in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening,
like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to
circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to
flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of a
masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun.
When you write in the active voice, 'They gave him a silver teapot,' you
write as a man. When you write 'He was made the recipient of a silver
teapot,' you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on
the concrete noun. Somebody--I think it was FitzGerald--once posited the
question 'What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had
had the writing of the Parables?' Without pursuing that dreadful enquiry
I ask you to note how carefully the Parables--those exquisite short
stories--speak only of 'things which you can touch and see'--'A sower
went forth to sow,' 'The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a
woman took,'--and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on the Mount and
almost every verse of the Gospel. The Gospel does not, like my young
essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says
'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's'--not 'Render unto
Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.' The Gospel does not
say 'Consider the growth of the lilies,' or even 'Consider how the lilies
grow.' It says, 'Consider the lilies, how they grow.'
Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly
chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch
and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the
particular. He does it even in "Venus and Adonis" (as Professor Wendell,
of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little monograph on Shakespeare,
published some ten years ago). Read any page of "Venus and Adonis" side
by side with any page of Marlowe's "Hero and Leander" and you cannot but
mark the contrast: in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualised
image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, the abstract term, the
thing seen at a literary remove. Take the two openings, both of which
start out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins:--
Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds:
Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds,
And, red for anger that he stay'd so long,
All headlong throws herself the clouds among.
Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to his
hero and to business without ado:--
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face--
(You have the sun visualised at once),
Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn,
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase;
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn.
When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:--
Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long,
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide,
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong;
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide.
Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:--
Upon this promise did he raise his chin,
Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave,
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.
Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meeting
Leander:--
It lies not in our power to love or hate,
For will in us is over-ruled by fate...,
and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting with
Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:--
Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain,
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit,
Long after fearing to creep forth again;
So, at his bloody view--
I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole passage) to be
lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But
you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract,
nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on
he learned to pack into verse, such as:--
Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care.
Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us take
Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something very
like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over
definite, detailed, and what I may call _solidified sensation_. Let us
take this admired passage from his "Duchess of Malfy":--
_Ferdinand._ How doth our sister Duchess bear herself
In her imprisonment?
_Basola._ Nobly: I'll describe her.
She's sad as one long used to 't, and she seems
Rather to welcome the end of misery
Than shun it: a behaviour so noble
As gives a majesty to adversity
(Note the abstract terms.)
You may discern the shape of loveliness
More perfect in her tears than in her smiles;
She will muse for hours together; and her silence
(Here we first come on the concrete: and beautiful it is.)
Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.
Now set against this the well-known passage from "Twelfth Night" where
the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to him
and invented by her--a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more
definite is the language:--
_Viola._ My father had a daughter lov'd a man;
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
_I_ should your lordship.
_Duke._ And what's her history?
_Viola._ A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought,
And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like Patience on a monument
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?
Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare _has_
to use the abstract noun 'concealment,' on an instant it turns into a
visible worm 'feeding' on the visible rose; how, having to use a second
abstract word 'patience,' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.
Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have
written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim--to prefer the
concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the
definite to the vague--as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on
it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke
(prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to
scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by
setting a passage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"
alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry into
the Policy of the European Powers." Here is the deadly parallel:--
BURKE.
In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the
extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Ægypt and
Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion
in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism
itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience
as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and
the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is
derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.
BROUGHAM.
In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the
further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do
its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more
inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and
easily decayed is the organisation of the government.
You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought to his own
page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's
vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on
the mind?
'This particularising style,' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence of
Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it
produces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its way: but it pales before
the flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of this
energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the
seventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish
of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," he communicates
more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of
fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons
put together.'
You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is
expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered
it vividly.
Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a
passage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay
within South's compass:--
The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell
me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it
sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust
of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it
distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest
not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine
eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the
dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust
of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those
dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble
flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the
death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say
_This is Iesabel_; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it
should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, _This is
Iesabel._
Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failing
tendency to transform into _shape_, into _life_, the feeling that may
dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet's
imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns
them into shape.'
Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to
my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of
Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so
trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.
A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; for
language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is your
reason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, which
express other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which
as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand
material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at
second-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your
whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should
go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a
fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or
circumvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there
his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.
LECTURE VI.
ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE
Thursday, May 15
To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we have
to essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of his
compass-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside his
knowledge--outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge.
I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his host
on the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In
asking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise only
that, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back'
of the desert.
In my last lecture but one, then,--and before our small interlude with
Jargon--the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this
point: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinary
unemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments.
This point, I believe, we made effectively enough.
Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a corresponding
point, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying
extraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to these
high emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be,
Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questions
about prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can,
to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, is
an art) you cannot classify as in a science.
Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. In
studying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust all
classification! All classifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an
art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may
make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have
any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one.
Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classified
is not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had
to _make_ a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would
classification help? To classify in a science is necessary for the
purpose of that science: to classify when you come to art is at the best
an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. It
serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite,
schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less
what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about
'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such
terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples
the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are
scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is
not: you cannot say as assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan.
We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans,
though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead.
Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if
'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs
to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the
horizon: whereas Donne--a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one--had by
1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those
wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to
Jacobean and Caroline poetry.
In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of
exact knowledge; and man (_improbus homo_) with his wicked inventions is
for ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled--and, if you are wise,
thank Heaven--that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.
Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital
difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up
to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our
admirable conclusions to ruins.
You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as
'a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm
laxly.' When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will,
genius will pretty surely get the better of you.
Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened.
Its difficulty--the inherent, the native disability of prose--is to
handle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse.
Well, we strike into the line of our prose-writers, say as early as
Malory. We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur:--
'My time hieth fast,' said the king. Therefore said Arthur unto Sir
Bedivere, 'Take thou Excalibur my good sword, and go with it to yonder
water side; and when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword in
that water and come again and tell me what there thou seest.' 'My
lord,' said Bedivere, 'Your commandment shall be done; and lightly
bring you word again.' So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the way he
beheld that noble sword, that the pommel and the haft was all of
precious stones, and then he said to himself, 'If I throw this rich
sword in the water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and loss.'
And then Sir Bedivere hid Excaliber under a tree. And so, as soon as he
might, he came again unto the king, and said he had been at the water
and had thrown the sword into the water, 'What saw thou there?' said
the king, 'Sir,' he said, 'I saw nothing but waves and winds.'
Now I might say a dozen things of this and of the whole passage that
follows, down to Arthur's last words. Specially might I speak to you of
the music of its monosyllables--'"What sawest you there?" said the king...
"Do as well as thou mayest; for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I
will into the Vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous wound. And if
thou hear never more of me, pray for my soul."' But, before making
comment at all, I shall quote you another passage; this from Lord
Berners' translation of Froissart, of the death of Robert Bruce:--
It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right sore aged and
feeble: for he was greatly charged with the great sickness, so that
there was no way for him but death. And when he felt that his end drew
near, he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he trusted
best, and shewed them how there was no remedy with him, but he must
needs leave this transitory life.... Then he called to him the gentle
knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the lords, 'Sir
William, my dear friend, ye know well that I have had much ado in my
days to uphold and sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most
ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not accomplished,
whereof I am right sorry; the which was, if I might achieve and make an
end of all my wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in
rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have gone and warred on
Christ's enemies, adversaries to our holy Christian faith. To this
purpose mine heart hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent
thereto... And sith it is so that my body can not go, nor achieve that my
heart desireth, I will send the heart instead of the body, to
accomplish mine avow... I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of
this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and embalm it, and
take of my treasure as ye shall think sufficient for that enterprise,
both for yourself and such company as ye will take with you, and
present my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord lay, seeing my
body can not come there. And take with you such company and purveyance
as shall be appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye come, let
it be known how ye carry with you the heart of King Robert of Scotland,
at his instance and desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre.' Then
all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity.
There, in the fifteenth century and early in the sixteenth, you have
Malory and Berners writing beautiful English prose; prose the emotion of
which (I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears to hear. So you
see that already our English prose not only achieves the 'high moment,'
but seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we ask ourselves,
'Who could help writing nobly, having to tell how King Arthur died or how
the Bruce?' Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory and Berners are both
relating what, however noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It
is when prose attempts to _philosophise_, to _express thoughts_ as well
as to relate simple sayings and doings--it is then that the trouble
begins. When Malory has to philosophise death, to _think_ about it, this
is as far as he attains:--
'Ah, Sir Lancelot,' said he, 'thou wert head of all Christian Knights!
And now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'that, Sir Lancelot, there thou
liest, thou were never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were the
curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou were the truest friend
to thy lover that ever strood horse, and thou were the truest lover of
a sinful man that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest man that
ever strooke with sword; and thou were the goodliest person that ever
came among press of knights; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest
that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest Knight
to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'
Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, eloquent as he can be on the
virtues of his dead friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of death
itself all he can accomplish is, 'And now I dare say that, Sir Lancelot,
there thou liest.'
Let us make a leap in time and contrast this with Tyndale and the
translators of our Bible, how they are able to make St Paul speak of
death:--
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this
mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass
the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O
death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
There you have something clean beyond what Malory or Berners could
compass: there you have a different kind of high moment--a high moment of
philosophising: there you have emotion impregnated with thought. It was
necessary that our English verse even after Chaucer, our English prose
after Malory and Berners, should overcome this most difficult gap (which
stands for a real intellectual difference) if it aspired to be what
to-day it is--a language of the first class, comparable with Greek and
certainly no whit inferior to Latin or French.
* * * * *
Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how Verse threw its bridge over
the gap. If you would hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will
find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' Prologue:--
O moder mayde! O maydë moder fre!
O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight!
in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of Griselda restored to her
children:--
O tendre, O dere, O yongë children myne,
Your woful moder wendë stedfastly
That cruel houndës or some foul vermyne
Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy
And your benignë fader tendrely
Hath doon you kept...
You will find a note quite as sincere in many a carol, many a ballad, of
that time:--
He came al so still
There his mother was,
As dew in April
That falleth on the grass.
He came al so still
To his mother's bour,
As dew in April
That falleth on the flour.
He came al so still
There his mother lay,
As dew in April
That falleth on the spray.
Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
Goddes mother be.
You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in such a stanza
as this, from "The Nut-Brown Maid":--
Though it be sung of old and young
That I should be to blame,
Their's be the charge that speak so large
In hurting of my name;
For I will prove that faithful love
It is devoid of shame;
In your distress and heaviness
To part with you the same:
And sure all tho that do not so
True lovers are they none:
For, in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone.
All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquisite: but they gush
straight from the unsophisticated heart: they are nowise deep save in
innocent emotion: they are not _thoughtful_. So when Barbour breaks out
in praise of Freedom, he cries
A! Fredome is a noble thing!
And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on
Fredome mayse man to hafe liking.
(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; that is, makes him free)
Fredome all solace to man giffis,
He livis at ese that frely livis!
A noble hart may haif nane ese,
Na ellys nocht that may him plese,
Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking
Is yharnit ouer all othir thing...
--and so on for many lines; all saying the same thing, that man yearns
for Freedom and is glad when he gets it, because then he is free; all
hammering out the same observed fact, but all knocking vainly on the door
of thought, which never opens to explain what Freedom _is_.
Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 'taking off' from the
Nut-Brown Maid's artless confession,
in my mind, of all mankind
I love but you alone,
let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's--
Thy bosom is endearéd with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposéd dead:
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts,
And all those friends which I thought buriéd.
How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye
As interest of the dead!--which now appear
But things removed, that hidden in thee lie.
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is mine alone:
Their images I loved I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.