when the poet is depicting an actual person or scene, he must see it
with the imaginative eye, the inward eye, as well as with the outward.
Unless he does, there is no poetry in the result. A poem is twofold,
presenting an actuality, and at the same time a tender lucent image
thereof, like the reflection of a castle, standing on the edge of a
lake, in the calm deep mirror before it: at one view we see the castle
and its glistening counterpart. In the best poetry there is vivid
picture-making: reality is made more visible by being presented as a
beautiful show. It is the power to present the beautiful show which
constitutes the poet. To conceive a scene or person with such
liveliness and compactness as to be able to transfer the conception to
paper with a distinctness and palpitation that shall make the reader
behold in it a fresh and buoyant type of the actual--this implies a
subtle, creative life in the mind, this is the test of poetic
faculty. To stand this test there must be an inward sea of thought and
sensibility, dipping into which the poet is enabled to hold up his
conception or invention all adrip with sparkling freshness. The poetic
mind, with a firm, and at the same time free, easy hold, holds a
subject at arm's length, where it can be turned round in the light;
the prosaic mind grasps and hugs what it handles so close that there
is no room for play of light or motion.
Contemplating synthetically the highest and choicest and purest, and
at the same time actively endeavoring to embody it, the genuine poet
has in his best work joy as exalted as the mind can here attain to;
and in the reader who can attune himself to the high pitch, he
enkindles the same kind of joyful exaltation. There is current a
detestable phrase or definition, which even Coleridge allows himself
to countenance, namely, that poetry is something which gives pleasure.
Pleasure! Do we speak of the pleasure of beholding the sun rise out of
the Atlantic or from the top of Mount Washington, or the pleasure of
standing beside Niagara, or of reading about the self-sacrifice of
Regulus or Winkelried? Pleasure is a word limited to the animal or to
the lighter feelings. "Let me have the pleasure of taking wine
with you." A good dinner gives great pleasure to a circle of gourmets.
Even enjoyment, a higher word than pleasure, should, when applied to
poetry, be conjoined with some elevating qualification; for all the
feelings impart enjoyment through their simple healthy function, and
there are people who enjoy a cock-pit, or a bull-fight, or an
execution. But poetry causes that refined, super-sensuous delight
which follows the apprehension of any thought, sentiment, act, or
scene, which rises towards the best and purest possible in the range
of that thought, sentiment, act, or scene. In the poetical there
always is exaltation, a reaching towards perfection, a subtle,
blooming spirituality. The end of poetry is not pleasure,--this were
to speak too grossly,--but refined enjoyment through emotion.
To him who has the finer sensibility to become aware of its presence,
the poetical is everywhere. The beautiful is a kiss which man gives to
Nature, who returns it; to get the kiss from her he must first give
it. Wordsworth says, "Poetry is the breath and fine spirit of all
knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the
countenance of all science." It might be called the aromatic
essence of all life.
A poem is the incarnation of this aroma, the condensation of it into
form. A drop of dew symbolizes a poem; for a true poem should be oval,
without angles, transparent, compact, complete in itself, graceful
from inward quality and fullness. It may be of a few lines, or of
hundreds or thousands; but there must be no superfluous line or word.
A poem drops out of the brain a fragrant distillation. A poem must be
a spiritual whole; that is, not only with the parts organized into
proportioned unity, but with the whole and the parts springing out of
the idea, the sentiment, form obedient to substance, body to soul, the
sensuous life to the inward. For enduring, ruddy incarnation, the
subject, whether it be incident, scene, sentiment, or action, must
have within its core this essential aroma. The poet (and the test of
his poetic capacity is his gift to draw the fragrance out of such a
core) keeps his conception distinctly and vividly before him. The
conception or ideal prefigurement of his theme precedes him, like the
pillar of fire in the night, drawing him onward surely and rapidly.
Otherwise he lags and flags and stumbles. The spring into poetry is on
a flash, which not only lights up the thought on which it springs, but
renews, recreates it.
A man's chief aim in life should be to better himself, to keep
bettering himself; and in this high duty the poet helps him. Poetry is
the great educator of the feelings. By seizing and holding up to view
the noblest and cleanest and best there is in human life, poetry
elevates and refines the feelings. It reveals and strengthens the
spirituality of our nature. Poetry tunes the mind. Faculty of
admiration is one of our super-animal privileges. Poetry purges and
guides admiration; and the sounder and higher our admirations, the
more admirable ourselves become.
The best poetry turns the mind inward upon itself, and sweetens its
imaginations. Our imaginations, that is, our inward thoughts, plans,
shaping our silent, interior doings, these are the chief part of us;
for out of these come most of our outward acts, and all of their
color. As is the preponderance of the man, will be this inward brood.
The timid man will imagine dangers, the anxious man troubles, the
hopeful man successes, the avaricious man accumulations, the ambitious
possession of power; and the poetic man will imagine all sorts
of perfections, be ever yearning for a better and higher, be ever
building beautiful air-castles, earthy or moral, material or ethereal,
according as the sensuous or the spiritual predominates in his nature.
Beckford, of a sensuously poetic nature, having command of vast
wealth, brought his castle in the air down to the ground, and dazzled
his contemporaries with Fonthill Abbey. Not only are Fonthill Abbeys
and all beautiful buildings achieved through the warm action of the
poetic faculty, but all improvements are brought about by its virtue.
Out of this deep, inward, creative power issue all theories and
practice for the bettering of human conditions. All original founders
and discoverers are poets: the most poetic French mind I know is that
of Fourier.
When a mind, having the texture and expansibility to become surcharged
with magnetic effluence, has moreover that æsthetic gift of rhythmic
expression which involves a sense of the beautiful, that is, of the
high and exquisite possibilities of created things,--when such a mind,
under the pressure of inward needs, betakes it to embodying in verse
its imaginations and conceptions, the result is poetry. _Poetry is
thought so inly warmed by creative sensibility as to overflow in
musical cadence._ And when we consider that thought is the gathering
of loose intellectual activity into a fast focus; that creative
sensibility is human feeling refined of its dross, stilled of its
tumultuousness in the glow of the beautiful; that musical cadence is
heard by him who can hearken with such rapt reverence as to catch some
sound of the tread in divine movement, we may apprehend that a genuine
poem implies, for its conception, an illuminated plenitude of mind,
and involves in its production a beatific visionariness.
III.
STYLE.
Thought, act, and speech are of one substance. Where the best things
have been done, the best things have been said. The history of Attica
is richer and more significant than that of her sister-states of old
Greece, and among them her literature is supreme. So of England in
modern Europe. And where good thoughts have been uttered the form of
those will be finest which carry the choicest life. The tree gets its
texture from the quality of its sap. Were I asked what author is the
most profitable to the student of English on account of style, I
should answer, study Shakespeare.
Have something to say, and say it in the best and fewest words, were a
good recipe for style. In this brief precept there are more
ingredients than at first view appear. To have something to say
implies that a man must write out of himself, and not chiefly out of
his memory; and so to write involves much more than many people
are aware of; in order that his style have freshness, which is a
primary need of a good style, the writer's thought must be fresh.
Then, to say his thought in the best and fewest words implies faculty
of choice in words, and faculty of getting rid of all verbal
superfluity; and these two faculties betoken proficiencies and some of
the finer æsthetic forces.
Style itself is a gift (or more properly an issue of several gifts),
not an acquisition; it cannot be taught. As to teaching style to one
with inharmonious or defective natural powers, you might as well
attempt to teach a thrush to sing the songs of the nightingale. To be
sure, like the poetical, or the scientific, or any mental gift, it
requires culture. But style is little helped from without. The most,
as to the form of his utterance, that a writer can get from
others--whether through study of the best masters or through direct
rhetorical instruction--is in the mechanical portion of the art; that
is, how to put sentences together according to relation of clauses,
how by position of words and phrases to avoid obscurity and
awkwardness, and thus make most presentable and accessible what he has
to give out. Even in these superficial lessons success imports
something more than a superficial capacity. These lessons learnt, and
you have still to go behind them for style, whose cradle is within
you. _Le style c'est l'homme même_ (a man's style is his very self),
is the oft-quoted profound sentence of Buffon. Style comes out of the
interior: beneath a genuinely good style are secret springs which give
to the surface its movement and sparkle. Mostly when people talk of
style 't is of the surface; they think not of the depths beneath. In
popularly good styles there are indeed no deep or fine springs
beneath; in Tom Moore's, for example, or Southey's.
Nevertheless there are writers who have more skill and art than others
in presenting agreeably what they have to say, in gracefully shaping
their utterances; they are better endowed with some of the plastic
faculties; they have what Sainte-Beuve calls the genius of style. Tact
and craft enable them to make themselves more readable than some other
writers of more substance; still, they are only capable of so doing by
means of qualities which, however secondary, are interior and fervent,
and the skill imparted by which cannot be acquired except through the
presence of these qualities. This superiority of skill in form
is illustrated by the literature of France in comparison with the
literature of Germany, and even with that of England. The French
follow a precept thus embodied by Béranger: "Perfection of style
should be sought by all those who believe themselves called to diffuse
useful thoughts. Style, which is only the form appropriated to a
subject by art and reflection, is the passport of which every thought
has need in order to circulate, expand, and lodge itself in people's
brains. To neglect style is not to show sufficient love for the ideas
one wishes to make others adopt." And so effective is the following of
such a precept that, through careful devices and manipulating
cleverness, a brilliant success, though transitory is achieved by some
writers who range lightly over surfaces, their thoughts dipping no
deeper than a flat stone thrown to skim along the water, which it
keeps ruffling, making a momentary sprightly splash at each contact,
until, its force being soon spent, it disappears and is seen no more.
The possession of certain mental gifts constitutes a talent for
writing, gifts which, with reference to the great primary powers of
the mind, are secondary. Sainte-Beuve says of the Abbé Gerbet
that he "had naturally the flowers of speech, movement and rhythm of
phrase, measure and choice of expression, even figurative language,
what, in short, makes a talent for writing." The possessor of these
qualifications may, nevertheless, rise only a little above mediocrity.
Of the styles of many, even clever, accomplished writers, one gets a
clear notion from the remark made of a certain polished actress, that
she always played well, never better.
When Sainte-Beuve says _Rien ne vit que par le style_, he asserts in
fact the exclusive privilege of original thought to give permanence to
literary work; for nothing but an interior source can give life to
expression. The inward flow will shape itself adequately and
harmoniously in proportion as it has at full command the auxiliary,
what I have called the plastic literary qualities; but shape itself it
will, effectively and with living force, without the fullest command,
while the readiest mastery over these qualities can never give
vitality to style when are wanting primary resources. Literary
substance which does not shape itself successfully (it may not be with
the fullest success) is internally defective, is insufficient;
for if it throb with life, it will mold a form for its embodiment,
albeit that form, from lack of complete command of the secondary
agents, will not be so graceful or rich as with such command it would
have been. Wordsworth has made to English literature a permanent
addition which is of the highest worth, in spite of notable plastic
deficiencies. A conception that has a soul in it will find itself a
body, and if not a literary body, one furnished by some other of the
fine arts; or, wanting that, in practical enterprise or invention. And
the body or form will be stamped with the inward lineaments of the
man. Style issues from within, and if it does not, it is not style,
but manner. Words get all their force from the thoughts and feelings
behind them. They are necessary media, created, molded, and combined
by mental wants. Picking and polishing words and phrases is
ineffectual without the picking and polishing of the thoughts: below
the surface of words lies that which controls and vivifies style. And
then between the substance, the mental material, and the executive
faculties there must be lively harmony. The executive power is a
purely intellectual composite instrument; the force that
wields it is feeling. For the best style the wielding force must be
fine as well as rich and strong, and the shaping, harmonizing
instrument of superfine temper and smiling willingness.
Style, in writing, is the art of putting into words what you think or
feel, in such a way as to make the best of it--presupposed, that what
you think or feel is worth putting into printed words. There are men
who, without being original or inventive, have still, through strong
understanding and culture, much to say that will profit their
contemporaries; men of a certain mental calibre, of talent, activity,
will, cleverness, of verbal facility and of prominent ambition and in
most cases of audacity, and who by discipline and labor attain to a
style which for their purposes is effective. Of this class Jeffrey,
Brougham, Macaulay are conspicuous examples. Theirs are not winged
minds. They keep to the plane of commonplace; they are never rapt into
an upper sphere of thought, where sentences grow transparent,
illuminated by soulful revelations. All three lack subtlety, the finer
insight, a penetrating perception. The style of such men, even when
most vivacious, is never marked by geniality, by newness of turns, by
imaginative combinations, by rhythmical sweeps, and especially not by
freshness, of all which the fountain is originality, genius,
creativeness. It is related that after several of Carlyle's papers had
appeared in the "Edinburgh Review," Brougham, one of its founders and
controllers, protested that if that man were permitted to write any
more he should cease to be a contributor. And so the pages of the
Review were closed against the best writer it ever had. This arbitrary
proceeding of Brougham is to be mainly accounted for as betraying the
instinct of creeping talent in the presence of soaring genius.
Not less than men of talent men of genius need to cultivate style;
nay, from the copiousness and variousness of their material, and from
its very inwardness, the molds into which it is to be thrown need the
finest care. Coleridge, rich and incomparable as he is, would have
made many of his prose pages still more effective by a studious
supervision; and De Quincey tells us what labor his periods sometimes
cost him. The following advice, given in a letter from Maurice de
Guérin to his sister, may be addressed to all literary aspirants:
"Form for yourself a style which shall be the expression of
yourself. Study our French language by attentive reading, making it
your care to mark constructions, turns of expression, delicacies of
style, but without ever adopting the manner of any master. In the
works of these masters we must learn our language, but we must use it
each in our own fashion."
One of the first constituents of a good style is what Coleridge calls
"progressive transition," which implies a dynamic force, a propulsive
movement, behind the pen. Hazlitt, for example, somewhat lacked this
force, and hence De Quincey is justified to speak of his solitary
flashes of thought, his "brilliancy, seen chiefly in separate
splinterings of phrase or image, which throw upon the eye a vitreous
scintillation for a moment." One of the charms, in a high sense, of
Coleridge's page is that in him this dynamic force was present in
liveliest action. His intellect, ever enkindled by his emotions,
exacted logical sequence, and thus a rapid forward movement is
overspread by a glow of generous feeling, which, being refined by his
poetic sensibility made his style luminous and flowing.
De Quincey, treating of aphoristic writing, says, "Any man [he of
course means any man with good things in him] as he walks
through the streets may contrive to jot down an independent thought, a
short-hand memorandum of a great truth; but the labor of composition
begins when you have to put your separate threads of thought into a
loom; to weave them into a continuous whole; to connect, to introduce
them; to blow them out or expand them; to carry them to a close."
Buffon attached the greatest importance to sequence, to close
dependence, to continuous enchainment. He detested a chopped, jerky
style, that into which the French are prone to fall. Certain it is,
and from obvious causes, that much of the secret of style lies in
aptness of sequence, thought and word, through an irresistible
impulsion and pertinence, leaping forth nimbly, each taking its place
promptly, because naturally and necessarily. Through fusion and close
coherency and dependence, the flow is at once smooth and lively. The
grace as well as the strength of the living physical body depends
much, nay primarily, on the joints. So with the body of a good
writer's thoughts, that is, his mode of utterance. To the linking of
sentences and paragraphs (the links being self-wrought out of inward
sap) is due much of the buoyancy and force of style. The
springiness of the joints depends, in the body, on the quality of its
nervous life; in style, much on the marrow and validity of the
thoughts. By a sprightly stream of thought, fed from a full spring of
feeling, the current of words is kept lively and graceful. Words,
sentences, paragraphs, cannot be held closely, symmetrically,
attractively together, without the unction invisibly distilled from
brisk mental movement, movement starting from sentiment fresh and
true. Soul is the source of style. Not sensibility alone is a
prerequisite for style: the sensibility must be _active_, made active
by the fine aspiring urgency which ever demands the best. A good style
will have the sheen communicated by lubrication from within, not the
gloss of outward rubbing.
That style varies in pitch and tone according to the subject treated
ought to be self-evident. In every page of "The Merry Wives of
Windsor" we recognize Shakespeare not less palpably than in "King
Lear." In his "Recollections of Charles Lamb" De Quincey writes, "Far
be it from me to say one word in praise of those--people of how narrow
a sensibility--who imagine that a simple (that is, according to many
tastes, an unelevated and _unrhythmical_) style--take, for
instance, an Addisonian or a Swiftian style--is _unconditionally_
good. Not so: all depends upon the subject; and there is a style,
transcending these and all other modes of simplicity, by infinite
degrees, and, in the same proportion, impossible to most men, the
rhythmical, the continuous--what in French is called the
_soutenu_--which, to humbler styles stands in the relation of an organ
to a shepherd's pipe. This also finds its justification in its
subject; and the subject which _can_ justify it must be of a
corresponding quality--loftier--and therefore, rare."
I quote De Quincey because he has written more, and more profoundly as
well as more copiously, on style than any writer I know. To this
point,--the adaption of style to subject,--he returns, laying down
with clearness and truth the law which should here govern. In a paper
on Schlosser's "Literary History of the Eighteenth Century" he
reaffirms--what cannot be too strongly insisted on--the falsity of the
common opinion that Swift's style is, for all writers, a model of
excellence, showing how it is only fitted to the kind of subjects on
which Swift wrote, and concluding with this characteristic passage:
"That nearly all the blockheads with whom I have at any time had the
pleasure of conversing upon the subject of style (and pardon me for
saying that men of the most sense are apt, upon two subjects, viz.,
poetry and style, to talk _most_ like blockheads) have invariably
regarded Swift's style not as if _relatively_, (i.e., _given_ a proper
subject), but as if _absolutely_ good--good unconditionally, no matter
what the subject. Now, my friend, suppose the case, that the dean had
been required to write a pendant for Sir Walter Raleigh's immortal
apostrophe to Death, or to many passages in Sir Thomas Brown's
'Religio Medici' and his 'Urn-Burial,' or to Jeremy Taylor's inaugural
sections of his 'Holy Living and Dying,' do you know what would have
happened? Are you aware what sort of a ridiculous figure your poor
bald Jonathan would have cut? About the same that would be cut by a
forlorn scullion or waiter from a greasy eating-house at Rotterdam, if
suddenly called away in vision to act as seneschal to the festival of
Belshazzar the king, before a thousand of his lords."
That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high
excellence ought to be a truism. Through a certain equilibrium among
his faculties, and assiduous literary culture, such a one may
excel colleagues who move on the same bounded plane; but that is all.
From the shallowest utterance, where, thoughts and feelings lying just
below the surface, there can be no strong lights and shadows, no
splendid play in the exposition, styles range, with the men who make
them, through all degrees of liveliness and significance and power, up
to that simple grandeur which conceals a vast volume of thought, and
implies a divine ruling of multiplicity.
In a good style, on whatever degree it stands, there must be a full
marriage between word and thought, so clean an adjustment of
expression to material as to leave no rough edges or nodes. The words
must not be too big or too shiny for the thought; they must not stand
out from the texture, embossing, as it were, the matter. A style can
hardly be too nervous; it can be too muscular, as, for example, was
sometimes that of Michael Angelo in sculpture and painting.
A primary requisite for a good style is that the man and the writer be
one; that is, that the man have a personal feeling for, a free
sympathy with, the theme the writer has taken in hand; his
subject must be fitted to him, and he to his subject. That he be
sincere is not enough; he must be cordial; then he will be magnetic,
attractive. You must love your work to do it well.
A good style is a stream, and a lively stream: it flows ever onward
actively. The worst vice a style can have is languor. With some
writers a full stop is a double full stop: the reader does not get
forward. Much writing consists of little more than sluggish eddies. In
many minds there is not leap enough for a style. Excellence in style
demands three vivacities, and rather exacting ones, for they involve a
somewhat rare mental apportionment; the vivacities of healthy and
poetic feeling, of intellectual nimbleness, and of inviolable
sequence.