I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose ear is
true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers refuse to
reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the inward sense.
Then the tears come rolling down from the poor scraper's eyes and the
bow falls from his hand.
Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much labour
of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert, this
discovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and felicity,
incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind,
it must be recognised by like intuition on the part of the reader, and
a sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sentences of
Flaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and
afterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various
faculties of the mind with each other, the exact apprehension of what
was needed to carry the meaning. And that it fits with absolute
justice will be a judgment of [34] immediate sense in the appreciative
reader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired translation.
Well! all language involves translation from inward to outward. In
literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the
merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that exact
proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style,
prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also,
are such, only as precise expression.
In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one
indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the
latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's
ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth
here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the
vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employing
for its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of expression to
idea--all other literary beauties and excellences whatever: how many
kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same time
safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of
"the phrase," are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what you
have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner
possible, with no surplusage:--there, is the justification of the
sentence so fortunately born, "entire, smooth, and round," that it
needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that is the point!) of the most
elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is the
office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. As
the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the function, of
which in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the
correctness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the
otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the
pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one's
sense. License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as
people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all
that opposes the liberty of beautiful production, will be but faith to
one's own meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is
nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in
itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence,
only redoubled beauty--the phrase so large and so precise at the same
time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of
words to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of
profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original,
initiative, generative, sense in them.
In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to the
medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things,
the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is
to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that.
Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant,
musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic
or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste
of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified,
yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his
portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular splendour, on his ivory chair.
A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the
subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon
transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the
conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament
of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word,
recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have intelligence" in the
matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and
delicate region of human language. The style, the manner, would be the
man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices,
involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what
is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again.--
Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37] peculiar
moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular writer, who is to
pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his
theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain
absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in all its intensity
and colour. For him the form was the work itself. As in living
creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour
and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a
work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the
measure, the rhythm--the form in all its characteristics.
If the style be the man, in all the colour and intensity of a veritable
apprehension, it will be in a real sense "impersonal."
I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose
literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as
others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned
that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the
opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the
imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free
and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And
certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring
literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music
takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all
art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to
distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the
expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the
absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be [38] but
fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere,
of all good art.
Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great
art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all
events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond,
surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its
interests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls,
its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of
the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness
of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les
Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I
have tried to explain as constituting good art;--then, if it be devoted
further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the
oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to
such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation
to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or
immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great
art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and
soul--that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it
has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its
architectural place, in the great structure of human life.
1888.