 'if we avoid loose talk on these
matters we are embarking on a mighty difficult business.' Why, to be sure
we are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoyment. After all, we have
a number of critics among whose methods we may search for help--from the
Persian monarch who, having to adjudicate upon two poems, caused the one
to be read to him, and at once, without ado, awarded the prize to the
other, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall finally invoke to sustain
my hope of building something; that is if you, Gentlemen, will be content
to accept me less as a Professor than as an Elder Brother.
The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a debt, perhaps appropriately
here, by quoting him as translated by the friend of mine, now dead, who
first invited me to Cambridge and taught me to admire her--one Arthur
John Butler, sometime a Fellow of Trinity, and later a great pioneer
among Englishmen in the study of Dante. Thus while you listen to the
appeal of Sainte-Beuve, I can hear beneath it a more intimate voice, not
for the first time, encouraging me.
Sainte-Beuve then--_si magna licet componere parvis_--is delivering an
Inaugural Lecture in the École Normale, the date being April 12th, 1858.
'Gentlemen,' he begins, 'I have written a good deal in the last thirty
years; that is, I have scattered myself a good deal; so that I need to
gather myself together, in order that my words may come before you with
all the more freedom and confidence.' That is his opening; and he ends:--
As time goes on, you will make me believe that I can for my part be
of some good to you: and with the generosity of your age you will
repay me, in this feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to
give you in intellectual freedom, in literary thought. If in one
sense I bestow on you some of my experience, you will requite me,
and in a more profitable manner, by the sight of your ardour for
what is noble: you will accustom me to turn oftener and more
willingly towards the future in your company. You will teach me
again to hope.
LECTURE II.
THE PRACTICE OF WRITING.
Wednesday, February 12
We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our first lecture, that the
argument had drawn us, as by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold
leap, over which I deferred asking you to take the plunge with me. Yet
the plunge must be taken, and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden
our hearts.
Well, then, I propose to you that, English Literature being (as we
agreed) an Art, with a living and therefore improvable language for its
medium or vehicle, a part--and no small part--of our business is _to
practise it._ Yes, I seriously propose to you that here in Cambridge we
_practise writing_: that we practise it not only for our own improvement,
but to make, or at least try to make, appropriate, perspicuous, accurate,
persuasive writing a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out by our
English School. By all means let us study the great writers of the past
for their own sakes; but let us study them for our guidance; that we, in
our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something to say in our span of
time, say it worthily, not dwindling out the large utterance of
Shakespeare or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look down on you
in your college halls: but while you are young and sit at the brief
feast, what avails their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts and
movingly persuade you to match your manhood to its inheritance?
I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not been sealed, as with wax,
by the pedagogues of whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of
regarding our own literature as a _hortus siccus_, this our neglect to
practise good writing as the constant auxiliary of an Englishman's
liberal education, would be amazing to you seated here to-day as it will
be starkly incredible to the future historian of our times. Tell me,
pray; if it concerned _Painting_--an art in which Englishmen boast a
record far briefer, far less distinguished--what would you think of a
similar acquiescence in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution
of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipitancy to divorce us from
the past, to rob the future of hope and even the present of lively
interest? Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Discourses
addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the Members
and Students of the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) enough to
say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, and of the duty of studying
their work with patience, with humility. But why does he exhort his
hearers to con them?--Why, because he is all the time _driving at
practice_. Hear how he opens his second Discourse (his first to the
Students). After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, he desires 'to
lead them into such a course of study as may render their future progress
answerable to their past improvement'; and the great man goes on:--
I flatter myself that from the long experience I have had, and the
necessary assiduity with which I have pursued these studies in which
like you I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in
offering some hints to your consideration. They are indeed in a
great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit....
Mark the noble modesty of that! To resume--
In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall only consider
it as it has relation to the method of your studies.
And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters.--But how?--why?--to what
end? Does he recite lists of names, dates, with formulae concerning
styles? He does nothing of the sort. Does he recommend his old masters
for copying, then?--for mere imitation? Not a bit of it!--he comes down
like a hammer on copying. Then for what, in fine, will he have them
studied? Listen:--
The more extensive your acquaintance is with the works of those who
have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention.
Yes, of _invention_, your power to make something new:
--and what may appear still more like a paradox, _the more original
will be your conceptions_.
There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds: and I call that the voice of a true
Elder Brother. He, standing face to face with the young, thought of the
old masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. And will anyone in
this room tell me that what Reynolds said of painting is not to-day, for
us, applicable to writing?
We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old Sixth Form master once said to
me, 'You may give up Latin Verse for this term, if you will: but I warn
you, no one can be a real scholar who does not constantly practise
verse.' He was mistaken, belike. I hold, for my part, that in our Public
Schools, we give up a quite disproportionate amount of time to
'composition' (of Latin Prose especially) and starve the boys' reading
thereby. But at any rate we do give up a large share of the time to it.
Then if we insist on this way with the tongues of Homer and Virgil, why
do we avoid it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living tongue? I
answer by quoting one of the simplest wisest sayings of Don Quixote
(Gentlemen, you will easily, as time goes on, and we better our
acquaintance, discover my favourite authors):--
The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a Greek; and Virgil
wrote not in Greek, because he was a Latin. In brief, all the
ancient poets wrote in the tongue which they sucked in with their
mother's milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones to
express the greatness of their conceptions: and, this being so, it
should be a reason for the fashion to extend to all nations.
Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves? Will you tell me,
'Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably
well'? Can he, indeed?... Can _you,_ sir? Nay, believe me, you are either
an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having
spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.
Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the result
is apt to be worse than our own vernacular. How often have I heard some
worthy fellow addressing a public audience!--say a Parliamentary
candidate who believes himself a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the moment
is addressing himself to meet some criticism of the financial proposals
of a Home Rule Bill. His own vernacular would be somewhat as follows:--
Oh, rot! Give the Irish their heads and they'll run straight enough.
Look at the Boers, don't you know. Not half such a decent sort as
the Irish. Look at Irish horses, too. Eh? What?
But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the occasion. He therefore
amends it thus:--
Mr Chairman--er--as regards the financial proposals of His Majesty's
Government, I am of the deliberate--er--opinion that our national
security--I may say, our Imperial security--our security as--er--a
governing people--lies in trusting the Irish as we did in the--er
--case of the Boers--H'm Mr Gladstone, Mr Chairman--Mr Chairman, Mr
Gladstone----
and so on. You perceive that the style is actually worse than in the
sample quoted before; it has become flabby whereas that other was at any
rate nervous? But now suppose that, having practised it, our candidate
was able to speak like this:--
'But what (says the Financier) is peace to us without money? Your plan
gives us no revenue.' No? But it does--for it secures to the subject
the power of Refusal, the first of all Revenues. Experience is a cheat,
and fact is a liar, if this power in the subject of proportioning his
grant, or of not granting at all, has not been found the richest mine
of Revenue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of man. It
does not indeed vote you 152,750 pounds 11 shillings 2 3/4 pence, nor
any other paltry limited sum--but it gives you the strong box itself,
the fund, the bank, from whence only revenues can arise among a people
sensible of freedom: _Positâ luditur arcâ_.... Is this principle to be
true in England, and false everywhere else? Is it not true in Ireland?
Has it not hitherto been true in the Colonies? Why should you presume
that in any country a body duly constituted for any function will
neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its trust? Such a presumption
would go against all Governments in all nations. But in truth this
dread of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no foundation in
nature. For first, observe that, besides the desire which all men have
naturally of supporting the honour of their own Government, that sense
of dignity, and that security to property, which ever attend freedom,
have a tendency to increase the stock of a free community. Most may be
taken where most is accumulated. And what is the soil or climate where
experience has not uniformly proved that the voluntary flow of
heaped-up plenty, bursting from the weight of its own luxuriance, has
ever run with a more copious stream of revenue than could be squeezed
from the dry husks of oppressed indigence by the straining of all the
politic machinery in the world?
That, whether you agree or disagree with its doctrine, is great prose.
That is Burke. 'O Athenian stranger,' said the Cretan I quoted in my
first lecture,--'inhabitant of Attica I will not call you, since you
deserve the name of Athene herself, because you go back to first
principles!'
But, you may object, 'Burke is talking like a book, and I have no wish to
talk like a book.' Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a long
sustained argument, and his language has soared with it, as his way
was--logic and emotion lifting him together as upon two balanced majestic
wings. But you are shy of such heights? Very well again, and all credit
to your modesty! Yet at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when you
talk or write, you would wish to _observe the occasion_; to say what you
have to say without impertinence or ill-timed excess. You would not
harangue a drawing-room or a subcommittee, or be facetious at a funeral,
or play the skeleton at a banquet: for in all such conduct you would be
mixing up things that differ. Be cheerful, then: for this desire of yours
to be appropriate is really the root of the matter. Nor do I ask you to
accept this on my sole word, but will cite you the most respectable
witnesses. Take, for instance, a critic who should be old enough to
impress you--Dionysius of Halicarnassus. After enumerating the qualities
which lend charm and nobility to style, he closes the list with
'appropriateness, which all these need':--
As there is a charming diction, so there is another that is noble;
as there is a polished rhythm, so there is another that is
dignified; as variety adds grace in one passage, so in another it
adds fulness; _and as for appropriation, it will prove the chief
source of beauty, or else of nothing at all_.
Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness in the very heart of his
teaching, as the master secret:--
Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica temperate, magna
graviter dicere.... Qui ad id quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare
orationem. Quod quum statuerit, tum, ut quidque erit dicendum, ita
dicet, nec satura jejune, nec grandia minute, nec item contra, sed
erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio.
'Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes it; neither meagrely
where it is copious, nor meanly where it is ample, nor in _this_ way
where it demands _that_; but keeping his speech level with the
actual subject and adequate to it.'
I might quote another great man, Quintilian, to you on the first
importance of this appropriateness, or 'propriety'; of speaking not only
to the purpose but _becomingly_--though the two as (he rightly says) are
often enough one and the same thing. But I will pass on to what has ever
seemed, since I found it in one of Jowett's 'Introductions' to Plato, the
best definition known to me of good style in literature:--
The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, ease,
clearness, the power of saying anything, and of striking any note in
the scale of human feelings, without impropriety.
You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut needs not to be very wide,
to begin with. The point is that within it you learn to play becomingly.
Now I started by proposing that we try together to make appropriate,
perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing a hall-mark of anything turned
out by our English School here, and I would add (growing somewhat
hardier) a hall-mark of all Cambridge style so far as our English School
can influence it. I chose these four epithets _accurate, perspicuous,
persuasive, appropriate_, with some care, of course as my duty was; and
will assume that by this time we are agreed to desire _appropriateness_.
Now for the other three:--
_Perspicuity._--I shall waste no words on the need of this: since the
first aim of speech is to be understood. The more clearly you write the
more easily and surely you will be understood. I propose to demonstrate
to you further, in a minute or so, that the more clearly you write the
more clearly you will understand yourself. But a sufficient reason has
been given in ten words why you should desire perspicuity.
_Accuracy._--Did I not remind myself in my first lecture, that Cambridge
is the home of accurate scholarship? Surely no Cambridge man would
willingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written? Surely here, if
anywhere, should be acknowledged of all what Newman says of the classics,
that 'a certain unaffected neatness and propriety and grace of diction
may be required of any author, for the same reason that a certain
attention to dress is expected of every gentleman.' After all, what are
the chief differentiae between man and the brute creation but that he
clothes himself, that he cooks his food, that he uses articulate speech?
Let us cherish and improve all these distinctions.
But shall we now look more carefully into these twin questions of
perspicuity and accuracy: for I think pursuing them, we may almost reach
the philosophic kernel of good writing. I quoted Newman playfully a
moment ago. I am going to quote him in strong earnest. And here let me
say that of all the books written in these hundred years there is perhaps
none you can more profitably thumb and ponder than that volume of his in
which, under the title of "The Idea of a University," he collected nine
discourses addressed to the Roman Catholics of Dublin with some lectures
delivered to the Catholic University there. It is fragmentary, because
its themes were occasional. It has missed to be appraised at its true
worth, partly no doubt by reason of the colour it derives from a religion
still unpopular in England. But in fact it may be read without offence by
the strictest Protestant; and the book is so wise--so eminently wise--as
to deserve being bound by the young student of literature for a frontlet
on his brow and a talisman on his writing wrist.
Now you will find much pretty swordsmanship in its pages, but nothing
more trenchant than the passage in which Newman assails and puts to rout
the Persian host of infidels--I regret to say, for the most part Men of
Science--who would persuade us that good writing, that style, is
something extrinsic to the subject, a kind of ornamentation laid on to
tickle the taste, a study for the _dilettante_, but beneath the notice of
_their_ stern and masculine minds.