spread at my feet; Magdalene below me, and the bridge which--poor product
as it is of the municipal taste--has given its name to so many bridges
all over the world; the river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the tower
of St John's, and beyond it the unpretentious but more beautiful tower of
Jesus College. To my right the magnificent chine of King's College Chapel
made its own horizon above the yellowing elms. I looked down on the
streets--the narrow streets--the very streets which, a fortnight ago, I
tried to people for you with that mediaeval throng which has passed as we
shall pass. Still in my ear the gaoler's answer repeated itself--_'I
suppose, if they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in and
play'_: and a broken echo seemed to take it up, in words that for a while
had no more coherence than the scattered jangle of bells in the town
below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence
and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon--_Regnum Scientiae ut regnum
Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.--Into the Kingdom of
Knowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must become
as a little child._
[Footnote 1: "Cambridge History of English Literature", vol. iii, p. 213.]
LECTURE XII.
ON STYLE
Wednesday, January 28, 1914
Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one of you to write books for
his living, he will find experimentally true what I here promise him,
that few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the reviewers say. This
promise I hand on with the better confidence since it was endorsed for me
once in conversation by that eminently good man the late Henry Sidgwick;
who added, however, 'Perhaps I ought to make a single exception. There
was a critic who called one of my books "epoch-making." Being anonymous,
he would have been hard to find and thank, perhaps; but I ought to have
made the effort.'
May I follow up this experience of his with one of my own, as a preface
or brief apology for this lecture? Short-lived as is the author's joy in
his critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, mournful his consent
with Sir Thomas Browne that 'there is nothing immortal but immortality,'
he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of business, who in England call
themselves 'Press-Cutting Agencies,' in America 'Press-Clipping Bureaux,'
and, as each successive child of his invention comes to birth,
unbecomingly presume in him an almost virginal trepidation. 'Your book,'
they write falsely, 'is exciting much comment. May we collect and send
you notices of it appearing in the World's Press? We submit a specimen
cutting with our terms; and are, dear Sir,' etc.
Now, although steadily unresponsive to this wile, I am sometimes guilty
of taking the enclosed specimen review and thrusting it for preservation
among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the book it was written to
appraise. So it happened that having this vacation, to dust--not to
read--a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, I happened on a
review signed by no smaller a man than Mr Gilbert Chesterton and
informing the world that the author of my obsolete book was full of good
stories as a kindly uncle, but had a careless or impatient way of
stopping short and leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted to
know: that, reaching the last chapter, or what he chose to make the last
chapter, instead of winding up and telling 'how everybody lived ever
after,' he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular knee with a blessing
and the remark that nine o'clock was striking and all good children
should be in their beds.
That criticism has haunted me during the vacation. Looking back on a
course of lectures which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting them in
print; revising them with all the nervousness of a beginner; I have
seemed to hear you complain--'He has exhorted us to write accurately,
appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold and essay Verse. He has
insisted that Literature is a living art, to be practised. But just what
we most needed he has not told. At the final doorway to the secret he
turned his back and left us. Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity--these we
may achieve. But where has he helped us to write with beauty, with charm,
with distinction? Where has he given us rules for what is called _Style_
in short?--having attained which an author may count himself set up in
business.'
Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind's ear I heard you reproaching me. I beg you
to accept what follows for my apology.
To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things
which Style is _not_; which have little or nothing to do with Style,
though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is
not--can never be--extraneous Ornament. You remember, may be, the Persian
lover whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to convey his passion he
sought a professional letter-writer and purchased a vocabulary charged
with ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as with a basket of
jewels. Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation,
you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a
practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an
impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it
--whole-heartedly--and delete it before sending your manuscript to press.
_Murder your darlings._'
But let me plead further that you have not been left altogether without
clue to the secret of what Style is. That you must master the secret for
yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that
a writer's training would be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in your
hands when, having insisted that Literature is a living art, I added that
therefore it must be personal and of its essence personal.
This goes very deep: it conditions all our criticism of art. Yet it
conceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly,
perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes--say Pure
Mathematics with Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with
man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are
rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther
away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not
ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon
keep the tally. In Acting on the other hand almost everything depends on
personal interpretation--on the gesture, the walk, the gaze, the tone of
a Siddons, the _rusé_ smile of a Coquelin, the exquisite, vibrant
intonation of a Bernhardt. 'English Art?' exclaimed Whistler, 'there is
no such thing! Art is art and mathematics is mathematics.' Whistler
erred. Precisely because Art is Art, and Mathematics is Mathematics and a
Science, Art being Art can be English or French; and, more than this,
must be the personal expression of an Englishman or a Frenchman, as a
'Constable' differs from a 'Corot' and a 'Whistler' from both. Surely I
need not labour this. But what is true of the extremes of Art and Science
is true also, though sometimes less recognisably true, of the mean: and
where they meet and seem to conflict (as in History) the impact is that
of the personal or individual mind upon universal truth, and the question
becomes whether what happened in the Sicilian Expedition, or at the trial
of Charles I, can be set forth naked as an alegebraical sum, serene in
its certainty, indifferent to opinion, uncoloured in the telling as in
the hearing by sympathy or dislike, by passion or by character. I doubt,
while we should strive in history as in all things to be fair, if history
can be written in that colourless way, to interest men in human doings. I
am sure that nothing which lies further towards imaginative, creative,
Art can be written in that way.
It follows then that Literature, being by its nature personal, must be by
its nature almost infinitely various. 'Two persons cannot be the authors
of the sounds which strike our ear; and as they cannot be speaking one
and the same speech, neither can they be writing one and the same lecture
or discourse.' _Quot homines tot sententiae._ You may translate that, if
you will, 'Every man of us constructs his sentence differently'; and if
there be indeed any quarrel between Literature and Science (as I never
can see why there should be), I for one will readily grant Science all
her cold superiority, her ease in Sion with universal facts, so it be
mine to serve among the multifarious race who have to adjust, as best
they may, Science's cold conclusions (and much else) to the brotherly
give-and-take of human life.
_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas..._ Is it possible,
Gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, three or more of the
acknowledged masterpieces of literature without having it borne in on you
that they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with cold
celestial certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves,
hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and vanity of human endeavour,
the transience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you and
I hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amuses
or vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on this
brief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, the
anchorage of our hearts? For an instance:--
Here lies a most beautiful lady,
Light of step and heart was she:
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare, rare it be;
And when I crumble who shall remember
That lady of the West Country?
(Walter de la Mare.)
Or take a critic--a literary critic--such as Samuel Johnson, of whom we
are used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic in
judgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he never
saw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature what
was false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse;
could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question of
passion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he could
not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however well turned)
which struck him as empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifies
to this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives.
Now let me carry this contention--that all Literature is personal and
therefore various--into a field much exploited by the pedant, and fenced
about with many notice-boards and public warnings. _'Neologisms not
allowed here,' 'All persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit of
originality....'_
Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature being
personal, and men various--and even the "Oxford English Dictionary" being
no Canonical book--man's use or defiance of the dictionary depends for
its justification on nothing but his success: adding that, since it takes
all kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probably
depend on the occasion. A few months ago I found myself seated at a
bump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggested
thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, that, the bonfire (which of
course he called the 'bonner') being due at nine-thirty o'clock, there
was little more than bare time left for 'langers and godders.' It cost
me, who think slowly, some seconds to interpret that by 'langers' he
meant 'Auld Lang Syne' and by 'godders' 'God Save the King.' I thought at
the time, and still think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster,
that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though not to be recommended
for essays or sermons, did admirably suit the time, place, and occasion.
Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much must
ever depend on _who_ speaks, and to _whom_, in what mood and upon what
occasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of all
manner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin against
the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the
fair way of use and wont (as 'wire,' for instance, for a telegram), even
as surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedantic
impostors, such as 'antibody' and 'picture-drome'; and that, generally,
it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the
censor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a
tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare's audacity)
our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable of
responding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge and
experience. Not because it was an ugly thing did I denounce Jargon to
you, the other day: but because it was a dead thing, leading no-whither,
meaning naught. There is _wickedness_ in human speech, sometimes. You
will detect it all the better for having ruled out what is _naughty_.
Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty. I came, the other
day, upon this passage in Mr Frank Harris's study of 'The Man
Shakespeare':--
In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown fourfold;
the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the
engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it
may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb
instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time
of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle
class.[1]
Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any more than over other
prophecies of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" has
not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to
enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with.
Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspire
to write poetry: as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:--
Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for the best word.
But practically, the habit of excessive care in word-selection
frequently results in loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit
of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always
taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary
speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a
kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise
combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact,
a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose
prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple....
Against these it is time some banner should be raised.... It is at any
rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic
diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a
despotism of his own making;
and he adds a note that this is the more surprising to him because so
many Victorian poets were prose-writers as well.
Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain
fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling
into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should
react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by
taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping
him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For
it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits
of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the
stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.
In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin
for its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out of
our treasuries new things and old.
Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and perhaps not the most
important part. So I revert to the larger question, 'What is Style? What
its [Greek: to ti en einai], its essence, the law of its being?'
Now, as I sat down to write this lecture, memory evoked a scene and with
the scene a chance word of boyish slang, both of which may seem to you
irrelevant until, or unless, I can make you feel how they hold for me the
heart of the matter.
I once happened to be standing in a corner of a ball-room when there
entered the most beautiful girl these eyes have ever seen or now--since
they grow dull--ever will see. It was, I believe, her first ball, and by
some freak or in some premonition she wore black: and not pearls--which,
I am told, maidens are wont to wear on these occasions--but one crescent
of diamonds in her black hair. _Et vera incessu patuit dea._ Here, I say,
was absolute beauty. It startled.
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes....
She died a year or two later. She may have been too beautiful to live
long. I have a thought that she may also have been too good.
For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw led up and presented among
others the man who was to be, for a few months, her husband: and then, as
the men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I saw
her eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjay
in Meredith's "The Egoist"? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and
glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, she
advanced, claimed him, and swept him off into the first waltz.
When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him;
my remark (which I forget) being no doubt 'just the sort of banality, you
know, one does come out with'--as maybe that the British Navy kept its
old knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears and
blurted, 'It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? It's--it's--my God, it's the
_style_!'
Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, or at any rate inadequate, cry
of the heart in my young seaman; as you may think it inadequate in me,
and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure you (as I do) that the first
and last secret of a good Style consists in thinking with the heart as
well as with the head.
But let us philosophise a little. You have been told, I daresay often
enough, that the business of writing demands _two_--the author and the
reader. Add to this what is equally obvious, that the obligation of
courtesy rests first with the author, who invites the séance, and
commonly charges for it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing we
have an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer's or reader's place?
It is _his_ comfort, _his_ convenience, we have to consult. To _express_
ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almost
unimportant as compared with _impressing_ ourselves: the aim of the whole
process being to persuade.
All reading demands an effort. The energy, the good-will which a reader
brings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour of
reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. The
more difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless
writing, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only in
our own interest--though I had rather keep it on the ground of
courtesy--we should study to anticipate his comfort.
But let me go a little deeper. You all know that a great part of
Lessing's argument in his "Laoköon", on the essentials of Literature as
opposed to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this--that in Pictorial
Art or in Sculpture the eye sees, the mind apprehends, the whole in a
moment of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that this moment of
time is fixed and stationary; whereas in writing, whether in prose or in
verse, we can only produce our effect by a series of successive small
impressions, dripping our meaning (so to speak) into the reader's
mind--with the correspondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that our
picture keeps moving all the while. Now obviously this throws a greater
strain on his patience whom we address. Man at the best is a
narrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit of speech he can utter--as
you, my hearers, can receive--only one word at a time. In writing (as my
old friend Professor Minto used to say) you are as a commander filing out
his battalion through a narrow gate that allows only one man at a time to
pass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, has to re-form and
reconstruct them. No matter how large or how involved the subject, it can
be communicated only in that way. You see, then, what an obligation we
owe to him of order and arrangement; and why, apart from felicities and
curiosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid such stress upon order
and arrangement as duties we owe to those who honour us with their
attention. '_La clarté,_' says a French writer, '_est la politesse._'
[Greek: Charisi kai sapheneia thue], recommends Lucian. Pay your
sacrifice to the Graces, and to [Greek: sapheneia]--Clarity--first among
the Graces.
What am I urging? 'That Style in writing is much the same thing as good
manners in other human intercourse?' Well, and why not? At all events we
have reached a point where Buffon's often-quoted saying that 'Style is
the man himself' touches and coincides with William of Wykeham's old
motto that 'Manners makyth Man': and before you condemn my doctrine as
inadequate listen to this from Coventry Patmore, still bearing in mind
that a writer's main object is to _impress_ his thought or vision upon
his hearer.
'There is nothing comparable _for moral force_ to the charm of truly
noble manners....'
I grant you, to be sure, that the claim to possess a Style must be
conceded to many writers--Carlyle is one--who take no care to put
listeners at their ease, but rely rather on native force of genius to
shock and astound. Nor will I grudge them your admiration. But I do say
that, as more and more you grow to value truth and the modest grace of
truth, it is less and less to such writers that you will turn: and I say
even more confidently that the qualities of Style we allow them are not
the qualities we should seek as a norm, for they one and all offend
against Art's true maxim of avoiding excess.
And this brings me to the two great _paradoxes_ of Style. For the first
(1),--although Style is so curiously personal and individual, and
although men are so variously built that no two in the world carry away
the same impressions from a show, there is always a norm somewhere; in
literature and art, as in morality. Yes, even in man's most terrific,
most potent inventions--when, for example, in "Hamlet" or in "Lear"
Shakespeare seems to be breaking up the solid earth under our feet--there
is always some point and standard of sanity--a Kent or an Horatio--to
which all enormities and passionate errors may be referred; to which the
agitated mind of the spectator settles back as upon its centre of
gravity, its pivot of repose.
(2) The second paradox, though it is equally true, you may find a little
subtler. Yet it but applies to Art the simple truth of the Gospel, that
he who would save his soul must first lose it. Though personality
pervades Style and cannot be escaped, the first sin against Style as
against good Manners is to obtrude or exploit personality. The very
greatest work in Literature--the "Iliad," the "Odyssey," the
"Purgatorio," "The Tempest," "Paradise Lost," the "Republic," "Don
Quixote"--is all
Seraphically free
From taint of personality.
And Flaubert, that gladiator among artists, held that, at its highest,
literary art could be carried into pure science. 'I believe,' said he,
'that great art is scientific and impersonal. You should by an
intellectual effort transport yourself into characters, not draw _them_
into _yourself_. That at least is the method.' On the other hand, says
Goethe, 'We should endeavour to use words that correspond as closely as
possible with what we feel, see, think, imagine, experience, and reason.
It is an endeavour we cannot evade and must daily renew.' I call
Flaubert's the better counsel, even though I have spent a part of this
lecture in attempting to prove it impossible. It at least is noble,
encouraging us to what is difficult. The shrewder Goethe encourages us to
exploit ourselves to the top of our bent. I think Flaubert would have hit
the mark if for 'impersonal' he had substituted 'disinterested.'