Talks on Writing English

II

METHODS OF STUDY

The question remains: How is skill in composition to be gained? The general principle is as simple as the details of the craft are complicated. The way to write is to write. Perhaps the most exact image of the process is that of piano-playing. Just as one acquires skill in the use of the piano by innumerable exercises and continual practice, so one attains to mastery in written language only by writing and writing and writing. It is necessary to compose and recompose; to write all sorts of things, to prune them, recast them, polish them; to elaborate and to simplify; to weigh each word and phrase; and when all is done to destroy the result as ruthlessly as we would destroy anything else which has become rubbish by outliving its usefulness.

This last point needs to be insisted upon. Personal vanity and that interest in self which is so naturally and so universally human, work constantly to persuade the beginner that his poorest trials are worth preservation. In the case of the pianist, the sound of the five-finger exercise dies on the air, and there is luckily an end of it. The player cannot gather it up and send it to a magazine. He cannot even without great risk of encountering personal violence impose it upon the friend whom he has invited to dine. With the writer it is unhappily different. His first verses he sends cheerfully and a little condescendingly to a magazine. His second he distributes on privately printed slips to his friends, – and any acquaintance will serve as a friend in the distribution of privately printed poems! His third effort is apt to go to some overworked man of letters, accompanied by a note delicately hinting that the inclosure is better than anything which the recipient has done, and requesting him to have it published at once in one of the leading magazines.

It is a thousand pities that the work of writers who are learning their art is not written in ink fading over night, or which would at least vanish as soon as the manuscript had undergone revision. The next best thing is for the would-be author to accustom himself to phrasing thoughts in his mind without setting them down upon paper at all. This habit is of great value from the constant training that it gives, and it is of value also because it takes its place as the study of form for the sake of form; the effort to attain technical excellence unhampered by any consideration of producing compositions permanent in themselves.

The best technical training is that which is entirely disassociated from any idea that permanent work is being done. No one can get on very well or very far in English composition who is not able patiently and faithfully to do a great deal of work simply for the sake of learning how to do it, entirely realizing that the thing produced is of no value when it is done. It is as absurd to preserve or to attempt to publish these crude experiments as it would be to practice the five-finger exercises in public, and to attempt to persuade music-lovers to pay to come and hear them. Every editor knows what need there is of saying this. Each mail carries to the office of every magazine scores of manuscript which are nothing but the crude exercises produced in more or less unintelligent struggles with the art of composition. The soul of the editor faints within him, while on the other hand the misguided, sensitive, self-conscious writer is smitten to the heart when his or her exercise is sent back with a printed card declining it with a hollow mockery of thanks. It is ludicrously pathetic; and I dwell upon it a little because in my time I have been foolish enough to offend in this manner; because as an editor I suffered enough from this cause to square the account beyond the cavil of the most exacting fate; and because in the course of my literary life I have seen so much of this sort of thing that I realize how general the experience is. It would be of less moment were it not for the depth of despair into which would-be authors are plunged by the return of these exercises. There is no despair like the despair of youth, and it makes my heart tingle now to recall the utter anguish with which I have received rejected early manuscripts – which should never have been sent to a publisher. Would to heaven that there were some one eloquent enough to persuade the world once and for all that literature is as surely a profession which must be learned as is law or medicine. No delicate woman or sensitive man, thrown suddenly upon her or his own resources, turns to law or medicine, expecting to gain a livelihood by practicing these professions uninstructed; yet this would be hardly less logical than to expect to make a way in literature without long preparation and study. Nobody seems to believe this. It is probably disbelieved now, as I say it; and examples of persons who have succeeded in writing with no apparent training come to mind at once. It would be idle to retort to objections of this sort that quacks have succeeded in all professions; and I must content myself with insisting that whether what I have been saying is believed or not, it is true, and the proofs are heart-sickeningly familiar to every man of literary experience at all extended.

It is important to remember that the best technical training is that in which nothing is considered but technical excellence. The student should write with his entire attention fixed upon the technical excellence of the work. He must think not of what he is doing, but of how he is doing it. It is a long time before the student has a right to look upon himself as a producer at all; and the more completely he can preserve the attitude of a learner, the better will be the results of his self-training.

Guy de Maupassant, one of the most finished masters of literary art, pure and simple, who have written in this century, – a writer who achieved so much, and who lacked only a supreme ethical ideal to do so much more, – indicates something of what is meant by technical training in composition in his account of his studies under Flaubert: —

Flaubert, whom I saw sometimes, conceived a friendship for me. I ventured to submit to him some of my attempts. He kindly read them, and said to me: “I cannot tell whether you have talent. What you have shown me proves a certain intelligence; but you must not forget this, young man, – that talent, in the phrase of Buffon, is only long patience. Work.” … For seven years I made verses, I made tales, I made novels, I even made a detestable play. Of them all nothing remains. The master … criticised them, and enforced upon me, little by little, two or three principles, which were the pith of his long and perfect teaching. “If one has not originality,” he said, “it is necessary to acquire it.” Talent is long patience. It is a question of regarding whatever one desires to express long enough and with attention close enough to discover a side which no one has seen and which has been expressed by nobody. In everything there is something of the unexplored, because we are accustomed to use our eyes only with the thought of what has been already said concerning the thing we see. The smallest thing has in it a grain of the unknown. Discover it. In order to describe a fire that flames or a tree in the plain, we must remain face to face with that fire or that tree until for us they no longer resemble any other tree or any other fire. This is the way to become original.

Having, moreover, impressed upon me the fact that there are not in the whole world two grains of sand, two insects, two hands or two noses absolutely alike, he forced me to describe a being or an object in such a manner as to individualize it clearly, to distinguish it from all other objects of the same kind. “When you pass,” he said to me, “a grocer seated in his doorway, a concierge smoking his pipe, a row of cabs, show me this grocer and this concierge, their attitude, all their physical appearance; suggest by the skill of your image all their moral nature, so that I shall not confound them with any other grocer or any other concierge; make me see, by a single word, wherein a cab-horse differs from the fifty others that follow or precede him.” … Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it; only one verb to animate it, but one adjective to qualify it. It is essential to search for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and never to be satisfied with anything else. —Pierre et Jean, Introduction.

I have given this long quotation because it puts the case so strongly, because it has the weight of authority so high in technical matters, and because it touches upon several points which will come up later. There are dangers in this method of which we shall speak in the proper place, but here the thing to be emphasized is the absolute indispensability of rigorous training when one is struggling to acquire the art of verbal expression.

Robert Louis Stevenson, that beautiful master of words, has also told us how he trained himself to that dexterity and grace which have been the delight of so great a company of readers: —

All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for a pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-book would be in my hand to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. And what I wrote thus was for no ulterior use. It was written consciously for practice. —A College Magazine.

It is well in learning to write to select uninteresting subjects; themes which depend for their effectiveness not upon what they are but upon the way in which they are presented. It is the natural tendency of any inexperienced writer to set to work to find something to write about which is in itself attractive. In the daily themes which I receive from students I find that the almost inevitable course of things is that the student writes upon whatever romantic or striking incidents have occurred in his life, and that when these are exhausted he is utterly at a loss for something to write about. It is not easy to persuade students that they will get training far more valuable out of careful attempts to express the commonplace. It is hard for eager young writers to follow the advice which Flaubert gave to De Maupassant. They are not willing to put their most strenuous efforts into the attempt to present vividly the grocer or the cab-horse. Yet there is nothing more valuable in training than to be thrown entirely upon one’s own literary skill, be it much or little. When one deals with a subject fascinating in itself it is difficult to determine how much of the force of what is written depends upon the theme and how much may fairly be attributed to the treatment. In training which is purely technical it is essential to make this distinction, and it follows that the learner is wise to choose for his ’prentice efforts matters little attractive in themselves.

I have said that the way to learn to write is to write. It would perhaps be better to say that the way to learn to write is to rewrite. In the careful revision, the patient reconstruction, the unsparing self-criticism of the student who is determined to be satisfied with nothing short of the best of which he is capable, lies the secret of success. Here, as in everything else connected with the study of technique, patient, painstaking, untiring work is the essential thing.

In regard to revision it is necessary to call attention to the fact that it must extend to the revision of paragraphs and whole compositions. We are apt to confine ourselves to the remodeling and the polishing of sentences, or, if we get so far as to revise paragraphs, to take each separately. It is essential that we train ourselves to consider sentences as part of paragraphs and paragraphs as but portions of a whole. This it is especially hard for untrained writers to do. Those who have taught will recognize how difficult it is to make students realize that the sentences of a theme may all be individually right while yet the theme as a whole is all wrong.

As a matter of practical work it is well to make a schedule of chapters by paragraphs and of the whole composition by chapters, if the work be on so extensive a scale. It is one of the tests of a properly constructed paragraph that it can be roughly summed up in a single sentence, and a longer division may consequently be reduced in substance to as many sentences as there are paragraphs. It is an excellent plan thus to summarize work, and a little practice enables a writer to do this in his head without the trouble of putting the abstract upon paper.

It is evident that to learn the art of composition is no small undertaking, but it is to be kept in mind that this art, being the means of human expression, underlies all study and all thought no less than it underlies all communication. It aids one to understand what one reads, what one studies, what one thinks, no less than it aids one to compose a poem, to produce a novel, to write a letter, or to relate the latest bit of piquant gossip. Do not make the mistake of supposing that it is outside of your other intellectual pursuits, save in the sense that all the rest of your education is inclosed in it. We fully understand only that which we are ourselves capable of; and to comprehend the literature of the world it is necessary to come as near to being able to have produced it as is possible to our individual capabilities.

III

PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURE

Since it is the object of this book first of all to be practical, it is well, before passing to matters more intricate, to consider for a little the elementary principles of composition.[1 - In this chapter and the next three I am so greatly indebted to Professor Barrett Wendell’s “English Composition” that this part of my book might almost be called a summary of his, although I have of course omitted much and have introduced some things upon which he has barely touched.] Written language, to repeat what everybody knows, consists of words arranged in sentences, which in turn are grouped into paragraphs, these again being placed together to form whole compositions. In all composition, it may be remarked, it is necessary to remember that the punctuation is as integral and as important a part of what is written as are the words. It is often more easy to forgive the careless printer for altering a word than for changing punctuation, since the reader more easily corrects an error of diction than of pointing. The student has not mastered even the preliminary stages of composition who is not as sure of the punctuation of a page as he is of its grammatical construction.

There is a general vagueness on the subject of the mechanical forms employed in written or printed language which affects the nerves as if it were connected with the moral laxity of the age. There is probably no real connection between the frequency of bank defalcations and a failure to recognize the relative values of the comma and the semicolon, but to a literary man this ignorance is so culpable as almost to seem likely to lead to crime. When an inexperienced writer gets the words down he is apt to suppose that all is well, and frequently he does not even know when to put in a period. It is necessary not only to close a sentence when it is done, but also to bear in mind that if it is not finished putting a period in the middle does not really make two sentences of it. When a tyro finds that his pen is getting out of breath, he has a tendency to set down a period, and then to go on with a conjunction, supposing, in the innocency of his heart, that he is beginning afresh. He is really only setting up the divorced better half – for the latter portion of a sentence should be the better half – in a sort of separate maintenance. The period in such a case has not even the power of a divorce, since it cannot make the separation legal. A sentence is like an ingot: if it be chopped in two, each piece is half of the original whole. It must be melted and recast to make individual ingots of smaller size.

It is also to be noted that students too often fail to recognize the fact that there are reasons as definite and as binding for the divisions of sentences into paragraphs as for the division of words into sentences. A teacher recently told me of the definition of a country schoolboy which, if not over-elegant, represents pretty fairly, it seems to me, the attitude of the common mind toward the paragraph. “A paragraph,” this lad said blunderingly, when called upon to define, “why, a paragraph – a paragraph – it’s – it’s a gob of sentences!” I fancy that most teachers have encountered plenty of pupils who think of a paragraph as merely a “gob” of sentences, – a lump accidentally broken off from the rest of the composition, but possessed of no structural qualities of its own.

The analysis of sentences is common in schools, but, so far as I know, there is little analysis of paragraphs. To my thinking there is more to be gained from the latter than from the former. The analysis of the paragraph calls for a wider view, for a better comprehension of subject, and for a more developed idea of form. I do not wish to be understood as endeavoring to invent a new torture for pupils or one more device for further overburdening teachers already overloaded. I merely call attention to the value as a means of mental and literary training of the study of paragraph structure in the works of the masters of style, and to the fact that such study is an indispensable part of a literary training.

Of course the ultimate appeal in all that concerns the mechanics of composition is to what is commonly called Good Use. All written symbols by which intelligence is conveyed from man to man are arbitrary. It is merely because it is agreed that the character “I” shall represent a sound and that this sound shall stand for an idea, that we are able to bring up the idea in the mind of others simply by writing the sign. That there is nothing innate in the symbol is evident from the fact that other signs have been used to represent this sound, and that other syllables have stood for the pronoun in the first person singular. The examples which might be given to illustrate this point are limited only by the number of words in existence. Consciously or by tacit consent – oftener, of course, by the latter – it has been agreed to attach sounds to ideas and to represent those sounds by definite symbols. It follows that he who wishes to communicate an idea in writing has no resource outside of the means which have been agreed upon by the consent of his fellow-men. A writer may decide to have a new vocabulary and to write it in novel characters. The difficulty is that it will be understood by nobody. He is forced to use the language of men, and to use it in the fashion in which it is employed by others. He is bound by the habit of men who write, established by custom and defined by common acceptance. In other words, he is constrained to follow Good Use.

Good Use is the general agreement in regard to conventions by means of which ideas are conveyed. It is the basis of all composition, and without an intimate knowledge of it no one can write successfully. What the best general agreement is, is to be determined by the practice of the most eminent and widely recognized authors. The fact of their general indorsement and recognition is a sufficient proof that their use is intelligible to their public, and that it is therefore safe to follow them. Their custom decides not because of their authority, but because their reputation proves that their use is the one which is tacitly accepted by intelligent readers, and which is therefore the only one that will insure comprehension.

There are certain things which in writing it is necessary to keep constantly in mind until they are observed unconsciously and instinctively. Always a writer must hold to three Principles of Structure and three Principles of Quality. The division is of course arbitrary, but it is logical and convenient. The three Principles of Structure, – the mechanical principles, so to say, those which direct most obviously the mechanics of language, – are Unity, Mass, and Coherence. The three Principles of Quality – those which govern the inner and more intellectual character of a composition – are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.

The first principle of structure, Unity, has to do with the substance of a sentence or a composition. It is the law which requires that every composition shall be informed with a general intention, shall centre around one fundamental idea; that every paragraph and every sentence shall be dominated by one essential thought or purpose. It is the principle which produces the difference between a well-ordered whole and an unorganized collection of scraps; between a rich embroidery and a sampler, a mosaic and a crazy-quilt. Without Unity as a whole a composition becomes as disjointed as a dictionary, without attaining to the instructiveness of that necessary book; and in degree only less from the proportionate importance of a part to the whole, the lack of Unity in a sentence destroys the value and effectiveness of the entire work.

The second principle, that of Mass, concerns the external arrangement of what is written. It is the rule which enjoins the putting of the chief parts of the composition, of the paragraph and of the sentence, in the places which most readily catch the eye or the ear. This is sometimes spoken of as Emphasis, but the term is hardly comprehensive enough. All questions of proportion come of course under the head of Mass, and so does whatever in the outward form of a composition appeals to the eye.

Coherence, the third principle of structure, is the law of internal arrangement. The relation of each part to the others must be made clear and unmistakable. We are all but too familiar with the style of writing which resembles the valley of dry bones of the prophet’s vision, composition wherein the relation of one fragment to another is to be discerned only by the most careful research. Coherence is as the inspired prophecy of Ezekiel, whereby the bones came together, bone to bone, so that the valley was filled with an exceeding great army.

Unity is at once the simplest and the most easily secured of these three requirements. It is within the power of any writer of reasonable judgment to tell when the matter contained in a sentence concerns a single idea or several ideas so closely connected that they must belong together. It is a matter of perception, and for avoiding incongruous constructions there is perhaps no other rule so good as the simple injunction: Be sure that sentences have Unity. Every text-book upon rhetoric warns against this fault and contains examples of it. The writer who accustoms himself to realize vividly what he is saying is not likely to fall into the error.

The danger attending upon the effort to secure Unity is that of Dryness. The writer who is excessively careful about confining every sentence to a single thought and every paragraph to a single group of thoughts dominated by a central idea is sometimes likely to fail of variety and richness of structure. He becomes timid about admitting even proper ornaments, and gives to his style an air of being constructed upon the model of a wall of brick masonry. Variety is as essential to composition as is Unity, and it is necessary to be careful lest in securing one the other be lost. Every student should become sufficiently self-critical to know in which direction he is more likely to err, and to direct his efforts for improvement accordingly.

The question of Mass is more difficult. This principle governs the places of words and clauses in the sentence, of sentences in paragraphs, of paragraphs in longer compositions. The whole matter is admirably and succinctly put by Mr. Wendell: —

In any composition the points which most readily catch the eye are evidently the beginning and the end. From which, of course, it follows that, broadly speaking, every composition – sentence, paragraph, chapter, book – may conveniently begin and end with the words which stand for ideas that we wish to impress on our readers… Broadly speaking, the office of punctuation is to emphasize, – to do for the eye what vocal pauses and stress do for the ear, – to show what parts of a composition belong together, and among these parts to indicate the most significant. It is clear that periods emphasize more strongly than semi-colons; and semi-colons than commas. From this, of course, it follows that in an ideally massed sentence the most significant words come close to the periods, the less significant close to the lesser marks of punctuation, the least significant in those unbroken stretches of discourse where there is nothing but words to arrest the eye. The test of a well-massed sentence, then, is very simple: Are the words that arrest the eye the words on which the writer would arrest your attention?

The application of this principle to books is easily seen, and perhaps is especially obvious in fiction. In an effective novel it will generally be found that some interesting and striking situation has been chosen for the beginning. Frequently the author makes a bold plunge into the very heart of the story in order to find an impressive passage with which to begin. The more important emphasis, that of the conclusion, must be properly employed or the entire effect of the work as a whole is sacrificed.

A good example of the ill effect of failing to employ the emphatic points of a book properly is afforded by Stanley J. Weyman’s pleasing story, “My Lady Rotha.” The first seven chapters are occupied with an account of the rebellion of a village against its chatelaine and of her flight from her castle to avoid their rage. Once the Lady Rotha is free of the castle, however, the book is devoted to her adventures in a country where the King of Sweden, the great Wallenstein, and numerous other leaders are filling the land with war and danger and bloodshed. To the very end of the tale the reader expects that the narrative will return to the castle, and that there will appear some better excuse for the opening chapters than the need of starting the heroine on her perilous travels; but the novel finishes without going back to the castle or telling how matters were settled there. The book is so badly massed that the very force of its beginning injures instead of aiding the effect of the whole.

In another and better tale by the same author, “A Gentleman of France,” the first emphasis is given to the poverty and undeserved ill fortune of the hero; so that when in time fate leads him to better things the later joy is heightened by contrast with the earlier gloom. I take these two books because they have been widely read of late, but any novel that comes to hand is an illustration of one sort or another.

The danger to be avoided in endeavoring to secure effective massing of compositions is that of artificiality. This is especially obvious in the construction of sentences. In an uninflected language, like English, wherein the relative places of words are necessarily fixed more or less absolutely, it is not easy to re-order the arrangement without giving to the style an appearance of artifice. Dexterously to overcome this difficulty is one of the things which the student has to learn, and perhaps more upon the success with which he is able to do so than upon any other single thing will depend the effectiveness of what he writes.

The third principle of structure, Coherence, is one of which the lack is easily perceptible, but the securing of which is often difficult. The rule is that words closely related by their share in the thought to be conveyed shall be kept together, – and so stated is simple enough. No one, however, is likely to have written even a page upon any subject at all intricate without having to pause to rearrange the clauses of some involved sentence or of some confused paragraph. A great hindrance in the struggle for Coherence, it should be added, is a want of clear perception of what one wishes to say. The position of words is often determined by the choice of shades of expression which are extremely delicate, and unless the writer has an accurate and acute perception of these he cannot be sure of the order of his words and clauses.

It is easy enough to see how the phrases are misplaced in the stock examples of incoherence which are given in the books of rhetoric. Any novice could improve a sentence of this sort: —

He left off his old coat to marry a lady with a large Roman nose which had been worn continuously for ten years.

It takes only a little thought to see the error in the phrase: —

The crowd turns, departs, disintegrates;

where it is evident that the connection is between “turns” and “disintegrates,” and that the crowd departs after it has broken up. Not less obvious, when attention is called to it, is the fault here: —

Lothair was unaffectedly gratified at not only receiving his friends at his own castle, but under these circumstances of intimacy.[2 - Disraeli: Lothair. Quoted by Professor Hill.]

It is not hard to see the difference of meaning between these two sentences: —

So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the country.

So long as men had slender means, especially in the country, of keeping out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was an unwelcome guest.

It requires a more trained perception to feel the variations which result from altering in the following example the position of “only.”

The theory that the poet is a being above the world and apart from it is true of him as an observer only who applies to the phenomena about him the test of a finer and more spiritual sense. – Lowell: Life and Letters of James Gates Percival.