painting; but it appeared to him that what Hazlitt said was of equal
force with respect to the fine art of literature; and that in his own
American field the English race failed, as far as it had failed, for the
same reason as that given by Hazlitt for its failure in painting. In his
mind he went further than Hazlitt, or came short of him, in refusing the
consolation of our race's superiority in poetry because it was will and
passion. As far as they had excelled in that, it was because they had
tried hard and not neglected the means for the end. Where they had
excelled most, it was quite imaginable that the poem would still have
been better if the poet had taken more pains. In the case of prose, he
thought we failed of the end because we were impatient of the means, and
as elderly men will, he accused the present of being more hasty and
indifferent to form than the past. He recalled the time when he was
apprentice in the art in which he could not yet call himself a master
workman, and thought how he tried to make what he did beautiful, and
fashioned his work with tireless pains after some high model. Perhaps
the young writers of this time were striving as earnestly; but he could
not see it, or thought he could not. He fancied their eyes dazzled by
the images of easy success, instead of taken with the glory of a thing
beautifully done. He remembered, with fond emotion, how once his soul
had glowed over some "cunning'st pattern of excelling nature," and had
been filled with longing to learn from it the art of surprising some
other mood or aspect of nature and making that loveliness or grandeur
his own. He had talked with other youths who were trying at the same
time to do good work, and he remembered that they too were trying in the
same way; and now, long after, he fancied that their difference from the
youth of the present day was in their willingness to strive for
perfection in the means and to let the end take care of itself. The end
could no more justify bad means in aesthetics than in ethics; in fact,
without the carefully studied means there could be no artistic result.
If it was true that the young writers of the present expected a high
result from hurried or neglected processes, they could have only the
results that Eugenio saw around him. If they admired these, and were
coming to him for the secret of achieving them, they were coming to the
wrong shop.
Yet he did not harshly blame them. He remembered how he, too, when he
had been impatient of the means, had once fancied postponing them to the
end. That was in the days which were mainly filled for him with the
business of writing fiction, and when the climax of his story seemed
always threatening to hide itself from him or to elude his grasp. There
were times when it changed to some other end or took a different
significance from that it had primarily had. Then he had said to himself
that if he could only write the end first, or boldly block it out as it
first presented itself, and afterward go back and write in the events
and characters leading up to it, he would have an effect glorified by
all the fervor of his primal inspiration. But he never did that, or
even tried to do it. Perhaps, when he came to consider it more
carefully, it appeared impossible; perhaps it approved itself ridiculous
without experiment. His work of art, such as it was, was a growth from
all his thinking and feeling about it; and without that it could no more
eventuate in a climax than a tree could ripen fruit without the
preliminaries of striking its roots into the ground, coming of the age
to bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking
into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was
going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he
might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock
when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel
turning out other than he had forecast it.
In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with
processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as
he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of
his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and
manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little
authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds,
and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled
them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as
he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was
the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story
never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the
author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up
the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.
As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was
less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked
more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some
spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the
more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast
design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose
might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious
insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with
unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art,
and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience
to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical
things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like _Hamlet_,
say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had
educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and
had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with
the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia
from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch,
forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome
Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the
whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not
fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went
down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so
many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a
playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he
had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and,
in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from
death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and
walk the world forever.
Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so
reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done?
The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided
that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the
earnestness of his nature, to write their _Hamlets_ from the beginning
forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He
saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did
not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of
producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every
part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it
seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the
parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of
any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the
true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to
outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective _Hamlets_; they must
slowly make their _Hamlets_' acquaintance by living with them.
If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought
he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation
for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had
noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better
in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would
smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a
certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest
happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the
perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of
little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate
triumph.
"But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was
one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to
say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about
perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a
style?"
"By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this
come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well,
patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you.
That is the one thing you must _not_ try for. If you try for style, you
will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will
be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You
will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come
into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that
any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then
have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of
expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which
every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have
borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no
better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing
that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary
qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme
artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or
Dante?"
Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so
dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said
that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected
the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves
respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but
probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He
realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they
did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help
outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without
learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He
reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their
circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could
do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their
aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?
One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper
maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to
secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of
indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening
conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of
the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While
we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure,
coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval,
the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our
endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this
censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we
grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the
environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a
compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer
matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if
we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than
ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most
perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our
work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower
and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight
the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our
choice of two things--stop working; stop going, cease to move, to
exist--or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of
conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which
we have not dropped, drops us.
Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his
palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling
them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when
they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would
count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal
than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he
meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and
not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their
youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly
doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or
borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could
sell or give or lend it.
Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not
only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it
used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw
abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself
instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to
hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they
seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due
course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through
living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and
would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that
it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that,
whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they
lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by
universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men,
and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How
instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work,
patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or
borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than
idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?
If he had set out to do that, they might have retorted upon him that he
was making a petty personal matter of art, which was not only so much
longer than life, but so much wider, deeper, and higher. In this event
he saw that he would have nothing for it but to confirm his
correspondents in their disappointment with him by declaring that art
_was_ a personal matter, and that though longer, it was not wider,
deeper, or higher than life, and could not be. It might be mysterious in
being personal, but it was not necessarily petty. It would be great if
the artist was so, but not otherwise; it could be fine on no other
terms. There was a theory and an appearance that it existed somehow
apart from the artist and that it made him. But the fact was he made it,
partly wittingly, partly unwittingly; and it had no being except in his
achievement. The power of imagining a work of art was the gift of
nature, as being long or short, dark or fair was. The concern of him it
was given to was how, after he found it out, to make the most of his
gift. It had no power to make much or little of him. If he cherished it
and served it, when he had made sure of it, by fulfilling the law that
its possession imposed, then it would rise up in something he had done
and call him master.
But how could Eugenio make such things--so true and yet so
self-contradictory, so mutually repellent--clear to these simple-hearted
young correspondents of his? The more he thought of the matter, the more
he resolved to do nothing about it.
V
THE UNSATISFACTORINESS OF UNFRIENDLY CRITICISM
It was the experience of Eugenio that the criticisms of his books, when
they were unfriendly, presented a varying offence, rather than a
cumulative offence, as the years wore on. The criticisms of one's books
are always hard to bear if they are unfavorable, but he thought that
displeasure for displeasure the earlier refusal to allow him certain
merits was less displeasing than the later consent to take these merits
for granted. To be taken for granted in any wise is to be limited. It is
tantamount to having it said of one that, yes, one has those virtues,
but one has no others. It comes also to saying that one has, of course,
the defects of one's virtues; though Eugenio noted that, when certain
defects of his were taken for granted, it did not so distinctly and
immediately follow that he was supposed to have the virtues of these.
Now, Eugenio's theory of himself was that he was not limited, and that,
if he modestly stopped short of infinity, it was because he chose. He
had a feeling of always breaking new ground; and he did not like being
told that he was tilling the old glebe and harvesting the same crops, or
that in the little garden-ground where he let his fancy play he was
culling flowers of such familiar tint and scent that they seemed to be
the very flowers he had picked thirty or forty years before. What made
it harder to endure suggestion of this sort was that in his feeling of
always breaking new ground there was an inner sense, or fear, or doubt,
that perhaps it was not really virgin soil he was turning up, but merely
the sod of fields which had lain fallow a year or two or had possibly
been cropped the season before.
The misgiving was forced upon him by certain appearances in the work of
other veteran authors. When he took up the last book of some lifelong
favorite, no matter how great a master he knew him still to be, he could
not help seeing that the poor old master was repeating himself, though
he would not have phrased the case in such brutal terms. Then the chill
wonder how long he could hope to escape the like fate pierced him, and
for a moment he could not silence the question whether it might not have
already befallen him. In another moment he knew better, and was justly
aggrieved with the next reviewer who took things in him for granted,
quite as offensively if they were merits as if they were defects. It was
vital to him to be always breaking new ground, and, if at times it
seemed to him that he had turned this or that furrow before, he said to
himself that it was merely one of those intimations of pre-existence
which are always teasing us here with the sense of experience in
circumstances absolutely novel; and he hoped that no one else would
notice the coincidence.
He was, indeed, tolerably safe from the chance, for it is one of the
conditions of literary criticism that the reviewers shall be nearly
always young persons. They, if they alone are capable of the cruelties
they sometimes practise, are alone capable of the enthusiasms which
supply publishers with quotable passages for their advertisements, and
which lift authors' hearts in pride and joy. It is to their advantage
that they generally bring to the present work of a veteran author an
ignorance of all that he has done before, and have the zest for it which
the performance of a novice inspires. They know he is not a novice, of
course, and they recognize his book as that of a veteran, but they
necessarily treat it as representative of his authorship. Of course, if
it is his twentieth or thirtieth book, or his fortieth or fiftieth, it
is merely one of a long series which fully represents him. Even these
collectively represent him inadequately as long as he is adding to them,
if he has the habit, like Eugenio, of always breaking new ground. The
reviewer, however, is probably much newer than the ground which the
established author breaks in his last book, and, coming to it in his
generous ignorance, which he has to conceal under a mask of smiling
omniscience, he condemns or praises it without reference to the work
which has gone before it and which it is merely part of, though of
course it has entirety enough of a sort to stand alone. If the author
has broken ground in the direction of a new type of heroine, the
reviewer, by the conditions of his calling, is all but obliged to say
that here is one of those enchanting girls whom the author in question
has endeared to generations of readers; or one of those tedious prudes
for whom his name is a synonyme. If, after many psychological romances,
the author has stepped down to the level of actual life, he is praised
or blamed for the vital or servile naturalism of his work; or if the
contrary is the case, he has to read of himself as doing something
habitual and entirely characteristic of him. In vain, so far as that
acute young critic is concerned, has he broken new ground. But if he has
with much compunction consciously turned his furrows in a field tilled
before, he stands a fair chance of being hailed at the outset of a new
career.
He cannot openly complain, and if he could the critic cannot help being
what he is. If the critic were older and more versed in the veteran
author, he might not like him so well, and he could not, at any rate,
bring the fresh interest to his work which the young reviewer brings.
What Eugenio would really wish would be to have each successive book of
his given for review to some lifelong admirer, some dear and faithful
friend, all the better for not being an acquaintance, who had liked him
from the beginning and was intimately versed in all his work. Such a
critic would know that Eugenio was always breaking new ground, and that
he was never more true to this inherent tendency than when he seemed to
be ploughing the same old furrows in the same old fields. Such a critic
would be alert to detect those fine differences of situation which
distinguish a later from an earlier predicament. He would note with
unfailing perspicacity the shades of variance which constitute Florindo
an essentially novel character when presented under the name of Lindoro,
or Floribella a fresh delight when she reappears as Doralinda. Even when
he could not deny that these persons were in themselves one and the
same, he would be able to make the reader observe that the new light
thrown upon them by the author's ever-renascent art revealed in familiar
creations traits of mind and charms of spirit unimagined before. He
would insist that, if not new, they were newer, because being more fully
ascertained they were truer. He would boldly recur to the personages in
Eugenio's former books whom they reminded one of, and, studying them in
contrast, would convince the reader that the increasing purpose of the
author in the treatment of the well-known types had been to reveal the
infinite variety of character which lay hid in each and every human
type.
Some such reviewer, Eugenio thought, all journals pretending to literary
authority ought to keep on their staff for the comfort of veteran
authors and for the dispensation of that more delicate and sympathetic
justice which their case required. It might be well enough to use a pair
of ordinary steelyards, or even hay-scales, in weighing out the rewards
and punishments of younger authors, but some such sensitive balance as
only the sympathetic nerves of equal years, and, if possible, equal
intelligence, could adjust ought to be used in ascertaining the merits
of a veteran author.
In his frankest self-consciousness, Eugenio did not say a veteran author
like himself, and he did not insist exclusively upon a veteran critic
for his behoof. There were times when he thought that a young critic,
coming in the glow of adolescence and the freshness of knowledge won
from the recent study of all his works, might be better fitted to
appreciate the qualities of the latest. He quite rejected the notion,
when it came to business, with which he had sometimes played, of an
author reviewing his own books, and this apart from his sense of its
immodesty. In the course of his experience he had known of but one
really great author who had done this, and then had done it upon the
invitation of an editor of rare if somewhat wilful perspicacity, who
invited the author to do it on the ground that no one else could do it
so well. But though he would not have liked to be his own reviewer,
because it was not seemly, he chiefly feared that if put upon his honor,
as he would be in such a case, he must deal with his work so damagingly
as to leave little or nothing of it. He might make the reputation of a
great critic, but in doing execution upon his own shortcomings he might
be the means of destroying himself as a great author.