There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the
subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. While the
one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth
communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money.
Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be
recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the
greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their
thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating;
again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight
out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing
is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before
they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover
paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for
example, with Lessing in his _Dramaturgie_, and even in many of Jean
Paul's romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw
the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author
begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the
reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to
say.
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the
ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing,
unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an
inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there
were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as
long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money
lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins
to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works
of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for
nothing or for very little. And here, too, that Spanish proverb holds
good, which declares that honor and money are not to be found in the
same purse--_honora y provecho no caben en un saco_. The reason why
Literature is in such a bad plight nowadays is simply and solely that
people write books to make money. A man who is in want sits down
and writes a book, and the public is stupid enough to buy it. The
secondary effect of this is the ruin of language.
A great many bad writers make their whole living by that foolish
mania of the public for reading nothing but what has just been
printed,--journalists, I mean. Truly, a most appropriate name. In
plain language it is _journeymen, day-laborers_!
Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First
come those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory,
from reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people's
books. This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their
thinking whilst they are writing. They think in order to write; and
there is no lack of them. Last of all come those authors who think
before they begin to write. They are rare.
Authors of the second class, who put off their thinking until they
come to write, are like a sportsman who goes forth at random and is
not likely to bring very much home. On the other hand, when an author
of the third or rare class writes, it is like a _battue_. Here the
game has been previously captured and shut up within a very small
space; from which it is afterwards let out, so many at a time, into
another space, also confined. The game cannot possibly escape the
sportsman; he has nothing to do but aim and fire--in other words,
write down his thoughts. This is a kind of sport from which a man has
something to show.
But even though the number of those who really think seriously before
they begin to write is small, extremely few of them think about _the
subject itself_: the remainder think only about the books that have
been written on the subject, and what has been said by others. In
order to think at all, such writers need the more direct and powerful
stimulus of having other people's thoughts before them. These become
their immediate theme; and the result is that they are always under
their influence, and so never, in any real sense of the word, are
original. But the former are roused to thought by the subject itself,
to which their thinking is thus immediately directed. This is the only
class that produces writers of abiding fame.
It must, of course, be understood that I am speaking here of writers
who treat of great subjects; not of writers on the art of making
brandy.
Unless an author takes the material on which he writes out of his
own head, that is to say, from his own observation, he is not
worth reading. Book-manufacturers, compilers, the common run of
history-writers, and many others of the same class, take their
material immediately out of books; and the material goes straight
to their finger-tips without even paying freight or undergoing
examination as it passes through their heads, to say nothing of
elaboration or revision. How very learned many a man would be if he
knew everything that was in his own books! The consequence of this is
that these writers talk in such a loose and vague manner, that the
reader puzzles his brain in vain to understand what it is of which
they are really thinking. They are thinking of nothing. It may now and
then be the case that the book from which they copy has been composed
exactly in the same way: so that writing of this sort is like a
plaster cast of a cast; and in the end, the bare outline of the face,
and that, too, hardly recognizable, is all that is left to your
Antinous. Let compilations be read as seldom as possible. It is
difficult to avoid them altogether; since compilations also include
those text-books which contain in a small space the accumulated
knowledge of centuries.
There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is
always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every
case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always
means progress. Real thinkers, men of right judgment, people who are
in earnest with their subject,--these are all exceptions only. Vermin
is the rule everywhere in the world: it is always on the alert, taking
the mature opinions of the thinkers, and industriously seeking to
improve upon them (save the mark!) in its own peculiar way.
If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing
to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them
alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the
old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have
been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often
does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling
to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad
way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the
old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject.
The new writer frequently omits the best things they say, their most
striking illustrations, their happiest remarks; because he does not
see their value or feel how pregnant they are. The only thing that
appeals to him is what is shallow and insipid.
It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new
and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great
pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man
tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often
means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which
is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions.
Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is
made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about
nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put
forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a
paradox. Their sterile heads take naturally to the path of negation;
so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted--the vital
power, for example, the sympathetic nervous system, _generatio
equivoca_, Bichat's distinction between the working of the passions
and the working of intelligence; or else they want us to return to
crass atomism, and the like. Hence it frequently happens that _the
course of science is retrogressive._
To this class of writers belong those translators who not only
translate their author but also correct and revise him; a proceeding
which always seems to me impertinent. To such writers I say: Write
books yourself which are worth translating, and leave other people's
works as they are!
The reader should study, if he can, the real authors, the men who
have founded and discovered things; or, at any rate, those who are
recognized as the great masters in every branch of knowledge. Let him
buy second-hand books rather than read their contents in new ones. To
be sure, it is easy to add to any new discovery--_inventis aliquid
addere facile est_; and, therefore, the student, after well mastering
the rudiments of his subject, will have to make himself acquainted
with the more recent additions to the knowledge of it. And, in
general, the following rule may be laid down here as elsewhere: if a
thing is new, it is seldom good; because if it is good, it is only for
a short time new.
What the address is to a letter, the title should be to a book; in
other words, its main object should be to bring the book to those
amongst the public who will take an interest in its contents. It
should, therefore, be expressive; and since by its very nature it must
be short, it should be concise, laconic, pregnant, and if possible
give the contents in one word. A prolix title is bad; and so is one
that says nothing, or is obscure and ambiguous, or even, it may be,
false and misleading; this last may possibly involve the book in the
same fate as overtakes a wrongly addressed letter. The worst titles
of all are those which have been stolen, those, I mean, which have
already been borne by other books; for they are in the first place a
plagiarism, and secondly the most convincing proof of a total lack of
originality in the author. A man who has not enough originality to
invent a new title for his book, will be still less able to give it
new contents. Akin to these stolen titles are those which have been
imitated, that is to say, stolen to the extent of one half; for
instance, long after I had produced my treatise _On Will in Nature_,
Oersted wrote a book entitled _On Mind in Nature_.
A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's
thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in _the matter about
which he has thought_, or in the _form_ which his thoughts take, in
other words, _what it is that he has thought about it._
The matter of books is most various; and various also are the several
excellences attaching to books on the score of their matter. By matter
I mean everything that comes within the domain of actual experience;
that is to say, the facts of history and the facts of nature, taken in
and by themselves and in their widest sense. Here it is the _thing_
treated of, which gives its peculiar character to the book; so that a
book can be important, whoever it was that wrote it.
But in regard to the form, the peculiar character of a book depends
upon the _person_ who wrote it. It may treat of matters which are
accessible to everyone and well known; but it is the way in which they
are treated, what it is that is thought about them, that gives the
book its value; and this comes from its author. If, then, from this
point of view a book is excellent and beyond comparison, so is its
author. It follows that if a writer is worth reading, his merit rises
just in proportion as he owes little to his matter; therefore, the
better known and the more hackneyed this is, the greater he will be.
The three great tragedians of Greece, for example, all worked at the
same subject-matter.
So when a book is celebrated, care should be taken to note whether it
is so on account of its matter or its form; and a distinction should
be made accordingly.
Books of great importance on account of their matter may proceed from
very ordinary and shallow people, by the fact that they alone have had
access to this matter; books, for instance, which describe journeys in
distant lands, rare natural phenomena, or experiments; or historical
occurrences of which the writers were witnesses, or in connection
with which they have spent much time and trouble in the research and
special study of original documents.
On the other hand, where the matter is accessible to everyone or very
well known, everything will depend upon the form; and what it is
that is thought about the matter will give the book all the value
it possesses. Here only a really distinguished man will be able to
produce anything worth reading; for the others will think nothing but
what anyone else can think. They will just produce an impress of
their own minds; but this is a print of which everyone possesses the
original.
However, the public is very much more concerned to have matter than
form; and for this very reason it is deficient in any high degree of
culture. The public shows its preference in this respect in the most
laughable way when it comes to deal with poetry; for there it devotes
much trouble to the task of tracking out the actual events or personal
circumstances in the life of the poet which served as the occasion of
his various works; nay, these events and circumstances come in the end
to be of greater importance than the works themselves; and rather than
read Goethe himself, people prefer to read what has been written about
him, and to study the legend of Faust more industriously than the
drama of that name. And when Bürger declared that "people would write
learned disquisitions on the question, Who Leonora really was," we
find this literally fulfilled in Goethe's case; for we now possess a
great many learned disquisitions on Faust and the legend attaching to
him. Study of this kind is, and remains, devoted to the material of
the drama alone. To give such preference to the matter over the form,
is as though a man were to take a fine Etruscan vase, not to admire
its shape or coloring, but to make a chemical analysis of the clay and
paint of which it is composed.
The attempt to produce an effect by means of the material employed--an
attempt which panders to this evil tendency of the public--is most to
be condemned in branches of literature where any merit there may be
lies expressly in the form; I mean, in poetical work. For all that, it
is not rare to find bad dramatists trying to fill the house by means
of the matter about which they write. For example, authors of this
kind do not shrink from putting on the stage any man who is in any way
celebrated, no matter whether his life may have been entirely devoid
of dramatic incident; and sometimes, even, they do not wait until the
persons immediately connected with him are dead.
The distinction between matter and form to which I am here alluding
also holds good of conversation. The chief qualities which enable a
man to converse well are intelligence, discernment, wit and vivacity:
these supply the form of conversation. But it is not long before
attention has to be paid to the matter of which he speaks; in other
words, the subjects about which it is possible to converse with
him--his knowledge. If this is very small, his conversation will
not be worth anything, unless he possesses the above-named formal
qualities in a very exceptional degree; for he will have nothing to
talk about but those facts of life and nature which everybody knows.
It will be just the opposite, however, if a man is deficient in these
formal qualities, but has an amount of knowledge which lends value to
what he says. This value will then depend entirely upon the matter of
his conversation; for, as the Spanish proverb has it, _mas sabe el
necio en su casa, que el sabio en la agena_--a fool knows more of his
own business than a wise man does of others.