FORM AND SUBSTANCE
Jack London in his confessions of his struggle for recognition as a
writer gives this formula for success in literature: Health, Work,
and a Philosophy of Life. Health is necessary, of course, in order to
do any hard work, and in a world against which old Malthus railed,
nothing can be attained without hard work. But it is the value of the
third ingredient which is most often overlooked and the absence of
which is responsible for the failure of most of our literary output to
rise above the level of mediocrity. We have noted, in another place,
that Jack London himself, in the bulk of his production, failed to
strike more than an occasional deep and sincere chord, but it was not
because his ear was faulty; it was simply because his audience rejected
precisely the deep chord.
Let it be understood that by a philosophy of life Jack London did not
refer to any definite view on economic reform or social regeneration.
Narrow, limited, prejudiced views have but little place in literature;
if presented by the hand of an artist, they may appeal for a short
time, but never for very long. Great writers there have been who were
not as actively engaged in the squabbles of the world as Jack London
was and who did not take definite sides in the skirmishes of any
generation but they have all had a philosophy of life none the less,
in that they have all had a broad, philosophic comprehension of the
basic laws which govern human life and actions; of causes and effects
conducive to human suffering and happiness; and of the reactions of
these basic laws upon the author himself so that he is able to present
them from a definite angle--his angle.
It is the possession of this individual angle upon the everlasting
panorama of life and death which distinguishes the vital master from
the flabby mechanic. We might call it philosophy of life, independence
of mind, originality, idealism, or what not, in all cases it makes for
substance--the thing by which a work of art lives.
No slight is intended on the value of form in literature. If the
appropriate masterful form clothes this vital substance, so much the
better, of course, but it is the substance that is the protoplasm. Form
follows fads and fashions, and is decidedly mortal; substance alone
illustrates the immutable law of the indestructibility of matter. With
all their beautiful rhetoric and genial humor, the Spectator and Tatler
papers of Addison and Steele are mildly entertaining dead matter today,
but the tragedies and comedies of the Bard of Avon are as appealing
today as three centuries ago, even though handicapped by a form no
longer in vogue. Dostoyevsky’s novels, to take a more modern example,
were written in a style as clumsy and uncouth as ever novels could be
written in, but their burning pages sear the souls of men who read
them. The gift of substance is in them--a fiery miracle, an Apocalypse.
The one supremely outstanding feature in our American fiction is its
lack of substance. Some of us have the O. Henry style and some of us
have the Henry James style and still others have the Washington Irving
or the Poe style; some of us can plot and others can end a story with
a flourish; some possess a dazzling vocabulary and others are genii of
rhetoric--but how many have something sustaining to impart to a world
drowning in platitudes? How much of worth has our fiction added to the
world’s sum of comprehension of beauty, of truth? We have developed
schools and systems of teaching and learning how to say things; we
have bent every effort toward the evolving of a science of expression
only to find that we have been too busy expressing to acquire what to
express. American ethics has always been a point of national pride, but
we have never applied it to the art of talking brilliantly when one
has nothing to say. As George Macdonald once put it: “... If a man has
nothing to communicate, there is no reason why he should have a good
style, any more than why he should have a good purse without any money,
or a good scabbard without any sword.”
Again, the acquisition of nobility of form is not to be discouraged,
but the possession of something to tell the world is the sublimest of
gifts, and gains the world’s everlasting gratitude; and the greatest
seeming anomaly in the conditions under which American literature is
produced is that this gift is not only rated at a discount but fought,
vilified, grappled with. The only way the gift can be acquired, if
it can, is through an insatiable interest in the stuff and forms of
life; but such interest leads to inquiry and inquiry leads to heresy;
venerable taboos are broken. The anomaly becomes a normal result of
an inferior conception of the rights and functions of literature.
Prejudices are placed above art; policies above truth; words above
meanings.
Once, at a suffrage gathering, a young writer was introduced by a
friend to a famous writer whose encouragement the beginner desired.
At the end of the evening the friend asked the famous writer for his
impressions of the budding genius. “I have not read any of his work,”
the famous writer answered, “but I am afraid he has not the makings
of a genius. The way he snubbed the poor girl I introduced him to
merely because she is a salesgirl indicates that he lacks the voracious
interest in the human element which marks the true artist. How is he
ever going to talk Man when he doesn’t know Man?”
Voracious interest--that’s the path that leads to the gift of
substance, to the “philosophy of life,” the original angle! Cæsar saw
before he conquered. And he had to come a long way before he could see.
But he wanted to see. And it is wanting to see that is the whip of
genius. Dickens walked the streets of London for hours, through rain
and fog and slush and shine, because he wanted to see it, all of it,
every nook and corner of it. Balzac tramped the length and breadth of
Paris, haunted parks and shops and drawing-rooms, because the human
comedy appealed to him. The Russian Kuprin dressed himself in a diver’s
suit and had himself lowered many fathoms into the Black Sea because he
wanted to experience the sensations of a diver. And Jack London circled
the globe because he wanted to see what it is like.
A little class-room episode comes to mind. In the poetry class Carl
Sandburg came up for discussion. A few of his Chicago poems were read
when a fair would-be poet spoke up in protest. “I have lived in Chicago
all my life,” she said, “and have never seen the things Sandburg sees!”
But there was another student in the room, a very unobtrusive little
girl sitting somewhere in the back of the room, and she suddenly came
to her instructor’s rescue. “That’s why you are not Sandburg!” she
exclaimed....
The true artist is the perpetual explorer. He cannot invent the
substance of his work, but he can discover it in the life of nature
and his fellow-men. And the more he sees the more he learns to see,
for to be able to see the new and unexplored in the old and elemental
is the highest art in itself. A hunchback to a child in the streets is
an object to throw stones at, to a Victor Hugo he is a grand, heroic
figure, fierce and glorious in his pathetic grandeur. A typhoon to a
Chinese fisherman represents the wrath of his god for the omission of
a prayer or a sacrifice; to Joseph Conrad it symbolizes the majestic
resentment of the Sea itself against man’s desecration of its peace and
beauty and mystery. Only the American artist knows no symbols and is
warned against attempting to know.
Our great cry has always been: “Acquire form!” Grammar, rhetoric,
metrics, technique--these have been the indispensable tools of our
writers. They still are. But having acquired them our writers find
they can fashion nothing beautiful, nothing lasting, nothing that
will weather the storms of time. For no tools, no matter how sharp or
perfect, can accomplish the feat of fashioning something out of vacuum.
The American story always has laid claims to style--but it hasn’t
lived. Writers have come and had their vogue and gone. Even years back
when style was more leisurely and rounded, when the badge of haste was
not upon it, Charles Dudley Warner remarked: “We may be sure that any
piece of literature which attracts only by some trick of style, however
it may blaze up for a day and startle the world with its flash, lacks
the element of endurance. We do not need much experience to tell us the
difference between a lamp and a Roman candle.”
This remark can be elaborated on, explained, complemented. The truth
is that there can be no style without substance. These elements are
not separate entities; only superficially do they seem to be. How
much sweetness can a “sweet nothing” contain? How much beauty can a
work of “art” contain which has emptiness of thought and ugliness of
conception? How much truth can be embedded in a fundamental falsehood?
Every great poet has found the soul of his poem determining its form.
Great style grows from within--it is an off-shoot of great substance.
To the American writer this relationship has never been apparent; and
most of our critics, professing a lofty æstheticism from the shadows
of their academies, have never paid attention to it. Our literature
cannot boast the possession of a single lucid outline of this vital
relationship between form and substance such as the following from Remy
de Gourmont’s “Le Probleme du Style.” I wonder how many authors of
textbooks exhorting American would-be authors to learn the cabalistic
lore of expression have ever read this:
“A new fact or a new idea is worth more than a fine phrase. A lovely
phrase is a lovely thing and so is a lovely flower. But their duration
is almost the same--a day, a century. Nothing dies more swiftly than a
style which does not rest upon the solidity of vigorous thinking. Such
a style shrivels like a stretched skin; it falls in a heap as ivy does
from the rotten tree that once gave it support....
“It is probably an error to attempt to distinguish between form and
substance.... There is no such thing as amorphous matter; all thought
has a limit, hence a form, since it is a partial representation of true
or possible, real or imaginary life. Substance engenders form exactly
as the tortoise and the oyster do the materials of their respective
shells....
“Form without a foundation, style without thought--what a poor thing it
is!...
“If nothing lives in literature except by its style, that is because
works well thought out are invariably well written. But the converse is
not true. Style alone is nothing....
“The sign of the man in any intellectual work is the thought. The
thought _is_ the man. And style and thought are one.”[27]
If we were candid enough the proper answer to make to this brilliant
Frenchman would be: “Who told you that literature is an ‘intellectual
work’?” But we are not candid enough. Only in our strictly professional
journals do we dare liken literature to cobbling or tin-smithing or
hod-carrying; in the official world, in our lectures and book-reviews,
we consider it an art and talk of Muses and Pegasus and all the
artistic divinities of Mount Olympus and Chillicothe.
A simple confession will not be amiss here. This discussion has been
largely a plea for the man and woman who would find in literature,
and in the short story specifically, the relief of a burdened soul.
The influences that would withhold this relief are multitudinous and
powerful. The struggle is unequal and pathetic. But of the hundreds
of literary aspirants that have come to my personal notice only an
isolated individual here and there was blessed with any kind of a
burden. The vast multitude of souls were cheerfully lightweight
and unencumbered. These aspirants came to study technique so that
they might learn how to write salable stories, but they had no
stories to tell. Some of them believed they could become great story
writers because when at school they had received excellent marks
in composition; others claimed on more general grounds a gift of
expression and they wished to put it to practical use. That it was
necessary to have lived in order to write of life was a thought that
had never occurred to them. They were blissfully unaware of such a
necessity. They needed form, nothing else, and applied themselves
conscientiously toward its acquisition. The irony of the whole matter
is that they actually estimated their deficiency accurately: form was
what they wanted, and nothing else. After a while they began to sell.
In all cases the unhappy aspirants who were plagued with thoughts and
emotions have found it harder to sell, no matter how much excellence of
form they succeeded in acquiring. In the field of the American short
story, the “lightweights” have it, so far.
It is true, of course, that even a lightweight must have something to
clothe with his all-potent form--be it a skeleton ever so rattling. But
that has been answered in Chapter IV on the Moving Pictures. There are
themes a-plenty, airy, optimistic, harmless themes that no respectable
editor, reader, or Board of Censorship can object to. They can be
adapted and readapted an infinity of times, provided each time a new
twist or a “different” trick is introduced.
All our themes seem to have divided themselves into two grand classes:
Stereotyped themes out of which stories are made, and Life themes out
of which literature is made. The first class contains an abundance of
material that any one might have for the taking, but which to make
salable requires all the tricks of form that we have so flamboyantly
evolved to disguise its hackneyed origin. The second class contains all
the substances of existence that only those that feel their kinship
thereto can transmute into literature. All the style and form that
the science of writing can teach cannot hope to produce one breathing
story unless the theme is eloquent with this kinship. Such is the story
of genius--the story that lives and endures. Such a story may or may
not have mechanical values; it will captivate and thrill; ruffle and
soothe; make and destroy. Such a story will be found to have a theme
not chosen with an eye for gallery approval; not even because the
writer himself approves of it. One cannot approve or disapprove of the
stuff he is made of. One merely accepts it. After all there is only one
theme--inexhaustible--out of which genuine literature has always been
and always will be made, perhaps it is the simple theme of Tagore’s
court poet: “The theme of Krishna, the lover god, and Radha, the
beloved, the Eternal Man and the Eternal Woman, the sorrow that comes
from the beginning of time, and the joy without end.”[28]