La simplicité divine de la pensée et du style.
—PAUL VERLAINE.
IN our day, as it now flies, there are fine films of distinction to
be considered, notably in literary art. The merest gossamer of verbal
indication must be respected in the behalf of style, lest a shade of
meaning, no matter how vague, be lost from paragraph or phrase. The
thing to be said is of no importance, we are told; but how it is said,
that is the great matter.
If the title of the present paper be seriously studied it will prove
puzzling to the average critic. It is a charming sentence, rich in
possibilities of meaning. The last two words, like the tail of a bee,
bear honey and poison on the same spike, or in sacs close by. Which
shall you receive, a sweet drop or an enraging prick? What, indeed,
does “saying nothing” mean? And nothing well said, does that mean a
well-said nothing? or shall we understand that anything has been poorly
said?
Behold how easily a pen slips into hopeless obscurities of mere ink! I
see that I am gone wool-gathering, and that my verbal distinctions just
attempted do not distinguish. Was it Horace who said this?—
“Non in caro nidore voluptas summa, sed in te ipso est.”
The “precious smack,” however, goes a long ways when there is nothing
else to be had. The art of saying nothing well is the art of the bore
or the art of the decadent, as you may interpret it. But a voice
at my elbow quietly suggests that the distinction is still without
a difference. The decadent, being always a bore, whether he has a
precious smack or a smack of preciousness, has the art of saying
nothing well and everything ill.
The good old days, when men who wrote were impressed with the value
of original thought, were hard on brains, but easy on dictionaries. A
tremendous idea was set for all time in a few words grabbed at random
from a scant vocabulary. Even after “art for art’s sake” had come to
stay, the great early poets were stingy in their verbal dealings with
art. It is surprising to note how meagre is the vocabulary of Sappho,
or of Theocritus, or of Pindar. And yet what incomparable riches of
expression! The masters were in a flux of imagination, and to them a
word had no value beyond its fitness to stand as a perfect sign of
what the brain originated. But not so with us; we chase the word for
the word’s sake. We imagine that there is something precious in verbal
style quite independent of what it may be used upon. A cheese, although
rotten, is made sweet enough, we think, by being wrapped in an artistic
poster.
We are quite familiar with the phrase “good literature,” which has come
to mean nothing and that wordy, or a good thing and that well written,
according to the individual taste of the critic deciding the matter.
But most generally we now take for granted that there is really nothing
worth saying on account of its intrinsic value. As a new woman said of
her kind the other day, “Oh, the female form is but a clothes-horse
nowadays. A woman is suggested, not seen, by what she wears,” we may
well say of thought: it is a mere word-rack, a peg upon which to hang
attractive diction. Not unfrequently the thought is quite dispensed
with and the phrasing hangs upon nothing.
If you have nothing to write, of course write it well. Good literature,
like Homer’s and Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, was well enough before
Théophile Gautier invented style; but since then there has come a
change, and now we demand, not new matter, but always a new manner. As
for durability, we are satisfied with a season’s run; permanency is not
desirable. Fame, which once was a thing to die for, has taken on the
form of a spring jacket or summer cravat; you wear it till the next
change in the weather. The art of saying nothing well is as fickle as
the moon; for nothing and woman pride themselves upon varying their
fashions; and what is good literature now but woman and nothing? Aminta
and her George Meredith strut before us as if they owned the earth; but
to-morrow there will be another woman and a new nothing.
The happiest literary folk in all the world must be those in Paris, who
actually took Paul Verlaine seriously, and are now making obeisance to
Stéphane Mallarmé. They seem to be, if we leave out certain provençal
dialect writers and our own American critics, the only _litterateurs_
upon earth who would heroically die rather than be right. M. Mallarmé
expresses perfectly in a single phrase the whole ambition of his
literary flock: “d’abord et toujours et irrésistiblement Verlaine.”
But how charming a thing literature is in the hands of these _poêtes
maudits_, as Verlaine styled them! To be sure, it is naught but nothing
well said. Verlaine may have been right when he wrote his eulogy:
“Absolus par l’imagination, absolus par l’expression, absolus comme
les Reys Netos des meilleurs siècles;” there is much to be said about
nothing, and more about such writers as Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé,
and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, who have served to amuse a blasé crowd
of the best fellows that ever lived, the Alexandrian Greek poets
doubtfully excepted.
What Sir Walter Scott called “the big bow-wow” is not suited to the
perfect expression of nothing. Browning’s diction gets on better at
a pinch, when the poet has to resort to a dazzling display of blank
verbal cartridges; for sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish
a meaningless whiff of word-wind from a whizzing bullet of thought. We
dodge with delight when either clips too near us. The other day I was
auditing the book-bills of “Narcissus,” and found myself delicately and
deliciously charmed by what under different circumstances would have
been a mere lack of assets to back the paper. Style never went further
nor came back with a more fragrant and savory load of nothing. From
paragraph to paragraph one glides over a meandering smoothness. It is
like bicycling on imaginary asphalt between immaterial clover fields.
One hears bumblebees and sheep and kine; but never is there any visible
or tangible matter of delectation: only a lulling composite noise; _vox
et præterea nihil_. This voice of the hollow sphere and this dripping
of melodious word-showers, to change the figures, combine to high
perfection in the latest good literature. Think of what a fascination
a style can have, when a young girl fresh from Vassar flings down
a volume by William Sharp, or one by I. Zangwill, and rapturously
exclaims: “Shakespeare and Scott are not in it for a minute longer!”
How delightful to do good that evil may come!
It would be hardly fair to wring into this paper a consideration of
the art of writing nothing ill. Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane have
given practical demonstrations of what may be done at a venture in that
field. Here again my own style persists in obscurity. Nothing to write
and the poorest imaginable style, is not exactly the same with plenty
to write and not a sentence ill written. The art of writing nothing and
writing it ill might, however, be admirable in the hands of a master.
For example, there is Andrew Lang’s eulogy of H. Rider Haggard’s
stories, which I might cite in any part of this essay with perfect
propriety and unqualified approval, as being strictly in point. When
Mr. Lang has absolutely nothing for subject he is alluringly objective
and revels in good literature. He is singularly expert in writing
nothing ill.
But the art of writing nothing well, of writing so that nothing
is well said, or whatever I mean, offers difficulties not readily
foreseen by the ambitious candidate for authorhood. Nothing must
ever be dressed up to look like a great something with an honorable
ancestry and a congenital lease upon posterity, unless we accept the
other interpretation of my caption. What could, on the other hand, be
reasonably described as the bloomer-costume style of writing, by which
effeminate imaginings are made to masquerade as virile and of the major
origin, demands serious and exhaustive study. To achieve it William
Watson has, we hope, a long life of self-reform before him; but some
are born to it. Austin Dobson would not, apparently, give a penny to
have it, albeit some of his best work neatly grazes the goal. Happy
accident has done much on this score for Henry James, reading whose
latest work one might exclaim with Mr. Sherburne Hardy: “But yet a
woman!” And Mr. Howells should never go near a Shaker village if he has
any regard for what old friends think of his style. It makes him say
nothing with unusual delight.
When I get back to my Greek, as I usually do at the earliest moment, an
essay like Aristotle’s on poetry makes me wonder how it has lived so
long and kept so well, seeing that it says something without regard,
at any point, to “lightness of touch” or to preciousness of phrasing.
It is not good literature, measured by the standard of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s style; but in its gnarls of diction are thoughts hard bound
with fibres that are indestructible. Aristotle was too busy inside of
his brain to have much respect for exterior frills; but where shall we
find solider phrases than he snatched out of his stinted vocabulary?
It is tough reading, almost as bad as Browning’s best, and the words
grate together like teeth with sand between them; still, something
is said. You remember his turns of diction by associating them with
his thoughts; but you never dream of regarding him as a writer with a
style-charm. His fascination comes from deep down, as if sent up by
roots squeezed between bowlders.
And it is true that a permanent fascination of style is always due to
something more than nothing well said. The attempt has been made in
American criticism to stow a poem like Poe’s “Raven” away in the lumber
garret as a mere word-trick; but there is something tremendously human
in the spiritual adumbration by which that great poem sustains itself.
Style is there, superb style; and the clutch of grim sorrow, the pang
of despair, and the helplessness of a soul in the presence of fate,
are there as well. Poe could not command Stevenson’s nimble diction,
nor could he even understand what humor like Lowell’s was. The power
in his work came from behind his lines out of a wellspring hidden in
a strange and original mind. He “played with dictionaries” and feigned
abstruse learning; but he said new and impressive things in a new and
impressive style.
The deepest truth connected with the permanency of art is that there
must be style, which does not stand for the same thing as diction, nor
for the same thing as characteristic stroke, manner, or tone. Mere
deftness with the brush, mere cleverness with the fiddle-bow, mere
facility in the doing of word-jugglery, cannot pass into permanent
art, and this is the lesson we need to-day. We take verbal style too
seriously when we reckon with it as of more importance than fresh
thought and enlarged ideals. It is not the art of saying nothing well
that wins in the long run; it is the art of saying a great thing with
a simple charm of style which does most to enrich literature. Indeed,
great things are themselves simple, the greatest the simplest. Nothing
is well said when nothing is said.