Literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. Twenty years
ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. But in the meantime
there has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors have
found excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatient
of difficult writing. It would not matter if it were only the paunched and
flat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing without
style. Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of
style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks I
have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing
which has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was a
good thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken for
granted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worth
the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a
pretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, a
juggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated by
irreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for
the days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of
George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place when
everybody found out the æsthetes. It was, one may admit, an excellent
thing to get rid of the æsthetes, but it was by no means an excellent
thing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into English art
and literature. The æsthetes were wrong in almost everything they said
about art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the
children of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With the
condemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected of
kinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of minor poets
and major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against style
had nothing to do with the Wilde condemnation. The heresy of the
stylelessness is considerably older than that. Perhaps it is not quite
fair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate to
describe it as the heresy of style without pains. It springs from the idea
that great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and
it is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest
literature is so. If lines like
Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings,
or
When daffodils begin to peer,
or
His golden locks time hath to silver turned,
shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool
to trouble himself further. Genius is the recognition of the perfect line,
the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect
line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an
eye as after a week of vigils. But the point is that it does not
invariably so appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days' labour to
write one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more hurriedly.
But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too.
Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by
inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with
better warrant than Shelley. "The mind," he wrote in the _Defence of
Poetry_--
The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the
greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration
is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry
that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble
shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the
greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to
assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour
and study.
He then goes on to interpret literally Milton's reference to _Paradise
Lost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the Muse, and to reply
scornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings of
the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_." Who is there who would not agree
with Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his
inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts
advocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds? Literature without
inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without
style. But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is
merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an
artist without taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled down
industriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not
grow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto "Nulle
dies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious
author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. On the other
hand, Trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and Zola
without pains might as well have been a waiter. Nor is it only the little
or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pity
we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might
then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how
much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin recently
published an early draft of Keats's sonnet, "Bright star, would I were
stedfast as thou art," which showed that in the case of Keats at least the
mind in creation was not "as a fading coal," but as a coal blown to
increasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study." And the poetry
of Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second
and later thoughts. Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with him
for time, declared that an early draft of _Endymion_ opened with the line: