I
Et ideo confiteatur eorum stultitia, qui
arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio
confidentes, ad summa summe canenda prorumpunt;
a tanta praesuntuositate desistant, et
si anseres naturali desidia sunt, nolint
astripetam aquilam imitari.
DANTE: De vulgari eloquio.
Depreciation of "writing"--that is, writing as an art--is a precaution
taken from time to time by worthless writers. They believe it sound,
but it is the sign of their mediocrity and the avowal of a secret
regret. It is not without chagrin that the impotent man gives up the
pretty woman whose limpid eyes invite him, and there must be bitterness
in the disdain publicly proclaimed by one who confesses utter ignorance
of his trade, or absence of the gift without which exercise of that
trade is an imposture. Yet some of these poor creatures actually pride
themselves upon their poverty. They declare that their ideas are rare
enough not to need fine clothing; that the newest, richest imagery is
merely the veil thrown by vanity over the emptiness of the thought;
that what matters, after all, is the substance and not the form, the
spirit and not the letter, the thing and not the word; and they can
continue like this a long time, for they have at their command a whole
flock of facile commonplaces which, however, fool nobody. We should
pity the first group and despise the second, replying to neither,
unless it be to say this: that there are two literatures, and that they
belong to each other.
Two literatures. This is a prudent and provisional form of expression
intended to divert the mob by according it a share in the landscape,
a view of the garden which it may not enter. If there were not two
literatures and two provinces, it would be necessary to cut at once the
throats of nearly all French writers--a dirty job and one in which, for
my part, I should blush to have a hand. Enough, then. The boundary is
established. There are two sorts of writers: the writers who write and
the writers who do not write--just as there are voiceless singers and
singers with voices.
The disdain for style would seem to be one of the conquests of 1789.
At least, prior to the democratic era, it had been taken for granted
that the one way to treat writers who did not write was to ridicule
them. From Pisistratus to Louis XVI, the civilized world was unanimous
on this point--a writer must know how to write. This was the Greek
view, and the Romans loved fine style to such a degree that they came
to write very badly through wishing to write too well. Saint Ambrose
esteemed eloquence so highly that he regarded it as one of the gifts of
the Holy Spirit--_vox donum Spiritus_--and Saint Hilary of Poitiers,
in chapter thirteen of his _Treatise on the Psalms_, does not hesitate
to call bad style a sin. It cannot, then, be from Roman Christianity
that we have derived our present indulgence for uncouth literature.
Still, inasmuch as Christianity is necessarily responsible for all
modern aggressions against external beauty, it might be supposed that
the taste for bad style was one of those Protestant importations that
befouled France in the eighteenth century--contempt for style and moral
hypocrisy being Anglican vices.[1]
However, if the eighteenth century wrote badly, it did so
unconsciously. It thought that Voltaire wrote well, especially in
verse, and reproached Ducis only with the barbarousness of his models.
It had an ideal. It did not admit that philosophy might be an excuse
for bad literature. It rhymed everything, from the treatises of Isaac
Newton to garden manuals and 'cook-books. This lust for putting art
and fine language where they did not belong, led to the adoption of a
medium style calculated to elevate all vulgar subjects and to degrade
all the others. With the best of intentions, the eighteenth century
ended by writing as if it were the most refractory to art in the
world's history. England and France signed, at that time, a literary
pact destined to endure till the arrival of Chateaubriand, whose
_Génie du Christianisme_[2] sounded its solemn dissolution. From the
appearance of this book, which opens the century, there has been but
one way for a writer to have talent, namely, to know how to write--no
longer in the manner of La Harpe, but in accordance with the examples
of an unconquered tradition as old as the first awakening of beauty in
human intelligence.[3]
But the eighteenth century manner corresponded only too well to the
natural tendencies of a democratic civilization. Neither Chateaubriand
nor Victor Hugo was able to abrogate the organic law which sends the
herd plunging down to the green plain where there is grass, and where
there will be nothing but dust, once it has passed. It was soon deemed
useless to cultivate a landscape destined to popular devastations, so
there sprang up a literature without style, just as there are highroads
without grass, without shade, and without wayside springs.