Father Payne had told me that my writing was becoming too juicy and too
highly-scented. "You mustn't hide the underlying form," he said; "have
plenty of plain spaces. This sort of writing is only for readers who want
to be vaguely soothed and made to feel comfortable by a book--it's a
stimulant, it's not a food!"
"Yes," I said with a sigh, "I suppose you are right."
"Up to a certain point, I am right," he replied, "because you are in
training at present--and people in training have to do abnormal things: you
can't _live_ as if you were in training, of course; but when you begin
to work on your own account, you must find your own pace and your own
manner: and even now you needn't agree with me unless you like."
I determined, however, that I would give him something very different next
time. He suggested that I should write an essay on a certain writer of
fiction. I read the novels with great care, and I then produced the driest
and most technical criticism I could. I read it aloud to Father Payne a
month later. He heard it in silence, stroking his beard with his left hand,
as his manner was. When I had finished, he said: "Well, you have taken my
advice with a vengeance; and as an exercise--indeed, as a
_tour-de-force_--it is good. I didn't think you had it in you to
produce such a bit of anatomy. I think it's simply the most uninteresting
essay I ever heard in my life--chip, chip, chip, the whole time. It won't
do you any harm to have written it, but, of course, it's a mere caricature.
No conceivable reason could be assigned for your writing it. It's like the
burial of the dead--ashes to ashes, dust to dust!"
"I admit," I said, "that I did it on purpose, to show you how judicious I
could be."
"Oh yes," he said, "I quite realise that--and that's why I admire it. If
you had produced it as a real thing, and not by way of reprisal, I should
think very ill of your prospects. It's like the work of an analytical
chemist--I tell you what it's like, it's like the diagnosis of the symptoms
of some sick person of rank in a doctor's case-book! But, of course, you
know you mustn't write like that, as well as I do. There must be some
motive for writing, some touch of admiration and sympathy, something you
can show to other people which might escape them, and which is worth while
for them to see. In writing--at present, at all events--one can't be so
desperately scientific and technical as all that. I suppose that some day,
when we treat human thought and psychology scientifically, we shall have to
dissect like that; but even so, it will be in the interests of science, not
in the interests of literature. One must not confuse the two, and no doubt,
when we begin to analyse the development of human thought, its heredity,
its genesis and growth, we shall have a Shelley-culture in a test-tube, and
we shall be able to isolate a Browning-germ: but we haven't got there yet."
"In that case," I said, "I don't really see what was so wrong with my last
essay."
"Why, it was a mere extemporisation," said Father Payne; "a phrase
suggested a phrase, a word evoked a lot of other words--there was no real
connection of thought. It was pretty enough, but you were not even roving
from one place to another, you were just drifting with the stream. Now this
last essay is purely business-like. You have analysed the points--but
there's no beauty or pleasure in it. It is simply what an engineer might
say to an engineer about the building of a bridge. Mind, I am not finding
fault with your essay. You did what you set out to do, and you have done it
well. I only say there is not any conceivable reason why it should have
been written, and there is every conceivable reason why it should not be
read."
"It was just an attempt," I said, "to see the points and to disentangle
them."
"Yes, yes," said Father Payne; "I see that, and I give you full credit for
it. But, after all, you must look on writing as a species of human
communication. The one reason for writing is that the writer sees something
which other people overlook, perceives the beauty and interest of it, gets
behind it, sees the quality of it, and how it differs from other similar
things. If the writer is worth anything, his subject must be so interesting
or curious or beautiful to himself that he can't help setting it down. The
motive of it all must be the fact that he is interested--not the hope of
interesting other people. You must risk that, though the more you are
interested, the better is your chance of interesting others. Then the next
point is that things mustn't be presented in a cold and abstract light--you
have done that here--it must be done as you see it, not as a photographic
plate records it: and that is where the personality of the artist comes in,
and where writers are handicapped, according as they have or have not a
personal charm. That is the unsolved mystery of writing--the personal
charm: apart from that there is little in it. A man may see a thing with
hideous distinctness, but he may not be able to invest it with charm: and
the danger of charm is that some people can invest very shallow, muddled,
and shabby thinking with a sort of charm. It is like a cloak, if I may say
so. If I wear an old cloak, it looks shabby and disgraceful, as it is. But
if I lend it to a shapely and well-made friend, it gets a beauty from the
wearer. There are men I know who can tell me a story as old as the hills,
and yet make it fresh and attractive. Look at that delicious farrago of
nonsense and absurdity, Ruskin's _Fors Clavigera_. He crammed in
anything that came into his head--his reminiscences, scraps out of old
dreary books he had read, paragraphs snipped out of the papers. There's no
order, no sequence about it, and yet it is irresistible. But then Ruskin
had the charm, and managed to pour it into all that he wrote. He is always
_there_, that whimsical, generous, perverse, affectionate, afflicted,
pathetic creature, even in the smallest scrap of a letter or the dreariest
old tag of quotation. But you and I can't play tricks like that. You are
sometimes there, I confess, in what you write, while I am never there in
anything that I write. What I want to teach you to do is to be really
yourself in all that you write."
"But isn't it apt to be very tiresome," said I, "if the writer is always
obtruding himself?"
"Yes, if he obtrudes himself, of course he is tiresome," said Father Payne.
"But look at Ruskin again. I imagine, from all that I read about him, that
if he was present at a gathering, he was the one person whom everyone
wanted to hear. If he was sulky or silent, it was everyone's concern to
smoothe him down--if _only_ he would talk. What you must learn to do
is to give exactly as much of yourself as people want. But it must be a
transfusion of yourself, not a presentment, I don't imagine that Ruskin
always talked about himself--he talked about what interested him, and
because he saw five times as much as anyone else saw in a picture, and
about three times as much as was ever there, it was fascinating: but the
primary charm was in Ruskin himself. Don't you know the curious delight of
seeing a house once inhabited by anyone whom one has much admired and
loved? However dull and commonplace it is, you keep on saying to yourself,
'That was what his eyes rested on, those were the books he handled; how
could he bear to have such curtains, how could he endure that wallpaper?'
The most hideous things become interesting, because he tolerated them. In
writing, all depends upon how much of what is interesting, original,
emphatic, charming in yourself you can communicate to what you are writing.
It has got to _live_; that is the secret of the commonplace and even
absurd books which reviewers treat with contempt, and readers buy in
thousands. They have _life!_"
"But that is very far from being art, isn't it?" I said.
"Of course!" said Father Payne, "but the use of art, as I understand it, is
just that--that all you present shall have life, and that you should learn
not to present what has not got life. Why I objected to your last essay was
because you were not alive in it: you were just echoing and repeating
things: you seemed to me to be talking in your sleep. Why I object to this
essay is that you are too wide awake--you are just talking shop."
"I confess I rather despair," I said.
"What rubbish!" said Father Payne; "all I want you to do is to _live_
in your ideas--make them your own, don't just slop them down without having
understood or felt them. I'll tell you what you shall do next. You shall
just put aside all this dreary collection of formulae and scalpel-work, and
you shall write me an essay on the whole subject, saying the best that you
feel about it all, not the worst that a stiff intelligence can extract from
it. Don't be pettish about it! I assure you I respect your talent very
much. I didn't think it was in you to produce anything so loathsomely
judicious."