SUGGESTIVENESS

There is a quality that adheres to one man’s writing or speaking, and

not to another’s, that we call suggestiveness,--something that warms

and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the

amount of truth or information directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or

description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere,

points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every

book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float

deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to

me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive.

Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he

has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon.

Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the

deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral

electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement

in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he

elaborates the least and gives us in profusion the buds and germs of

poetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him

more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do,--he abounded in

hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic

language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with

perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely

present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness

and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style,--nothing that

stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he

works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less

fruitful in his readers’ minds than his earlier and more direct one,

or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and

elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind;

at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating

around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the

great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the

spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent

only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in

the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things

is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The

twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, a rolling

field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight one. In literature

perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal

value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer,

sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete

and the specific, that shun vague generalities,--with these go the

power of suggestiveness.

Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, while the elaborated,

the highly wrought, the perfected afford us a different kind of

pleasure. The art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence,

and the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has another. All

beginnings in nature afford us a peculiar pleasure. The early spring

with its hints and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first

robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender skies, the

first rainbow, the first wild flower, the dropping bud scales, the

awakening voices in the marshes,--all these things touch and move us

in a way that later developments in the season do not. What meaning,

too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in the night with its stars, the

sea with its tides and currents, the morning with its dews, autumn

with its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its sands,--in

everything in the germ and in the bud,--in parasites, suckers, blights,

in floods, tempests, droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the

falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have a tongue, the

pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust, conveys a hint of the method

of nature.

Some things and events in our daily experience are more typical, and

therefore more suggestive, than others. Thus the sower striding across

the ploughed field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the

whole life of the husbandman,--his first-hand relation to things, his

ploughing, his planting, his fertilizing, his draining, his pruning,

his grafting, his uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the

wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat, his fencing his

field with the stones and boulders that hindered his plough or cumbered

his sward, his making the wilderness blossom as the rose,--all these

things are pleasant to contemplate because in them there is a story

within a story, we translate the facts into higher truths.

In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the seaman with his

compass and rudder, the potter with his clay, the weaver with his warp

and woof, the sculptor with his marble, the painter with his canvas

and pigments, the builder with his plans and scaffoldings, the chemist

with his solvents and precipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and

antiseptics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with his text,

the fisherman with his nets,--all are more or less symbolical and

appeal to the imagination.

In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestiveness of language used

in a vivid, imaginative way, and the suggestiveness of words redolent

of human association, words of deep import, as friend, home, love,

marriage.

To me Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most suggestive sonnets in the

language, because they so abound in words, images, allusions drawn from

real life; they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon by near-by

things, that uses language steeped in the common experience of mankind.

The poet drew his material not from the strange and the remote, but,

as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of life. Does not that

poetry or prose work touch us the most nearly that deals with that with

which we are most familiar? One thing that separates the minor poet

from the major is that the thoughts and words of the minor poet are

more of the nature of asides, or of the exceptional; he does not take

in the common and universal; we are not familiar with the points of

view that so agitate him; and he has not the power to make them real

to us. I read poems every day that provoke the thought, “Well, that is

all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that earth, those men or

those women,”--all is so shadowy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you

enter the world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid ground;

the sky and the earth, and the things in them and upon them, are what

you have always known, and not for a moment are you called upon to

breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to see the

landscape. Dante even makes hell as tangible and real as the objects of

our senses, if not more so.

Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power of pregnant, compact

sentences,--type thoughts, compendious phrases,--vital distinctions

or generalizations, such as we find scattered through literature, as

when De Quincey says of the Roman that he was great in the presence

of man, never in the presence of nature; or his distinction between

the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, or similar

illuminating distinctions in the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge,

Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe, Lessing. Arnold’s dictum that poetry is a

criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to

verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not what one would call

a suggestive writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Augustine

Birrell has lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one’s

mind: “I have learnt from experience that many false opinions may be

exchanged for true ones without in the least altering the habits of

mind of which false opinions are the result.” In a new home writer

whose first books are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive

sentences on nearly every page. Here are two or three of them: “In

your inmost soul you are as well suited to the whole cosmical order

and every part of it as to your own body. You belong here. Did you

suppose that you belonged to some other world than this, or that you

belonged nowhere at all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities?...

Conceivably He might have flung you into a world that was unrelated to

you, and might have left you to be acclimated at your own risk; but you

happen to know that this is not the case. You have lived here always;

this is the ancestral demesne; for ages and ages you have looked out

of these same windows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps.

You are at home.” “How perverse and pathetic the desires of the

animals! But they all get what they ask for,--long necks and trunks,

flapping ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, anything, if

only they will believe in life and try.”[1]

[1] _The Religion of Democracy._ By Charles Ferguson.

The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which class our new author

belongs, and the most notable example of which, in this country, was

Emerson, are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly demonstrating

and logical writers. A challenge to the soul seems to mean more than

an appeal to the reason; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the

mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought does not. Science

rarely suggests more than it says; but in the hands of an imaginative

man like Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history

becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be witnessed in his

wonderful “Life of the Bee,”--one of the most enchanting and poetic

contributions to natural history ever made. Darwin’s work upon the

earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of flowers, in the same

way seems to convey more truth to the reader than is warranted by the

subject.

The writer who can touch the imagination has the key, at least one key,

to suggestiveness. This power often goes with a certain vagueness and

indefiniteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of Shakespeare’s

sonnets:--

“the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible passage.

Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the mind in one way, and

truth at the surface, or at the periphery of the circle, indirectly

put, excites it in another way and for other reasons; just as a light

in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to the eye in a different

way from the light of day falling through vapors or colored glass,

wherein objects become softened and illusory.

A common word may be so used as to have an unexpected richness of

meaning, as when Coleridge speaks of those books that “find” us; or

Shakespeare of the “marriage of true minds,” or Whitman of the autumn

apple hanging “indolent-ripe” on the tree. Probably that language is

the most suggestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most

largely from the experience of life, that savors of real things. The

Saxon English of Walton or Barrow is more suggestive than the latinized

English of Johnson or Gibbon.

Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite exceptional in the

eighteenth-century writers. It is much more abundant in the writers of

the seventeenth century. It goes much more with the vernacular style,

the homely style, than with the polished academic style.

With the stream of English literature of the nineteenth century has

mingled a current of German thought and mysticism, and this has

greatly heightened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and in

prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell or Moore or Macaulay

or Irving, but it is in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Landor and

Carlyle and Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and Emerson and

Whitman,--a depth and richness of spiritual and emotional background

that the wits of Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems as if

the subconscious self played a much greater part in the literature of

the nineteenth century than of the eighteenth, probably because this

term has been recently added to our psychology.

As a rule it may be said that the more a writer condenses, the more

suggestive his work will be. There is a sort of mechanical equivalent

between the force expended in compacting a sentence and the force

or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s mind. A diffuse writer

is rarely or never a suggestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more

suggestive than prose, because it is the result of a more compendious

and sublimating process. The mind of the poet is more tense, he uses

language under greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose

medium of expression gives his mind more playroom. The poet often

succeeds in focusing his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and he

alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There are pregnant

sentences in all the great prose writers; there are immortal lines only

in the poets.

Whitman said the word he would himself use as most truly descriptive

of his “Leaves of Grass” was the word suggestiveness. “I round and

finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme.

The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I

have had mine. I seek less to state or display my theme or thought,

and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or

thought--there to pursue your own flight.” These sentences themselves

are suggestive, because they bring before the mind a variety of

definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a thing, doing your

part, pursuing your own flight, and yet the idea conveyed has a certain

subtlety and elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a whole

probably lies in its blending of realism and mysticism, and in the art

of it running parallel to or in some way tallying with the laws and

processes of nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few modern

works do.

Of course the suggestiveness of any work--poem, picture, novel,

essay--depends largely upon what we bring to it; whether we bring a

kindred spirit or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert

sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to speak, if you have

passed through the experience described, if you have known the people

portrayed, if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts the

author exploits, the work will have a deeper meaning to you than to one

who is a stranger to these things. The best books make us acquainted

with our own,--they help us to find ourselves. No book calls forth

the same responses from two different types of mind. The wind does

not awaken æolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a hero to his

valet. It is the deep hollows and passes of the mountains that give

back your voice in prolonged reverberations. The tides are in the sea,

not in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do not mean much to a

child. The world of books is under the same law as these things. What

any given work yields us depends largely upon what we bring to it.