There is a good deal of wisdom in Voltaire’s saying that “all styles
are good that are not tiresome.” Voltaire’s own style certainly had
the merit of not tiring. Even in the English translation I never cease
to marvel at its grace and buoyancy. In keeping with this dictum is
the remark I heard concerning a certain living writer, namely, that he
had the best style in literature to-day because one could read fifty
pages of his and not know that one was reading at all; it was pure
expression--offered no resistance.
This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity--a getting rid
of all friction in the written page--herein certainly lies the secret
of much that is winsome in literature. How little friction the mind
encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the best of our own prose
writers; and how much in Meredith, and the later writings of Henry
James! Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible in all
departments of life? One does not want his shoes to pinch, nor his
coat to bind, neither does he want to waste any strength on involved
sentences, or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row a boat in
water in which lay a sodden fleece of newly fallen snow? I find the
reading of certain books like that. Some of Browning’s poems impede my
mind in that way.
Force of impact--that is another matter; that warms and quickens the
mind. Browning’s “How they brought the Good News from Ghent” makes the
mind hot by its rush and power. There is no mere mechanical friction of
elliptical sentences and obscure allusions here.
Yes, the style that does not tire us is better than the style that
does. Thus Arnold’s style is better than Walter Pater’s, because it
is easier to follow; it is not so conscious of itself; it is not so
obviously studied. Pater studied words; Arnold studied ideas. Pater
sacrificed the more familiar democratic traits of language--ease,
simplicity, flexibility, transparency--to his passion for the more
choice aristocratic features,--the perfumed, the academic, the highly
wrought. Again, I find Arnold’s style less fatiguing than Lowell’s,
because it has more current, more continuity of thought, and is freer
from _concetti_ and mere surface sparkle. I find Swinburne’s prose more
tiresome than that of any contemporary British critic, because of its
inflated polysyllabic character, and his poetry more cloying than that
of any other poet, because of its almost abnormal lilt and facility;
it has a pathological fluidity; it seems as though, when he begins
to write verse, his whole mental structure is in danger of melting
down and running away in mere words. His heat is that of fever; his
inspiration borders on delirium.
We never tire of Addison by reason of his style, or of Swift or of
Lamb or of our own Irving or Hawthorne or Warner. It is probably as
rare to find a French writer whose style tires the reader as it is to
find a German whose style does not. As M. Brunetière well says, French
literature is a social literature, German is philosophic, and English
individualistic. It is the business of the first to be agreeable,
of the second to be profound, of the third to be original. Who does
not tire of Strauss sooner than of Renan, of Macaulay sooner than of
Sainte-Beuve?
A writer with a pronounced, individualistic style--one full of mere
mechanical difficulties, like Browning’s or Carlyle’s--runs great risk
of wearying the reader and of being left behind. So far as his style
degenerates into mannerism, so far is he handicapped in the race.
Smoothness is not beauty, neither is roughness power; yet without a
certain harmony and continuity there is neither beauty nor power.
Herbert Spencer, in his essay on the Philosophy of Style, would have a
writer avoid this danger of wearying his reader, by writing alternately
in different styles. “To have a specific style,” he says, “is to be
poor in speech.” “The perfect writer will express himself as Junius,
when in the Junius frame of mind; when he feels as Lamb felt, will use
a like familiar speech; and will fall into the ruggedness of Carlyle
when in a Carlylean mood.” A man who should try to follow this advice
would be pretty sure to be Jack-of-all-styles and master of none. What
a piece of patchwork his composition would be! A “specific style” is
not to be avoided; it is to be cultivated and practiced till every
false note, every trace of crudeness and insincerity, is purged out of
it.
The secret of good prose is a subtle quality or flavor, hard to define,
like that of a good apple or a good melon, and it is as intimately
bound up in the very substance and texture in the one case as in the
other, and, we may add, is of as many varieties. We are sure always to
get good prose from Mr. Howells and Colonel Higginson, but we are not
always so sure of getting it from certain of our younger novelists.
Here is a sample of bad prose from a popular novel by a Southern
writer:--
“The whole woods emerged from the divine bath of nature with the
coolness, the freshness, the immortal purity of Diana united to the
roseate glow and mortal tenderness of Venus, and haunted by two
spirits: the chaste, unfading youth of Endymion and the dust-born
warmth and eagerness of Dionysus.”
Yet the man who could permit himself the use of such inflated language
as that, was capable of turning off such a passage as this:--
“Some women, in marrying, demand all and give all: with good men they
are happy; with base men they are the broken-hearted. Some demand
everything and give little: with weak men they are tyrants; with strong
men they are the divorced. Some demand little and give all: with
congenial souls they are already in heaven; with uncongenial they are
soon in their graves. Some give little and demand little: they are the
heartless, and they bring neither the joy of life nor the peace of
death.”
That is sound prose; it is like a passage from a great classic.
When we advise the young writer to go honestly to work to say in the
simplest manner what he really thinks and feels, one does not mean that
by this course he is likely to write like the great prose masters, but
that by this means alone can his work have the basic qualities of good
literature,--directness, veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of
natural things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence afterwards.
“The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “is better than a mask.”
It is real, it is alive. So the simple, direct speech of a man in
earnest is so much better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so
often compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality--nothing can make
up for a want of reality.
Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that the peasant always
has style; the French peasant probably more often than any other. This
is certainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc as a typical
peasant. What adroitness, and at times, classic beauty in her answer
to her judges! When they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do
you know if you are in the grace of God?” she replied, “If I am not,
may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” Under pressure,
the peasant mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, capable
of these things. But usually the charm of rustic speech is in its
plainness and simplicity, like that of other rural things, a bridge, a
woodshed, a well-sweep, a log house,--no thought of style, thought of
service only. But the beauty of what may be called the architectural
style of the great prose masters,--Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, De
Quincey,--like the beauty of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral,
is quite another matter. What both have in common is the beauty of
sincerity and reality.
The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth century, like
Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more in keeping with the taste of
to-day than the rhetorical and highly wrought style of certain of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.
Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely things, or to speech,
we mean something quite different from style when applied to the great
compositions either in literature, music, or architecture.
Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and attain beauty;
Wordsworth attains beauty by his sincerity and simplicity, and his
fervent love of rural things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense.
One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naïve beauty. The
monumental works of the ancients were planned and wrought like their
architecture, and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare rarely
attains anything like classic beauty, and has any poem since Keats’s
“Ode to a Nightingale” struck the note firmly and surely?
V
I have often asked myself why it is that the interviewer will sometimes
get so much more wisdom out of a man, and so many more fresh and
entertaining statements--in short, so much better literature--than
the man can get out of himself. Is it because one’s best and ripest
thoughts rise to the surface, like the cream on the milk, and does
the interviewer simply skim them off? Maybe, in writing, we often
dip too deep, make too great an effort. Interviews are nearly always
interesting,--much more so than a formal studied statement by the
interviewed himself. Many a piece of sound, excellent literature
has been got out of a man who had no skill at all with the pen. His
spoken word is vital and real; but in a conscious literary effort the
fire is quenched at once. Hence the charm of letters, of diaries, of
the simple narrations and recitals of pioneers, farmers, workers, or
persons who have no conscious literary equipment. Who would not rather
read a bit of real experience of a soldier in battle, such as a clever
interviewer could draw out of him, than to read his general’s studied
account of the same engagement? “To elaborate is of no avail,” says
Whitman. “Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.” Only the great
artist can rival or surpass the sense of reality we often find in
common speech. Set a man to writing out his views or his experience
and the danger is that he will be too formal; he will get himself up
for the occasion; there will be no ease or indifference in his manner;
he will go to delving in his mind, and we shall miss the simple, direct
self-expression that we are after.
In Dr. Johnson’s talk, as reported by Boswell, we touch the real man;
in the “Rambler” you touch only his clothes or periwig. His more
formal writing seems the product of some kind of artificial put-on
faculty, like the Sunday sermons one hears or the newspaper editorials
one reads. The sermon is in what may be called the surpliced style,
the Rambler in the periwigged style. Emerson said of Alcott that his
conversation was wonderful, but that when he sat down to write his
inspiration left him. Most men are wiser in company than in the study.
What is interesting in a man is what he himself has felt or seen or
experienced. If you can tell us that, we shall listen eagerly. The
uncultured man does not know this, but seeks the far-off or the deep
down.
Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on the tree: they must
take time to ripen; and when they are ripe, how easily they fall! A
mere nudge brings them down. How easily the old man talks; how full he
is of wisdom! Time was when his tongue was tied; he could not express
himself; his thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung tightly
to the bough. Set him to writing, and with great labor he produced some
crude, half-formed notions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions
of the authors he had read. But now his fruit has matured and it has
mellowed; it has color and flavor; and his conversation abounds in
wisdom.