THE ART OF WRITING
I
FROM time to time we are solemnly warned that in the hands of modern
writers language has fallen into a morbid state. It has become
degenerate, if not, indeed, the victim of “senile ataxy” or “general
paralysis.” Certainly it is well that our monitors should seek to arouse
in us the wholesome spirit of self-criticism. Whether we write ill or
well, we can never be too seriously concerned with what it is that we
are attempting to do. We may always be grateful to those who stimulate
us to a more wakeful activity in pursuing a task which can never be
carried to perfection.
Yet these monitors seldom fail at the same time to arouse a deep revolt
in our minds. We are not only impressed by the critic’s own inability to
write any better than those he criticises. We are moved to question the
validity of nearly all the rules he lays down for our guidance. We are
inclined to dispute altogether the soundness of the premises from which
he starts. Of these three terms of our revolt, covering comprehensively
the whole ground, the first may be put aside—since the ancient retort is
always ineffective and it helps the patient not at all to bid the
physician heal himself—and we may take the last first.
Men are always apt to bow down before the superior might of their
ancestors. It has been so always and everywhere. Even the author of the
once well-known book of Genesis believed that “there were giants in the
earth in those days,” the mighty men which were of old, the men of
renown, and still to-day among ourselves no plaint is more common than
that concerning the physical degeneracy of modern men as compared with
our ancestors of a few centuries ago. Now and then, indeed, there comes
along a man of science, like Professor Parsons, who has measured the
bones from the remains of the ancestors we still see piled up in the
crypt at Hythe, and finds that—however fine the occasional
exceptions—the average height of those men and women was decidedly less
than that of their present-day descendants. Fortunately for the vitality
of tradition, we cherish a wholesome distrust of science. And so it is
with our average literary stature. The academic critic regards himself
as the special depository of the accepted tradition, and far be it from
him to condescend to any mere scientific inquiry into the actual facts.
He half awakens from slumber to murmur the expected denunciation of his
own time, and therewith returns to slumber. He usually seems unaware
that even three centuries ago, in the finest period of English prose,
Swift, certainly himself a supreme master, was already lamenting “the
corruption of our style.”
If it is asserted that the average writer of to-day has not equalled the
supreme writer of some earlier age,—there are but one or two in any
age,—we can only ejaculate: Strange if he had! Yet that is all that the
academic critic usually seems to mean. If he would take the trouble to
compare the average prose writer of to-day with the average writer of
even so great an age as the Elizabethan, he might easily convince
himself that the former, whatever his imperfections, need not fear the
comparison. Whether or not Progress in general may be described as “the
exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance,” it is certainly so with
the progress of style, and the imperfections of our average everyday
writing are balanced by the quite other imperfections of our
forefathers’ writing. What, for instance, need we envy in the literary
methods of that great and miscellaneous band of writers whom Hakluyt
brought together in those admirable volumes which are truly great and
really fascinating only for reasons that have nothing to do with style?
Raleigh himself here shows no distinction in his narrative of that
discreditable episode,—as he clearly and rightly felt it to be,—the loss
of the _Revenge_ by the wilful Grenville. Most of them are bald,
savourless, monotonous, stating the obvious facts in the obvious way,
but hopelessly failing to make clear, when rarely they attempt it,
anything that is not obvious. They have none of the little unconscious
tricks of manner which worry the critic to-day. But their whole manner
is one commonplace trick from which they never escape. They are only
relieved by its simplicity and by the novelty which comes through age.
We have to remember that all mediocrity is impersonal and that when we
encourage its manifestations on printed pages we merely make mediocrity
more conspicuous. Nor can that be remedied by teaching the mediocre to
cultivate tricks of fashion or of vanity. There is more personality in
Claude Bernard’s “Leçons de Physiologie Expérimentales,” a great critic
of life and letters has pointed out, Remy de Gourmont, than in Musset’s
“Confession d’un Enfant du Siècle.” For personality is not something
that can be sought; it is a radiance that is diffused spontaneously. It
may even be most manifest when most avoided, and no writer—the remark
has doubtless often been made before—can be more personal than Flaubert
who had made almost a gospel of Impersonality. But the absence of
research for personality, however meritorious, will not suffice to bring
personality out of mediocrity.
Moreover, the obvious fact seems often to be overlooked by the critic
that a vastly larger proportion of the population now write, and see
their writing printed. We live in what we call a democratic age in which
all are compulsorily taught how to make pothooks and hangers on paper.
So that every nincompoop—in the attenuated sense of the term—as soon as
he puts a pen in ink feels that he has become, like M. Jourdain, a
writer of prose. That feeling is justified only in a very limited sense,
and if we wish to compare the condition of things to-day with that in an
age when people wrote at the bidding of some urgent stimulus from
without or from within, we have at the outset to delete certainly over
ninety-five per cent of our modern so-called writers before we institute
any comparison. The writers thus struck out, it may be added, cannot
fail to include many persons of much note in the world. There are all
sorts of people to-day who write from all sorts of motives other than a
genuine aptitude for writing. To suppose that there can be any
comparison at this point of the present with the past and to dodder over
the decay of our language would seem a senile proceeding if we do not
happen to know that it occurs in all ages, and that, even at the time
when our prose speech was as near to perfection as it is ever likely to
be, its critics were bemoaning its corruption, lamenting, for instance,
the indolent new practice of increasing sibilation by changing
“arriveth” into “arrives” and pronouncing “walked” as “walkd,” sometimes
in their criticisms showing no more knowledge of the history and methods
of growth of English than our academic critics show to-day.
For we know what to-day they tell us; it is not hard to know, their
exhortations, though few, are repeated in so psittaceous a manner. One
thinks, for instance, of that solemn warning against the enormity of the
split infinitive which has done so much to aggravate the Pharisaism of
the bad writers who scrupulously avoid it. This superstition seems to
have had its origin in a false analogy with Latin in which the
infinitive is never split for the good reason that it is impossible to
split. In the greater freedom of English it is possible and has been
done for at least the last five hundred years by the greatest masters of
English; only the good writer never uses this form helplessly and
involuntarily, but with a definite object; and that is the only rule to
observe. An absolute prohibition in this matter is the mark of those who
are too ignorant, or else too unintelligent, to recognise a usage which
is of the essence of English speech.[55]
One may perhaps refer, again, to those who lay down that every sentence
must end on a significant word, never on a preposition, and who
reprobate what has been technically termed the post-habited prefix. They
are the same worthy and would-be old-fashioned people who think that a
piece of music must always end monotonously on a banging chord. Only
here they have not, any more than in music, even the virtue—if such it
be—of old fashion, for the final so-called preposition is in the genius
of the English language and associated with the Scandinavian—in the
wider ancient sense Danish—strain of English, one of the finest strains
it owns, imparting much of the plastic force which renders it flexible,
the element which helped to save it from the straitlaced tendency of
Anglo-Saxon and the awkward formality of Latin and French influence. The
foolish prejudice we are here concerned with seems to date from a period
when the example of French, in which the final preposition is
impossible, happened to be dominant. Its use in English is associated
with the informal grace and simplicity, the variety of tender cadence,
which our tongue admits.
In such matters as the “split infinitive” and the “post-habited
preposition,” there should never have been any doubt as to the complete
validity and authority of the questioned usages. But there are other
points at which some even good critics may be tempted to accept the
condemnation of the literary grammarians. It is sufficient to mention
one: the nominative use of the pronoun “me.” Yet, surely, any one who
considers social practice as well as psychological necessity should not
fail to see that we must recognise a double use of “me” in English. The
French, who in such matters seem to have possessed a finer social and
psychological tact, have realised that je cannot be the sole nominative
of the first person and have supplemented it by _moi_ (_mi_ from
_mihi_). The Frenchman, when asked who is there, does not reply “Je!”
But the would-be English purist is supposed to be reduced to replying
“I!” Royal Cleopatra asks the Messenger: “Is she as tall as me?” The
would-be purist no doubt transmutes this as he reads into: “Is she as
tall as I?” We need not envy him.
Such an example indicates how independent the free and wholesome life of
language is of grammatical rules. This is not to diminish the importance
of the grammarian’s task, but simply to define it, as the formulator,
and not the lawgiver, of usage. His rules are useful, not merely in
order to know how best to keep them, but in order to know how best to
break them. Without them freedom might become licence. Yet even licence,
we have to recognise, is the necessary offscouring of speech in its
supreme manifestations of vitality and force. English speech was never
more syntactically licentious than in the sixteenth century, but it was
never more alive, never more fitly the material for a great artist to
mould. So it is that in the sixteenth century we find Shakespeare. In
post-Dryden days (though Dryden was an excellent writer and engaged on
an admirable task) a supreme artist in English speech became impossible,
and if a Shakespeare had appeared all his strength would have been
wasted in a vain struggle with the grammarians. French speech has run a
similar and almost synchronous course with English. There was a
magnificently natural force and wealth in sixteenth-century French: in
Rabelais it had been even extravagantly exuberant; in Montaigne it is
still flexible and various—_ondoyant et divers_—and still full of
natural delight and freedom. But after Malherbe and his fellows French
speech acquired orderliness, precision, and formality; they were
excellent qualities, no doubt, but had to be paid for by some degree of
thinness and primness, even some stiffening of the joints. Rousseau came
and poured fresh blood from Switzerland into the language and a new
ineffable grace that was all his own; so that if we now hesitate to say,
with Landor, that he excels all the moderns for harmony, it is only
because they have learnt what he taught; and the later Romantics, under
the banner of Hugo, imparted colour and brilliance. Yet all the great
artists who have wrestled with French speech for a century have never
been able to restore the scent and the savour and the substance which
Villon and Montaigne without visible effort could once find within its
borders. In this as in other matters what we call Progress means the
discovery of new desirable qualities, and therewith the loss of other
qualities that were at least equally desirable.
Then there is yet another warning which, especially in recent times, is
issued at frequent intervals, and that is against the use of verbal
counters, of worn or even worn-out phrases, of what we commonly fall
back on modern French to call _clichés_. We mean thereby the use of old
stereotyped phrases—Goethe called them “stamped” or _gestempelt_—to save
the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning. The word
_cliché_ is thus typographic, though, it so happens, it is derived from
an old French word of phonetic meaning, _cliqueter_ or _cliquer_
(related to the German _klatschen_), which we already have in English as
to “click” or to “clack,” in a sense which well supplements its more
modern technical sense for this literary end. Yet the warning against
_clichés_ is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive
and craves speech that is vivid, as _clichés_ never are, instinctively
avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his
tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed _clichés_, falls into the most
deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so
anxious to avoid _clichés_ that he acquired the habit of using them in
an inverted form and wrote a prose that made one feel like walking on
sharp flints; for, though a macadamized road may not be so good to walk
in as a flowered meadow, it is better than a macadamized road with each
stone turned upside down and the sharp edge uppermost. As a matter of
fact it is impossible to avoid the use of _clichés_ and counters in
speech, and if it were possible the results would be in the highest
degree tedious and painful. The word “_cliché_” itself, we have seen, is
a _cliché_, a worn counter of a word, with its original meaning all
effaced, and even its secondary meaning now only just visible. That, if
those folk who condemn _clichés_ only had the intelligence to perceive
it, is a significant fact. You cannot avoid using _clichés_, not even in
the very act of condemning them. They include, if we only look keenly
enough, nearly the whole of language, almost every separate word. If one
could avoid them one would be unintelligible. Even those common phrases
which it is peculiarly meet to call counters are not to be absolutely
condemned. They have become so common to use because so fit to use, as
Baudelaire understood when he spoke of “the immense depth of thought in
vulgar locutions.”[56] There is only one rule to follow here,—and it is
simply the rule in every part of art,—to know what one is doing, not to
go sheeplike with the flock, ignorantly, unthinkingly, heedlessly, but
to mould speech to expression the most truly one knows how. If, indeed,
we are seeking clarity and the precise expression of thought, there is
nothing we may not do if only we know how to do it—but that “if” might
well be in capitals. One who has spent the best part of his life in
trying to write things that had not been written before, and that were
very difficult to write, may perhaps be allowed to confess the hardness
of this task.
To write is thus an arduous intellectual task, a process which calls for
the highest tension of the muscles in the escalade of a heaven which the
strongest and bravest and alertest can never hope to take by violence.
He has to be true,—whether it is in the external world he is working or
in his own internal world,—and as truth can only be seen through his own
temperament, he is engaged in moulding the expression of a combination
which has never been seen in the world before.
It is sometimes said that the great writer seldom quotes, and that in
the main is true, for he finds it difficult to mix an alien music of
thought and speech with his own. Montaigne, it is also said, is an
exception, but that is scarcely true. What Montaigne quoted he often
translated and so moulded to the pattern of his own mind. The same may
be said of Robert Burton. If it had not been so these writers (almost
certainly Burton) could scarcely have attained to the rank of great
authors. The significant fact to note, however, is not that the great
writer rarely quotes, but that he knows how to quote. Schopenhauer was
here a master. He possessed a marvellous flair for fine sayings in
remote books, and these he would now and again let fall like jewels on
his page, with so happy a skill that they seem to be created for the
spot on which they fell. It is the little writer rather than the great
writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is really
never doing anything else.[57]
It is not in writing only, in all art, in all science, the task before
each is that defined by Bacon: _man added to Nature_. It is so also in
painting, as a great artist of modern time, Cézanne, recognised even in
those same words: “He who wishes to make art,” he once said to Vollard,
“must follow Bacon, who defined the artist as ‘Homo additus Naturæ.’” So
it is that the artist, if he has succeeded in being true to his
function, is necessarily one who makes all things new.[58] That
remarkable artist who wrote the Book of the Revelation has expressed
this in his allegorical, perhaps unconscious, Oriental way, for he
represents the artist as hearing the divine spirit from the throne
within him uttering the command: “Behold, I make all things new. Write!”
The command is similar whatever the art may be, though it is here the
privilege of the writer to find his own art set forth as the inspired
ensample of all art.
Thus it is that to write is a strenuous intellectual task not to be
achieved without the exercise of the best trained and most deliberate
rational faculties. That is the outcome of the whole argument up to this
point. There is so much bad writing in the world because writing has
been dominated by ignorance and habit and prudery, and not least by the
academic teachers and critics who have known nothing of what they claim
to teach and were often themselves singular examples of how not to
write. There has, on the other hand, been a little good writing here and
there in the world, through the ages, because a few possessed not only
courage and passion and patience, but knowledge and the concentrated
intellectual attention, and the resolution to seek truth, and the
conviction that, as they imagined, the genius they sought consisted in
taking pains.
Yet, if that were all, many people would become great writers who, as we
well know, will never become writers; if that were all, writing could
scarcely even be regarded as an art. For art, or one side of it,
transcends conscious knowledge; a poet, as Landor remarked, “is not
aware of all that he knows, and seems at last to know as little about it
as a silkworm knows about the fineness of her thread.” Yet the same
great writer has also said of good poetry, and with equal truth, that
“the ignorant and inexpert lose half its pleasures.” We always move on
two feet, as Élie Faure remarks in his “L’Arbre d’Éden,” the two poles
of knowledge and of desire, the one a matter of deliberate acquirement
and the other of profound instinct, and all our movements are a
perpetual leap from one to the other, seeking a centre of gravity we
never attain.[59] So the achievement of style in writing, as in all
human intercourse, is something more than an infinite capacity for
taking pains. It is also defined—and, sometimes I think, supremely well
defined—as “grace seasoned with salt.” Beyond all that can be achieved
by knowledge and effort, there must be the spontaneous grace that
springs up like a fountain from the depth of a beautifully harmonious
nature, and there must be also the quality which the Spaniards call
“sal,” and so rightly admire in the speech of the women of the people of
their own land, the salt quality which gives savour and point and
antiseptic virtue.[60]
The best literary prose speech is simply the idealisation in the heaven
of art of the finest common speech of earth, simply, yet never reached
for more than a moment in a nation’s long history. In Greece it was
immortally and radiantly achieved by Plato; in England it was attained
for a few years during the last years of the seventeenth and the first
years of the eighteenth centuries, lingering on, indeed, here and there
to the end of that century until crushed between the pedantry of Johnson
and the poetic licence of the Romantics. But for the rest only the most
happily endowed genius can even attain for a rare moment the perfection
of the Pauline ideal of “grace seasoned with salt.”
It is fortunate, no doubt, that an age of machinery is well content with
machine-made writing. It would be in bad taste—too physiological, too
sentimental, altogether too antiquated—to refer to the symbolical
significance of the highly relevant fact that the heart, while
undoubtedly a machine, is at the same time a sensitively pulsating organ
with fleshy strings stretched from ventricle to valves, a harp on which
the great artist may play until our hearts also throb in unison. Yet
there are some to whom it still seems that, beyond mechanical skill, the
cadences of the artist’s speech are the cadences of his heart, and the
footfalls of his rhythm the footfalls of his spirit, in a great
adventure across the universe.
II
THUS we do not always realise that learning to write is partly a matter
of individual instinct. This is so even of that writing which, as
children, we learnt in copybooks with engraved maxims at the head of the
page. There are some, indeed, probably the majority, who quickly achieve
the ability to present a passable imitation of the irreproachable model
presented to them. There are some who cannot. I speak as one who knows,
for I recall how my first schoolmaster, a sarcastic little Frenchman,
irritated by my unchastenable hand, would sometimes demand if I wrote
with the kitchen poker, or again assert that I kept a tame spider to run
over the page, while a later teacher, who was an individualist and more
tolerant, yet sometimes felt called upon to murmur, in a tone of dubious
optimism: “You will have a hand of your own, my boy.” It is not lack of
docility that is in question, but an imperative demand of the nervous
system which the efforts of the will may indeed bend but cannot crush.
Yet the writers who cheerfully lay down the laws of style seldom realise
this complexity and mystery enwrapping even so simple a matter as
handwriting. No one can say how much atavistic recurrence from remote
ancestors, how much family nervous habit, how much wayward yet
deep-rooted personal idiosyncrasy deflect the child’s patient efforts to
imitate the copperplate model which is set before him. The son often
writes like the father, even though he may seldom or never see his
father’s handwriting; brothers may write singularly alike, though taught
by different teachers and even in different continents. It has been
noted of the ancient and distinguished family of the Tyrrells that their
handwriting in the parish books of Stowmarket remained the same
throughout many generations. I have noticed, in a relation of my own,
peculiarities of handwriting identical with those of an ancestor two
centuries ago whose writing he certainly never saw. The resemblance is
often not that of exact formation, but of general air or underlying
structure.[61] One is tempted to think that often, in this as in other
matters, the possibilities are limited, and that when the child is
formed in his mother’s womb Nature cast the same old dice and the same
old combinations inevitably tend to recur. But that notion scarcely fits
all the facts, and our growing knowledge of the infinite subtlety of
heredity, of its presence even in the most seemingly elusive psychic
characters, indicates that the dice may be loaded and fall in accord
with harmonies we fail to perceive. The development of Mendelian
analysis may in time help us to understand them.
The part in style which belongs to atavism, to heredity, to unconscious
instinct, is probably very large. It eludes us to an even greater extent
than the corresponding part in handwriting because the man of letters
may have none among his ancestors who sought expression in style, so
that only one Milton speaks for a mute inglorious family, and how far he
speaks truly remains a matter of doubt. We only divine the truth when we
know the character and deeds of the family. There could be no more
instructive revelation of family history in style than is furnished by
Carlyle. There had never been any writer in the Carlyle family, and if
there had, Carlyle at the time when his manner of writing was formed,
would scarcely have sought to imitate them. Yet we could not conceive
this stern, laborious, plebeian family of Lowland Scots—with its remote
Teutonic affinities, its coarseness, its narrowness, its assertive
inarticulative force—in any more fitting verbal translation than was
given it by this its last son, the pathetic little figure with the face
of a lost child, who wrote in a padded room and turned the rough
muscular and reproductive activity of his fathers into more than half a
century of eloquent chatter concerning Work and Silence, so writing his
name in letters of gold on the dome of the British Museum.[62]
When we consider the characteristics, not of the family, but of the
race, it is easier to find examples of the force of ancestry, even
remote ancestry, overcoming environment and dominating style.
Shakespeare and Bacon were both Elizabethans who both lived from youth
upwards in London, and even moved to some extent almost in the same
circles. Yet all the influences of tradition and environment, which
sometimes seem to us so strong, scarcely sufficed to spread even the
faintest veneer of similarity over their style, and we could seldom
mistake a sentence of one for a sentence of the other. We always know
that Shakespeare—with his gay extravagance and redundancy, his essential
idealism—came of a people that had been changed in character from the
surrounding stock by a Celtic infolding of the receding British to
Wales.[63] We never fail to realise that Bacon—with his instinctive
gravity and temperance, the suppressed ardour of his aspiring
intellectual passion, his temperamental naturalism—was rooted deep in
that East Anglian soil which he had never so much as visited. In
Shakespeare’s veins there dances the blood of the men who made the
“Mabinogion”; we recognise Bacon as a man of the same countryside which
produced the forefathers of Emerson. Or we may consider the mingled
Breton and Gascon ancestry of Renan, in whose brain, in the very contour
and melody of his style, the ancient bards of Brittany have joined hands
with the tribe of Montaigne and Brantôme and the rest. Or, to take one
more example, we can scarcely fail to recognise in the style of Sir
Thomas Browne—as later, may be, in that of Hawthorne—the glamour of
which the latent aptitude had been handed on by ancestors who dwelt on
the borders of Wales.
In these examples hereditary influence can be clearly distinguished from
merely external and traditional influences. Not that we need imply a
disparagement of tradition: it is the foundation of civilised progress.
Speech itself is a tradition, a naturally developed convention, and in
that indeed it has its universal applicability and use. It is the crude
amorphous material of art, of music and poetry. But on its formal side,
whatever its supreme significance as the instrument and medium of
expression, speech is a natural convention, an accumulated tradition.
Even tradition, however, is often simply the corporeal embodiment, as it
were, of heredity. Behind many a great writer’s personality there stands
tradition, and behind tradition the race. That is well illustrated in
the style of Addison. This style—with a resilient fibre underneath its
delicacy and yet a certain freedom as of conversational familiarity—has
as its most easily marked structural signature a tendency to a usage it
has already been necessary to mention: the tendency to allow the
preposition to lag to the end of the sentence rather than to come tautly
before the pronoun with which in Latin it is combined. In a century in
which the Latin-French elements of English were to become developed, as
in Gibbon and Johnson, to the utmost, the totally different physiognomy
of Addison’s prose remained conspicuous,—though really far from
novel,—and to the sciolists of a bygone age it seemed marked by
carelessness, if not licence, at the best by personal idiosyncrasy. Yet,
as a matter of fact, we know it was nothing of the kind. Addison, as his
name indicates, was of the stock of the Scandinavian English, and the
Cumberland district he belonged to is largely Scandinavian; the
adjoining peninsula of Furness, which swarms with similar patronymics,
is indeed one of the most purely Scandinavian spots in England. Now in
the Scandinavian languages, as we know, and in the English dialects
based upon them, the preposition comes usually at the end of the
sentence, and Scandinavian structural elements form an integral part of
English, even more than Latin-French, for it has been the part of the
latter rather to enrich the vocabulary than to mould the structure of
our tongue. So that, instead of introducing a personal idiosyncrasy or
perpetrating a questionable licence, Addison was continuing his own
ancestral traditions and at the same time asserting an organic
prerogative of English speech. It may be added that Addison reveals his
Scandinavian affinities not merely in the material structure, but in the
spiritual quality, of his work. This delicate sympathetic observation,
the vein of gentle melancholy, the quiet restrained humour, meet us
again in modern Norwegian authors like Jonas Lie.
When we put aside these ancestral and traditional influences, there is
still much in the writer’s art which, even if personal, we can only term
instinctive. This may be said of that music which at their finest
moments belongs to all the great writers of prose. Every writer has his
own music, though there are few in whom it becomes audible save at rare
and precious intervals. The prose of the writer who can deliberately
make his own personal cadences monotonously audible all the time grows
wearisome; it affects us as a tedious mannerism. This is a kind of
machine-made prose which indeed it requires a clever artisan to produce;
but, as Landor said, “he must be a bad writer to whom there are no
inequalities.” The great writers, though they are always themselves,
attain the perfect music of their style under the stress of a stimulus
adequate to arouse it. Their music is the audible translation of
emotion, and only arises when the waves of emotion are stirred. It is
not properly speaking a voluntary effect. We can but say that the winds
of the spirit are breathed upon the surface of style, and they lift it
into rhythmic movement. And for each writer these waves have their own
special rate of vibration, their peculiar shape and interval. The rich
deep slow tones of Bacon have nothing in common with the haunting,
long-drawn melody, faint and tremulous, of Newman; the high metallic
falsetto ring of De Quincey’s rhetoric is far away from the pensive
low-toned music of Pater.
Imitation, as psychologists have taught us to realise, is a part of
instinct. When we begin to learn to write, it rarely happens that we are
not imitators, and, for the most part, unconsciously. The verse of every
young poet, however original he may afterwards grow, usually has plainly
written across it the rhythmic signature of some great master whose work
chances to be abroad in the world; once it was usually Tennyson, then
Swinburne, now various later poets; the same thing happens with prose,
but the rhythm of the signature is less easy to hear.
As a writer slowly finds his own centre of gravity, the influence of the
rhythm of other writers ceases to be perceptible except in so far as it
coincides with his own natural movement and _tempo_. That is a familiar
fact. We less easily realise, perhaps, that not only the tunes but the
notes that they are formed of are, in every great writer, his own. In
other words, he creates even his vocabulary. That is so not only in the
more obvious sense that out of the mass of words that make up a language
every writer uses only a limited number and even among these has his
words of predilection.[64] It is in the meanings he gives to words, to
names, that a writer creates his vocabulary. All language, we know, is
imagery and metaphor; even the simplest names of the elementary things
are metaphors based on resemblances that suggested themselves to the
primitive men who made language. It is not otherwise with the aboriginal
man of genius who uses language to express his new vision of the world.
He sees things charged with energy, or brilliant with colour, or
breathing out perfume, that the writers who came before him had
overlooked, and to designate these things he must use names which convey
the qualities he has perceived. Guided by his own new personal
sensations and perceptions, he creates his metaphorical vocabulary. If
we examine the style of Montaigne, so fresh and personal and inventive,
we see that its originality lies largely in its vocabulary, which is
not, like that of Rabelais, manufactured afresh, but has its novelty in
its metaphorical values, such new values being tried and tempered at
every step, to the measure of the highly individual person behind them,
who thereby exerts his creative force. In later days Huysmans, who
indeed saw the world at a more eccentric angle than Montaigne, yet with
unflinching veracity and absolute devotion, set himself to the task of
creating his own vocabulary, and at first the unfamiliarity of its
beauty estranges us.
To think of Huysmans is to be led towards an aspect of style not to be
passed over. To say that the artist in words is expressing a new vision
of the world and seeking the designations for things as he sees them, is
a large part of the truth, and, I would say, perhaps the most important
part of it. For most of us, I suppose (as I know it has been for me),
our vision of Nature has been largely, though by no means entirely,
constituted by pictures we have seen, by poems we have read, that left
an abiding memory. That is to say that Nature comes to us through an
atmosphere which is the emanation of supreme artists who once thrilled
us. But we are here concerned with the process of the artist’s work and
not with his æsthetic influence. The artist finds that words have a rich
content of their own, they are alive and they flourish or decay. They
send out connecting threads in every direction, they throb with meaning
that ever changes and reverberates afar. The writer is not always, or
often, merely preparing a _catalogue raisonné_ of things, he is an
artist and his pigments are words. Often he merely takes his suggestions
from the things of the world and makes his own pictures without any real
resemblance to the scene it is supposed to depict. Dujardin tells us
that he once took Huysmans to a Wagner concert; he scarcely listened to
the music, but he was fascinated by the programme the attendant handed
to him; he went home to write a brilliant page on “Tannhäuser.”
Mallarmé, on the other hand, was soaked in music; to him music was the
voice of the world, and it was the aim of poetry to express the world by
itself becoming music; he stood on a height like a pioneer and looked
towards the Promised Land, trying to catch intimations of a new
sensibility and a future art, but a great master of language, like
Huysmans, he never was. Huysmans has written superb pages about Gustave
Moreau and Félicien Rops, thinking, no doubt, that he was revealing
supreme artists (though we need not follow too closely the fashion of
depreciating either of those artists), but he was really only attracted
to their programmes and therein experiencing a stimulus that chanced to
be peculiarly fitted for drawing out his own special art. Baudelaire
would have written less gorgeously, but he would have produced a more
final critical estimate.
Yet even the greatest writers are affected by the intoxication of mere
words in the artistry of language. Shakespeare is, constantly, and, not
content with “making the green one red,” he must needs at the same time
“the multitudinous seas incarnadine.” It is conspicuous in Keats (as
Leigh Hunt, perhaps his first sensitively acute critic, clearly
explained), and often, as in “The Eve of St. Agnes,” where he seemed to
be concerned with beautiful things, he was really concerned with
beautiful words. In that way he is sometimes rather misleading for the
too youthful reader; “porphyry” seemed to me a marvellous substance when
as a boy of twelve I read of it in Keats, and I imagine that Keats
himself would have been surprised, had he lived long enough to walk to
St. Thomas’s Hospital over the new London Bridge, when told that he was
treading a granite that was porphyritic. I recall how Verlaine would
sometimes repeat in varying tones some rather unfamiliar word, rolling
it round and round in his mouth, sucking it like a sweetmeat, licking
the sound into the shape that pleased him; some people may perhaps have
found a little bizarre the single words (“Green,” for example) which he
sometimes made the title of a song, but if they adopt the preliminary
Verlainian process they may understand how he had fitted such words to
music and meaning.
The most obviously beautiful things in the world of Nature are birds and
flowers and the stones we call precious. But the attitude of the poet in
the presence of Nature is precisely that of Huysmans in the presence of
art: it is the programme that interests him. Of birds the knowledge of
poets generally is of the most generalised and elementary kind; they are
the laughing-stock of the ornithologist; they are only a stage removed
from the standpoint of the painter who was introducing a tree into his
landscape and when asked what tree, replied, “Oh, just the ordinary
tree.” Even Goethe mistook the finches by the roadside for larks. The
poet, one may be sure, even to-day seldom carries in his pocket the
little “Führer durch unsere Vogelwelt” of Bernhard Hoffmann, and has
probably never so much as heard of it. Of flowers his knowledge seems to
be limited by the quality of the flower’s name. I have long cherished an
exquisite and quite common English wild-flower, but have never come
across a poem about it, for its unattractive name is the stitchwort, and
it is only lately that even in prose it has met (from Mr. Salt) with due
appreciation. As regards precious stones the same may be said, and in
the galleries of the Geological Museum it has hardly seemed to me that,
among the few visitors, there were poets (unless I chanced to bring one
myself) to brood over all that beauty. It is the word and its inner
reverberation with which the poet is really concerned, even sometimes
perhaps deliberately. When Milton misused the word “eglantine” one
realises the unconscious appeal to him of the name and one cannot feel
quite sure that it was altogether unconscious. Coleridge has been
solemnly reproved for speaking of the “loud” bassoon. But it was to the
timbre of the word, not of the instrument, that Coleridge was
responding, and had he been informed that the bassoon is not loud, I
doubt not he would have replied: “Well, if it is not loud it ought to
be.” On the plane on which Coleridge moved “the loud bassoon” was
absolutely right. We see that the artist in speech moves among words
rather than among things. Originally, it is true, words are closely
related to things, but in their far reverberation they have become
enriched by many associations, saturated with many colours; they have
acquired a life of their own, moving on another plane than that of
things, and it is on that plane that the artist in words is, as an
artist, concerned with them.
It thus comes about that the artist in words, like the artist in
pigments, is perpetually passing between two planes—the plane of new
vision and the plane of new creation. He is sometimes remoulding the
external world and sometimes the internal world; sometimes, by
predilection, lingering more on one plane than on the other plane. The
artist in words is not irresistibly drawn to the exact study of things
or moved by the strong love of Nature. The poets who describe Nature
most minutely and most faithfully are not usually the great poets. That
is intelligible because the poet—even the poet in the wide sense who
also uses prose—is primarily the instrument of human emotion and not of
scientific observation. Yet that poet possesses immense resources of
strength who in early life has stored within him the minute knowledge of
some field of the actual external world.[65] One may doubt, indeed,
whether there has been any supreme poet, from Homer on, who has not had
this inner reservoir of sensitive impressions to draw from. The youthful
Shakespeare who wrote the poems, with their minute descriptions, was not
a great poet, as the youthful Marlowe was, but he was storing up the
material which, when he had developed into a great poet, he could draw
on at need with a careless and assured hand. Without such reservoirs,
the novelists also would never attain to that touch of the poet which,
beyond their story-telling power, can stir our hearts. “À la Recherche
du Temps Perdu” is the name of a great modern book, but every novelist
during part of his time has been a Ulysses on a perilous voyage of
adventure for that far home. One thinks of George Eliot and her early
intimacy with the life of country people, of Hardy who had acquired so
acute a sensitivity to the sounds of Nature, of Conrad who had caught
the flashes of penetrating vision which came to the sailor on deck; and
in so far as they move away into scenes where they cannot draw from
those ancient reservoirs, the adventures of these artists, however
brilliant they may become, lose their power of intimate appeal. The most
extravagant example of this to-day is the Spanish novelist Blasco
Ibañez, who wrote of the Valencian _huerta_ that had saturated his youth
in novels that were penetrating and poignant, and then turned to writing
for the cosmopolitan crowd novels about anything, that were completely
negligible.
We grow familiar in time with the style of the great writers, and when
we read them we translate them easily and unconsciously, as we translate
a foreign language we are familiar with; we understand the vocabulary
because we have learnt to know the special seal of the creative person
who moulded the vocabulary. But at the outset the great writer may be
almost as unintelligible to us as though he were writing in a language
we had never learnt. In the now remote days when “Leaves of Grass” was a
new book in the world, few who looked into it for the first time,
however honestly, but were repelled and perhaps even violently repelled,
and it is hard to realise now that once those who fell on Swinburne’s
“Poems and Ballads” saw at first only picturesque hieroglyphics to which
they had no key. But even to-day how many there are who find Proust
unreadable and Joyce unintelligible. Until we find the door and the clue
the new writer remains obscure. Therein lies the truth of Landor’s
saying that the poet must himself create the beings who are to enjoy his
Paradise.
For most of those who deliberately seek to learn to write, words seem
generally to be felt as of less importance than the art of arranging
them. It is thus that the learner in writing tends to become the devoted
student of grammar and syntax whom we came across at the outset. That is
indeed a tendency which always increases. Civilisation develops with a
conscious adhesion to formal order, and the writer—writing by fashion or
by ambition and not by divine right of creative instinct—follows the
course of civilisation. It is an unfortunate tendency, for those whom it
affects conquer by their number. As we know, writing that is real is not
learnt that way. Just as the solar system was not made in accordance
with the astronomer’s laws, so writing is not made by the laws of
grammar. Astronomer and grammarian alike can only come in at the end, to
give a generalised description of what usually happens in the respective
fields it pleases them to explore. When a new comet, cosmic or literary,
enters their sky, it is their descriptions which have to be readjusted,
and not the comet. There seems to be no more pronounced mark of the
decadence of a people and its literature than a servile and rigid
subserviency to rule. It can only make for ossification, for anchylosis,
for petrification, all the milestones on the road of death. In every age
of democratic plebeianism, where each man thinks he is as good a writer
as the others, and takes his laws from the others, having no laws of his
own nature, it is down this steep path that men, in a flock, inevitably
run.
We may find an illustration of the plebeian anchylosis of advancing
civilisation in the minor matter of spelling. We cannot, it is true,
overlook the fact that writing is read and that its appearance cannot be
quite disregarded. Yet, ultimately, it appeals to the ear, and spelling
can have little to do with style. The laws of spelling, properly
speaking, are few or none, and in the great ages men have understood
this and boldly acted accordingly. They exercised a fine personal
discretion in the matter and permitted without question a wide range of
variation. Shakespeare, as we know, even spelt his own name in several
different ways, all equally correct. When that great old Elizabethan
mariner, Sir Martin Frobisher, entered on one of his rare and hazardous
adventures with the pen, he created spelling absolutely afresh, in the
spirit of simple heroism with which he was always ready to sail out into
strange seas. His epistolary adventures are, certainly, more interesting
than admirable, but we have no reason to suppose that the distinguished
persons to whom these letters were addressed viewed them with any
disdain. More anæmic ages cannot endure creative vitality even in
spelling, and so it comes about that in periods when everything
beautiful and handmade gives place to manufactured articles made
wholesale, uniform, and cheap, the same principles are applied to words,
and spelling becomes a mechanic trade. We must have our spelling
uniform, even if uniformly bad.[66] Just as the man who, having out of
sheer ignorance eaten the wrong end of his asparagus, was thenceforth
compelled to declare that he preferred that end, so it is with our race
in the matter of spelling; our ancestors, by chance or by ignorance,
tended to adopt certain forms of spelling and we, their children, are
forced to declare that we prefer those forms. Thus we have not only lost
all individuality in spelling, but we pride ourselves on our loss and
magnify our anchylosis. In England it has become almost impossible to
flex our stiffened mental joints sufficiently to press out a single
letter, in America it is almost impossible to extend them enough to
admit that letter. It is convenient, we say, to be rigid and formal in
these things, and therewith we are content; it matters little to us that
we have thereby killed the life of our words and only gained the
conveniency of death. It would be likewise convenient, no doubt, if men
and women could be turned into rigid geometrical diagrams,—as indeed our
legislators sometimes seem to think that they already are,—but we should
pay by yielding up all the infinite variations, the beautiful
sinuosities, that had once made up life.
There can be no doubt that in the much greater matter of style we have
paid heavily for the attainment of our slavish adherence to mechanical
rules, however convenient, however inevitable. The beautiful
incorrection, as we are now compelled to regard it, that so often marked
the great and even the small writers of the seventeenth century, has
been lost, for all can now write what any find it easy to read, what
none have any consuming desire to read. But when Sir Thomas Browne wrote
his “Religio Medici” it was with an art made up of obedience to personal
law and abandonment to free inspiration which still ravishes us. It is
extraordinary how far indifference or incorrection of style may be
carried and yet remain completely adequate even to complex and subtle
ends. Pepys wrote his “Diary,” at the outset of a life full of strenuous
work and not a little pleasure, with a rare devotion indeed, but with a
concision and carelessness, a single eye on the fact itself, and an
extraordinary absence of self-consciousness which rob it of all claim to
possess what we conventionally term style. Yet in this vehicle he has
perfectly conveyed not merely the most vividly realised and delightfully
detailed picture of a past age ever achieved in any language, but he
has, moreover, painted a psychological portrait of himself which for its
serenely impartial justice, its subtle gradations, its bold
juxtapositions of colours, has all the qualities of the finest
Velasquez. There is no style here, we say, merely the diarist, writing
with careless poignant vitality for his own eye, and yet no style that
we could conceive would be better fitted, or so well fitted, for the
miracle that has here been effected.
The personal freedom of Browne led up to splendour, and that of Pepys to
clarity. But while splendour is not the whole of writing, neither,
although one returns to it again and again, is clarity. Here we come
from another side on to a point we had already reached. Bergson, in
reply to the question: “Comment doivent écrire les Philosophes?” lets
fall some observations, which, as he himself remarks, concern other
writers beside philosophers. A technical word, he remarks, even a word
invented for the occasion or used in a special sense, is always in its
place provided the instructed reader—though the difficulty, as he fails
to point out, is to be sure of possessing this instructed reader—accepts
it so easily as not even to notice it, and he proceeds to say that in
philosophic prose, and in all prose, and indeed in all the arts, “the
perfect expression is that which has come so naturally, or rather so
necessarily, by virtue of so imperious a predestination, that we do not
pause before it, but go straight on to what it seeks to express, as
though it were blended with the idea; it became invisible by force of
being transparent.”[67] That is well said. Bergson also is on the side
of clarity. Yet I do not feel that that is all there is to say. Style is
not a sheet of glass in which the only thing that matters is the absence
of flaws. Bergson’s own style is not so diaphanous that one never pauses
to admire its quality, nor, as a hostile critic (Edouard Dujardin) has
shown, is it always so clear as to be transparent. The dancer in prose
as well as in verse—philosopher or whatever he may be—must reveal all
his limbs through the garment he wears; yet the garment must have its
own proper beauty, and there is a failure of art, a failure of
revelation, if it possesses no beauty. Style indeed is not really a mere
invisible transparent medium, it is not really a garment, but, as
Gourmont said, the very thought itself. It is the miraculous
transubstantiation of a spiritual body, given to us in the only form in
which we may receive and absorb that body, and unless its clarity is
balanced by its beauty it is not adequate to sustain that most high
function. No doubt, if we lean on one side more than the other, it is
clarity rather than beauty which we should choose, for on the other side
we may have, indeed, a Sir Thomas Browne, and there we are conscious not
so much of a transubstantiation as of a garment, with thick embroidery,
indeed, and glistening jewels, but we are not always sure that much is
hidden beneath. A step further and we reach D’Annunzio, a splendid mask
with nothing beneath, just as in the streets of Rome one may sometimes
meet a Franciscan friar with a head superb as a Roman Emperor’s and yet,
one divines, it means nothing. The Italian writer, it is significant to
note, chose so ostentatiously magnificent a name as Gabriele D’Annunzio
to conceal a real name which was nothing. The great angels of
annunciation create the beauty of their own real names. Who now finds
Shakespeare ridiculous? And how lovely a name is Keats!
As a part of the harmony of art, which is necessarily made out of
conflict, we have to view that perpetual seeming alternation between the
two planes—the plane of vision and the plane of creation, the form
within and the garment that clothes it—which may sometimes distract the
artist himself. The prophet Jeremiah once said (and modern prophets have
doubtless had occasion to recognise the truth of his remark) that he
seemed to the people round him only as “one that hath a pleasant voice
and can play well on an instrument.” But he failed to understand that it
was only through this quality of voice and instrument that his
lamentations had any vital force or even any being, and that if the poem
goes the message goes. Indeed, that is true of all his fellow prophets
of the Old Testament and the New who have fascinated mankind with the
sound of those harps that they had once hung by the waters of Babylon.
The whole Bible, we may be very sure, would have long ago been forgotten
by all but a few intelligent archæologists, if men had not heard in it,
again and again and again, “one that hath a pleasant voice and can play
well on an instrument.” Socrates said that philosophy was simply music.
But the same might be said of religion. The divine dance of satyrs and
nymphs to the sound of pipes—it is the symbol of life which in one form
or another has floated before human eyes from the days of the sculptors
of Greek bas-reliefs to the men of our own day who catch the glimpse of
new harmonies in the pages of “L’Esprit Nouveau.” We cannot but follow
the piper that knows how to play, even to our own destruction. There may
be much that is objectionable about Man. But he has that engaging trait.
And the world will end when he has lost it.
One asks one’s self how it was that the old way of writing, as a
personal art, gave place to the new way of writing, as a mere impersonal
pseudo-science, rigidly bound by formal and artificial rules. The
answer, no doubt, is to be found in the existence of a great new current
of thought which began mightily to stir in men’s minds towards the end
of the seventeenth century. It will be remembered that it was at that
time, both in England and France, that the new devitalised, though more
flexible, prose appeared, with its precision and accuracy, its conscious
orderliness, its deliberate method. But only a few years before, over
France and England alike, a great intellectual wave had swept, imparting
to the mathematical and geometrical sciences, to astronomy, physics, and
allied studies, an impetus that they had never received before on so
great a scale. Descartes in France and Newton in England stand out as
the typical representatives of the movement. If that movement had to
exert any influence on language—and we know how sensitively language
reacts to thought—it could have been manifested in no other way than by
the change which actually took place. And there was every opportunity
for that influence to be exerted.[68] This sudden expansion of the
mathematical and geometrical sciences was so great and novel that
interest in it was not confined to a small band of men of science: it
excited the man in the street, the woman in the drawing-room; it was
indeed a woman, a bright and gay woman of the world, who translated
Newton’s profound book into French. Thus it was that the new qualities
of style were invented, not merely to express new qualities of thought,
but because new scientific ideals were moving within the minds of men. A
similar reaction of thought on language took place at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, when an attempt was made to vitalise language
once more, and to break the rigid and formal moulds the previous century
had constructed. The attempt was immediately preceded by the awakening
of a new group of sciences, but this time the sciences of life, the
biological studies associated with Cuvier and Lamarck, with John Hunter
and Erasmus Darwin. With the twentieth century we see the temporary
exhaustion of the biological spirit with its historical form in science
and its romantic form in art, and we have a neo-classic spirit which has
involved a renaissance of the mathematical sciences and, even before
that, was beginning to affect speech.
To admire the old writers, because for them writing was an art to be
exercised freely and not a vain attempt to follow after the ideals of
the abstract sciences, thus by no means implies a contempt for that
decorum and orderliness without which all written speech must be
ineffective and obscure. The great writers in the great ages, standing
above classicism and above romanticism, have always observed this
decorum and orderliness. In their hands such observance was not a
servile and rigid adherence to external rules, but a beautiful
convention, an instinctive fine breeding, such as is naturally observed
in human intercourse when it is not broken down by intimacy or by any
great crisis of life or of death.
The freedom of art by no means involves the easiness of art. It may
rather, indeed, be said the difficulty increases with freedom, for to
make things in accordance with patterns is ever the easiest task. The
problem is equally arduous for those who, so far as their craft is
conscious, seek an impersonal and for those who seek a personal ideal of
style. Flaubert sought—in vain, it is true—to be the most objective of
artists and to mould speech with heroic energy in shapes of abstract
perfection. Nietzsche, one of the most personal artists in style, sought
likewise, in his own words, to work at a page of prose as a sculptor
works at a statue. Though the result is not perhaps fundamentally
different, whichever ideal it is that, consciously or instinctively, is
followed, the personal road of style is doubtless theoretically—though
not necessarily in practice—the sounder, usually also that which moves
most of us more profoundly. The great prose writers of the Second Empire
in France made an unparalleled effort to carve or paint impersonal
prose, but its final beauty and effectiveness seem scarcely equal to the
splendid energy it embodies. Jules de Goncourt, his brother thought,
literally died from the mental exhaustion of his unceasing struggle to
attain an objective style adequate to express the subtle texture of the
world as he saw it. But, while the Goncourts are great figures in
literary history, they have pioneered no new road, nor are they of the
writers whom men continuously love to read; for it is as a document that
the “Journal” remains of enduring value.
Yet the great writers of any school bear witness, each in his own way,
that, deeper than these conventions and decorums of style, there is a
law which no writer can escape from, a law which must needs be learnt,
but can never be taught. That is the law of the logic of thought. All
the conventional rules of the construction of speech may be put aside if
a writer is thereby enabled to follow more closely and lucidly the form
and process of his thought. It is the law of that logic that he must for
ever follow and in attaining it alone find rest. He may say of it as
devoutly as Dante: “In la sua voluntade è nostra pace.” All progress in
literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and
exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful
because alive and are now false because dead. The simple and naked
beauty of Swift’s style, sometimes so keen and poignant, rests
absolutely on this truth to the logic of his thought. The twin qualities
of flexibility and intimacy are of the essence of all progress in the
art of language, and in their progressive achievement lies the
attainment of great literature. If we compare Shakespeare with his
predecessors and contemporaries, we can scarcely say that in imaginative
force he is vastly superior to Marlowe, or in intellectual grip to
Jonson, but he immeasurably surpasses them in flexibility and in
intimacy. He was able with an incomparable art to weave a garment of
speech so flexible in its strength, so intimate in its transparence,
that it lent itself to every shade of emotion and the quickest turns of
thought. When we compare the heavy and formal letters of Bacon, even to
his closest friends, with the “Familiar Letters” of the vivacious
Welshman Howell, we can scarcely believe the two men were
contemporaries, so incomparably more expressive, so flexible and so
intimate, is the style of Howell. All the writers who influence those
who come after them have done so by the same method. They have thrown
aside the awkward and outworn garments of speech, they have woven a
simpler and more familiar speech, able to express subtleties or
audacities that before seemed inexpressible. That was once done in
English verse by Cowper and Wordsworth, in English prose by Addison and
Lamb. That has been done in French to-day by Proust and in English by
Joyce. When a great writer, like Carlyle or Browning, creates a speech
of his own which is too clumsy to be flexible and too heavy to be
intimate, he may arouse the admiration of his fellows, but he leaves no
traces on the speech of the men who come after him. It is not easy to
believe that such will be Joyce’s fate. His “Ulysses”—carrying to a much
further point qualities that began to appear in his earlier work—has
been hailed as epoch-making in English literature, though a
distinguished critic holds that it is this rather by closing than by
opening an epoch. It would still be preparing a new road, and as thus
operative we may accept it without necessarily judging it to be at the
same time a master-work, provided we understand what it is that has been
here attempted. This huge Odyssey is an ordinary day’s history in the
ordinary life of one ordinary man and the persons of his immediate
environment. It is here sought to reproduce as Art the whole of the
man’s physical and psychic activity during that period, omitting
nothing, not even the actions which the most naturalistic of novelists
had hitherto thought too trivial or too indelicate to mention. Not only
the thoughts and impulses that result in action, but also the thoughts
and emotions that drift aimlessly across the field of his consciousness,
are here; and, in the presentation of this combined inner and outer
life, Joyce has sometimes placed both on the same plane, achieving a new
simplicity of style, though we may at first sometimes find it hard to
divine what is outer and what inner. Moreover, he never hesitates, when
he pleases, to change the tone of his style and even to adopt without
notice, in a deliberately ironical and chameleon-like fashion, the
manner of other writers. In these ways Joyce has here achieved that new
intimacy of vision, that new flexibility of expression, which are of the
essence of all great literature at its vitally moving point of advance.
He has succeeded in realising and making manifest in art what others had
passed over or failed to see. If in that difficult and dangerous task he
has failed, as some of us may believe, to reach either complete clarity
or complete beauty, he has at all events made it possible for those who
come after to reach a new height which, without the help of the road he
had constructed, they might have missed, or even failed to conceive, and
that is enough for any writer’s fame.
When we turn to Proust we are in the presence of a writer about whom, no
doubt, there is no violent dispute. There may be much about his work
that is disturbing to many, but he was not concerned, like Joyce, to
affront so many prejudices, and in France it is not even necessary, for
the road has already been prepared by heroic pioneers of old during a
thousand years. But the writer who brings a new revelation is not
necessarily called upon to invite the execration of the herd. That is a
risk he must be called upon to face, it is not an inevitable fate. When
the mob yell: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” the artist, in whatever
medium, hears a voice from Heaven: “This is my beloved son.” Yet it is
conceivable that the more perfectly a new revelation is achieved the
less antagonism it arouses. Proust has undoubtedly been the master of a
new intimacy of vision, a new flexibility of expression, even though the
style through which the revelation has been made, perhaps necessarily on
account of the complexity involved, has remained a little difficult and
also, it must be said, a little negligent. But it has achieved a
considerable degree of clarity and a high degree of beauty. So there is
less difficulty in recognising a great masterpiece in “À la Recherche du
Temps Perdu” than if it were more conspicuously the work of a daring
pioneer. It is seen as the revelation of a new æsthetic sensibility
embodied in a new and fitting style. Marcel Proust has experienced
clearly what others have felt dimly or not at all. The significance of
his work is thus altogether apart from the power of its dramatic
incidents or its qualities as a novel. To the critic of defective
intelligence, craving for scenes of sensation, it has sometimes seemed
that “À l’Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleur” is the least important
section of Proust’s work. Yet it is on that quiet and uneventful tract
of his narrative that Proust has most surely set the stamp of his
genius, a genius, I should like to add, which is peculiarly congenial to
the English mind because it was in the English tradition, rather than in
the French tradition, that Proust was moving.[69]
No doubt it is possible for a writer to go far by the exercise of a
finely attentive docility. By a dutiful study of what other people have
said, by a refined cleverness in catching their tricks, and avoiding
their subtleties, their profundities, their audacities, by, in short, a
patient perseverance in writing out copperplate maxims in elegant
copybooks, he can become at last, like Stevenson, the idol of the crowd.
But the great writer can only learn out of himself. He learns to write
as a child learns to walk. For the laws of the logic of thought are not
other than those of physical movement. There is stumbling, awkwardness,
hesitation, experiment—before at last the learner attains the perfect
command of that divine rhythm and perilous poise in which he asserts his
supreme human privilege. But the process of his learning rests
ultimately on his own structure and function and not on others’ example.
“Style must be founded upon models”; it is the rule set up by the pedant
who knows nothing of what style means. For the style that is founded on
a model is the negation of style.
The ardour and heroism of great achievement in style never grow less as
the ages pass, but rather tend to grow more. That is so, not merely
because the hardest tasks are left for the last, but because of the ever
increasing impediments placed in the path of style by the piling up of
mechanical rules and rigid conventions. It is doubtful whether on the
whole the forces of life really gain on the surrounding inertia of
death. The greatest writers must spend the blood and sweat of their
souls, amid the execration and disdain of their contemporaries, in
breaking the old moulds of style and pouring their fresh life into new
moulds. From Dante to Carducci, from Rabelais to Proust, from Chaucer to
Whitman, the giants of letters have been engaged in this life-giving
task, and behind them the forces of death swiftly gather again. Here
there is always room for the hero. No man, indeed, can write anything
that matters who is not a hero at heart, even though to the people who
pass him in the street or know him in the house he may seem as gentle as
any dove. If all progress lies in an ever greater flexibility and
intimacy of speech, a finer adaptation to the heights and depths of the
mobile human soul, the task can never be finally completed. Every writer
is called afresh to reveal new strata of life. By digging in his own
soul he becomes the discoverer of the soul of his family, of his nation,
of the race, of the heart of humanity. For the great writer finds style
as the mystic find God, in his own soul. It is the final utterance of a
sigh, which none could utter before him, and which all can who follow.
In the end, it will be seen we return at last to the point from which we
start. We have completed the cycle of an art’s evolution,—and it might,
indeed, be any other art as much as writing,—reaching in the final sweep
of ever wider flights the fact from which we started, but seeing it
anew, with a fresh universal significance. Writing is an arduous
spiritual and intellectual task, only to be achieved by patient and
deliberate labour and much daring. Yet therewith we are only at the
beginning. Writing is also the expression of individual personality,
which springs up spontaneously, or is slowly drawn up from within, out
of a well of inner emotions which none may command. But even with these
two opposite factors we have not attained the complete synthesis. For
style in the full sense is more than the deliberate and designed
creation, more even than the unconscious and involuntary creation, of
the individual man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus
expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came the man himself
can never entirely know whence. It is by the instinctive stress of a
highly sensitive, or slightly abnormal constitution, that he is impelled
to instil these tendencies into the alien magic of words. The stylum
wherewith he strives to write himself on the yet blank pages of the
world may have the obstinate vigour of the metal rod or the wild and
quavering waywardness of an insect’s wing, but behind it lie forces that
extend into infinity. It moves us because it is itself moved by pulses
which in varying measure we also have inherited, and because its primary
source is in the heart of a cosmos from which we ourselves spring.
Footnote 55:
It may be as well to point that it is the amateur literary grammarian
and not the expert who is at fault in these matters. The attitude of
the expert (as in C. T. Onions, _Advanced English Syntax_) is entirely
reasonable.
Footnote 56:
It is interesting to note that another aristocratic master of speech
had also made just the same observation. Landor puts into the mouth of
Horne Tooke the words: “No expression can become a vulgarism which has
not a broad foundation. The language of the vulgar hath its source in
physics: in known, comprehended, and operative things.” At the same
time Landor was as stern a judge as Baudelaire of the random use of
_clichés_.
Footnote 57:
Speaking as a writer who has been much quoted,—it ought to be a
satisfaction, but I have had my doubts,—I may say that I have observed
that those who quote belong mostly to two classes, one consisting of
good, or at all events indifferent, writers, and the other of bad
writers. Those of the first class quote with fair precision and due
acknowledgement, those of the second with no precision, and only the
vaguest intimation, or none at all, that they are quoting. This would
seem to indicate that the good writer is more honest than the bad
writer, but that conclusion may be unjust to the bad writer. The fact
is that, having little thought or knowledge of his own, he is not
fully conscious of what he is doing. He is like a greedy child who,
seeing food in front of him, snatches it at random, without being able
to recognise whether or not it is his own. There is, however, a third
class of those who cannot resist the temptation of deliberately
putting forth the painfully achieved thought or knowledge of others as
their own, sometimes, perhaps, seeking to gloss over the lapse with:
“As every one knows—”
Footnote 58:
Croce, who is no doubt the most instructive literary critic of our
time, has, in his own way, insisted on this essential fact. As he
would put it, there are no objective standards of judgment; we cannot
approach a work of art with our laws and categories. We have to
comprehend the artist’s own values, and only then are we fit to
pronounce any judgment on his work. The task of the literary critic is
thus immensely more difficult than it is vulgarly supposed to be. The
same holds good, I would add, of criticism in the fields of art, not
excluding the art of love and the arts of living in general.
Footnote 59:
“This search is the art of all great thinkers, of all great artists,
indeed of all those who, even without attaining expression, desire to
live deeply. If the dance brings us so near to God, it is, I believe,
because it symbolizes for us the movement of this gesture.” (Élie
Faure, _L’Arbre d’Éden_, p. 318.)
Footnote 60:
This is that “divine malice” which Nietzsche, in _Ecce Homo_, speaking
of Heine (“one day Heine and I will be regarded as by far the greatest
artists of the German language,” he says rather egotistically, but
perhaps truly) considered essential to perfection. “I estimate the
value of men and of races,” he added, “by their need to identify their
God with a satyr,” a hard saying, no doubt, to the modern man, but it
has its meaning.
Footnote 61:
Since this was written I have found that Laycock, whose subtle
observation pioneered so many later ideas, long ago noted (“Some
Organic Laws of Memory,” _Journal of Mental Science_, July, 1875)
reversion to ancestral modes of handwriting.
Footnote 62:
This was written fifteen years ago, and as Carlyle has of late been
unduly depreciated I would add that, while strictly to the present
point, it is not put forward as an estimate of Carlyle’s genius. That
I seem to have attempted twenty-five years earlier in a private letter
(to my friend the late Reverend Angus Mackay) I may here perhaps be
allowed to quote. It was in 1883, soon after the publication of
Carlyle’s _Reminiscences_: “This is not Carlylese, but it is finer.
The popular judgment is hopelessly wrong. We can never understand
Carlyle till we get rid of the ‘great prophet’ notion. Carlyle is not
(as we were once taught) a ‘great moral teacher,’ but, in the high
sense, a great _comedian_. His books are wonderful comedies. He is the
Scotch Aristophanes, as Rabelais is the French and Heine the German
Aristophanes—of course, with the intense northern imagination, more
clumsy, more imperfect, more profound than the Greek. But, at a long
distance, there is a close resemblance to Aristophanes with the same
mixture of audacity in method and conservatism in spirit. Carlyle’s
account of Lamb seems in the true sense Aristophanic. His humour is,
too, as broad as he dares (some curious resemblances there, too). In
his lyrical outbursts, again, he follows Aristophanes, and again at a
distance. Of course he cannot be compared as an artist. He has not,
like Rabelais, created a world to play with, but, like Aristophanes
generally, he sports with the things that are.” That youthful estimate
was alien to popular opinion then because Carlyle was idolised; it is
now, no doubt, equally alien for an opposite reason. It is only on
extremes that the indolent popular mind can rest.
Footnote 63:
J. Beddoe, _The Races of Britain_, p. 254.
Footnote 64:
I once studied, as an example, colour-words in various writers,
finding that every poet has his own colour formula. Variations in
length of sentence and peculiarities of usage in metre have often been
studied. Reference is made to some of these studies by A. Niceforo,
“Metodo Statistico e Documenti Litterari,” _Revista d’Italia_, August,
1917.
Footnote 65:
“The Muses are the daughters of Memory,” Paul Morand tells us that
Proust would say; “there is no art without recollection,” and
certainly it is supremely true of Proust’s art. It is that element of
art which imparts at once both atmosphere and poignant intimacy,
external farness with internal nearness. The lyrics of Thomas Hardy
owe their intimacy of appeal to the dominance in them of recollection
(in _Late Lyrics and Earlier_ one might say it is never absent), and
that is why they can scarcely be fully appreciated save by those who
are no longer very young.
Footnote 66:
The Oxford University Press publishes a little volume of _Rules for
Compositors and Readers_ in which this uniform is set forth. It is a
useful and interesting manual, but one wonders how many unnecessary
and even undesirable usages—including that morbid desire to cling to
the _ize_ termination (charming as an eccentricity but hideous as a
rule) when _ise_ would suffice—are hereby fostered. Even when we leave
out of consideration the great historical tradition of variety in this
matter, it is doubtful, when we consider them comprehensively, whether
the advantages of encouraging every one to spell like his fellows
overbalances the advantages of encouraging every one to spell unlike
his fellows. When I was a teacher in the Australian bush I derived far
less enjoyment from the more or less “correctly” spelt exercises of my
pupils than from the occasional notes I received from their parents
who, never having been taught to spell, were able to spell in the
grand manner. We are wilfully throwing away an endless source of
delight.
Footnote 67:
_Le Monde Nouveau_, 15th December, 1922.
Footnote 68:
Ferris Greenslet (in his study of _Joseph Glanvill_, p. 183),
referring to the Cartesian influence on English prose style, quotes
from Sprat’s _History of the Royal Society_ that the Society “exacted
from its members a close, naked, natural way of speaking, positive
expressions, a native easiness, bringing all things as near the
mathematic plainness as they can.” The Society passed a resolution to
reject “all amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style.”
Footnote 69:
If it is asked why I take examples of a quality in art that is
universal from literary personalities that to many are questionable,
even morbid or perverse, rather than from some more normal and
unquestioned figure, Thomas Hardy, for example, I would reply that I
have always regarded it as more helpful and instructive to take
examples that are still questionable rather than to fall back on the
unquestionable that all will accept tamely without thought. Forty
years ago, when Hardy’s genius was scarcely at all recognised, it
seemed worth while to me to set forth the quality of his genius.
To-day, when that quality is unquestioned, and Hardy receives general
love and reverence, it would seem idle and unprofitable to do so.