Style is the invariable mark of any master; and for the student who does
not aspire so high as to be numbered with the giants, it is still the one
quality in which he may improve himself at will. Passion, wisdom,
creative force, the power of mystery or colour, are allotted in the hour
of birth, and can be neither learned nor simulated. But the just and
dexterous use of what qualities we have, the proportion of one part to
another and to the whole, the elision of the useless, the accentuation of
the important, and the preservation of a uniform character from end to
end—these, which taken together constitute technical perfection, are to
some degree within the reach of industry and intellectual courage. What
to put in and what to leave out; whether some particular fact be
organically necessary or purely ornamental; whether, if it be purely
ornamental, it may not weaken or obscure the general design; and finally,
whether, if we decide to use it, we should do so grossly and notably, or
in some conventional disguise: are questions of plastic style continually
rearising. And the sphinx that patrols the highways of executive art has
no more unanswerable riddle to propound.
In literature (from which I must draw my instances) the great change of
the past century has been effected by the admission of detail. It was
inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and at length, by the semi-romantic
Balzac and his more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound like a
duty on the novelist. For some time it signified and expressed a more
ample contemplation of the conditions of man’s life; but it has recently
(at least in France) fallen into a merely technical and decorative stage,
which it is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. With a movement
of alarm, the wiser or more timid begin to fall a little back from these
extremities; they begin to aspire after a more naked, narrative
articulation; after the succinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a
means to this, after a general lightening of this baggage of detail.
After Scott we beheld the starveling story—once, in the hands of
Voltaire, as abstract as a parable—begin to be pampered upon facts. The
introduction of these details developed a particular ability of hand; and
that ability, childishly indulged, has led to the works that now amaze us
on a railway journey. A man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola
spends himself on technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and
attract the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to
call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what more
particularly interests the artist is this tendency of the extreme of
detail, when followed as a principle, to degenerate into mere
_feux-de-joie_ of literary tricking. The other day even M. Daudet was to
be heard babbling of audible colours and visible sounds.
This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to remind us of
the fact which underlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All
representative art, which can be said to live, is both realistic and
ideal; and the realism about which we quarrel is a matter purely of
externals. It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, but a mere
whim of veering fashion, that has made us turn our back upon the larger,
more various, and more romantic art of yore. A photographic exactitude
in dialogue is now the exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands it
tells us no more—I think it even tells us less—than Molière, wielding his
artificial medium, has told to us and to all time of Alceste or Orgon,
Dorine or Chrysale. The historical novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the
conditions of man’s nature and the conditions of man’s life, the truth of
literary art, is free of the ages. It may be told us in a carpet comedy,
in a novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene may be pitched in
London, on the sea-coast of Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah.
And by an odd and luminous accident, if there is any page of literature
calculated to awake the envy of M. Zola, it must be that _Troilus and
Cressida_ which Shakespeare, in a spasm of unmanly anger with the world,
grafted on the heroic story of the siege of Troy.
This question of realism, let it then be clearly understood, regards not
in the least degree the fundamental truth, but only the technical method,
of a work of art. Be as ideal or as abstract as you please, you will be
none the less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the risk of being
tedious and inexpressive; and if you be very strong and honest, you may
chance upon a masterpiece.
A work of art is first cloudily conceived in the mind; during the period
of gestation it stands more clearly forward from these swaddling mists,
puts on expressive lineaments, and becomes at length that most faultless,
but also, alas! that incommunicable product of the human mind, a
perfected design. On the approach to execution all is changed. The
artist must now step down, don his working clothes, and become the
artisan. He now resolutely commits his airy conception, his delicate
Ariel, to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost in a breath, the
scale, the style, the spirit, and the particularity of execution of his
whole design.
The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical
preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle of life.
And with these the execution is but play; for the stylistic problem is
resolved beforehand, and all large originality of treatment wilfully
foregone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, which we have
learnt to admire, with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr.
Lang and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity or
even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial nobility of
design. So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin to write _Esmond_
than _Vanity Fair_, since, in the first, the style was dictated by the
nature of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of some indolence of
mind, enjoyed and got good profit of this economy of effort. But the
case is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that have been
conceived from within outwards, and generously nourished from the
author’s mind, the moment in which he begins to execute is one of extreme
perplexity and strain. Artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect
devotion to their own ideal make this ungrateful effort once for all;
and, having formed a style, adhere to it through life. But those of a
higher order cannot rest content with a process which, as they continue
to employ it, must infallibly degenerate towards the academic and the
cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which they embark is the signal for a
fresh engagement of the whole forces of their mind; and the changing
views which accompany the growth of their experience are marked by still
more sweeping alterations in the manner of their art. So that criticism
loves to dwell upon and distinguish the varying periods of a Raphael, a
Shakespeare, or a Beethoven.
It is, then, first of all, at this initial and decisive moment when
execution is begun, and thenceforth only in a less degree, that the ideal
and the real do indeed, like good and evil angels, contend for the
direction of the work. Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the needle,
and the brush, all have their grossnesses, their ineffable impotences,
their hours, if I may so express myself, of insubordination. It is the
work and it is a great part of the delight of any artist to contend with
these unruly tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty expedient, to
drive and coax them to effect his will. Given these means, so laughably
inadequate, and given the interest, the intensity, and the multiplicity
of the actual sensation whose effect he is to render with their aid, the
artist has one main and necessary resource which he must, in every case
and upon any theory, employ. He must, that is, suppress much and omit
more. He must omit what is tedious or irrelevant, and suppress what is
tedious and necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the main design,
subserve a variety of purposes, he will perforce and eagerly retain. And
it is the mark of the very highest order of creative art to be woven
exclusively of such. There, any fact that is registered is contrived a
double or a treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament in its place,
and a pillar in the main design. Nothing would find room in such a
picture that did not serve, at once, to complete the composition, to
accentuate the scheme of colour, to distinguish the planes of distance,
and to strike the note of the selected sentiment; nothing would be
allowed in such a story that did not, at the same time, expedite the
progress of the fable, build up the characters, and strike home the moral
or the philosophical design. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so
far from building the fabric of our works exclusively with these, we are
thrown into a rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a score of
them, to be the plums of our confection. And hence, in order that the
canvas may be filled or the story proceed from point to point, other
details must be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful
title; many without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds
towards completion, too often—I had almost written always—loses in force
and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed
among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story drowns
in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slipshod talk.
But again, we are rather more tempted to admit those particulars which we
know we can describe; and hence those most of all which, having been
described very often, have grown to be conventionally treated in the
practice of our art. These we choose, as the mason chooses the acanthus
to adorn his capital, because they come naturally to the accustomed hand.
The old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of workmanship and
schemes of composition (all being admirably good, or they would long have
been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, offer us ready-made but not
perfectly appropriate solutions for any problem that arises, and wean us
from the study of nature and the uncompromising practice of art. To
struggle, to face nature, to find fresh solutions, and give expression to
facts which have not yet been adequately or not yet elegantly expressed,
is to run a little upon the danger of extreme self-love. Difficulty sets
a high price upon achievement; and the artist may easily fall into the
error of the French naturalists, and consider any fact as welcome to
admission if it be the ground of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into the
error of the modern landscape-painter, who is apt to think that
difficulty overcome and science well displayed can take the place of what
is, after all, the one excuse and breath of art—charm. A little further,
and he will regard charm in the light of an unworthy sacrifice to
prettiness, and the omission of a tedious passage as an infidelity to
art.
We have now the matter of this difference before us. The idealist, his
eye singly fixed upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up the
interval with detail of the conventional order, briefly touched, soberly
suppressed in tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a fine
intemperance, will not suffer the presence of anything so dead as a
convention; he shall have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all
charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The style that befits either
of these extremes, once chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities
and dangers. The immediate danger of the realist is to sacrifice the
beauty and significance of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the
insane pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers under facts; but he
comes in the last resort, and as his energy declines, to discard all
design, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thoroughness, steadily to
communicate matter which is not worth learning. The danger of the
idealist is, of course, to become merely null and lose all grip of fact,
particularity, or passion.
We talk of bad and good. Everything, indeed, is good which is conceived
with honesty and executed with communicative ardour. But though on
neither side is dogmatism fitting, and though in every case the artist
must decide for himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for each
succeeding work and new creation; yet one thing may be generally said,
that we of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, breathing as we do
the intellectual atmosphere of our age, are more apt to err upon the side
of realism than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that theory it may be
well to watch and correct our own decisions, always holding back the hand
from the least appearance of irrelevant dexterity, and resolutely fixed
to begin no work that is not philosophical, passionate, dignified,
happily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic in design.