would begin by making a personal confession. My own occupations are
mainly literary; and I would say frankly that there seems to me to be
no pleasure comparable to the pleasure of writing. To find a congenial
subject, and to express that subject as lucidly, as sincerely, as
frankly as possible, appears to me to be the most delightful occupation
in the world. Nature is full of exquisite sights and sounds, day by
day; the stage of the world is crowded with interesting and fascinating
personalities, rich in contrasts, in characteristics, in humour, in
pathos. We are surrounded, the moment we pass outside of the complex
material phenomena which surround us, by all kinds of wonderful secrets
and incomprehensible mysteries. What is this strange pageant that
unrolls itself before us from hour to hour? this panorama of night and
day, sun and moon, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, life and death?
We have all of us, like Jack Horner, our slice of pie to eat. Which of
us does not know the delighted complacency with which we pull out the
plums? The poet is silent of the moment when the plate is empty, when
nothing is left but the stones; but that is no less impressive an
experience.
The wonderful thing to me is, not that there is so much desire in the
world to express our little portion of the joy, the grief, the mystery
of it all, but that there is so little. I wish with all my heart that
there was more instinct for personal expression; Edward FitzGerald said
that he wished we had more lives of obscure persons; one wants to know
what other people are thinking and feeling about it all; what joys they
anticipate, what fears they sustain, how they regard the end and
cessation of life and perception, which waits for us all. The worst of
it is that people are often so modest; they think that their own
experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. It is an entire
mistake. If the dullest person in the world would only put down
sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and
love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document. My only
sorrow is that the amateurs of whom I have spoken above will not do
this; they rather turn to external and impersonal impressions, relate
definite things, what they see on their travels, for instance,
describing just the things which any one can see. They tend to indulge
in the melancholy labour of translation, or employ customary, familiar
forms, such as the novel or the play. If only they would write diaries
and publish them; compose imaginary letters; let one inside the house
of self instead of keeping one wandering in the park! The real interest
of literature is the apprehending of other points of view; one spends
an immense time in what is called society, in the pursuit of other
people's views; but what a very little grain results from an
intolerable deal of chaff! And all because people are conventional and
not simple-minded; because they will not say what they think; indeed
they will not as a rule try to find out what they do think, but prefer
to traffic with the conventional counters. Yet what a refreshment it is
to meet with a perfectly sincere person, who makes you feel that you
are in real contact with a human being! This is what we ought to aim at
in writing: at a perfectly sincere presentment of our thoughts. We
cannot, of course, all of us hope to have views upon art, upon
theology, upon politics, upon education, because we may not have any
experience in these subjects; but we have all of us experience in life,
in nature, in emotion, in religion; and to express what we feel, as
sincerely as we can, is certainly useful to ourselves, because it
clears our view, leads us not to confuse hopes with certainties,
enables us to disentangle what we really believe from what we
conventionally adopt.
Of course this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to
write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our thoughts;
we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we
cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass
through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred
notions, all more or less bearing on the central thought, but the
movements of which they cannot wholly control. Their thoughts are like
a turbulent crowd, and one's business is to drill them into an ordered
regiment. A writer has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and
the cure for this natural vagueness is to choose small precise
subjects, to say all that we have in our minds about them, and to stop
when we have finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness
and clearness.
I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own
belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I believe
that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant practice; we
must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty manuscripts altogether;
we ought not to fret over them and rewrite them. The two things that I
have found to be of infinite service to myself, in learning to write
prose, have been keeping a full diary, and writing poetry. The habit of
diarizing is easily acquired, and as soon as it becomes habitual, the
day is no more complete without it than it is complete without a cold
bath and regular meals. People say that they have not time to keep a
diary; but they would never say that they had not time to take a bath
or to have their meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's
movements; it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some
particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice
which brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful
thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten
years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's
earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has the
immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready to hand;
and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and frank
expression.
And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain
years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when
poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self-expression.
This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry need not be very
good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the merits of my own;
but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches the art of poise, of
cadence, of choice in words, of picturesqueness. There comes a time
when one abandons poetry, or is abandoned by it; and, after all, prose
is the most real and natural form of expression. There arrives, in the
case of one who has practised poetical expression diligently, a
wonderful sense of freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he
begins to use what has been material for poetry for the purposes of
prose. Poetical expression is strictly conditioned by length of
stanzas, dignity of vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme.
How good are the days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when
one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in
flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences
of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the
sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy--these are the joys
of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them
easy and instinctive.
A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at
flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other writers;
he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great authors. This system
has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A sensitive literary
temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to perpetuate the charming
mannerisms of great writers. I have sometimes had to write critical
monographs on the work of great stylists. It is a perilous business! If
for several months one studies the work of a contagious and delicate
writer, critically and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's
sentences with a dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author
whom one is supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my
monograph has been completed, I have felt that it might almost have
been written by the author under examination; and there is no merit in
that. I am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular
style. The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as
vigorously, as forcibly as one can; if one does this sincerely, one's
own personality will make the style; and thus I feel that people whose
aim is to write vigorously should abstain from even reading authors
whose style affects them strongly. Stevenson himself dared not read
Livy; Pater confessed that he could not afford to read Stevenson; he
added, that he did not consider his own style better than the style of
Stevenson--rather the reverse--but he had his own theory, his own
method of expression, deliberately adopted and diligently pursued. He
therefore carefully refrained from reading an author whom he felt
unconsciously compelled to imitate. The question of style, then, is one
which a writer who desires originality should leave altogether alone.
It must emerge of itself, or it is sure to lack distinctiveness. I saw
once a curious instance of this. I knew a diligent writer, whose hasty
and unconsidered writings were forcible, lively, and lucid, penetrated
by his own poetical and incisive personality; but he set no store by
these writings, and if they were ever praised in his presence, he said
that he was ashamed of them for being so rough. This man devoted many
years to the composition of a great literary work. He took infinite
pains with it; he concentrated whole sentences into epithets; he
hammered and chiselled his phrases; he was for ever retouching and
rewriting. But when the book at last appeared it was a complete
disappointment. The thing was really unintelligible; it had no motion,
no space about it; the reader had to devote heart-breaking thought to
the exploration of a paragraph, and was as a rule only rewarded by
finding that it was a simple thought, expressed with profound
obscurity; whereas the object of the writer ought to be to express a
profound and difficult thought clearly and lucidly. The only piece of
literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use,
is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful
essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant
intricacy. "Don't be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones
show." That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely
dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and
appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be
visible.
The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as
Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal
stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the
very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy
water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a
beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its
chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over
the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the
surface. How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How
stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded! But seen
through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret
and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of
rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding
stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of
gentle tranquillity, it all gives!
Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The objects
by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial
and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one's hand, one seems to
have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear
and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem
the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring
all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which
is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of
which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its
existence with a grateful heart. One who devotes himself to writing
should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the
rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one
the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote
without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final
labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs
unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is
wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one's work
makes on others. If one's work is generally contemned, it is bracing to
know that one fails in one's appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest
readers. High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect
and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a
proof that one's standard is high and one's taste fastidious. Moreover,
if one has done one's best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and
believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a
grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure,
perhaps even encouragement, from a book. These are some of the pleasant
rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one's eye on
the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.
Of course there will come moods of discouragement to all authors, when
they will ask themselves, as even Tennyson confesses that he was
tempted to do, what, after all, it amounts to? The author must beware
of rating his own possibilities too high. In looking back at one's own
life, in trying to trace what are the things that have had a deep and
permanent influence on one's character, how rarely is it possible to
point to a particular book, and say, "That book gave me the message I
most needed, made me take the right turn, gave me the requisite bias,
the momentous impulse"? We tend to want to do things on too large a
scale, to affect great masses of people, to influence numerous hearts.
An author should be more than content if he finds he has made a
difference to a handful of people, or given innocent pleasure to a
small company. Only to those whose heart is high, whose patience is
inexhaustible, whose vigour is great, whose emotion is passionate, is
it given to make a deep mark upon the age; and there is needed too the
magical charm of personality, overflowing in "thoughts that breathe and
words that burn." But we can all take a hand in the great game; and if
the leading parts are denied us, if we are told off to sit among a row
of supers, drinking and whispering on a bench, while the great
characters soliloquize, let us be sure that we drain our empty cup with
zest, and do our whispering with intentness; not striving to divert
attention to ourselves, but contributing with all our might to the
naturalness, the effectiveness of the scene.
XI
THE CRITICISM OF OTHERS
I was staying the other day in the house of an old friend, a public
man, who is a deeply interesting character, energetic, able, vigorous,
with very definite limitations. The only male guest in the house, it so
happened, was also an old friend of mine, a serious man. One night,
when we were all three in the smoking-room, our host rose, and excused
himself, saying that he had some letters to write. When he was gone, I
said to my serious friend: "What an interesting fellow our host is! He
is almost more interesting because of the qualities that he does not
possess, than because of the qualities that he does possess." My
companion, who is remarkable for his power of blunt statement, looked
at me gravely, and said: "If you propose to discuss our host, you must
find some one else to conduct the argument; he is my friend, whom I
esteem and love, and I am not in a position to criticise him." I
laughed, and said: "Well, he is my friend, too, and _I_ esteem and love
him; and that is the very reason why I should like to discuss him.
Nothing that either you or I could say would make me love him less; but
I wish to understand him. I have a very clear impression of him, and I
have no doubt you have a very clear impression too; yet we should
probably differ about him in many points, and I should like to see what
light you could throw upon his character." My companion said: "No; it
is inconsistent with my idea of loyalty to criticise my friends.
Besides, you know I am an old-fashioned person, and I disapprove of
criticising people altogether. I think it is a violation of the ninth
commandment; I do not think we are justified in bearing false witness
against our neighbour."
"But you beg the question," I said, "by saying 'FALSE witness.' I quite
agree that to discuss people in a malicious spirit, or in a spirit of
mockery, with the intention of exaggerating their faults and making a
grotesque picture of their foibles, is wrong. But two just persons,
such as you and I are, may surely talk over our friends, in what Mr.
Chadband called a spirit of love?" My companion shook his head. "No,"
he said, "I think it is altogether wrong. Our business is to see the
good points of our friends, and to be blind to their faults." "Well," I
said, "then let us 'praise him soft and low, call him worthiest to be
loved,' like the people in 'The Princess.' You shall make a panegyric,
and I will say 'Hear, hear!'" "You are making a joke out of it," said
my companion, "and I shall stick to my principles--and you won't mind
my saying," he went on, "that I think your tendency is to criticise
people much too much. You are always discussing people's faults, and I
think it ends in your having a lower estimate of human nature than is
either kind or necessary. To-night, at dinner, it made me quite
melancholy to hear the way in which you spoke of several of our best
friends." "Not leaving Lancelot brave nor Galahad pure!" I said; "in
fact you think that I behaved like the ingenious demon in the Acts, who
always seems to me to have had a strong sense of humour. It was the
seven sons of one Sceva, a Jew, was it not, who tried to exorcise an
evil spirit? But he 'leapt upon them and overcame them, so that they
fled out of the house naked and wounded.' You mean that I use my
friends like that, strip off their reputations, belabour them, and
leave them without a rag of virtue or honour?" My companion frowned,
and said: "Yes; that is more or less what I mean, though I think your
illustration is needlessly profane. My idea is that we ought to make
the best of people, and try as far as possible to be blind to their
faults." "Unless their fault happens to be criticism?" I said. My
companion turned to me very solemnly, and said: "I think we ought not
to be afraid, if necessary, of telling our friends about their faults;
but that is quite a different thing from amusing oneself by discussing
their faults with others." "Well" I said, "I believe that one is in a
much better position to speak to people about their faults, if one
knows them; and personally I think I arrive at a juster view both of my
friends' faults and virtues by discussing them with others. I think one
takes a much fairer view, by seeing the impression that one's friends
make on other people; and I think that I generally arrive at admiring
my friends more by seeing them reflected in the mind of another, than I
do when they are merely reflected in my own mind. Besides, if one is
possessed of critical faculties, it seems to me absurd to rule out one
part of life, and that, perhaps, the most important--one's
fellow-beings, I mean--and to say that one is not to exercise the
faculty of criticism there. You would not think it wrong, for instance,
to criticise books?" "No," said my companion, "certainly not. I think
that it is not only legitimate, but a duty, to bring one's critical
faculties to bear on books; it is one of the most valuable methods of
self-education." "And yet books are nothing but an expression of an
author's personality," I said. "Would you go so far as to say that one
has no business to criticise one's friends' books?" "You are only
arguing for the sake of arguing," said my companion. "With books it is
quite different; they are a public expression of a man's opinions, and
consequently they are submitted to the world for criticism." "I
confess," I said, "that I do not think the distinction is a real one. I
feel sure one has a right to criticise a man's opinions, delivered in
conversation; and I think that much of our lives is nothing but a more
or less public expression of ourselves. Your position seems to me no
more reasonable than if a man was to say: 'I look upon the whole world,
and all that is in it, as the work of God; and I am not in a position
to criticise any of the works of God.' If one may not criticise the
character of a friend whom one esteems and loves, surely, a fortiori,
we ought not to criticise anything in the world at all. The whole of
ethics, the whole of religion, is nothing else than bringing our
critical faculties to bear upon actions and qualities; and it seems to
me that if our critical faculty means anything at all, we are bound to
apply it to all the phenomena we see about us." My companion said
disdainfully that I was indulging in the merest sophistry, and that he
thought that we had better go to bed, which we presently did.
I have, since this conversation, been reflecting about the whole
subject, and I am not inclined to admit that my companion was right. In
the first place, if every one were to follow the principle that one had
no business to criticise one's friends, it would end in being
deplorably dull. Imagine the appalling ponderosity of a conversation in
which one felt bound to praise every one who was mentioned. Think of
the insensate chorus which would arise. "How tall and stately A---- is!
How sturdy and compact B---- is! Then there is dear C----; how wise,
judicious, prudent, and sensible! And the excellent D----, what
candour, what impulsiveness! E----, how worthy, how business-like! Yes,
how true that is! How thankful we should be for the examples of A----,
B----, C----, D----, and E----!" A very little of such conversation
would go a long way. How it would refresh and invigorate the mind! What
a field for humour and subtlety it would open up!
It may be urged that we ought not to regulate our conduct upon the
basis of trying to avoid what is dull; but I am myself of opinion that
dulness is responsible for a large amount of human error and misery.
Readers of The Pilgrim's Progress will no doubt remember the young
woman whose name was Dull, and her choice of companions--Simple, Sloth,
Presumption, Short-mind, Slow-pace, No-heart, Linger-after-lust, and
Sleepy-head. These are the natural associates of Madam Dull. The danger
of dulness, whether natural or acquired, is the danger of complacently
lingering among stupid and conventional ideas, and losing all the
bright interchange of the larger world. The dull people are not, as a
rule, the simple people--they are generally provided with a narrow and
self-sufficient code; they are often entirely self-satisfied, and apt
to disapprove of everything that is lively, romantic, and vigorous.
Simplicity, as a rule, is either a natural gift, or else can be
attained only by people of strong critical powers, who will, firmly and
vigorously, test, examine, and weigh motives, and arrive through
experience at a direct and natural method of dealing with men and
circumstances. True simplicity is not an inherited poverty of spirit;
it is rather like the poverty of one who has deliberately discarded
what is hampering, vexatious, and unnecessary, and has learnt that the
art of life consists in disentangling the spirit from all conventional
claims, in living by trained impulse and fine instinct, rather than by
tradition and authority. I do not say that the dull people are not
probably, in a way, the happier people; I suppose that anything that
leads to self-satisfaction is, in a sense, a cause of happiness; but it
is not a species of happiness that people ought to pursue.