Talks on Writing English

This very statement of the difficulty provokes the reader to go on to see how that difficulty is overcome.

In somewhat the same vein is Saintsbury’s beginning of his paper on Hogg: —

“What on earth,” it was once asked, “will you make of Hogg?” I think that there is something to to be made of Hogg, and that it is something worth making.

Or take the opening of Stevenson’s “Gossip on Romance:” —

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our minds filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or continuous thought.

The intoxication of the ideal which this gives us is so full of suggestion, it brings up so vividly the best delights that have marked our reading, that our minds are awake and alert from the start. We are not only ready but eager to go forward under the guidance of an author who has so charming a conception of what sort of a treat he should strive to give the reader.

Endings are if possible even more important, and they are carefully studied by masters of style. Take this conclusion of Lowell’s “Abraham Lincoln:” —

Never was funeral panegyric so eloquent as the silent looks of sympathy which strangers exchanged as they met that day. Their common manhood had lost a kinsman.

One puts down the book with that suggestively solemn phrase sounding on in the brain like the reverberation when a great bell ceases its knell for a hero.

Or re-read the brief description of the tombstone of Hester Prynne, which closes “The Scarlet Letter,” and which ends with a phrase so haunting: —

It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend, so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow: “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules.”

Or take the wonderful ending of that chapter in “Vanity Fair” which gives a description of Waterloo, and in a single sentence shows its relation to the story and brings the tale into closest connection with all of history and all of human life: —

The darkness came down on field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.

It is of course unnecessary to go on with examples. The student can find them abundantly for himself. The point is that in his own work he shall remember to look carefully to this detail, since there is no single matter more closely connected with the effect of a composition.

It is evident that the power to interest and to arouse by suggestion must depend largely upon the extent to which the writer is able to enter into the reader’s mood. In other words, that writer is most effectively suggestive who is most completely and practically sympathetic. The foundation of whatever is really vital must be in the genuine feeling and the actual experience of the author. This experience, it is true, may be actual in the imagination only, but it must have been felt as a reality. The secret of sympathy is in the well-known line of Sidney: —

“Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write!”

It is idle to hope to hold any reader, or to move him strongly, unless we are really interested ourselves; and it is equally impossible to touch him if there be any suspicion on his part that we are not dealing with him with perfect frankness. What we write must be real to us, and it must be told with perfect frankness, if we are to reach the hearts of those we address.

There is perhaps no advice more wholesome for young writers than that they confine themselves absolutely to their own experience whenever it is in any way possible. If an illustration is to be given, a figure employed, a comparison used, let the illustration, the figure, the comparison be found in the things of which the writer has actual knowledge. It is not alone that this will insure a vitality which is hardly to be imparted to anything taken at second hand, but, what is of more importance, it will also make it at least more probable that the writer keeps within the experiences of his readers. Of the things which one has actually seen and felt, it is easy to judge how far they are usual; and the more closely a writer confines himself to usual things, the more forceful his style is likely to be.

A remark of Lowell’s contains by implication a hint which we shall do well to notice here.

What he [Dryden] valued above all things was force, though in his haste he is willing to make shift with its counterfeit, effect. —Dryden.

The word “force” is here used in the sense of vigor and lasting power, its meaning being somewhat more limited than that in which we are using it as a technical term. It is the same in essentials, however, and the distinction which is brought out in the sentence quoted is one not to be overlooked. Effect is the transient, whereas force is the permanent: effect startles, force holds; effect is the sham, force the true. The worst type of style which sacrifices force to effect is the sensational novel, or the so-called “breezy” journalism. To startle, to shock, to produce a sensation, at whatever sacrifice of probability, of reason, or of good taste, – the thing is unfortunately too well known to need particularization.

An effeminate form of striving for effect is what is known as “fine writing.” “Fine writing” is a fault so gross that it is not necessary to waste many words on it. It need only be said that there is no more certain indication of a hopelessly diseased literary taste, or of a hopelessly depraved habit of composition, than this absurdly antiquated verbal vice. Of course no writer who produces literature is guilty of it, but I somewhere have picked up an example which so happily illustrates all that could be said on the subject that I cannot forbear to quote it. It is from a novel called “Barabbas,” by Miss Marie Corelli, and is part of the description of the appearance of Christ before Pontius Pilate. Water having been brought, Pilate, according to Miss Corelli, thus proceeded: —

Slowly lowering his hands, he dipped them in the shining bowl, rinsing them over and over again in the clear, cold element, which sparkled in its polished receptacle like an opal against the fire.

The Bible finds it possible to say all of this that is necessary in the words: —

Pilate took water, and washed his hands.

Miss Corelli’s ingenuity in expanding and distorting has won its reward, – her novel has been warmly commended by Queen Victoria.

Even really great writers are not always free from this fault, although here it is apt to be from some mixture of humorous intent that they fall into it. Instead of “she hardened her heart,” George Meredith writes, in one of those irritating sentences which are too frequent in his books, and which affect one like freckles on the face of a goddess, “She turned her inward flutterer to steel.”

Force, then, depends upon suggestion, and this is secured by sincerity, by appeals to human experiences common to all, by freedom from affectations, and by attention to such details as proper beginnings and endings. Other means of securing it we shall deal with later. Here it is enough to insist again that the great secret of Force lies in earnestness, sincerity, and sympathy.

To pass from Force to Elegance is to advance from the more subtle to the most subtle. It is not difficult to be definite in speaking of Clearness; it is less easy in discussing Force; while, at the very outset of the consideration of Elegance, we are met by the fact that it is hardly possible even to define this third principle of quality. Indeed, it is perhaps not too much to say that nobody is even fully satisfied with this name for the æsthetic quality. “Elegance” is the term which is coming to be accepted as, on the whole, the most convenient and satisfactory offered; but I suppose that nobody would feel inclined to insist strongly upon this especial word. Mr. Wendell writes: —

Elegance is that distinguishing quality of style that pleases the taste; … the æsthetic quality of style, that subtle something in a work of literary art which makes us feel delight in workmanship. Beauty, some call it; charm, others; others still, grace, ease, finish, mastery.

The name does not much matter; the quality matters greatly. It is this more than all else that gives lasting value to literature. There is in style an indefinable power of reaching the emotions of the reader which is beyond the effect of what is actually said, even beyond the effect of what is suggested. The quality which makes intelligible actual statement is Clearness; that which brings home to the reader the wealth of suggestion which may lie behind what is directly said is Force; while beyond both is that quality of style which conveys the intangible, which carries to the mind of the reader emotions too delicate to be confined in words, which touches and arouses as fineness of color or line or sound moves us in painting or sculpture or music. This is what we mean by Elegance. It is the æsthetic effect produced purely by the literary form; by the perfection of the relation between the end sought and the means employed; by the complete mastery of technique, and the employment of all the resources of art for the embodiment of the imaginative in literary form.

I am aware that my definition may make the matter less clear rather than more plain, but the thing is too elusive to be caught in the trap of a simple definition. Elegance is the quality in which the imagination most directly makes itself manifest. It is the most tangible proof that a writer possesses that power which at the start we spoke of as inborn and incommunicable. As a matter of workmanship, and so far as it may be learned, Elegance is chiefly the ability to convey in words the mood of the writer. It depends largely upon an exquisite sensitiveness to the indirect effect of words and of word-combination. It is to be cultivated by training the mind to consider always the value of terms in their connotation; to weigh them not only by their direct meaning, but by their association, and by the ideas and ideals and emotions which they bring to the mind; and by developing taste in literary construction. To write with Elegance, it is also necessary to keep in mind the effect upon the reader of the emotional word-color. The suggestions of words are dependent in part upon the mere vocal effect of the sounds producing them, upon the harmony of the sentence, the tone-value and cadence of clause and paragraph. All these things are elements which must be considered. Completely to master all these, so as to work upon the mind and imagination of the reader at will, is of course within the power of the great imagination only; but every student may advance toward it.

We are none of us able satisfactorily to define beauty, or to explain the pleasure which it excites; yet there is no one of us who has not recognized both. Why a curve is more pleasing to the eye than a straight line may be too deep a question; but none the less may one safely appeal to the universal experience that there are certain lines, certain forms, certain colors, certain sounds which give us pleasure. With equal assurance may one appeal to the universal instinct which is gratified by the adaptation of ends to means; to the innate human sense of the rightness of what is fitting; the constant pleasure in order, in appropriateness, in harmony. It is this instinct, this sense, this pleasure, which underlies the sensitiveness of the mind to what we call Elegance in composition.

The quality which we are discussing is, more than any other, dependent upon the personal taste and culture of the writer. The thing to be said to the student is perhaps this: “Elegance is the result of a keen and acutely imaginative perception of the fitness of things, and of a quick appreciation of beauty, with the power to convey both by a delicate adaptation of literary means to literary effects.” A keen and acute perception of the fitness of things can only be acquired by the development of the taste. This is an affair of culture in its broadest sense, and it is hardly possible to separate here the question of literary excellence from that of general development. The study of the masterpieces of literature – always with earnestness and with sympathy – is the most direct means of improving a sensitiveness to literary fitness and to literary beauty. The adaptation of means to ends we shall go on considering throughout these talks; and now, as always, it is necessary to remember that the way to learn to write is to write. The way to achieve Elegance is to labor for it with that persistence which is in itself the best compensation which Heaven has bestowed upon man for all other boons denied. “Persistence, persistence, and persistence” is the motto which the student must engrave on his heart.

There will always remain the personal equation. No student can afford to close his eyes to the fact that all men are born intellectually unequal. To one has Nature given gifts of appreciation, of apprehension, and of expression, while from another she has withheld them. This personal difference affects all work, and it affects work more and more strongly as we draw nearer to that quality in literature which is incommunicable. Steadily, since the beginning of these talks, have we been advancing toward those fields of composition where comes into play that power which is the gift of the gods only; that imaginative essence which some men are dowered with at birth, and which some go seeking their whole lives through with insistence pathetically vain. The one thing important is, that the student not only accept his individual limitations, but that he do not stop short of them. It is necessary to realize that one has not genius, and then to work as if one had; and it is amazing how much may be done in this way. Nature, for instance, plainly intended that Matthew Arnold should not write elegant prose, and she absolutely forbade him to write poetry, yet he succeeded in doing both. The earnest student of literary art should resolutely refuse to be satisfied with any thing short of the miracle of the impossible, and haply so he may sometimes attain to it.

VII

MEANS AND EFFECTS

When the student has come to have a clear idea of what is to be sought in composition, he naturally goes on to inquire by what means a writer can gain the ends desired. It has been shown that there are certain principles which govern the mechanical structure of language, and also that there are as well principles which have to do with the quality of what is written. The next step is to examine the especial means which are at the command of the worker, and what effects may be secured by the use of given means.

It has already been said and insisted upon that it is necessary to know accurately what effect the writer desires to produce; and it is to be added that it is especially needful to realize from the start what is to be the conclusion of a work, great or small. The end of a composition is its consummation, the climax toward which all else conducts the reader, the ultimate effect to which all other effects are subordinate. The writer who sets out to go nowhere in particular, it has been said, is little likely to arrive anywhere. It is also to be remembered that, unless he is clearly aware what is to be his strongest point, he is not in a position to make all other parts properly subordinate to this, – to secure that careful proportion of emphasis which is one of the great essentials of all good work in whatever province of art.

Before he begins to write, the writer must make up his mind how he intends to end. He may, it is true, modify to some extent the first idea of the form in which this climax of his work is to be put, but it is safe to lay down as a general rule that he shall not essentially alter it. Whether one sits down to write a novel, a tale, an essay, an editorial, or a simple paragraph, let him know at least what the conclusion is to be, whether he is aware of the steps by which he is to reach this or not. The minor points may be thought up as one proceeds, but the end, which is in a manner the reason of the existence of the whole, must be clear in the mind of the writer from the very start.

It is this thing which Mr. Walter Pater means when he speaks of —

That architectural conception of a work which foresees the end from the beginning, and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of all the rest, till the very last sentence does but, with undiminished vigor, unfold and justify the first.

The conclusion being well defined in the writer’s thought, the next thing to be determined is the point of view. The point of view is to any composition what the hypothesis is to a proposition in geometry. It is the assumption of personality and of attitude which is presupposed from the start, and which must be rigidly maintained to the end.

If a writer is describing a landscape, he is obliged to fix in his own mind the point from which he is to consider that landscape as being seen, – whether near or remote, from hill or plain, from a bridge, a window, or it may be from the deck of a vessel. If he hopes to produce an impression which shall be clear, or to bring up vividly in the mind of the reader the thing described, he must not forget where the reader is supposed to be placed. If at the start he writes as if the view were remote, and then forgets and speaks of it as if it were near at hand, he destroys the consistency of the work and makes all ineffectual.

Another easily appreciated illustration is to be found in novels which are written in the form of an autobiography. Since the story is supposed to be narrated by one of the characters, it follows that nothing should be told which that person could not know. The introduction of scenes at which he could not have been present, of talk which he could not have heard, of thoughts which he had no means of discovering, completely dispels the illusion. If these things must be used, care must be taken to show how the narrator came to know them; since otherwise the hypothesis with which the author started is violated by the alteration of the point of view. The reader may or may not realize why the story loses its effect of reality, but he cannot fail to feel that it does lose it.

The same principle applies to everything that is written, even to the most trivial paragraph. Consciously or unconsciously, the writer at the start assumes a certain mental attitude toward the subject of which he writes, and this attitude he must carefully preserve. Of course the point of view may be progressive, as when one describes the scenery as viewed from a car window or shows the change of opinion; but in this case the motion is part of the original hypothesis. The first assumption must be adhered to, since to change the point of view is to break faith with the reader, and to break faith is to lose his confidence.

The philosophy of the matter is simple and obvious enough. It is the aim to induce the reader to submit, for the time being, his personality to that of the writer; to induce him to see with the eyes of the author, and to think with the author’s mind. The slightest jar may destroy all illusion; the least difficulty may make the reader assert the supremacy of his own individuality. If even unconsciously his judgment is offended, his own consciousness is sure to assert itself, and he gives himself up no longer.

In practical work, the secret of preserving one mental attitude is largely that of being clearly aware of it. This detail of composition is perhaps most easily understood in its application to description or narration, but it must be as clearly realized in all composition. It is of high importance to determine beforehand what is the attitude of the writer both toward the subject and toward the reader addressed. The effect of a failure to observe this is found in a great many letters, and, perhaps I may be pardoned if I add, especially in feminine letters. The mind of woman is so flexible, so versatile, so capable of seeing many sides to a subject which to the duller masculine intellect seems to have but one, that it not infrequently happens that in a single page of a woman’s letter there will be half a dozen points of view, or even that seeming impossibility of two or three points of view at once.

Often the application of this principle is so subtle that the tyro is entirely at a loss to know what is the matter with his sentence. Take these examples: —

The crowd turns, departs, disintegrates.