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TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
First Series
by
ARLO BATES
* * * * * *
Books by Arlo Bates.
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* * * * * *
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
First Series
by
ARLO BATES
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1896,
By Arlo Bates.
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
These talks were given in the autumn of 1894 as a course on Advanced
English Composition in the Lowell Free Classes, and that they are now
printed is largely due to the fact that they were so well received by
those who then heard them. In preparing them, I consulted whatever
books upon composition came to my hand. I examined some with profit,
some with pleasure, and some, it must be confessed, not wholly without
amusement, or even impatience. Doubtless, I owe something to many
of these books; but I am not conscious of much obligation to any
save the “Principles of Rhetoric,” by Professor A. S. Hill, “English
Composition,” by Professor Barrett Wendell, and “English Prose,” by
Professor John Earle.
I have conscientiously endeavored to make the lectures as practical
as possible, stating as clearly as I could those things which would
have been most helpful to me had I read and heeded them twenty years
ago. The necessity of holding an audience made fitting some effort
to render the talks entertaining; but I have never consciously said
anything for the mere purpose of being amusing, and I have never been
of the opinion that a book gains either in dignity or in usefulness
by being dull. My purpose has throughout been sincerely serious, and
if the book shall prove helpful, I shall have attained the object for
which it was written.
A. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE ART OF WRITING 1
II. METHODS OF STUDY 20
III. PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURE 29
IV. DETAILS OF DICTION 43
V. PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY 59
VI. PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED 71
VII. MEANS AND EFFECTS 89
VIII. MEANS AND EFFECTS CONTINUED 107
IX. CLASSIFICATION 120
X. EXPOSITION 128
XI. EXPOSITION CONTINUED 144
XII. ARGUMENT 152
XIII. ARGUMENTATIVE FORM 166
XIV. DESCRIPTION 181
XV. DESCRIPTION CONTINUED 202
XVI. NARRATION 210
XVII. NARRATION CONTINUED 224
XVIII. ACCESSORIES OF NARRATION 241
XIX. CHARACTER AND PURPOSE 258
XX. TRANSLATION 269
XXI. CRITICISM 285
XXII. STYLE 299
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
I
THE ART OF WRITING
Into all productive art enter two sorts of power, that which is
communicable and that which is incommunicable,--in other words,
that which may be taught and that which is inborn. Upon this fact
is based the distinction between the mechanical and the fine arts,
although since both kinds of power have a share in all production
nobody has ever been able to draw a sharp and definite line at which
the mechanical arts end and the fine arts begin. The power which is
incommunicable is that of imagination, that indefinable grace and
skill, that enchantment of creative ability which is born with rare
individuals, and for which he who is not dowered with it by nature
struggles in vain. It is this which has given rise to that saying as
profound as it is terribly hackneyed which declares that a poet is born
and not made. It is this which distinguishes genius from talent; and it
is this which has so dazzled the eyes of the world as to produce the
mistaken notion that since imagination is not to be learned nothing is
to be learned in the realm of art.
This incommunicable power is the soul of fine art; yet into fine art
no less than into the mechanical arts comes also that power which
may be learned. This communicable power is commonly spoken of as
the technical, or as technique. This any person of intelligence and
perseverance can and may master if he choose, every man according
to his ability; and this every artist must acquire, no matter how
richly he may have been gifted by nature with the magic power which
transcends and dominates it. It is this that musicians, painters,
sculptors, architects, dancers, and writers are set to learn when they
are said to study art. The world has long recognized that in painting,
music, sculpture, and architecture it is indispensable that technique
shall be acquired; but--absurd as it may seem--it is only recently,
comparatively speaking, that it has been practically recognized that
this is as true of poetry as of painting, as true of literature as of
any other art. It is in truth only in our own day that there has been
anything like a general acceptance of the fact that in literature as
in the other arts technical skill must be laboriously acquired before
any successful and permanent work can be produced. The masters have of
course known this; but the idea that to be an author nothing is needed
but pen, ink, and paper used to hold undisputed sway over the popular
mind, and is by no means extinct yet. Not long ago I heard a learned
professor in one of the leading American colleges declare that he could
not see what there is to learn in composition. Last summer a gentleman
of really wide reading, but who was brought up under the old system,
said to me: “By teaching composition, I suppose you mean chiefly
correcting the grammar and punctuation.” He was somewhat surprised when
I explained that students were supposed to have mastered both grammar
and punctuation before the teaching of composition as such could begin.
The truth is that there has never been anything like a popular
understanding of the difference between spoken and written speech.
Anybody is supposed to be able to talk, and to learn to do so
unconsciously,--a doctrine to which I do not wish to be understood
as giving assent!--and it has been held to follow that anybody could
write. To write was merely to talk with the pen, and that has commonly
been held to be all there is to the matter save for the fact that some
persons were born to write and some were not.
A personal experience of my own illustrates this, if its introduction
may be pardoned. I have never forgotten the general bewilderment with
which my friends met my announcement when I left college that I meant
to study literature. That one should follow literature as a profession
was not entirely unintelligible, if it did suggest a dire mental
weakness on the part of the young man who was rash enough to take such
a resolution; but how one studied literature as a profession was beyond
ordinary understanding. “You mean that you are going to write books,”
some said tentatively. My reply that such a possibility was presupposed
in the study of literature just as the pleading of cases might be
presupposed in the study of law only increased the difficulty of the
confusing puzzle. It was of course understood that there was in the law
something to study; but what, in the name of common sense, was there
to study in literature? Books one sat down and wrote, and that was
the whole of it; and I soon found the idea gaining ground that I only
put the matter in this way for the sake of producing an impression,
or perhaps of covering a fixed and reprehensible intention of doing
nothing.
I thought then that I had some idea of what the study of literature
really meant, and I gave such explanations as I could; but, alas, the
incessant work of years has chiefly served to show me how inadequate my
idea was, and how much more there is to be learned than I then had any
notion of! Some of the things which experience has taught me I think
may be of value to you; and in these lectures I shall try to state
them, although I realize but too well how far I am from being able
to cover or exhaust the subject. I shall, of course, say some things
which all of you know already, and many things which some of you know.
I hope, however, to say also some things which you have not thought
of, and by arrangement and system to give fresh value and force to old
ideas. It is not impossible that experience has shown me things which
will be practically helpful to others. Any man who has wrought long at
a craft is likely to be able to give suggestions valuable to those who
have not. The sluggard is by the Scriptures referred to the ant not
on account of her intellectual superiority, but solely because of her
great practical training.
* * * * *
All discussion must begin with definition, either expressed or
understood. There is of course no doubt that each of us has an idea
what composition is, yet to be sure that we are agreed, it is necessary
to state the meaning in which we use the term. Let us say, then:--
Composition is the art by which ideas and mental impressions are
conveyed in written language.
Nothing could sound more simple; few things are more difficult of
achievement. It is not hard to convey ideas, but it is by no means
easy to be sure that they will arrive at their destination in good
order. Impressions and ideas are delicate things, and are most liable
to be injured in the passage. There are writers whose methods suggest
an attempt to get eggs to market by shooting them from a cannon,--the
eggs may arrive, it is true, but in what condition? The means must
be adapted to that with which one is dealing. It is folly to attempt
to carry soap-bubbles in a mealsack or leaden bullets in a lace
handkerchief. The student of the art of writing has to learn to suit
his means to the end sought. He must train himself to judge what manner
of expression, of style, or treatment, will best serve to transfer
ideas from his own mind to that of the reader. He must study the effect
of words and of combinations of words; the value of suggestion, and of
all the emotional effects possible in written words. He must train
himself to be able to use language as a skillful swordsman uses his
rapier, adapting it to every emergency, master of it always; he must
learn to be dexterous, adroit, and full of resources.
Exactly to impart an idea or an impression to another human being
is manifestly impossible. The character of the mind of the receiver
necessarily affects and modifies whatever comes to it. The thing which
we say to our closest friend strikes him in a way somehow and somewhat
different from that which we intend. A poem by John Boyle O’Reilly
expresses this so fully that I take leave to quote it:--
AT BEST.
The faithful helm commands the keel,
From port to port fair breezes blow;
But the ship must sail the convex sea,
Nor may she straighter go.
So, man to man; in fair accord,
On thought and will, the winds may wait;
But the world will bend the passing word,
Though its shortest course be straight.
From soul to soul the shortest line
At best will bended be;
The ship that holds the straightest course
Still sails the convex sea.
I do not quote this merely as a matter of sentiment, but because it
phrases one of the most insistent and practical difficulties with which
every writer must contend. The study of literary art, and indeed of all
art, is in one sense an effort at approximation. Perfect expression
can never be reached, and the thing after which a writer strives is
to approach more and more closely toward that complete transmission
of meaning which is forever unattainable while the barriers of human
individuality stand between mind and mind.
We recognize this fact as soon as we reflect. Bob, thinking of Betty,
remarks to Jack that he does admire a pretty girl; and Jack, fondly
recalling the features of Jane, receives the idea with all the
variations which belong to an altogether different idea of feminine
loveliness. Tom, Dick, and Harry, returning from the races, declare to
one another that it has been a jolly day. Each accepts the statements
of his companions according to his individual experiences, and no one
has imparted precisely the thought which was in his own mind. We praise
a picture, a piece of music, a sunset, and the friend to whom we speak
listens with a temperament and cultivation so different from our own
that our words inevitably mean one thing to us and another to him. The
ear which hears has always its share in the impression produced as
surely as has the tongue that speaks.
The result might be much the same whether the words in these cases were
spoken or written; but there is another element which makes an immense
difference between oral and written communication. The speaker adds to
his words a language of emphasis, of inflection, of facial expression,
of gesture, of mien. He modifies what he says by what he looks; his
bearing has as important a share in the work of conveying impressions
as have his words. Two actors taking the same text will give characters
so different as hardly to seem to have anything in common. A speaker
may so contradict and override his speech that his hearer believes not
the tongue that speaks, but the personality and manner which declare
the contrary. You remember how Emerson puts this: “What you are stands
over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to
the contrary.”
Now the writer is confronted by the necessity of making himself
intelligible without the many aids by which the speaker may help
out or modify his oral communication. The novelist, it is true, may
avail himself of the simple device of describing the manner in which
his characters speak. He tells us that this was said with a sly look
of coquetry, while that was uttered in a voice of utter misery, and
the other thundered forth in tones of overmastering determination.
My washing came home in London last summer wrapped in a newspaper
containing an installment of a blood-curdling tale which began thus:
“Eleanore shot at Reginald from under her pellucid brows a lingering
look of lurid hate.” All this, however, is at its best ineffective
and unsatisfactory, even when heroines have pellucid brows and the
author is master of the art of alliteration. Some things are within the
province of language and some are not.
Words may describe form, color, sound, and motion, but they can
reproduce none of them. What they can do is to call up in the mind of
the reader something which he has seen; or aid him to construct from
material in his memory some new image. If one read a description of a
landscape, for instance, he unconsciously selects bits of nature which
he remembers and arranges them as nearly as may be after the pattern
which the author gives. On the first page of “Westward Ho!” there is a
description of--
the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upward from its
broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old
bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant
upland on the west. Above the town hills close in, cushioned
with deep oak woods, through which juts here and there a crag of
fern-fringed slate; below they lower, and open more and more in
softly-rounded knolls, and fertile squares of red and green, till
they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt marshes
and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins her sister Tor, and
both together flow quietly toward the broad surges of the bar, and
the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.
The reader constructs the picture as he goes on; but unless he has
actually seen “the little white town of Bideford” the picture in his
mind is likely to bear no very close resemblance to the reality.
The broad tide-river which his fancy sees is some stream of his
boyhood’s home, and far enough from North Devon; the many-arched old
bridge may be one which he knows or which comes to his memory from a
picture,--perhaps from a photograph that a friend has brought from
abroad of some hoary stone structure spanning a French river or a
stream of Italy. The hills and the fern-clad cliffs are recalled in
the same way, their outlines identical with the curves of some spot
in the Catskills, in Wales, in Brittany, or wherever the reader is
most familiar or has been most impressed. It is evident that the most
carefully elaborate verbal description could not enable the artist to
reproduce a scene; and herein is manifest the limitation of words in
this direction.
The inadequacy of words becomes the more evident when it comes to
matters intellectual. Who has not, even in conversation, experienced
that baffled and hopeless feeling which comes from not being able to
make another understand? Who does not know the sensation of being
shut in as by walls of stone, so that it is impossible to reach the
comprehension of the one addressed? Yet the speaker has a hundred
advantages over the writer. He has at command all the resources of
gesture, of look, accent, tone, mien. No man has written much and
written earnestly without experiencing moments of complete despair in
regard to being able to convey to his readers that which it is in his
heart to say.
How far it is possible to overcome the obstacles which hinder
communication is the study of the literary--as of every--artist. We
human beings are prisoned in the solitary confinement of the body,
and must needs devise means of sharing our thoughts, as political
convicts in the Russian prisons strive to communicate by rapping on the
walls. Every device by which intelligence may be carried more safely
and surely is an addition to the intellectual resources and strength
of the race. On this power of mutual transference and understanding
of thought depends the whole intellectual progress of men, and on
individual mastery of it rests the ability to share that progress.
It is only by the most careful and patient labor, the most rigid
self-discipline, that advance can be made in a matter so difficult and
so delicate. If you have supposed that the art of composition is one
easily acquired, I beg you to lay aside that idea at the start. It is
true that any person who has had an ordinary school training may write
a poor letter or a badly bungled paragraph. Some even attain to a
respectable facility in the superficial expression of ordinary ideas.
To go beyond this, however, to arrive at being able really to write,
to be capable of expressing with the pen genuine thoughts and real
emotions with a reasonable hope that these will reach the reader not
entirely distorted out of all resemblance to what they were when they
left the mind of the writer,--this requires labor long and strenuous.
The devils of incoherence, obscurity, and incompetency go not out save
by untiring striving and watching.
This is strikingly illustrated by the great gulf between amateur
and professional work. Many newspaper reporters are ignorant and
intellectually untrained; yet merely from continuous and earnest
practice they become so dexterous in the use of words as to be able to
serve their needs with surprising facility. I have had well educated
and cultivated men come into my office when I was an editor, and spend
an hour in trying satisfactorily to phrase some simple announcement
which they wished printed. All that there was to do was to say that
such a charity needed funds, that a subscription had been opened, or
some learned society was to meet at such a time and place; yet the
amateur would struggle with the paragraph in an agony of ineptitude
which was alike pathetic and farcical. When at last the conflict
between mind and matter ended from the sheer exhaustion of the mind,
there would be handed to me a scrawled sheet, recrossed and rewritten,
and in the end a miracle of obscurity and awkwardness,--the art of how
not to say it illustrated to perfection. Then after the visitor had
taken himself off, in a condition not far from nervous exhaustion, it
was only necessary to say to a reporter: “Make a paragraph of these
facts.” In a couple of minutes the slip would be ready to send to the
printer, written in English not elegant, but easy and above all clear.
The reporter had very likely not a hundredth part of the information
or the experience of life of the amateur, but he had had continued
business-like drill. He had written as a matter of steady work, with
the improving consciousness of an editorial blue pencil ever before his
mind. I have seen many definitions of the difference between amateur
and professional work. To my own mind it has always seemed sufficient
to say that the professional is one who has learned how to do a thing
while the amateur is one who has not.
Closely connected with the difficulty of saying a thing is the
difficulty of knowing when it is said. Anybody may write, but only
the trained writer is able to be sure that what he has written says
what he supposes it to say. This is of course doubly true from the
need that there is of making words impart mood as well as meaning, the
atmosphere as well as the facts. If it is hard to express ideas, it is
doubly hard to embody also the state of mind from which they spring and
which must be understood before their real value and significance can
be appreciated. Not only is it far from easy to know when the written
word will express what is meant; it is no less hard to be sure how much
of a thought is actually on paper. It requires great effort to realize
that the sentence or the paragraph which we write will not mean to the
reader all that we wish him to understand. The thought in our mind is
so vivid, so poignant, so vital, that for us the words brim over with
significance as a full honeycomb drips with honey. The emotion which
we feel in writing seems to belong inevitably to what is written, and
to be inseparable from it. It is of all things most difficult for the
author, especially in an impassioned mood, to put himself in the place
of the cool and unmoved public; yet in no other way is it possible to
judge how that public will be affected; in no other way is it possible
to compare what is written with what is intended; to estimate the power
of those poor black conventional signs there on the paper to express
the thought and the mood, the glow and the fervor of head and of heart
which it is their mission to carry vibrating and alive to the mind and
the spirit of the reader.
It has often been remarked that authors are apt to be most fond of
works which are not their best, and it is notorious that the most
passionately poetic mood may be that in which a writer produces his
least effective compositions. It is easy to see how this is connected
with the point under consideration. In the aroused, imaginative,
ecstatic mood every word is suggestive, every phrase full of meaning,
each sentence rich with emotion. The writer who is carried away by
his feelings is apt to go beyond the range of his judgment. He puts
down the sign of his mood in language intelligible only to himself. He
writes a sort of emotional shorthand, illegible to every eye except
his own. To him it may remain beautiful because to him it recalls
the exalted mood which produced it. To him it is the significant and
sufficient memorandum of a thing beautiful and sublime; to others it is
but a mass of words left by the elusive
Fancies which broke through language and escaped.
Dr. Holmes has said, with that quaint mingling of wit and wisdom which
made him unique, that writing a poem is like pouring syrup out of
a pitcher,--some of it always sticks to the pitcher. The principle
holds good of all composition, and by no means the smallest thing to
be learned is to judge how completely the syrup has been poured out.
Often it is necessary to let the mood pass away entirely before one
can estimate work. It is frequently well to let a manuscript lie by
until the original enthusiasm of creation has faded fully, whether this
process requires more or less time than the nine years which Horace
recommended as the proper period during which a poem should remain
unpublished.
It is perhaps not necessary to speak much of the value of a mastery
of the art of composition; but there is one point which needs to be
touched upon. There is a prevalent if not generally spoken idea that
while this skill is an excellent thing, it is really necessary to
nobody save professional writers; that while persons who give their
lives to writing must of course master technique, it is not at all
worth while for others to bother about a thing so difficult. That this
error is less wide-spread than of old is evident from the increased
attention which is everywhere given to composition in all modern
schemes of education; but it survives in popular misapprehension. The
truth is, on the contrary, that as society is organized to-day it is
essential that every man or woman who hopes to make his or her way,
at least to anything like eminence even comparative, shall be able
to write fairly good English. In a world so largely dominated by the
printing-press as is ours in these modern days, not only has the man
who can express himself in ink a manifest advantage, but he who cannot
is hampered from the start. The highest skill in composition which
can be acquired is of instant practical value in every profession.
Students of technical and scientific subjects seem to me to be as
truly acquiring practical training when they are improving their skill
in writing as when they are performing experiments in the laboratory or
smelting ores at the furnaces. In reports to corporations, papers on
sanitary engineering addressed to city officials, schemes for railroads
or telegraphs laid before legislative committees, they will have need
of all the literary cleverness that they can compass, all the literary
skill which they are able to acquire. Competition is fierce all along
the line, and facility in the use of the pen counts in every trade and
in every profession no less truly than it does among avowed writers.
Nor is this the whole of the matter. Into every-day, common experience
has the modern habit of life brought the need of being master of
expression; and even he who does not put pen to paper--if it is
possible to suppose such a person to exist among intelligent people--is
under the necessity of cultivating his knowledge of the art of
expression to the end that he may read more intelligently and more
sensitively. There is great need of establishing communication with
our fellow-men; there is hardly less need of learning to establish
communication with ourselves. It seems sometimes as if our beings were
like those Chinese carved balls which Tennyson calls
Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere.
We strive to make our different selves know one another, but we find
it hard. We are conscious of feelings, of ideas, of emotions, which
some sphere of our manifold being knows, yet which to us--to the
outer sphere, to the external Ego, so to say--are vague and distant
however keenly we long to understand. The ability to phrase for others
is soon found to be ability to phrase for ourselves. By no means the
least of the advantages, as it is one of the greatest of the delights,
of conquering expression, is the power of interpreting ourselves to
ourselves.
There is a crude popular idea that the refinements of literary art are
wasted, at any rate upon the general reader. So many books succeed, at
least temporarily, which can make no slightest pretense to any grace of
manner, and which have not even the merit of reasonable accuracy, that
the student is apt to feel that these things are superfluous.
Of course the ordinary reader does not perceive delicate shades of
expression, fine distinctions of phrase, or subtile beauties of style.
Very likely he does not pause to consider whether a style is good or
bad; and certainly he would be unable to analyze its merits if he
attempted this. It does not follow that these graces do not touch him.
It is by means of them that deep and lasting effects are produced.
Susceptibility to artistic beauty is not necessarily conscious.
Frankly, it is to be admitted that for the instant, evanescent,
lurid success of sensational popularity it is not necessary to write
good English. Books outside of the furthest stretch of charity in
workmanship and style have, each in its day, the dazzling, however
transient, success of a Roman candle or a rocket. In far too many
newspapers one may see how flippant pertness and vulgar sharpness can
dispense with the smallest shred of good style, may ignore syntax,
scorn accuracy, and outrage decency itself.
Once for all it must be allowed that whoever seeks this sort of success
need not waste his time in the study of English composition. The
author of the latest scandalous novel never experiences the necessity
of any exhaustive acquaintance with rhetoric, or even of knowing much
more than the outside of the English grammar. The young women who are
employed by enterprising journals to scramble around the world in the
briefest possible time with a hand-satchel for luggage are apt to be as
little encumbered with syntax as with trunks. The purveyors of gossip
to society papers are not in the least obliged to know the language in
which they attempt to convey their precious information. If they can
discover that Mrs. Cholmondely-Jones is at the Sea View House, their
readers are not troubled at the declaration that this leader of fashion
is “stopping at the hotel for a week;”--confusingly impossible as such
a feat may appear.
All this has been said over and over, and I repeat it here simply by
way of reminder that there is no claim that popular success is not to
be won without literary merit; any more than it could be claimed on the
other hand that popular success is insured by it. It is certain that no
permanent literary work can be accomplished without the mastery of a
good English style; and it is equally certain that command of written
language is of the highest value and use. Sensational books make their
way not because of their crudities of style and their inaccuracies,
but in spite of them. If to the qualities which have given them vogue
had been added literary merit, they might have reached to permanent in
place of temporary success. Certainly if a writer desires to impress,
to persuade, to move, to arouse; if he have a report to write which he
hopes may be adopted, a theory to state which he is in earnest to have
received; a history to relate that he would have believed; an appeal
that he longs to have heeded, a creation of the imagination by which he
aims to touch the emotions of his fellow-men, he cannot too carefully
cultivate the art of communicating it. In any of these cases mastery of
literary technique is as essential to success as is air to breathing or
light to seeing.
II
METHODS OF STUDY
The question remains: How is skill in composition to be gained?
The general principle is as simple as the details of the craft are
complicated. The way to write is to write. Perhaps the most exact
image of the process is that of piano-playing. Just as one acquires
skill in the use of the piano by innumerable exercises and continual
practice, so one attains to mastery in written language only by writing
and writing and writing. It is necessary to compose and recompose; to
write all sorts of things, to prune them, recast them, polish them;
to elaborate and to simplify; to weigh each word and phrase; and when
all is done to destroy the result as ruthlessly as we would destroy
anything else which has become rubbish by outliving its usefulness.
This last point needs to be insisted upon. Personal vanity and that
interest in self which is so naturally and so universally human, work
constantly to persuade the beginner that his poorest trials are worth
preservation. In the case of the pianist, the sound of the five-finger
exercise dies on the air, and there is luckily an end of it. The player
cannot gather it up and send it to a magazine. He cannot even without
great risk of encountering personal violence impose it upon the friend
whom he has invited to dine. With the writer it is unhappily different.
His first verses he sends cheerfully and a little condescendingly
to a magazine. His second he distributes on privately printed slips
to his friends,--and any acquaintance will serve as a friend in the
distribution of privately printed poems! His third effort is apt to go
to some overworked man of letters, accompanied by a note delicately
hinting that the inclosure is better than anything which the recipient
has done, and requesting him to have it published at once in one of the
leading magazines.
It is a thousand pities that the work of writers who are learning their
art is not written in ink fading over night, or which would at least
vanish as soon as the manuscript had undergone revision. The next
best thing is for the would-be author to accustom himself to phrasing
thoughts in his mind without setting them down upon paper at all. This
habit is of great value from the constant training that it gives, and
it is of value also because it takes its place as the study of form for
the sake of form; the effort to attain technical excellence unhampered
by any consideration of producing compositions permanent in themselves.
The best technical training is that which is entirely disassociated
from any idea that permanent work is being done. No one can get on very
well or very far in English composition who is not able patiently and
faithfully to do a great deal of work simply for the sake of learning
how to do it, entirely realizing that the thing produced is of no value
when it is done. It is as absurd to preserve or to attempt to publish
these crude experiments as it would be to practice the five-finger
exercises in public, and to attempt to persuade music-lovers to pay to
come and hear them. Every editor knows what need there is of saying
this. Each mail carries to the office of every magazine scores of
manuscript which are nothing but the crude exercises produced in more
or less unintelligent struggles with the art of composition. The soul
of the editor faints within him, while on the other hand the misguided,
sensitive, self-conscious writer is smitten to the heart when his or
her exercise is sent back with a printed card declining it with a
hollow mockery of thanks. It is ludicrously pathetic; and I dwell upon
it a little because in my time I have been foolish enough to offend in
this manner; because as an editor I suffered enough from this cause
to square the account beyond the cavil of the most exacting fate; and
because in the course of my literary life I have seen so much of this
sort of thing that I realize how general the experience is. It would
be of less moment were it not for the depth of despair into which
would-be authors are plunged by the return of these exercises. There
is no despair like the despair of youth, and it makes my heart tingle
now to recall the utter anguish with which I have received rejected
early manuscripts--which should never have been sent to a publisher.
Would to heaven that there were some one eloquent enough to persuade
the world once and for all that literature is as surely a profession
which must be learned as is law or medicine. No delicate woman or
sensitive man, thrown suddenly upon her or his own resources, turns to
law or medicine, expecting to gain a livelihood by practicing these
professions uninstructed; yet this would be hardly less logical than
to expect to make a way in literature without long preparation and
study. Nobody seems to believe this. It is probably disbelieved now,
as I say it; and examples of persons who have succeeded in writing
with no apparent training come to mind at once. It would be idle to
retort to objections of this sort that quacks have succeeded in all
professions; and I must content myself with insisting that whether what
I have been saying is believed or not, it is true, and the proofs are
heart-sickeningly familiar to every man of literary experience at all
extended.
It is important to remember that the best technical training is that
in which nothing is considered but technical excellence. The student
should write with his entire attention fixed upon the technical
excellence of the work. He must think not of what he is doing, but of
how he is doing it. It is a long time before the student has a right to
look upon himself as a producer at all; and the more completely he can
preserve the attitude of a learner, the better will be the results of
his self-training.
Guy de Maupassant, one of the most finished masters of literary art,
pure and simple, who have written in this century,--a writer who
achieved so much, and who lacked only a supreme ethical ideal to do so
much more,--indicates something of what is meant by technical training
in composition in his account of his studies under Flaubert:--
Flaubert, whom I saw sometimes, conceived a friendship for me.
I ventured to submit to him some of my attempts. He kindly read
them, and said to me: “I cannot tell whether you have talent. What
you have shown me proves a certain intelligence; but you must not
forget this, young man,--that talent, in the phrase of Buffon,
is only long patience. Work.” ... For seven years I made verses,
I made tales, I made novels, I even made a detestable play. Of
them all nothing remains. The master ... criticised them, and
enforced upon me, little by little, two or three principles, which
were the pith of his long and perfect teaching. “If one has not
originality,” he said, “it is necessary to acquire it.” Talent
is long patience. It is a question of regarding whatever one
desires to express long enough and with attention close enough to
discover a side which no one has seen and which has been expressed
by nobody. In everything there is something of the unexplored,
because we are accustomed to use our eyes only with the thought
of what has been already said concerning the thing we see. The
smallest thing has in it a grain of the unknown. Discover it. In
order to describe a fire that flames or a tree in the plain, we
must remain face to face with that fire or that tree until for us
they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. This is
the way to become original.
Having, moreover, impressed upon me the fact that there are not
in the whole world two grains of sand, two insects, two hands or
two noses absolutely alike, he forced me to describe a being or
an object in such a manner as to individualize it clearly, to
distinguish it from all other objects of the same kind. “When you
pass,” he said to me, “a grocer seated in his doorway, a concierge
smoking his pipe, a row of cabs, show me this grocer and this
concierge, their attitude, all their physical appearance; suggest
by the skill of your image all their moral nature, so that I shall
not confound them with any other grocer or any other concierge;
make me see, by a single word, wherein a cab-horse differs from
the fifty others that follow or precede him.” ... Whatever may
be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for
expressing it; only one verb to animate it, but one adjective to
qualify it. It is essential to search for this verb, for this
adjective, until they are discovered, and never to be satisfied
with anything else.--_Pierre et Jean_, Introduction.
I have given this long quotation because it puts the case so strongly,
because it has the weight of authority so high in technical matters,
and because it touches upon several points which will come up later.
There are dangers in this method of which we shall speak in the
proper place, but here the thing to be emphasized is the absolute
indispensability of rigorous training when one is struggling to acquire
the art of verbal expression.
Robert Louis Stevenson, that beautiful master of words, has also told
us how he trained himself to that dexterity and grace which have been
the delight of so great a company of readers:--
All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out
for a pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own
private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books
in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind
was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat
by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny
version-book would be in my hand to note down the features of
the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with
words. And what I wrote thus was for no ulterior use. It was
written consciously for practice.--_A College Magazine._
It is well in learning to write to select uninteresting subjects;
themes which depend for their effectiveness not upon what they are but
upon the way in which they are presented. It is the natural tendency
of any inexperienced writer to set to work to find something to write
about which is in itself attractive. In the daily themes which I
receive from students I find that the almost inevitable course of
things is that the student writes upon whatever romantic or striking
incidents have occurred in his life, and that when these are exhausted
he is utterly at a loss for something to write about. It is not easy to
persuade students that they will get training far more valuable out of
careful attempts to express the commonplace. It is hard for eager young
writers to follow the advice which Flaubert gave to De Maupassant. They
are not willing to put their most strenuous efforts into the attempt to
present vividly the grocer or the cab-horse. Yet there is nothing more
valuable in training than to be thrown entirely upon one’s own literary
skill, be it much or little. When one deals with a subject fascinating
in itself it is difficult to determine how much of the force of what is
written depends upon the theme and how much may fairly be attributed to
the treatment. In training which is purely technical it is essential
to make this distinction, and it follows that the learner is wise
to choose for his ’prentice efforts matters little attractive in
themselves.
I have said that the way to learn to write is to write. It would
perhaps be better to say that the way to learn to write is to rewrite.
In the careful revision, the patient reconstruction, the unsparing
self-criticism of the student who is determined to be satisfied with
nothing short of the best of which he is capable, lies the secret
of success. Here, as in everything else connected with the study of
technique, patient, painstaking, untiring work is the essential thing.
In regard to revision it is necessary to call attention to the
fact that it must extend to the revision of paragraphs and whole
compositions. We are apt to confine ourselves to the remodeling and the
polishing of sentences, or, if we get so far as to revise paragraphs,
to take each separately. It is essential that we train ourselves to
consider sentences as part of paragraphs and paragraphs as but portions
of a whole. This it is especially hard for untrained writers to do.
Those who have taught will recognize how difficult it is to make
students realize that the sentences of a theme may all be individually
right while yet the theme as a whole is all wrong.
As a matter of practical work it is well to make a schedule of
chapters by paragraphs and of the whole composition by chapters, if
the work be on so extensive a scale. It is one of the tests of a
properly constructed paragraph that it can be roughly summed up in a
single sentence, and a longer division may consequently be reduced
in substance to as many sentences as there are paragraphs. It is an
excellent plan thus to summarize work, and a little practice enables
a writer to do this in his head without the trouble of putting the
abstract upon paper.
It is evident that to learn the art of composition is no small
undertaking, but it is to be kept in mind that this art, being the
means of human expression, underlies all study and all thought no less
than it underlies all communication. It aids one to understand what
one reads, what one studies, what one thinks, no less than it aids
one to compose a poem, to produce a novel, to write a letter, or to
relate the latest bit of piquant gossip. Do not make the mistake of
supposing that it is outside of your other intellectual pursuits, save
in the sense that all the rest of your education is inclosed in it.
We fully understand only that which we are ourselves capable of; and
to comprehend the literature of the world it is necessary to come as
near to being able to have produced it as is possible to our individual
capabilities.
III
PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURE
Since it is the object of this book first of all to be practical,
it is well, before passing to matters more intricate, to consider
for a little the elementary principles of composition.[1] Written
language, to repeat what everybody knows, consists of words arranged in
sentences, which in turn are grouped into paragraphs, these again being
placed together to form whole compositions. In all composition, it may
be remarked, it is necessary to remember that the punctuation is as
integral and as important a part of what is written as are the words.
It is often more easy to forgive the careless printer for altering
a word than for changing punctuation, since the reader more easily
corrects an error of diction than of pointing. The student has not
mastered even the preliminary stages of composition who is not as sure
of the punctuation of a page as he is of its grammatical construction.
There is a general vagueness on the subject of the mechanical forms
employed in written or printed language which affects the nerves
as if it were connected with the moral laxity of the age. There is
probably no real connection between the frequency of bank defalcations
and a failure to recognize the relative values of the comma and
the semicolon, but to a literary man this ignorance is so culpable
as almost to seem likely to lead to crime. When an inexperienced
writer gets the words down he is apt to suppose that all is well,
and frequently he does not even know when to put in a period. It is
necessary not only to close a sentence when it is done, but also to
bear in mind that if it is not finished putting a period in the middle
does not really make two sentences of it. When a tyro finds that his
pen is getting out of breath, he has a tendency to set down a period,
and then to go on with a conjunction, supposing, in the innocency of
his heart, that he is beginning afresh. He is really only setting up
the divorced better half--for the latter portion of a sentence should
be the better half--in a sort of separate maintenance. The period in
such a case has not even the power of a divorce, since it cannot make
the separation legal. A sentence is like an ingot: if it be chopped in
two, each piece is half of the original whole. It must be melted and
recast to make individual ingots of smaller size.
It is also to be noted that students too often fail to recognize
the fact that there are reasons as definite and as binding for the
divisions of sentences into paragraphs as for the division of words
into sentences. A teacher recently told me of the definition of a
country schoolboy which, if not over-elegant, represents pretty fairly,
it seems to me, the attitude of the common mind toward the paragraph.
“A paragraph,” this lad said blunderingly, when called upon to define,
“why, a paragraph--a paragraph--it’s--it’s a gob of sentences!” I
fancy that most teachers have encountered plenty of pupils who think of
a paragraph as merely a “gob” of sentences,--a lump accidentally broken
off from the rest of the composition, but possessed of no structural
qualities of its own.