STYLE

[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in

differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object

into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to

confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of

achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for

instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and

characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the

other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction

between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been

tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this

again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation

of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs

make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by

anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with

which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or

the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always

liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while

prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque

with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and

intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or

florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to

protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and

narrowly confined to mainly practical ends--a kind of "good

round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch

prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with

Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. In

subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in

all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so

the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to

estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look

for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too

has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions,

the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the

logical structure:--how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in

prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it

as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an

estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.

[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to

emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against

their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect

from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic

excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only

fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all

unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that

humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really

a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery

of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the

rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its

assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual

needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary

form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively

enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry

he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or

presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him

the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as

the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and

unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between

"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the

former of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar

sense of fact, whether past or present.

Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition

of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of

the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one

only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain

qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the

literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the

imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and

prose, so far as either is really imaginative--certain conditions of

true art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the

secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar

excellences of either.

The line between fact and something quite different from external fact

is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive

writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time

to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must

consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading--a theorem no

longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's

spirit, to think with him, if one can or will--an expression no longer

of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world,

prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present,

in either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world. In science,

on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule,

we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be

always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of

literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so

all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible

to various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in

all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament,

as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history

especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the

borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various

degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful

intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs

select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something

that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon

moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus,

Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the

past, each, after his own sense, modifies--who can tell where and to

what degree?--and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as

he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in

proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to

be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his

sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art

(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his

presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of

literature also, truth--truth to bare fact, there--is the essence of

such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit,

no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long

run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer

accommodation of speech to that vision within.

--The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being

preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In

literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding

of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts

itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above

its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of

course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely

serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is

in any way imitative or reproductive of fact--form, or colour, or

incident--is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of

a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.

Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature--this

transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as

modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.

It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or

rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its

representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only

one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be

thought, being the special art of the modern world. That imaginative

prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world

results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic

variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue,

the really master currents of the present time incalculable--a

condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse

form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century

has been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, a

curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a

certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the

less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as

the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will

be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its

excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest

experience--an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,

descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will

be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the

varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]

or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every

syllable.*

The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .

proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the

scholarly conscience--the male conscience in this matter, as we must

think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent

limits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he supposes

always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily,

considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground

which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the

material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the

sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending

tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its

own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary

recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter

he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws,

the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a

restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them an

opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his

medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility,

of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae--the exclusions, or rejections,

which nature demands--we know how large a part these play, according to

Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we might

say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those

rejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must

use. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its

utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of

words, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority

of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, the

facility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the

vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those

affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, of his language, which

through the associations of literary history have become a part of its

nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license,

many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive.

His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in

literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed

illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned.

Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation,

having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute

consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail,

being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too,

that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and

therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the

science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a

freedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master.

For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really

vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system

of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of

the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.

Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English

equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the

rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which

like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still

further illustrate good taste.--The right vocabulary! Translators have

not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of

translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;

whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with

its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible

by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after

word, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only

each word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration

a little.

Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed

and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would

select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the

words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and

doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search

of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a

vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the

strictest sense original. That living authority which language needs

lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every

language possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own,

expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change

along with the changing thoughts of living people. Ninety years ago,

for instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth,

to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and

speak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the

language of the next generation. But he did it with the tact of a

scholar also. English, for a quarter of a century past, has been

assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the

phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years

ago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but

pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For

many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of

the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive

scholarship--in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,

for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,

rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist, therefore,

will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its

turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothing

without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really

obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in

use: ascertain, communicate, discover--words like these it has been

part of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language was made for

man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom

of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed

not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his"

"hers," for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really

inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. Racy

Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix

readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second

intention." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be

conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism we

have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How

illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the

phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the

writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship

throughout!

A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something

to the willing intelligence of his reader. "To go preach to the first

passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the

first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, naturally

distressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering

uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To really strenuous

minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous

effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp

of the author's sense. Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means,

ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed

there will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of

style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every

sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to

thought, in the logically filled space connected always with the

delightful sense of difficulty overcome.

Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very

various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not

[18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always

look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral

refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem

like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a

theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of

the uses of a religious "retreat." Here, then, with a view to the

central need of a select few, those "men of a finer thread" who have

formed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every component

element, will have undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will be

no uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible

ornament being for the most part structural, or necessary. As the

painter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the

production by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The

artist," says Schiller, "may be known rather by what he omits"; and in

literature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact of

omission. For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the

ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference,

is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but

will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it

of perhaps quite alien associations.

Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of

scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true

artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornament

indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all

literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and

verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its

fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in

Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned,

with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel,

allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--he

knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to

which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder,

because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject.

Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does

not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never

depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a

ponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will

still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford,

to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just

then?--Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.

For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,

from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle

of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finished

work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the

rough-hewn block of stone.

And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other

accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of

specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which

language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake,

to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant

observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for

obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed

in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it.

Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements

or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first

that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the

resources of expression. The elementary particles of language will be

realised as colour and light and shade through his scholarly living in

the full sense of them. Still opposing the constant degradation of

language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured

glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure

unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent

figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed

personification--a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21]

because it has no really rhetorical motive--which plays so large a part

there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously

exact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value.

So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art

arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the

essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent

ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good

taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate

quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist

himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent

to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all

other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,

everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees the

end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is

conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with

undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition of

literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the

artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of

mind in style.

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose

works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and

with obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)

wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to

show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing, in

each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity with

itself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing aim at

a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes by which

the word is associated to its import. The term is right, and has its

essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it signifies, as

with the names of simple sensations. To give the phrase, the sentence,

the structural member, the entire composition, song, or essay, a

similar unity with its subject and with itself:--style is in the right

way when it tends towards that. All depends upon the original unity,

the vital wholeness and identity, of the initiatory apprehension or

view. So much is true of all art, which therefore requires always its

logic, its comprehensive reason--insight, foresight, retrospect, in

simultaneous action--true, most of all, of the literary art, as being

of all the arts most closely cognate to the abstract intelligence.

Such logical coherency may be evidenced not merely in the lines of

composition as a whole, but in the choice of a single word, while it by

no means interferes with, but may even prescribe, much variety, in the

building of the sentence for instance, or in the manner, argumentative,

descriptive, discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the

entire design. The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's

expression of its needs, may alternate with the long-contending,

victoriously intricate sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity

of a single word, relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look

closely, you can see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a

highly qualified matter into compass at one view. For the literary

architecture, if it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only

foresight of the end in the beginning, but also development or growth

of design, in the process of execution, with many irregularities,

surprises, and afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary

being subsumed under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack of

such architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image,

vigorously informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition,

which shall be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from

first to last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses

of conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or

member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an

original structure in thought not organically complete. With such

foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written out

of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With

some strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold of

which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the

literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to

joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing

the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he

may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting

mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not

interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, is

burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it,

leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end,

but in all the freshness of volition. His work now structurally

complete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of

meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that

ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive. The house he

has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its

greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be

recounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading.

And though there are instances of great writers who have been no

artists, an unconscious tact sometimes directing work in which we may

detect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one

of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the

critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the

pervading sense of it [25] as we read. Yet of poetic literature too;

for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is

one of the forms of the imagination.

That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul:--hard

to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough

practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with

each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of

preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of

preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a

fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of

attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety

which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration.

By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective

indications of design in his work, legible to all. By soul, he reaches

us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant

sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but

approve where we recognise it; soul may repel us, not because we

misunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimes

avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the

force I mean to indicate generally in literature, by the word soul.

Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without

finding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle

[26] words to various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them

doubles its force. Religious history presents many remarkable

instances in which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious

literary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway

from one to another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those

lips!" The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the

writings of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have

instances of widely different and largely diffused phases of religious

feeling in operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind

acts with similar power in certain writers of quite other than

theological literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar

sense of theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature,

this quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence.

At their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";

such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter, but

of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with, peculiar

form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on

which account it is that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, in

style. And this too is a faculty of choosing and rejecting what is

congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity--unity of atmosphere

here, as there of design--soul securing colour (or perfume, might [27]

we say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the

former vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is

practically infinite. There are some to whom nothing has any real

interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and

it is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art.

They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet,

although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it

is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it

does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different

from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing

that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in

what is there expressed.

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps

rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence, a

curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year, records

what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of letters

which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed anguish, its

tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in which the

whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes supposed, one

of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he does display,

by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate pondering, as in

his love for literature, a heart really moved, but [28] still more, and

as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his work. Madame X., too,

is a literary artist, and the best gifts he can send her are precepts

of perfection in art, counsels for the effectual pursuit of that better

love. In his love-letters it is the pains and pleasures of art he

insists on, its solaces: he communicates secrets, reproves, encourages,

with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such

divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees

that, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of

what was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary

and exclusive one.

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks, scandalises

me, the small concern, namely, you show for art just now. As regards

glory be it so: there, I approve. But for art!--the one thing in life

that is good and real--can you compare with it an earthly love?--prefer

the adoration of a relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty?

Well! I tell you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one

thing I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the

beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable, what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count

everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of all beside when

it is established on a large basis. Work! God wills it. That, it

seems to me, is clear.--+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I repeat to

myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay in one's head,

by which I find myself beset, as with those musical airs which are for

ever returning, and cause you pain, you love them so much. I observe

that I no longer laugh much, and am no longer depressed. I am ripe.

You talk of my serenity, and envy me. It may well surprise you. Sick,

[29] irritated, the prey a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I

continue my labour like a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned

up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling

himself whether it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like

that formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will

has counted for something in the matter.--

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect of

ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician were

something else than healing, of the painter than painting-as if the end

of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued

with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a

sympathetic commentator:--

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of

expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to qualify,

one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman labour for the

discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that verb, that epithet. In

this way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of expression, and

when a true word seemed to him to lack euphony still went on seeking

another, with invincible patience, certain that he had not yet got hold

of the unique word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at

the same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his

spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and turns of

expression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to express what I

want to say.

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude of

words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!--the

unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song, absolutely

proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.

[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and

removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which

it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing

itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,

from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,

indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the possibility

of which constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the idea

of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a

relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,

somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in

the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting

each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's

rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his theory

philosophical expression.--

There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful forms,

and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a physical body

the qualities which really constitute it--colour, extension, and the

like--without reducing it to a hollow abstraction, in a word, without

destroying it; just so it is impossible to detach the form from the

idea, for the idea only exists by virtue of the form.

All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature

(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully considered

[31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part of the actual

value of what one says. But still, after all, with Flaubert, the

search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth, or winsome, or

forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but quite simply and

honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning. The first condition

of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to have ascertained your

own sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an artist, he says to the

reader,--I want you to see precisely what I see. Into the mind

sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is

ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic

selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible

vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within,

nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined,

enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at

those doubtful points that the function of style, as tact or taste,

intervenes. The unique term will come more quickly to one than

another, at one time than another, according also to the kind of matter

in question. Quickness and slowness, ease and closeness alike, have

nothing to do with the artistic character of the true word found at

last. As there is a charm of ease, so there is also a special charm in

the signs of discovery, of effort and contention towards a due end, as

so often with Flaubert himself--in the style which has [32] been

pliant, as only obstinate, durable metal can be, to the inherent

perplexities and recusancy of a certain difficult thought.

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how

tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his

confession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to do

with diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will be

the product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.

Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety in

"seeking the phrase," which gathered all the other small ennuis of a

really quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with his

lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art, facile and

flimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the slowness or

quickness of the process, but the absolute success of the result. As

with those labourers in the parable, the prize is independent of the

mere length of the actual day's work. "You talk," he writes, odd,

trying lover, to Madame X.--

"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes. That might have

enabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in the matter of love.

I grow so hard to please as a literary artist, that I am driven to

despair. I shall end by not writing another line."

"Happy," he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient

labour, which for him, certainly, was the condition of a great

success--[33]

Happy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out, as the

pen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains. As for me, I

hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself in despite: my

taste is augmented in proportion as my natural vigour decreases, and I

afflict my soul over some dubious word out of all proportion to the

pleasure I get from a whole page of good writing. One would have to

live two centuries to attain a true idea of any matter whatever. What

Buffon said is a big blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience.

Still, there is some truth in the statement, and more than people

think, especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter

deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on to

destruction...