clearness, it is a thing so important and so universally essential in
all intellectual training that it is difficult to pass it without a
word more. If a new Dante were to people a new Inferno with sinners
guilty of crimes intellectual, as the stern old Florentine peopled his
with those who violated moral laws, the most populous circle would
be devoted to those who mistakenly think themselves to think. There
is a discouragingly large portion of mankind whose mental processes
are apparently those of the oyster. They are mentally so indolent or
incapable that the labor of reflecting is entirely beyond them. No
student can afford to remain in doubt as to whether he really thinks,
or merely indulges in vague mental impressions which are to genuine
thought as is the dull smouldering of a heap of wet leaves in a
November fog to a brisk beech-wood fire on a wide hearth in a winter
night.
Macaulay is right when he says: “Propriety of thought and propriety
of diction are commonly found together.... Obscurity of expression
generally springs from confusion of ideas.” He might have added that
it is of great importance that the writer be able to think of his
subject as a whole. It is easy for the mind to grasp a small thing
and it is proportionately harder for it to seize upon a greater; yet
upon the power to hold work in the mind in its entirety must as surely
depend success in writing as does all vigorous mental development.
The third cause of obscurity, inability to express the thought which
one has, is at once the most common, and the most inexcusable. Here we
are dealing with a tangible thing, to a great extent a matter of rule,
and, at most, largely a question of study. There is no reason why a
person of ordinary intelligence should not be able to express whatever
he is able to think. Indeed, whoever has fully thought out an idea has
already phrased it, and if he has even a moderate amount of training in
composition should have no difficulty in expressing it on paper if he
will but take the necessary pains.
It is evident that what is clear to one reader may be obscure to
another. It follows that the first question to be decided is to what
audience a composition is to be addressed. Few of us can understand
this sentence from a treatise on comparative embryology.
The inner wall of each of the paired cavities forms a
splanchnopleuric mesoblast, and the outer wall of the whole the
somatic mesoblast.
This is clear to readers who understand the technical language of
embryology; and for them the author wrote. Parallel examples might be
given which would show how many sorts of writing there are which are
clear to a limited audience only. The reports of base-ball games are
unintelligible to the average English reader, while to the American the
notes on cricket are equally meaningless. The criticisms of artists
upon pictures seldom convey a definite impression to those not versed
in the technical language of painting; and the same principle holds
throughout all sorts of literature.
The whole matter then resolves itself into the simple maxim: Use the
language of those addressed. There is somewhere a story of a lady who
always spoke to her maid in French, because in taking the situation
the girl had wrongfully claimed to know that tongue. The mistress
held stubbornly to the position that the maid should understand, and
she endured the discomforts of never being well served rather than
abandon it. Much writing and not a little talking is all but as absurd.
Constantly authors address themselves to the general public in language
which they know or might know the general public will not understand.
Whatever else the human race may be, it is not logical; there are few
of us free from the fault of sometimes acting upon assumptions which we
know to be false; and nowhere is this fact more strikingly illustrated
than in composition.
This question of using the language of those addressed is one which
meets every teacher at the very threshold of the class-room. The best
instructor is not he who knows most, but he who imparts most; and he
imparts most who most perfectly speaks the language of his pupils. It
is of no use daily to fire over the heads of children all the wisdom
of Solomon if it be embodied in a language which is not theirs. The
teacher who really teaches does not take the attitude of the lady whose
maid should have known French; he does not assume that pupils should
understand what he says; he simply considers whether as a matter of
fact they do understand. If they do not, he sets himself with patience
to re-phrase it, and, if need be, re-phrase again, until he has put
it into language which the children cannot fail to comprehend. It is
not a question of what might be understood but of what must be. It is
true that this calls for a patience which is almost divine, and there
are teachers in the common schools to-day who are only preserved to us
because the age of translation to heaven is past. There are unhappily
others who do not understand that this patient and laborious seeking
after the intellectual dialect of the pupil is the only possible means
of imparting instruction; and thus it happens that some schools are
taught in a language which, while it is English, is yet hardly more
intelligible to the students than would be Choctaw or the speech of
Borrioboola-Gha.
In writing, the safest guide in this respect is sound, homely common
sense. Write without nonsense in the way of self-consciousness or
affectation. Make it always a rule in general composition to aim at
the simple, average man; to write so that the traditionally foolish
wayfaring man need not err therein. Remember that the aim is not to
write so that one may be understood, but to write so that one cannot
be misunderstood.
Absurdly enough, human vanity comes in here. Untrained writers are apt
to feel that they lower themselves if they condescend to write for
the intellectual bourgeoisie. Many a clever young author has come to
grief because he could not bring himself to use simple language lest
it should seem that he had not command of a more elaborate diction.
He has failed because he could not be willing to address the ordinary
reader lest he thereby might appear to show that he had not the gift of
speaking to the learned. The great writers are men who are free from
this weakness; who are intent upon making their message understood, and
not upon preserving a foolish appearance of superiority. Shakespeare
did not disdain to write for the London apprentices brawling in the
pit, or Homer to sing for semi-barbarians half-drunken at the feast.
The masterpieces of literature which have been addressed to the
educated few are revered; those which have been confessedly for the
many have been read and lived upon. To take as instances two works
written at about the same time: “Paradise Lost” has been commended by
critics and admired by scholars; “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been and is
the favorite book with thousands. The one has always been profoundly
admired and the other has been loved. I do not mean that this is all
that might be said of these classics, or that there are no other
considerations in determining their worth, but they do serve to make
more clear the fact that to reach the general reader it is necessary
to write for the general reader.
Speaking the language of the average man includes also the confining
of allusions to the range of his probable knowledge, the taking for
granted nothing which he may not reasonably be supposed to know. The
temptation to show erudition is at the elbow of every writer. When,
near the beginning of this lecture, I referred in an easy manner to the
Taj Mahal, I was instantly conscious that I had used the comparison
with a pleasant sense of the air of superior knowledge which it might
give. However it may be with you, the probabilities are that the
ordinary reader would not be sufficiently familiar with the elaborate
ornamentation of that wonder of the East to make my comparison to its
jewelled walls effective, and I left it only because I wanted to use it
here as an illustration.
It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional experiences
of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. It must be
remembered that all art is based on the assumption of a community of
human feelings; in other words, upon the theory that the fundamental
emotions are shared by all mankind. The more closely a writer holds to
common humanity, to common human experience, the more wide will be the
range of his work, and the more clear will he be in those very matters
where clearness is most difficult of attainment. The more subtile and
remote from ordinary human life are the emotions and the passions to
be portrayed, the more absolute is the necessity of conveying them in
terms of simple and common experience. Analyze one of the tragedies
of Shakespeare or of the old Greek dramatists, and you will find that
its tremendous effects are produced by means essentially simple. By
keeping always within the range of the sympathies and feelings common
to humanity, the masters are able to make every stroke tell; and
this method is in the nature of things the only possible one. Common
humanity can comprehend only what it has felt.
To gain Clearness it is necessary first to avoid all vagueness of
thought and all vagueness of expression. It is needful to shun
ambiguity of word or of phrase, and that more subtle ambiguity which
may arise from ill-considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from
bad arrangement of the parts of a composition. It is no less important
to write with a constant remembrance of the audience addressed; to use
their language, and to appeal to the emotions and experiences which are
likely to be common to the average individual of the class for which
one writes. Inexperienced writers may make the mistake of supposing
that this is the rule by which mediocrity is to be reached; but as a
matter of fact these are the principles upon which have been written
the masterpieces of the world.
VI
PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED
Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions.
Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are
conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work,
yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value
despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying
phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this
qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as
they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of
what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as
they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of
the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has
been lost.
We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a
signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given
to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of
literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us
to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages
of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the
fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and
intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the
term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has
of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance--the
antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular
person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so
on--might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have
nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which
certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour,--the
prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways
decent or indecent,--have not in themselves anything that can be called
Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention,
but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.
“The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he
goes on to exemplify this thus:--
Compare these three simple statements: “I found him very agreeable
one afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon;” “I
found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house.”
Now all that the word “wet” says is that the afternoon was watery;
but it clearly implies that it was an afternoon when you would
not care to be out of doors. All that the words “in a country
house” state is a simple fact of locality; but they imply that
you were in a place where not to be out of doors was probably a
serious trial to the temper. So the last statement as a whole, “I
found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house,”
suggests, though it does not state, that the person spoken of was
one whose charms could overcome a pretty bad temper. At the same
time it is a phrase which I fancy anybody would admit to hold the
attention more strongly than either of its predecessors; and its
superiority in force lies not so much in the bare facts which
it adds to the first statement as in the thoughts and emotions
it suggests. Still again, take this sentence from one of M. de
Maupassant’s stories: “It was the 15th of August--the feast of
the Holy Virgin, and of the Emperor Napoleon.” He states only
two facts about the 15th of August, and these in the simplest
of words. Neither by itself would hold one’s attention enough
to remain long in memory. But put them together; think what
the Holy Virgin means to Catholic Europe, and what the Emperor
Napoleon means to those who are not subdued by the magic genius
of Bonaparte,--and you have a sentence that when mid-August comes
about will hover in your head. Yet the force of this--so greatly
superior to the force of either statement by itself--lies not in
what is actually said, but wholly in what is implied, suggested,
connoted, in this sudden, unexpected antithesis.
The thing which the writer has caused the reader to think--or even
to suppose himself to think--is sure to interest him. The dullest of
bores is absorbed in his own words, and in effect that which the reader
receives by suggestion is his own thought. What is denoted is the word
of the writer; what is connoted is for the time being the thought of
the reader.
It is not difficult to see that Clearness is an aid to Force; or, to
put it more exactly, that a lack of Clearness will interfere with
Force. Yet the one is by no means essential to the other. The diction
of “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” that book so strong that it
wrings the heart almost like a fierce personal sorrow, is in passages
so obscure as to have given rise to the rather cheap _mot_ that the
novel would be successful if it were translated into English. Almost
any page of Carlyle might also be cited in illustration; while that
Clearness may fail to secure Force is proved by the pellucidly stupid
lucubrations of an innumerable company of authors whom nobody could
fail to understand if it were possible to keep awake to read them.
Connotation may be the result of various causes. It may be produced
by a swiftness and briskness of motion which so awakens and quickens
the mind that the reader is aroused to thought, and seizes each idea
presented as if he had himself originated it. It is this sort of force
that we mean when we speak of the vivacity or the brilliancy of a work.
The secret lies chiefly in passing quickly from one significant point
to another. This involves, it is apparent, the power of selecting the
significant, and of bringing this out while avoiding the unessential.
The effectiveness of the sensational story depends largely upon
a quality closely allied to this, although here it is a matter
not so much of style as of material. The tale which moves rapidly
from situation to situation, so that the reader seems to share the
adventures of the characters, often owes as much to the swiftness of
its progress as to the nature of the story told. It owes more, as a
general thing, to the vividness with which the exciting situations
are imagined and presented. The more real a thing seems to the reader,
the more suggestive it must be to him, and the more likely is he to
share the sensations set down, so that for the moment it seems as if
he were actually experiencing them. In other words, the more real the
narrative, the more suggestive it becomes.
One great means of producing this sense of reality either in narrative
or in any other kind of composition, whether in the setting forth of
thoughts, or in the telling of events, is in making what is written
specific. The specific term is apt to be more suggestive than the
general from the fact that it presents to the mind an idea which can be
grasped readily. When one reads that the Indians are on the war-path
and are ravaging the country, one has a vague feeling of horror; but
if one is told that the Red Men have crossed the bounds of Big Lick
Reservation, have murdered and scalped a settler named John Thing, have
burned his cabin, and carried off his wife and children, there is no
vagueness about it. The impression becomes at once vivid and forceful
in what it denotes, and stirring in what it connotes.
It is from a misapplication of this fact that modern fiction has fallen
into that vice which has been known as Realism--perhaps because it is
less real than any other sort of fiction ever devised. It is apparently
by a perception of the effectiveness of the specific, that Realists
have been led into the error of believing in the effectiveness of the
minute.
Before leaving the quality under discussion it is well to say a word
about what is called “reserved force.” Our respect for a writer is
always increased by feeling that he might do more than he is doing. We
are led on by a desire to see what greater things he will accomplish.
The feeling in reading an author who is evidently doing his utmost
is not unlike that felt in crossing a bridge which shakes with the
footfall. It may carry us over the stream, but on the other hand it may
break under us. I once heard a lady explain her dislike for a certain
youth by saying: “I never could endure a man who is always doing his
darnedest!” The expression is unhappily vulgar, but it does seem to me
to be humanly expressive. We do not like to feel that we have come to
the end of the resources of a friend or of an author.
How then does a writer produce an impression of reserved force? The
phrase meets one in book reviews, and to inexperienced writers is
apt to convey little but bewilderment. One way in which the finished
literary craftsman secures the impression of reserved power is by
deliberately making the minor parts of his work weaker than those more
important. In other words, he gains the effect of reserved strength by
reserving strength. Often it is well in the revision of a composition
to lessen the stress of expression in unimportant passages; to soften
down, as it were, all portions except the high lights. The natural
tendency of every earnest writer is to express himself as vigorously as
possible, and in the first draft this is well,--provided always that
he has the self-control and the skill so to modify in revision the
less important parts that the emphasis shall be properly proportioned.
Shading in literature is a matter which it is not easy to explain
without examples much longer than it is possible to use here. It must
be learned by the study of masterpieces. It is well to keep in mind,
however, that it is oftener the result of a clever softening of minor
passages than of a heavier emphasis upon important portions; and
above all that the secret of shading and of reserved force as well
is proportion. It is rather comparative than absolute stress which
is effective. Vehemence is not vigor. Make up your mind clearly what
points you wish to bring out most sharply; that is half of the process:
then see to it that the remaining parts of the composition are kept
subordinate to these; that is the rest of it.
Largely, too, is a sense of reserved force imparted by smoothness and
ease of style. A style which is rough generally seems hard and labored.
To carry the reader forward easily seems to be to carry him surely, and
gives the impression that the writer could go faster and farther if he
but chose.
One of the secrets of smoothness is the art of easy transition from one
paragraph to another, from one sentence to another, from one thought
to another. In Macaulay’s essay on “Machiavelli,” for instance, after
speaking of the correspondence of the Italian, the author continues:
It is interesting and curious to recognize, in circumstances which
elude the notice of historians, ... the fierce and haughty energy
which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and
graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the
implacable hatred of Cæsar Borgia.
We have mentioned Cæsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for
a moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of
Italy was so strongly personified, etc.
And so the essayist goes on to draw a comparison between Cæsar Borgia
and Machiavelli, which he had of course intended from the first, but
which he has had the art to introduce as if it were a sudden thought.
The effect is as if the name of Borgia had suggested the parallel; and
not only does this give an air of spontaneity, but it also impresses
the reader with a feeling of security in the resources of the writer.
If the mere mention of a famous name can bring so much from his mind,
it is evident that that mind must be most abundantly stored.
More subtle, and therein so much the more admirable, is the art which
links together the parts of a composition simply by closeness of
meaning. To illustrate it would take too much room, but all the great
essayists afford examples, and it is in them that this detail of
literary skill may most conveniently be studied.
Another matter closely connected with Force is that of beginning and
ending well. If the opening sentence of a composition interest the
reader he is ready to go on, while an effective close leaves him with
a pleasant impression of what he has been reading. In a composition
divided into parts or chapters, it is especially important to see to it
that the separate portions end effectively. The general verdict upon
a book is largely made up of the sum of impressions received from the
endings of sections. Here again the reader will find examples in all
the masters, but a few may be given. In a vein almost familiar, but in
entirely good taste, Lowell begins his superb essay on Chaucer:--
Will it _do_ to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope
to say anything, not new but even fresh, on a topic so well worn?
This very statement of the difficulty provokes the reader to go on to
see how that difficulty is overcome.
In somewhat the same vein is Saintsbury’s beginning of his paper on
Hogg:--
“What on earth,” it was once asked, “will you make of Hogg?” I
think that there is something to be made of Hogg, and that it
is something worth making.
Or take the opening of Stevenson’s “Gossip on Romance:”--
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process
itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a
book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal,
our minds filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images,
incapable of sleep or continuous thought.
The intoxication of the ideal which this gives us is so full of
suggestion, it brings up so vividly the best delights that have marked
our reading, that our minds are awake and alert from the start. We are
not only ready but eager to go forward under the guidance of an author
who has so charming a conception of what sort of a treat he should
strive to give the reader.
Endings are if possible even more important, and they are carefully
studied by masters of style. Take this conclusion of Lowell’s “Abraham
Lincoln:”--
Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent looks of
sympathy which strangers exchanged as they met that day. Their
common manhood had lost a kinsman.
One puts down the book with that suggestively solemn phrase sounding on
in the brain like the reverberation when a great bell ceases its knell
for a hero.
Or re-read the brief description of the tombstone of Hester Prynne,
which closes “The Scarlet Letter,” and which ends with a phrase so
haunting:--
It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for
a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend, so
sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light
gloomier than the shadow: “ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”