redundancies and shapeless prolixities; the man who writes the second is
trying to produce what he believes to be “literature” by means of imagery
and rhythmical movement. Sir Arthur says that the greatest propagators of
Jargon are public bodies, politicians, and so on; but he recognizes that
journalists also use it. The two things, in fact, are often seen in one
article. I conceive that there might be passages which would fall into
either of Sir Arthur’s classes. But there is a clear difference between
bad sentences produced by an effort to say something and those produced
by an effort to say something vividly. All bad writers, however, have
common defects, and these are dealt with in other chapters.
Every one who has thought about the art at all has discovered for himself
the truths that Sir Arthur tabulates. One must aim at accuracy (a word
that covers almost everything that is needful) and at clarity; one must,
normally, prefer the concrete to the abstract word, and the short word to
the long; and one must avoid the superfluous adjective. How well we know
these rules; how certain we are of their validity; how feebly we struggle
to obey them! At all times the ready-made sentence, the makeshift
epithet, the pot-shot image must have been ready to the hand. In the
present age, when we live in a honeycomb of print and begin each day by
exposing ourselves, before, during, or after breakfast, to masses of the
weakest English we can find, the job of writing well is more difficult
than ever. Our fluency is the measure of our accursed memory. We have
bales of phrases ready for every experience we describe; our pigeon-holes
are stuffed with dead metaphors and bogus synonyms; and we are always
ready to say in six words what ought to be said in two. Every time we
sit down at a desk or open our lips to speak, the nymphs Jargonia and
Journalesia, besieging us as the sylphs besieged St. Anthony, hold out
their hands full of glittering treasures which will save us the trouble
of thinking. Usually we do not even see them; we find the fatal gifts
in our hands and employ them without remembering their origin. And the
descent to hell is rapid.
It is good to revise: to correct, to improve, and to delete. Few, even of
the most careful writers, find their proof-sheets free from trite and
superfluous words which they would be ashamed to publish. It is better
still to think long before writing, to make sure that one’s thoughts
are clear-cut before one gives them a visible form. That habit it is
a writer’s duty to acquire. But it does not do to be incessantly and
acutely conscious of the qualities of good writing and the difficulty
of securing them. That way madness lies. Sometimes, to a man who broods
overmuch on these things, every phrase will appear a cliché, and every
word a dummy. “God help me!” he will moan, “I have called the sun
‘bright’ and the grass ‘green’! Millions of men before me have written
‘bright sun’ and ‘green grass.’ I know I did not think freshly and
independently _at_ these objects. I put the adjectives down mechanically.
I have merely heard that the grass was green. Why haven’t I looked at it
through my own eyes? If a real writer looked at it, I don’t for a moment
suppose that its greenness would be the attribute which would impinge
most forcibly upon him. Very likely it isn’t green at all.” This, I
say, does not do. I don’t suggest that there is anything peculiar about
grass which should make a novel statement about it impossible. In fact,
Swinburne said that grass is hair, and Mr. Chesterton has very probably
said that it is red. I merely use “green grass” as an example of the sort
of thing that an exaggerated fastidiousness might lead a man to question
in his own work.
There remains one property of good prose that no amount of painstaking
or instruction can produce. That is rhythm. It is, indeed, remarkable
that one of the most elaborate analyses of prose rhythms hitherto made
was made by a writer whose own prose is anything but musical. Either
Providence has given a man an ear or it has not; if it has not, he will
not write great prose. But his prose will be better in proportion as
he obeys the principles of good writing as “Q.” enunciates them. One
suggestion more might be useful for him. That is, that he will be well
advised in making his uneuphonious sentences short if he desires his
writing to be an efficient instrument of persuasion.
Woodland Creatures
“Parnassus in Piccadilly,” is the headline I see in my paper. Follows an
account of a “séance” promoted by Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the
Star and Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works of their own to an
audience of four hundred who had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house
a large concourse watched the poets arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir
O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de-la Mare,
Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, who is described as looking
like “one of his own woodland creatures.” I read that one of the reciters
intoned, that another was bluff, and that a third ought to get somebody
else to read for him; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, sat with his
head buried in his hands until the arrival of the first comic turn, Mr.
Belloc’s. But I wish I had been there: for the account does not tell me
how it was really done.
Did the poets sit in the audience and march up to the platform one by
one as their turns came? Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in
singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion of the wings when
ten minutes was up? Or did they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the
platform, the whole dozen of them in a semicircle, listening to, and
discreetly applauding, each other’s efforts. I am sorry I missed it. Some
of them will have been exalted by a sense of the holiness of their work;
their eyes will have looked out across the audience with a prophetic and
otherworldly fire. Others will have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a
table was thoughtfully provided) what to do with their feet. And one or
two, I think, will have been preoccupied with the control of their own
faces, which, on such an occasion, must have “strained at the leash of
dignified deportment.”
Why is it that so many people feel awkward when they are present at a
public recitation by a poet of his own verse; and why should writers
shrink from such recitations? Amusement on such occasions is closely
allied to sheepishness: both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness,
a sense that “the fitness of things” is being violated. We are
accustomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the reading by
an interpreter who is not a creator, and who is not exposing his heart
in public: the prize child and the local elocutionist who declaims
Tennyson’s _Revenge_, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air when
he comes to the part about the pinnace which is like a bird. But our
poets themselves have not recited much. It was not always so. “’Omer
smote his bloomin’ lyre” in public; he had nowhere else to smite it,
for he (presumably) could not write, and his audiences could not read.
Every composer of tribal lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were
_Lieder ohne Worte_) to the Druidic harpists, sang his compositions to
his admiring fellows without embarrassment; troubadours and mediæval
laureates had no objection at all to public recitation. Most foreigners,
one supposes, do not feel so strongly as we do about it now; but the
timidity of Englishmen in the matter is very pronounced. I am sure that
nothing short of the needs of a War Fund would have induced some of the
Piccadilly performers to face the ordeal.
It is all a part of our national reserve, that very reserve which,
perhaps, accounts for the greatness and volume of our poetry. In poetry
our feelings find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our finest
sentiments and our profoundest emotions. We don’t mind putting them into
books and then running round the corner out of sight. But we dislike
unbosoming them _viva voce_ in the actual physical presence of strangers.
Our dislike of “scenes” covers equally the public row in a restaurant and
the public demonstration of our yearnings after virtue and the stirrings
of our hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to the Atlantic at
night. We sit bolt upright at concerts; look at pictures with our mouths
set like vices; and observe “Yes, very nice” as, with wistfulness in our
breasts, we stand on a hill and look at a wooded panorama under the
moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs
and says it looks like a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the
admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world. So, if
somebody gets up to recite his most intimate feelings, we feel it as
almost an indecency. He is usually bashful about it himself, and unable
therefore to recite with that abandonment which will do his poem justice.
The audience, at least that part of it which is most intelligent and
self-conscious, feels as if it were intruding. It is like eavesdropping
or opening a stranger’s letters. And everybody is conscious of the
national titter in the background. When the authors of Prize Poems at the
Universities give the official reading of their verses, their friends
invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. Undergraduates have still
some naturalness. They titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in
silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter and it is still more
reserve that suppresses it; just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers
sing, not invocations to England, home, or glory, but comic songs about
cowardice and death.
The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly varied in accordance with
each writer’s tastes and talents, is invariably repeated when the
character of English people is under discussion. But it may be that, at
any rate in our attitude towards poetry, we are changing. In the last
four or five years the habit of public readings has been growing; and
some of our poets have grown quite addicted to them. This may be a time
of transition: if the enthusiasts for recitation keep at it hard enough,
people’s constraint may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite an
ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand on a platform and, with all
the passion he can release and all the vocal modulation he can command,
chant his lyrics to congregations which will yield themselves to him with
all the spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and ejaculations,
of a Welsh revivalist’s converts. It is a commonplace that poetry
gains by being spoken; and that if verse were always read and never
recited, poets would be in danger of getting out of touch with natural
speech-rhythms. We could do with a little less amusement and a little
more excitement; and we might as well, if cowardice or a sense of humour
are the only things that hold us back, hold and attend public readings
until we are as unselfconscious about them as we are about church
services or political meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not
invariably read well, and that few persons with the taste for standing
on a platform and declaiming are competent to take an author’s place as
reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the inspired reader of
other people’s verse; but the understanding, the inclination, and the
voice cannot be expected to come often together. When the author himself
is reciting you can at least be certain that the speaker—unless he is a
very “advanced” poet indeed—understands the work which he is repeating.
With other performers one always has to take one’s chance. From the
professional reciter God save us all.
Other People’s Books
Like most people, I possess a number of books which I have not read. I
am not referring to volumes, such as the _Speculum Morale_ of Vincent of
Beauvais or the commentary of Œcolampadius on St. John’s Gospel, which
I bought merely because they looked pleasant and which nobody on earth
could be expected to read. I mean books in English and of comparatively
recent date. There is, for example, Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_, for
which, in a weak moment, I paid some shillings with the feeling that,
as a cogitative being, I ought not leave so notable a stone unturned.
The feeling passed and never came back. And there is Ranke’s _History of
the Popes_—up to the present undisturbed by me; there are _The Last Days
of Pompeii_, _Romola_, _Vittoria_, Carlyle’s essays on Burns and Scott,
_What Maisie knew_, _What Katy did_, and dozens of other modern works,
some of which, if I live, I shall certainly read, and others of which, I
am sure, I shall never begin. But it makes no difference. Whether he has
read them or not, a man’s own books get, in a manner, stale to him. If a
book remains for years unopened on one’s shelves it becomes increasingly
difficult to read it. Yet if one finds another edition of it in somebody
else’s house one may fly to it, and, under the same conditions, one may
read or re-read almost anything one finds.
So it is, at the moment, with me. I am in a place previously unknown to
me. It is bestrewn with books; and, penned to the house by the brilliant
summer weather, I have been doing some miscellaneous reading. For one
thing I have gone solidly once more through Mr. Thomas Hardy’s verse. How
extraordinarily good it is! And how remarkably he has gone on improving,
especially as a metrist. But more than ever, after a heavy dose of these
compressed statements of his point of view, one realizes his determined
and unmitigated gloom. It is at its densest in _Wessex Poems_, and in
places one laughs outright at it. He illustrated the book himself, his
drawing is naïve, and the sketch of two floors of a church, the pews
(and two lovers) above, and the skulls and cross-bones below, has an “I
_will_ be grim at all costs” air about it that robs it of all its horror.
The story attached is a neat one. The man is a consumptive about to die;
he asks the woman if she loves him? She falsely says “Yes” in order to
brighten his last hours. He dies, and her life is ever after blighted
because she cannot reconcile herself to a Universe in which the telling
of such lies is a moral obligation. There is another small drama in which
a woman, maltreated by her husband, dies, telling her old lover that
she wishes she had married him and that her child could have been his
child, and asking him to see that the brutal husband does not ill-treat
the child. The brutal husband remarries and does ill-treat the child. One
day he finds the lover mourning on the dead wife’s grave, and demands
by what right he is there. The lover, remembering the death-bed remark
and suddenly seeing a chance of saving the child, says that he has every
right to be there as he was really the father of the child. His supposed
offspring is then left on his doorstep, to be looked after carefully,
and he spends his time wondering whether he was justified in telling,
etc. Probably these stories, if expanded into novels, might convince; as
narrative poems they do not; and when they are squeezed into the brief
compass of the _Satires of Circumstance_ they are grotesquely Life as
Thomas Hardy makes it and not Life as Thomas Hardy sees it.
It is a little bold in these days to admit that one hasn’t read the
whole of Mr. Conrad’s works, but until this week I had never laid hands
on _Almayer’s Folly_. It was his first book. In his _Reminiscences_ he
gives an account of how it was begun, in a Pimlico lodging-house, when
he was a sea captain and carried about the ocean for five years until
(when he was thirty-five) he finished it. When, half-done and laid by,
it was yellowing and mouldering, he showed it to his first reader, a
Cambridge man going to Australia for his health, and asked him if it was
worth completing. The passenger, with a nice economy of words, answered
“Distinctly,” and Captain Conrad was thus encouraged to proceed. I had
read all this before, and also the novelist’s statement that before
this he had not attempted literature and had hardly ever written even a
letter—though I suppose there must have been an occasional entry in a
log. I have certainly been surprised by the craftsmanship of _Almayer’s
Folly_. Not only is the structure good, but the writing, except in one
or two places, is astonishingly finished, accurate, and restrained. It
is absurdly unlike a first book. Its weakness, as it appears to me, lies
in the dullness of the principal character. It is difficult to keep up
one’s interest in a person whose main characteristic is his impotence.
But it doesn’t matter so much here as it might, for the subsidiary story
of Dain and Nina is very fascinating, and the real hero, after all, is
none of the people, white or Malay, but the Bornean river (its topography
is not always clear to me) on whose overgrown banks they all live and the
changes of which, night and day, are described with marvellous eloquence
and certainty.
Peacock
Finally, after various minor excursions, I have settled down to the
works of Thomas Love Peacock, of whom I had read nothing before except
some poems. Why? I don’t know, but I think his name has vaguely
repelled me. Anyhow, I am thankful now that I have been able to come
fresh to Peacock’s novels. He has a few devotees, but it is surprising
that so admirable a writer is not more read. _Nightmare Abbey_ and
_Headlong Hall_ are not great masterpieces, but they are certainly small
masterpieces. They belong to the class of intellectual comedy to which
_Candide_, and, in some measure, _Rasselas_ belong; in fact, they must
certainly have been modelled on _Candide_. They are burlesques of oneself
and one’s friends, and every other discussing, theorizing person and his
friends. Charlatans of all kinds, literary, political, ecclesiastical,
and scientific, and philosophers of all kinds from the man who believes
that upward progress is inevitable to the man who believes that downward
progress is undeniable, from the secret revolutionary conspirator to
the professional sceptic; he gets them all in, quintessentializes their
doctrines into exquisitely flowing prose, and knocks their heads together
with charming ruthlessness. Any extract will illustrate the flow of his
dialogue:
“‘The anatomy of the human stomach,’ said Mr. Escot, ‘and the
formation of the teeth, clearly place man in the class of
fungivorous animals.’
“‘Many anatomists,’ said Mr. Foster, ‘are of a different
opinion, and agree in discerning the characteristics of the
carnivorous classes.’
“‘I am no anatomist,’ said Mr. Jenkinson, ‘and cannot decide
where doctors disagree; in the meantime, I conclude that man is
omnivorous, and on that conclusion I act.’
“‘Your conclusion is truly orthodox,’ said the Reverend Doctor
Gaster; ‘indeed, the loaves and fishes are typical of a mixed
diet, and the practice of the Church in all ages shows——’
“‘That it never loses sight of the loaves and fishes,’ said Mr.
Escot.”
If loud asseveration on my part sends to Peacock a few people who have
not tried him before, I shall feel that the recent rain has not descended
in vain.
Wordsworth’s Personal Dullness
The Strange Case of William Wordsworth is to me of perennial interest,
and I have just emerged from several days’ burrowing under Professor C.
G. Harper’s two enormous volumes entitled _William Wordsworth, His Life,
Works, and Influence_. It is a conscientious and valuable piece of work,
very fully documented, and containing much out-of-the-way information
and a great deal of sensible, if not always illustrious, criticism.
The information may perhaps be a little too ample for the weaker
brethren. The map (showing lakes, mountain ranges (brown) and so on)
of Wordsworth’s country with which we open gives the clue to Professor
Harper’s exhaustive method. Every procurable date of Wordsworth’s
continental programme is copied out; and we are even supplied with the
winter and summer timetables of the Grammar School at Hawkshead which he
attended and at which (as Professor Harper rather sententiously observes)
an education different in kind, but perhaps not inferior in quality,
to that supplied by Eton was bestowed upon him. New light is thrown on
certain incidents in his career; his “circle” is elaborately described;
and a very charming picture is given of his sister Dorothy. But the old
problem of Wordsworth’s defects remains much where it did.
It is a commonplace that Wordsworth is the most uneven of great poets.
Every textbook writer tells one that when he was inspired he was a
giant, that when he was not he wrote maundering doggerel, and that he
himself never knew when he was and when he was not at his best. _The
Idiot Boy_ has been held up to the ridicule of generations—beyond its
deserts perhaps. The point was most forcibly put by J. K. Stephen when he
wrote a parody of Wordsworth’s “Two voices are there,” saying that one
of the voices was that of the sea, etc., and the other that of “an old
half-witted sheep.” But a thing less frequently faced, and never, as far
as I know, properly explained, is his personal lack of attractiveness.
Flippant persons may be met who dismiss him as “a pompous old dullard”;
but, generally speaking, whenever one hears such a remark it comes from
some one who openly confesses that he cannot stand Wordsworth’s poetry at
any price, and that he has very seldom attempted to read it. The people
who are in difficulties are those (and I am among them) who agree without
qualification that Wordsworth is our greatest poet since Milton, but
who cannot sincerely say that they are drawn towards him as a man. If
they—any one who does not feel like this is happy and I do not speak for
him—pretend to be fond of him their pretence is glaring. If they do not
stick up for him they feel that they are being faithless to a poet who
still stands in need of all the propagandists he can get. It is not easy
to face the truth about him even in the solitude of one’s own chamber.
But, by heaven, he _is_ a dull man!
“There was a boy” (as Wordsworth would himself begin) who at one time
used nightly to dine in hall under a large oil-painting of the poet.
In this painting Wordsworth was represented sitting on a rock against
a landscape background which was an agreeable and symbolical blend of
wildness and tranquillity. The poet was clad in broadcloth; he held a
book in his hand; his face was smooth and pink; and his mild eye surveyed
the spectator as though the latter were a lamb about to receive a pat
of the hand and his blessing. There he sat, meditative and benevolent,
while the soup gave place to the fish and the fish to the beef; and
when one had drained off the last dregs of one’s beer one went off
still conscious of that meditative and benevolent eye. It became almost
maddening. Every other great English poet had something fascinating about
him. Even Milton, in spite of certain unsociable qualities, had a certain
attractive force, a touch of the virulent, and the scars of suffering.
But this Wordsworth! His genuine philanthropy was unquestionable. His
portrait might, one thought, be that of a pioneer of the Anti-Slave
Trade Agitation, or an inventor of Sunday Schools, or an endower of Bands
of Hope. But not a poet; oh, not a poet!