Wisdom of Solomon, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Thoughts
of Pascal and Joubert, books that are nothing but collections of
maxims and aphorisms; nor even of books like Bacon’s Essays or Amiel’s
Journal, that come near to falling under the same head. To find a happy
and pregnant sentence in such a place is like taking an apple out of a
dish and eating it at the table; to run upon one in the reading of a
_book_ is like plucking an apple from a wayside tree in the midst of
a half-day ramble, and munching it on the road. The fruit may be as
fair and well-flavored in the first case as in the second, but what a
difference in the relish of it! It is one thing to receive a coin over
the banker’s counter, and another to pick a nugget out of the gravel.
In reading, as well as anywhere else, a man enjoys the thrill of
discovery.
Here, in great part, lies the enduring charm of an author like
Montaigne, who wrote without plan, rambling at his own sweet will,
never sticking to his text, and never so much as dreaming of unity or
anything else that could be called “artistic,” yet making a book to
live forever. As Sainte-Beuve says, you may open it at what page you
will, and be in what mood you may, and you are sure to find a wise
thought expressed in lively and durable phrase, a beautiful meaning
set in a single strong line. And the best of it all is that these fine
sentences, so detachable and memorable, are written like all the rest
of the essay, and are part and parcel of it. No attention is called to
them; they call no attention to themselves. They drop on the page, and
the pen runs on. Seemingly, it was as easy for the writer to set down
a “durable” phrase--done once for all and past all bettering--as to
mention the kind of fish he preferred or any other trivial every-day
matter. His good things are never tainted with smartness, the besetting
vice of sentence-makers in general, nor have they at all the appearance
of things designed to nudge the reader, to keep him awake, as if the
writer had said to himself, “Go to, let us brighten up the discussion a
bit.”
A gift of this sort comes mostly by nature, but no one ever wrote
much and well without arriving at some pretty definite notions as to
the art of writing; and so it was with Montaigne. If his style was
discursive, formless, highly sententious, and yet to an extraordinary
degree familiar, he was not only aware of the fact, but gloried in it.
He loved a natural and plain way of speaking, he tells us; the same
on paper as in the mouth; juicy and sinewy (_succulent et nerveux_),
irregular, incontinuous and bold, every piece a body by itself,--“a
soldier-like style.” Fine words he had no place for. “May I never
use any other language than what is used in the markets of Paris!” he
exclaims. As for mere rhetoric, he held it cheap, as every good writer
does. Word painting, no matter how well done, is “easily obscured by
the lustre of a simple truth.” But a good sentence, a thing worth
saying and well said, he believed to be always in order. “If it is
not good for what went before nor for what comes after, it is good in
itself.” He praises Tacitus for being “full of sentences.” And therein,
perhaps, as in Thoreau’s eulogy of Sir Walter Raleigh, we may see the
author defending his own practice. There is no neater way of speaking
well of ourselves than by complimenting our own special virtues in
the person of another. In truth, however, Montaigne had no need to
apologize even with indirectness. His “good sentences” are not only
good in themselves, but good for what precedes and follows. They are
never stuck on nor thrust in. On the contrary, as has been already
observed, they are sure to be part of the very substance of the essay
itself. You will never find Montaigne writing or retaining a paragraph
for the sake of its snapper, like those authors of whom he said that
they would “go a mile out of their way to run after a fine word.”
There is a natural relation, it would seem, between a quotable style
and a fondness for quoting. If a man’s own thought falls easily
into well-minted, separable phrases, he will almost of course be
appreciative of similar aphoristic turns of speech in the works of
others. So we find Montaigne’s pages bespattered from top to bottom
with extracts from the philosophers and poets of an older time. As
years passed, and successive editions of the book were published, the
quotations grew more and more numerous, till some of the essays seemed
in danger of losing their identity and becoming hardly more than leaves
out of a commonplace book.
And as it was with the Frenchman, so was it with our two Concord
philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were almost as fond of others’
bright things as of their own. And the same may be said of their
contemporary and critic, Lowell, who, like them, was also a master
of the phrase, a putter forth of “stamped sentences,” like gold and
silver coins, as one of his admirers has called them. He, too, is
always offering us a nugget out of another man’s pack. All three of
these men, be it added, borrowed not only with freedom, but with great
advantage to their own work. They had a right to borrow, being in
good measure original in their very quotations, because, as has been
remarked of Montaigne, “they employed them only when they found in them
an idea of their own, or had been struck by them in a new and singular
manner.”
But what a change when we turn to Hawthorne! His work is all of a
piece, woven in his own loom. As nobody quotes him, so he quotes
nobody. Inverted commas are as scarce on his pages as November violets
are in the Concord meadows. You will find them, but you will have to
search for them. On Thoreau’s page they are thick as violets in May.
We were not undertaking to determine rank or to appraise values,
we said, but so much as this we will venture upon suggesting: that
a piece of pure art--“The Scarlet Letter,” if you will--is not on
that ground alone to be considered as worthier in itself, or better
assured of lasting honor, than some work less perfectly constructed,
but, it may be, more nobly inspired. In the final result of things,
literary merit and literary fame are not portioned out by any critical
yardstick. Lowell complained of Thoreau that “he had no artistic power
such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness.”
True enough. It is the same criticism which Carlyle, and Arnold after
him, brought against Emerson; in whose case, also, we need not dispute
the point. But Lowell said further of Thoreau, “His work gives me
the feeling of a sky full of stars;” and again: “As we read him, it
seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own
Montaigne.... Compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even
White’s ‘Selborne,’ seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological
journal in an old almanac.” In other words, Thoreau was not an artist,
but he did something new, and something grandly worth doing. Emerson,
likewise, was not an artist; but the critic who tells us so tells us in
the same breath that Emerson’s essays are the most important work done
in English prose during their century.
Whether Emerson will outlive Hawthorne, or Hawthorne outlive Emerson,
who can say? It would be rash guessing to attempt a prophecy. As for
Thoreau, there are some, perhaps, who would bid higher for his chance
of immortality than for that of either of his two famous townsmen.
Let such things turn out as they may, Emerson and Thoreau have each
given to American literature, and better still to American life,
something that can never be lost, even though their works and their
names together should be forgotten; and they have done this partly
by reason of their very limitations, their making of sentences and
paragraphs--portable wisdom--instead of “artistic bronze statues.”
“Wisdom is the principal thing,” said an ancient writer; and an English
critic and statesman of our own day has uttered the same truth in
more modern fashion. “Aphorism or maxim,” says Mr. John Morley, “let
us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature;
that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most
richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart
from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the
reading of books.”
Yes, and it is one of the objects that men do seek; for the history
of literature proves abundantly that the world keeps a relish for
that which feeds the soul as well as for that which ministers to the
passion for beauty; if it crowns the literary artist, it has a wreath
also for his humbler brother--if he _is_ humbler--the originator and
disseminator of thought. For it is to be considered that a man with a
genius for writing is not therefore a man of original ideas, or indeed,
so far as the necessity of the case goes, of any ideas at all. His gift
may be--nay, perhaps is likely to be--purely artistic and literary, a
faculty for seeing and describing. Thus we read of Sterne that he was
a great author, “not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a
sentence in his writings which can be called a thought, ... but because
of his wonderful sympathy with and wonderful power of representing
simple human nature.” Obviously, it is not to such as he that we are to
go in search of wisdom. The man who furnishes us with that commodity,
the quotable man, be his rank higher or lower, is one who thinks, or,
lacking that, has an instinct for the discovery and expression of
thought,--a man under the friction of whose pen ideas crystallize into
handy and final shape, and so become current coin.
THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY
THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY
Clearness, directness, ease, precision,--these are literary virtues
of a homely and primary sort. Reserve, urbanity, depth, force,
suggestiveness,--these, too, are virtues, and happy the writer who has
them. He is master of his art.
No good workman likes to be praised overmuch for the elementary
qualities. Let some things be taken for granted, or touched upon
lightly. Tell a schoolboy that he writes grammatically,--if you
can,--but not the editor of a newspaper. Almost as well confide to your
banker that you hold him for something better than a thief. “Simplicity
be cursed!” a sensitive writer used to exclaim, as book after book
elicited the same good-natured verdict. “They mean that I am simple,
easily seen through. Henceforth I will be muddy, seeing it is beyond me
to be deep.” But nature is inexorable, and with the next book it was
the same story. Probably there is not a line of his work over which
any two readers ever disputed as to its meaning. In vain shall such a
man dream of immortality. Great books, books to which readers return,
books that win vogue and maintain it, books for the study of which
societies are organized and about which libraries accumulate, must be
of a less flimsy texture,--in his own testy phrase, less “easily seen
through.”
Consider the great classics of all races, the Bibles of the world.
Not one but abounds in dark sayings. What another book the Hebrew
Scriptures would be if the same text could never be interpreted in
more than one way, if some texts could ever be interpreted at all! How
much less matter for preaching! How much less motive for exegetical
research! And withal, how much less appeal to the deepest of human
instincts, the passion for the vague, the far-away, and the mysterious!
All religious teachers, in so far as they are competent and sincere,
address themselves to this instinct. The worthier they are of their
calling, the better do they appreciate the value of paradox and
parable. The greatest of them made open profession of his purpose to
speak over the heads of his hearers; and his followers are still true
to his example in that particular, however they may have improved upon
it in other respects. They no longer encourage evil by turning the
other cheek to the smiter; not many of them foster indolence by selling
all that they have and giving to the poor; but without exception they
speak things hard to be understood. Therein, in part at least, lies
their power; for mankind craves a religion, a revelation of the unseen
and the unprovable, and is not to be put off with simple morality, with
such commonplace and worldly things as honesty, industry, purity, and
brotherly love. No church ever waxed great by the inculcation of these
humble, earthly, every-day virtues.
In literature, the value of half-lights is recognized, consciously or
not, by all who dabble in foreign tongues. Indeed, so far, at least,
as amateurs are concerned, it is one of the chief encouragements to
linguistic studies, the heightened pleasure of reading in a language
but half understood. The imagination is put freshly in play, and
time-worn thoughts and too familiar sentiments are again almost as good
as new. Doudan, writing to a friend in trouble, drops suddenly into
English, with a sentence or two about the universality of misfortune.
“Commonplaces regain their truth in a strange language,” he explains;
“if we complain of ordinary evils, we ought to do it in Latin.” The
hint is worth taking. So long as we have something novel and important
to communicate, we may choose the simplest words. “Clearness is the
ornament of profound thoughts,” says Vauvenargues; but we need not
go quite so far as the same philosopher when he bids us reject all
thoughts that are “too feeble to bear a simple expression.” That would
be to reduce the literary product unduly. Joubert is a more comforting
adviser. “Banish from words all uncertainty of meaning,” he says, “and
you have made an end of poetry and eloquence.” “It is a great art,” he
adds, “the art of being agreeably ambiguous.”
Such tributes to the vague are the more significant as coming from
Frenchmen, who, of all people, may be said to worship lucidity. Let us
add, then, the testimony of one of the younger French writers, a man of
our own day. “Humanity hardly attaches itself with passion to any works
of poetry and art,” says M. Anatole France, “unless some parts of them
are obscure and susceptible of diverse interpretations.” And in another
place in the same volume (“Le Jardin d’Épicure”) we come upon this
fine saying: “What life has of the best is the idea it gives us of an
unknown something which is not in it.” How true that is of literature,
also! The best thing we derive from a book is something that the author
never quite succeeded in putting into it. What good reader (and without
good reading there is no good writing) has not found a glimpse, a
momentary brightness as of something infinitely far off, more exciting
and memorable than whole pages of crystalline description?
Vagueness like this is one of the noblest gifts of a writer. Artifice
cannot compass it. If a man would have it, let him pray for a soul, and
refresh himself continually with dreams and high imaginings. Then if,
in addition, he have genius, knowledge, and literary tact, there may
be hope for him. But even then the page must find the reader.
Of vagueness of a lower order there is always plenty; some of it a
matter of individual temperament, some of it a matter of art, and some
a matter of a want of art. It is not to be despised, perhaps, since
it has utility and a marketable value. It results in the formation of
clubs, and so is promotive of social intercourse. It makes it worth
men’s while to read the same book twice, or even thrice, and so is
of use in relieving the tedium of the world. It renders unspeakable
service to worthy people who would fain have a fine taste in
literature, but for whom, as yet, it is more absorbing to guess riddles
than to read poems; and it is almost as good as a corruption of the
text to the favored few who have an eye for invisible meanings,--men
like the famous French philosopher who discovered extraordinary beauty
in certain profundities of Pascal, which turned out to be errors of a
copyist.
This inferior kind of obscurity, like most things of a secondary
rank, is open to cultivation, although the greater number of those
who profit by such husbandry are slow to acknowledge the obligation.
A bright exception is found in Thoreau. He was one who believed
in telling the truth. “I do not suppose that I have attained to
obscurity,” he writes. But he was too modest by half. He did attain to
it, and in both kinds: sometimes in willful paradox and exaggeration, a
sort of “Come, now, good reader, no falling asleep!” and sometimes, but
less often,--for such visitations are rare with the best of men,--in
some quick, unstudied phrase that opens, as it were, an unsuspected
door within us, and makes us forget for the time being both the author
and his book.
Perhaps it would be true to say that when men are most inspired, their
speech becomes most like Nature’s own,--inarticulate, and so capable of
expressing things inexpressible. What book, what line of verse, ever
evoked those unutterable feelings--feelings beyond even the _thought_
of utterance--that are wakened in us now and then, in divinely
favorable moments, by the plash of waters or the sighing of winds? When
an author does aught of this kind for us, we must love and praise him,
let his shortcomings be what they will. If a man is great enough in
himself, or serviceable enough to us, we need not insist upon all the
minor perfections.
For the rest, these things remain true: language is the work of
the people, and belongs to the people, however lexicographers and
grammarians may codify, and possibly, in rare instances, improve it.
Commonplaces are the staple of literature. The great books appeal
to men as men, not as scholars. A fog is not a cloud, though a man
with his feet in the mud may hug himself and say, “Look, how I soar!”
Preciosity is good for those that like it; they have their reward; but
to set up a conventicle, with passwords and a private creed, is not
to found a religion. In the long run, nothing is supremely beautiful
but genuine simplicity, which may be a perfection of nature or the
perfection of art; and the only obscurity that suits with it and sets
it off is occasional, unexpected, momentary,--a sudden excess of light
that flashes and is gone, surprising the writer first, and afterward
the reader.
IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK
IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK
It is a more or less common habit of Americans to cry out against
the conceit of foreigners, Englishmen especially, who, after a run
through “the States,” publish their impressions of the country. These
outcries--though that may seem too strong a word--are supposed to be
quite independent of the character of the comments in question, whether
favorable or unfavorable. In the tourist’s eyes, Americans may be an
uninteresting, boastful, worldly-minded people. The magnitude of our
lakes may not blind him to the imperfections of our newspapers, and
in spite of Niagara and the prairies, he may esteem our politicians,
for the most part, a vulgar and time-serving set. Whatever criticisms
of this sort he in his unwisdom may feel called upon to express are
likely to have their modicum of truth; at least they would have, if
any one but a foreigner were to utter them. Americans are not slow to
say similar things of each other, and especially of their public men.
Except on the Fourth of July, we are far from constituting anything
fairly to be called a mutual admiration society. The complaint, then,
is not that the tourist offers criticism of such and such a tenor,
but that he takes it upon himself to offer any criticism at all.
What business has he with “impressions of America” after a visit of
a month or two? And even if he has impressions, why should he be so
presumptuous as to print them? A great people cannot be understood
after this haphazard, percursory fashion. True; but the objection is
futile, if for no other reason, because it goes wide of the mark. The
question is not of understanding a people, but of having something to
say about them.
Since the world began, men have traveled, and, having traveled, have
recounted their adventures. The two things go together, and are alike
inevitable. And the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be.
Some authors travel in other men’s books; some travel in the outward
and literal sense of the word; and both tell as good a story as
they can of the wonders they have seen. It is only here and there
a philosopher who can sit at home and spin his web out of his own
insides. Thoreau delighted to talk as if Concord were the centre and
sum of the world. Everything grew there, everything happened there. Why
should a Concord man ever stir beyond the town limits? Sure enough!
And yet what are Thoreau’s books but records of his journeys: “A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;” “The Maine Woods;” “Cape Cod;”
“A Yankee in Canada;” “Excursions.” With him, as with the rest of us,
it was the volume he had just read that he liked to talk about; it was
the country he had just seen that his pen naturally busied itself with
describing. Even his one Concord book is really a book of travels. To
write it he went into camp, that he might study the world on its off
side, as it were, and feel his life new.
In other words, for here we come to the pith of the matter, it is
the fresh impression that is vivid, and therefore will have itself
expressed. We may almost say that it is the only thing that can be
expressed. This is what Bagehot had in mind. “Those who know a place
or a person best,” he said, “are not those most likely to describe it
best; their knowledge is so familiar that they cannot bring it out in
words.” And this truth, partial though it be, and, like all truth,
liable to misunderstanding and abuse, is the scribbling tourist’s
encouragement, and, if he be supposed to need it, his perennial
justification.
More than one scholar has failed to produce the great work that was
expected of him,--that he of all men seemed elected to produce,--simply
because he put off the doing of it till his knowledge should be
something like complete. So monumental a structure could not be too
carefully prepared for, he thought: a conscientiousness most scholarly
and honorable, but deadly in its result; for by the time he had laid
in his stores, he had lost the freshness of his enthusiasm; a palsy
had stricken his pen; and by and by the night came, and his knowledge
perished with him.
Writers of travels, whatever their shortcomings, fall into no error
of this kind. They strike while the iron is hot; and whether their
subject be Africa or America, that is the true method. The value
of such literature depends on the observer’s alertness, fairness,
good sense, and general competency, rather than upon the length and
leisureliness of his journey. Time of itself never did much for a blind
man’s vision; and to come back to our Englishman, he may run through
America in a month, or spend a year in his note-taking, and in either
event he will discover only what he came prepared to discover. If the
photographic plate is sensitive enough, it may need but the briefest
exposure. And anyhow, let the picture turn out never so badly, no
irreparable harm is done. The object itself is not altered because its
portrait is drawn awry. What we have to dread is not the foreigner’s
unfair opinion of us, but our unfair opinion of the foreigner. It is
our own thoughts that do us injury, not other men’s thoughts about
us. And if this be too rare an atmosphere for comfortable every-day
breathing, we may come at a similar result on lower ground. Who are we,
that we should be treated better than the rest of the world? Must our
feelings never be hurt, because we are Americans? Have we never learned
that it is a man’s part to be thankful for intelligent and friendly
criticism, and to bear all other in silence?
Let visitors to “the States,” then, be “impressed;” and let them print
their impressions, the more the better. Some of them will be shallow,
some of them unkindly and prejudiced, some, perhaps, ignorantly and
foolishly eulogistic. We shall be blamed for faults that are beyond
our mending, and praised for virtues that were never ours,--if such
virtues there be. At best, the criticism and the comment will fall a
little short of inerrancy; for perfection is one of the lost arts, even
in England; but in the sum many true things will be said, and in the
end the cause of truth will be forwarded; and possibly, if a thousand
English pens are thus employed, one of them may happen to make an
immortal picture of the Great Republic as it now is, and as it will
not be, for better or worse, a hundred years hence. Thus it is, at any
rate, by one lucky experimenter out of many, that immortal work is
done.