They exist in books only by accident, and for one written there are a
thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken. They are deeds: the man who
brings word of a lost battle can work no comparable effect with the
muscles of his arm; Iago’s breath is as truly laden with poison and
murder as the fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin. Hence
the sternest education in the use of words is least of all to be gained
in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of
seclusion. A soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise
of power that he loves, and he is accustomed to do more with his words
than give pleasure. To keep language in immediate touch with reality, to
lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot from the heart of
determination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of power. All this may
be achieved without the smallest study of literary models, and is
consistent with a perfect neglect of literary canons. It is not the
logical content of the word, but the whole mesh of its conditions,
including the character, circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that
is its true strength. “Damn” is often the feeblest of expletives, and
“as you please” may be the dirge of an empire. Hence it is useless to
look to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style;
the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only
in his own abstract world. A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make
trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing, a thing
three times said, and each time said badly, may be of more effect than
that terse, full, and final expression which the doctors rightly commend.
The art of language, regarded as a question of pattern and cadence, or
even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract
study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with
words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where
speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and
upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the
ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the
fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that
action and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the
playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds, a
framework for those silences that are more telling than any speech. Here
lies an escape from the poverty of content and method to which
self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore are epic
and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry. The greater force of
the objective treatment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets,
whose ambition has led them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or the
play. There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the
thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the
saying of it; a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy
reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack.
In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought up short
by the question, “Why must you still be talking?” Even the passionate
lyric feels the need of external authorisation, and some of the finest of
lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth’s
_Solitary Reaper_, are cast in a dramatic mould, that beauty of diction
may be vitalised by an imagined situation. More than others the dramatic
art is an enemy to the desultory and the superfluous, sooner than others
it will cast away all formal grace of expression that it may come home
more directly to the business and bosoms of men. Its great power and
scope are shown well in this, that it can find high uses for the
commonest stuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of daily
intercourse.
Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of
impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary facts
of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama, and in its
modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and novelist create
their own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own plots, and when
all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an
inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the
glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or æsthetics,
critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with
their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two
removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the
vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response.
Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their reach; the
matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is to
employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the meaning of their words
is not obvious, and they must go aside to define it. The strength of
their writing has limits set for it by the nature of the chosen task, and
any transgression of these limits is punished by a fall into sheer
violence. All writing partakes of the quality of the drama, there is
always a situation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker
and the hearer. A gentleman in black, expounding his views, or narrating
his autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of
response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he too
may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display sympathy
and tact, and avoid the faults of senility. The only character that can
lend strength to his words is his own, and he sketches it while he states
his opinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied
in the very arguments he uses. Who does not know the curious blank
effect of eloquence overstrained or out of place? The phrasing may be
exquisite, the thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it
were, dumb-show where no community of feeling exists between the speaker
and his audience. A similar false note is struck by any speaker or
writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his disqualifications,
by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes
his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility,
by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank
ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.
“How many things are there,” exclaims the wise Verulam, “which a man
cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself! A man’s person
hath many proper relations which he cannot put off. A man cannot speak
to his son but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his enemy
but upon terms; whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not
as it sorteth with the person.” The like “proper relations” govern
writers, even where their audience is unknown to them. It has often been
remarked how few are the story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so
much as by a passing reflection or sentiment, without a discordant
effect. The friend who saves the situation is found in one and another
of the creatures of their art.
For those who must play their own part the effort to conceal themselves
is of no avail. The implicit attitude of a writer makes itself felt; an
undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions, an unwarrantable
assumption of sympathy, a tendency to truck with friends or with enemies
by the way, are all possible indications of weakness, which move even the
least skilled of readers to discount what is said, as they catch here and
there a glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young dandy, behind the
imposing literary mask. Strong writers are those who, with every reserve
of power, seek no exhibition of strength. It is as if language could not
come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an
evil necessity. Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant
witness. They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways
have failed. The bane of a literary education is that it induces
talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words. But those whose
words are stark and terrible seem almost to despise words.
With words literature begins, and to words it must return. Coloured by
the neighbourhood of silence, solemnised by thought or steeled by action,
words are still its only means of rising above words. “_Accedat verbum
ad elementum_,” said St. Ambrose, “_et fiat sacramentum_.” So the
elementary passions, pity and love, wrath and terror, are not in
themselves poetical; they must be wrought upon by the word to become
poetry. In no other way can suffering be transformed to pathos, or
horror reach its apotheosis in tragedy.
When all has been said, there remains a residue capable of no formal
explanation. Language, this array of conventional symbols loosely strung
together, and blown about by every wandering breath, is miraculously
vital and expressive, justifying not a few of the myriad superstitions
that have always attached to its use. The same words are free to all,
yet no wealth or distinction of vocabulary is needed for a group of words
to take the stamp of an individual mind and character. “As a quality of
style” says Mr. Pater, “soul is a fact.” To resolve how words, like
bodies, become transparent when they are inhabited by that luminous
reality, is a higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent
persuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on
glory. The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the
chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It is the old problem,
to be met only by the old solution of the Platonist, that
Soul is form, and doth the body make.
The soul is able to inform language by some strange means other than the
choice and arrangement of words and phrases. Real novelty of vocabulary
is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a parasitical existence,
and are always quoting. Quotations, conscious or unconscious, vary in
kind according as the mind is active to work upon them and make them its
own. In its grossest and most servile form quotation is a lazy folly; a
thought has received some signal or notorious expression, and as often as
the old sense, or something like it, recurs, the old phrase rises to the
lips. This degenerates to simple phrase-mongering, and those who
practise it are not vigilantly jealous of their meaning. Such an
expression as “fine by degrees and beautifully less” is often no more
than a bloated equivalent for a single word—say “diminishing” or
“shrinking.” Quotations like this are the warts and excremental parts of
language; the borrowings of good writers are never thus superfluous,
their quotations are appropriations. Whether it be by some witty turn
given to a well-known line, by an original setting for an old saw, or by
a new and unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of the borrower is put upon the
goods he borrows, and he becomes part owner. Plagiarism is a crime only
where writing is a trade; expression need never be bound by the law of
copyright while it follows thought, for thought, as some great thinker
has observed, is free. The words were once Shakespeare’s; if only you
can feel them as he did, they are yours now no less than his. The best
quotations, the best translations, the best thefts, are all equally new
and original works. From quotation, at least, there is no escape,
inasmuch as we learn language from others. All common phrases that do
the dirty work of the world are quotations—poor things, and not our own.
Who first said that a book would “repay perusal,” or that any gay scene
was “bright with all the colours of the rainbow”? There is no need to
condemn these phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferior work to
do. The expression of thought, temperament, attitude, is not the whole
of its business. It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will
attempt to remint all the small defaced coinage that passes through his
hands, only a lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventional
garments and all conventional speech. At a modern wedding the frock-coat
is worn, the presents are “numerous and costly,” and there is an “ovation
accorded to the happy pair.” These things are part of our public
civilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to be lightly set
aside. But let it be a friend of your own who is to marry, a friend of
your own who dies, and you are to express yourself—the problem is
changed, you feel all the difficulties of the art of style, and fathom
something of the depth of your unskill. Forbidden silence, we should be
in a poor way indeed.
Single words too we plagiarise when we use them without realisation and
mastery of their meaning. The best argument for a succinct style is
this, that if you use words you do not need, or do not understand, you
cannot use them well. It is not what a word means, but what it means to
you, that is of the deepest import. Let it be a weak word, with a poor
history behind it, if you have done good thinking with it, you may yet
use it to surprising advantage. But if, on the other hand, it be a
strong word that has never aroused more than a misty idea and a
flickering emotion in your mind, here lies your danger. You may use it,
for there is none to hinder; and it will betray you. The commonest Saxon
words prove explosive machines in the hands of rash impotence. It is
perhaps a certain uneasy consciousness of danger, a suspicion that
weakness of soul cannot wield these strong words, that makes debility
avoid them, committing itself rather, as if by some pre-established
affinity, to the vaguer Latinised vocabulary. Yet they are not all to be
avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on some occult ability
in their employer. For every living person, if the material were
obtainable, a separate historical dictionary might be compiled, recording
where each word was first heard or seen, where and how it was first used.
The references are utterly beyond recovery; but such a register would
throw a strange light on individual styles. The eloquent trifler, whose
stock of words has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would
stand denuded of his plausible pretences as soon as it were seen how
roguishly he came by his eloquence. There may be literary quality, it is
well to remember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has been
happily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be. Yet the voice will
sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chance listeners, for a
genuine utterance of humanity; and the like is true in literature. But
writing cannot be luminous and great save in the hands of those whose
words are their own by the indefeasible title of conquest. Life is spent
in learning the meaning of great words, so that some idle proverb, known
for years and accepted perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day, like a
blow. “If there were not a God,” said Voltaire, “it would be necessary
to invent him.” Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word, but some
of those who use it most, if they would be perfectly sincere, should
enclose it in quotation marks. Whole nations go for centuries without
coining names for certain virtues; is it credible that among other
peoples, where the names exists the need for them is epidemic? The
author of the _Ecclesiastial Polity_ puts a bolder and truer face on the
matter. “Concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity,” he writes, “without
which there can be no salvation, was there ever any mention made saving
only in that Law which God himself hath from Heaven revealed? There is
not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of
these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth
of the eternal God.” Howsoever they came to us, we have the words; they,
and many other terms of tremendous import, are bandied about from mouth
to mouth and alternately enriched or impoverished in meaning. Is the
“Charity” of St. Paul’s Epistle one with the charity of
“charity-blankets”? Are the “crusades” of Godfrey and of the great St.
Louis, where knightly achievement did homage to the religious temper,
essentially the same as that process of harrying the wretched and the
outcast for which the muddle-headed, greasy citizen of to-day invokes the
same high name? Of a truth, some kingly words fall to a lower estate
than Nebuchadnezzar.
Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar. It is in this
obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by
shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called it, that
we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our mortal lives. To
be overtaken by a master, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured
skill and courage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the
crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gain fresh
confidence from despair. He twines wreaths of the entangling ivy, and
builds ramparts of the thorns. He blazes his mark upon the secular oaks,
as a guidance to later travellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of
mouldering rubbish. There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity,
clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real and easy. In the
light of great literary achievement, straight and wonderful, like the
roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments the mind like a riddle.
Yet there are the dusky barbarians!—fleeing from the harmonious tread of
the ordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass of vulgar
sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of low thought.
* * * * *
It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculative consideration of any
subject with the counsels of practical wisdom. The words of this essay
have been vain indeed if the idea that style may be imparted by tuition
has eluded them, and survived. There is a useful art of Grammar, which
takes for its province the right and the wrong in speech. Style deals
only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the
rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them. Yet no one
is a better judge of equity for ignorance of the law, and grammatical
practice offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and
versatility. The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, the
marshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be
learned. There is a kind of inarticulate disorder to which writers are
liable, quite distinct from a bad style, and caused chiefly by lack of
exercise. An unpractised writer will sometimes send a beautiful and
powerful phrase jostling along in the midst of a clumsy sentence—like a
crowned king escorted by a mob.
But Style cannot be taught. Imitation of the masters, or of some one
chosen master, and the constant purging of language by a severe
criticism, have their uses, not to be belittled; they have also their
dangers. The greater part of what is called the teaching of style must
always be negative, bad habits may be broken down, old malpractices
prohibited. The pillory and the stocks are hardly educational agents,
but they make it easier for honest men to enjoy their own. If style
could really be taught, it is a question whether its teachers should not
be regarded as mischief-makers and enemies of mankind. The Rosicrucians
professed to have found the philosopher’s stone, and the shadowy sages of
modern Thibet are said, by those who speak for them, to have compassed
the instantaneous transference of bodies from place to place. In either
case, the holders of these secrets have laudably refused to publish them,
lest avarice and malice should run amuck in human society. A similar
fear might well visit the conscience of one who should dream that he had
divulged to the world at large what can be done with language. Of this
there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency, emphasis, and
other warlike equipments at the disposal of evil forces, but style, like
the Christian religion, is one of those open secrets which are most
easily and most effectively kept by the initiate from age to age.
Divination is the only means of access to these mysteries. The formal
attempt to impart a good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher
of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for
the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not
truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be
imparted. The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here
witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be
a good man. Good style is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the
soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much. “Always be ready to
speak your minds” said Blake, “and a base man will avoid you.” But to
insist that he also shall speak his mind is to go a step further, it is
to take from the impostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative
whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to stand
erect among its fellows and declare itself. His occupation is gone, and
he does not love the censor who deprives him of the weapons of his
mendicity.
All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of the soul. Mind we
have in common, inasmuch as the laws of right reason are not different
for different minds. Therefore clearness and arrangement can be taught,
sheer incompetence in the art of expression can be partly remedied. But
who shall impose laws upon the soul? It is thus of common note that one
may dislike or even hate a particular style while admiring its facility,
its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matter set forth. Milton, a
chaster and more unerring master of the art than Shakespeare, reveals no
such lovable personality. While persons count for much, style, the index
to persons, can never count for little. “Speak,” it has been said, “that
I may know you”—voice-gesture is more than feature. Write, and after you
have attained to some control over the instrument, you write yourself
down whether you will or no. There is no vice, however unconscious, no
virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your
character, that will not pass on to the paper. You anticipate the Day of
Judgment and furnish the recording angel with material. The Art of
Criticism in literature, so often decried and given a subordinate place
among the arts, is none other than the art of reading and interpreting
these written evidences. Criticism has been popularly opposed to
creation, perhaps because the kind of creation that it attempts is rarely
achieved, and so the world forgets that the main business of Criticism,
after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.
Graves, at its command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them
forth. It is by the creative power of this art that the living man is
reconstructed from the litter of blurred and fragmentary paper documents
that he has left to posterity.
* * * * *
THE END
* * * * *
_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_