It has been said that novel-writing is a much finer art in our day
than it was in the time of Scott, or of Dickens and Thackeray,--finer,
I think, because it is in the hands of finer-strung, more daintily
equipped men; but would one dare to say it is a greater art? One may
admit all that is charged about Scott’s want of style, his diffuseness
and cumbrousness, and his tedious descriptions, and still justly
claim for him the highest literary honors. He was a great nature, as
Goethe said, and we come into vital contact with that great nature
in his romances. He was not deficient in the larger art that knows
how to make a bygone age live again to the imagination. He himself
seems to have deprecated his “big bow-wow” style in comparison with
the exquisite touches of Jane Austen. But no fineness of workmanship,
no deftness of handling, can make up for the want of a large, rich,
copious human endowment. I think we need to remember this when we
compare unfavorably such men as Dickens and Thackeray with the cleverer
artists of our own day. Scott makes up to us for his deficiencies in
the matter of style by the surpassing human interest of his characters
and incidents, their relations to the major currents of human life.
His scenes fill the stage of history, his personages seem adequate to
great events, and the whole story has a certain historic grandeur and
impressiveness. There is no mistaking a great force, a great body, in
literature any more than there is in the physical world; in Scott we
have come upon a great river, a great lake, a great mountain, and we
are more impressed by it than by the lesser bodies, though they have
many more graces and prettinesses.
Frederic Harrison, in a recent address on style, is cautious in
recommending the young writer to take thought of his style. Let him
rather take thought of what he has to say; in turning his ideal
values into the coin of current speech he will have an exercise in
style. If he has no ideal values, then is literature barred to him.
Let him cultivate his sensibilities; make himself, if possible, more
quickly responsive to life and nature about him; let him try to see
more clearly and feel more keenly, and connect his vocabulary with
his most radical and spontaneous self. Style can never come from the
outside,--from consciously seeking it by imitating the manner of
favorite authors. It comes, if at all, like the bloom upon fruit, or
the glow of health upon the cheek, from an inner essential harmony and
felicity.
In a well known passage Macaulay tells what happened to Miss Burney
when she began to think about her style, and fell to imitating Dr.
Johnson; how she lost the “charming vivacity” and “perfectly natural
unconsciousness of manner” of her youthful writings, and became modish
and affected. She threw away her own style, which was a “tolerably good
one,” and which might “have been improved into a very good one,” and
adopted “a style in which she could attain excellence only by achieving
an almost miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could
cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.”
It is giving too much thought to style in the more external and
verbal aspects of it, which I am here considering, that leads to
the confounding of style with diction, and that gives rise to the
“stylist.” The stylist shows you what can be done with mere words. He
is the foliage plant of the literary flower garden. An English college
professor has recently exploited him in a highly wrought essay on
Style. Says our professor, “The business of letters is twofold, to find
words for meaning and to find meaning for words.” It strikes me that
the last half of this proposition is not true of the serious writer, of
the man who has something to say, but is true only of what is called
the stylist, the man who has been so often described as one having
nothing to say, which he says extremely well. The stylist’s main effort
is a verbal one, to find meaning for words; he does not wrestle with
ideas, but with terms and phrases; his thoughts are word-begotten and
are often as unsubstantial as spectres and shadows.
The stylist cultivates words as the florist cultivates flowers, and
a new adjective or a new collocation of terms is to him what a new
chrysanthemum or a new pansy is to his brother of the forcing house.
He is more an European product than an American. London and Paris
abound in men who cultivate the art of expression for its own sake, who
study how to combine words so as to tickle the verbal sense without
much reference to the value of the idea expressed. Club and university
life, excessive library culture--a sort of indoor or hothouse literary
atmosphere--foster this sort of thing.
French literature can probably show more stylists than English, but
the later school of British writers are not far behind in the matter
of studied expression. Professor Raleigh, from whose work on style I
quoted above, often writes forcibly and suggestively; but one cannot
help but feel, on finishing his little volume, that it is more the work
of a stylist than of a thinker. This is the opening sentence: “Style,
the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that
handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements
of speech.” Does not one faintly scent the stylist at the start? Later
on he says: “In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that
compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of
their individual scope,--bringing with them, if they be torn away too
quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association.” Does
not the stylist stand fully confessed here? That he may avoid these
“cumbrous fragments” that will stick to words when you suddenly pull
them up by the roots, “a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts,
and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his
encumbrance.” The lust of expression, the conjuring with mere words, is
evident. “He is a poor stylist,” says our professor, “who cannot beg
half a dozen questions in a single epithet, or state the conclusion
he would fain avoid in terms that startle the senses into clamorous
revolt.”
What it is in one that starts into “clamorous revolt” at such verbal
gymnastics as are shown in the following sentences I shall not try to
define, but it seems to me it is something real and legitimate. “A
slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism in the common
turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have shaken off
the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a select
audience of ticket holders with closed doors. A single natural phrase
of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel
parlance authorizes readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and
at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa
and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed
sunshine.”
Amiel says of Renan that science was his material rather than his
object; his object was style. Yet Renan was not a stylist in the sense
in which I am using the word. His main effort was never a verbal
one, never an effort to find meaning for words; he was intent upon
his subject; his style was vital in his thought, and never took on
airs on its own account. You cannot in him separate the artist from
the thinker, nor give either the precedence. All writers with whom
literature is an art aim at style in the sense that they aim to present
their subject in the most effective form,--with clearness, freshness,
force. They become stylists when their thoughts wait upon their words,
or when their thoughts are word-begotten. Such writers as Gibbon, De
Quincey, Macaulay, have studied and elaborate styles, but in each the
matter is paramount and the mind finds something solid to rest upon.
“The chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer,” says
Professor Raleigh, is “the necessity at all times and at all costs
to mean something,” or to find meaning for words. This no doubt is a
hard task. The trouble begins when one has the words first. To invoke
ideas with words is a much more difficult experience than the reverse
process. But probably all true writers have something to say before
they have the desire to say it, and in proportion as the thought is
vital and real is its expression easy.
When I meet the stylist, with his straining for verbal effects, I love
to recall this passage from Whitman. “The great poet,” he says, “swears
to his art, I will not be meddlesome. I will not have in my writing any
elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and
the rest, like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the
richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who
may, exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe; I will have purpose, as
health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I
experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of
my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with
me.”
This is the same as saying that the great success in writing is to
get language out of the way and to put your mind directly to the
reader’s, so that there be no veil of words between you. If the reader
is preoccupied with your words, if they court his attention or cloud
his vision, to that extent is the communication imperfect. In some
of Swinburne’s poems there is often such a din and echo of rhyme and
alliteration that it is almost impossible to hear what the man is
really saying.
To darken counsel with words is a common occurrence. Words are like
lenses,--they must be arranged in just such a way, or they hinder
rather than help the vision. When the adjustment is as it should
be, the lens itself is invisible; and language in the hands of the
master is as transparent. Some of the more recent British poets affect
the archaic, the quaint, the eccentric, in language, so that one’s
attention is almost entirely occupied with their words. Reading them is
like trying to look through a pair of spectacles too old or too young
for you, or with lenses of different focus.
But has not style a value in and of itself? As in the case of light,
its value is in the revelation it makes. Its value is to conceal
itself, to lose itself in the matter. If humility, or self-denial,
or any of the virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit
for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from grace? What
incomparable style in the passage I have quoted from Whitman when we
come to think of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account
for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a writer’s style humbles
itself, the more it is exalted. There is nothing true in religion
that is not equally true in art. Give yourself entirely. All selfish
and secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic grandfathers,
who fancied themselves willing to be damned for the glory of God,
illustrate the devotion of the true artist to his ideal. “Consider the
lilies of the field, ... they toil not, neither do they spin.” The
style of the born poet or artist takes as little thought of itself,
and is the spontaneous expression of the same indwelling grace and
necessity.