Talks on Writing English. First Series
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Title: Talks on Writing English. First Series
Author: Arlo Bates
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TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
First Series
by
ARLO BATES
* * * * * *
Books by Arlo Bates.
THE DIARY OF A SAINT. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
LOVE IN A CLOUD. A Novel. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
THE PURITANS. A Novel. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
THE PHILISTINES. A Novel. 12mo, $1.50.
THE PAGANS. A Novel. 16mo, $1.00.
PATTY’S PERVERSITIES. A Novel. 16mo, $1.00.
PRINCE VANCE. The Story of a Prince with a Court in his Box. By
ARLO BATES and ELEANOR PUTNAM. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
A LAD’S LOVE. 16mo, $1.00.
UNDER THE BEECH-TREE. Poems. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH. First Series. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH. Second Series. Crown 8vo, $1.30, _net_.
Postpaid, $1.42.
TALKS ON TEACHING LITERATURE. Crown 8vo, $1.30, _net_. Postpaid,
$1.42.
TALKS ON THE STUDY OF LITERATURE. Crown 8vo, $1.50.
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
BOSTON AND NEW YORK.
* * * * * *
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
First Series
by
ARLO BATES
[Illustration]
Boston and New York
Houghton, Mifflin and Company
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
Copyright, 1896,
By Arlo Bates.
All rights reserved.
PREFACE
These talks were given in the autumn of 1894 as a course on Advanced
English Composition in the Lowell Free Classes, and that they are now
printed is largely due to the fact that they were so well received by
those who then heard them. In preparing them, I consulted whatever
books upon composition came to my hand. I examined some with profit,
some with pleasure, and some, it must be confessed, not wholly without
amusement, or even impatience. Doubtless, I owe something to many
of these books; but I am not conscious of much obligation to any
save the “Principles of Rhetoric,” by Professor A. S. Hill, “English
Composition,” by Professor Barrett Wendell, and “English Prose,” by
Professor John Earle.
I have conscientiously endeavored to make the lectures as practical
as possible, stating as clearly as I could those things which would
have been most helpful to me had I read and heeded them twenty years
ago. The necessity of holding an audience made fitting some effort
to render the talks entertaining; but I have never consciously said
anything for the mere purpose of being amusing, and I have never been
of the opinion that a book gains either in dignity or in usefulness
by being dull. My purpose has throughout been sincerely serious, and
if the book shall prove helpful, I shall have attained the object for
which it was written.
A. B.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE ART OF WRITING 1
II. METHODS OF STUDY 20
III. PRINCIPLES OF STRUCTURE 29
IV. DETAILS OF DICTION 43
V. PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY 59
VI. PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED 71
VII. MEANS AND EFFECTS 89
VIII. MEANS AND EFFECTS CONTINUED 107
IX. CLASSIFICATION 120
X. EXPOSITION 128
XI. EXPOSITION CONTINUED 144
XII. ARGUMENT 152
XIII. ARGUMENTATIVE FORM 166
XIV. DESCRIPTION 181
XV. DESCRIPTION CONTINUED 202
XVI. NARRATION 210
XVII. NARRATION CONTINUED 224
XVIII. ACCESSORIES OF NARRATION 241
XIX. CHARACTER AND PURPOSE 258
XX. TRANSLATION 269
XXI. CRITICISM 285
XXII. STYLE 299
TALKS ON WRITING ENGLISH
I
THE ART OF WRITING
Into all productive art enter two sorts of power, that which is
communicable and that which is incommunicable,--in other words,
that which may be taught and that which is inborn. Upon this fact
is based the distinction between the mechanical and the fine arts,
although since both kinds of power have a share in all production
nobody has ever been able to draw a sharp and definite line at which
the mechanical arts end and the fine arts begin. The power which is
incommunicable is that of imagination, that indefinable grace and
skill, that enchantment of creative ability which is born with rare
individuals, and for which he who is not dowered with it by nature
struggles in vain. It is this which has given rise to that saying as
profound as it is terribly hackneyed which declares that a poet is born
and not made. It is this which distinguishes genius from talent; and it
is this which has so dazzled the eyes of the world as to produce the
mistaken notion that since imagination is not to be learned nothing is
to be learned in the realm of art.
This incommunicable power is the soul of fine art; yet into fine art
no less than into the mechanical arts comes also that power which
may be learned. This communicable power is commonly spoken of as
the technical, or as technique. This any person of intelligence and
perseverance can and may master if he choose, every man according
to his ability; and this every artist must acquire, no matter how
richly he may have been gifted by nature with the magic power which
transcends and dominates it. It is this that musicians, painters,
sculptors, architects, dancers, and writers are set to learn when they
are said to study art. The world has long recognized that in painting,
music, sculpture, and architecture it is indispensable that technique
shall be acquired; but--absurd as it may seem--it is only recently,
comparatively speaking, that it has been practically recognized that
this is as true of poetry as of painting, as true of literature as of
any other art. It is in truth only in our own day that there has been
anything like a general acceptance of the fact that in literature as
in the other arts technical skill must be laboriously acquired before
any successful and permanent work can be produced. The masters have of
course known this; but the idea that to be an author nothing is needed
but pen, ink, and paper used to hold undisputed sway over the popular
mind, and is by no means extinct yet. Not long ago I heard a learned
professor in one of the leading American colleges declare that he could
not see what there is to learn in composition. Last summer a gentleman
of really wide reading, but who was brought up under the old system,
said to me: “By teaching composition, I suppose you mean chiefly
correcting the grammar and punctuation.” He was somewhat surprised when
I explained that students were supposed to have mastered both grammar
and punctuation before the teaching of composition as such could begin.
The truth is that there has never been anything like a popular
understanding of the difference between spoken and written speech.
Anybody is supposed to be able to talk, and to learn to do so
unconsciously,--a doctrine to which I do not wish to be understood
as giving assent!--and it has been held to follow that anybody could
write. To write was merely to talk with the pen, and that has commonly
been held to be all there is to the matter save for the fact that some
persons were born to write and some were not.
A personal experience of my own illustrates this, if its introduction
may be pardoned. I have never forgotten the general bewilderment with
which my friends met my announcement when I left college that I meant
to study literature. That one should follow literature as a profession
was not entirely unintelligible, if it did suggest a dire mental
weakness on the part of the young man who was rash enough to take such
a resolution; but how one studied literature as a profession was beyond
ordinary understanding. “You mean that you are going to write books,”
some said tentatively. My reply that such a possibility was presupposed
in the study of literature just as the pleading of cases might be
presupposed in the study of law only increased the difficulty of the
confusing puzzle. It was of course understood that there was in the law
something to study; but what, in the name of common sense, was there
to study in literature? Books one sat down and wrote, and that was
the whole of it; and I soon found the idea gaining ground that I only
put the matter in this way for the sake of producing an impression,
or perhaps of covering a fixed and reprehensible intention of doing
nothing.
I thought then that I had some idea of what the study of literature
really meant, and I gave such explanations as I could; but, alas, the
incessant work of years has chiefly served to show me how inadequate my
idea was, and how much more there is to be learned than I then had any
notion of! Some of the things which experience has taught me I think
may be of value to you; and in these lectures I shall try to state
them, although I realize but too well how far I am from being able
to cover or exhaust the subject. I shall, of course, say some things
which all of you know already, and many things which some of you know.
I hope, however, to say also some things which you have not thought
of, and by arrangement and system to give fresh value and force to old
ideas. It is not impossible that experience has shown me things which
will be practically helpful to others. Any man who has wrought long at
a craft is likely to be able to give suggestions valuable to those who
have not. The sluggard is by the Scriptures referred to the ant not
on account of her intellectual superiority, but solely because of her
great practical training.
* * * * *
All discussion must begin with definition, either expressed or
understood. There is of course no doubt that each of us has an idea
what composition is, yet to be sure that we are agreed, it is necessary
to state the meaning in which we use the term. Let us say, then:--
Composition is the art by which ideas and mental impressions are
conveyed in written language.
Nothing could sound more simple; few things are more difficult of
achievement. It is not hard to convey ideas, but it is by no means
easy to be sure that they will arrive at their destination in good
order. Impressions and ideas are delicate things, and are most liable
to be injured in the passage. There are writers whose methods suggest
an attempt to get eggs to market by shooting them from a cannon,--the
eggs may arrive, it is true, but in what condition? The means must
be adapted to that with which one is dealing. It is folly to attempt
to carry soap-bubbles in a mealsack or leaden bullets in a lace
handkerchief. The student of the art of writing has to learn to suit
his means to the end sought. He must train himself to judge what manner
of expression, of style, or treatment, will best serve to transfer
ideas from his own mind to that of the reader. He must study the effect
of words and of combinations of words; the value of suggestion, and of
all the emotional effects possible in written words. He must train
himself to be able to use language as a skillful swordsman uses his
rapier, adapting it to every emergency, master of it always; he must
learn to be dexterous, adroit, and full of resources.
Exactly to impart an idea or an impression to another human being
is manifestly impossible. The character of the mind of the receiver
necessarily affects and modifies whatever comes to it. The thing which
we say to our closest friend strikes him in a way somehow and somewhat
different from that which we intend. A poem by John Boyle O’Reilly
expresses this so fully that I take leave to quote it:--
AT BEST.
The faithful helm commands the keel,
From port to port fair breezes blow;
But the ship must sail the convex sea,
Nor may she straighter go.
So, man to man; in fair accord,
On thought and will, the winds may wait;
But the world will bend the passing word,
Though its shortest course be straight.
From soul to soul the shortest line
At best will bended be;
The ship that holds the straightest course
Still sails the convex sea.
I do not quote this merely as a matter of sentiment, but because it
phrases one of the most insistent and practical difficulties with which
every writer must contend. The study of literary art, and indeed of all
art, is in one sense an effort at approximation. Perfect expression
can never be reached, and the thing after which a writer strives is
to approach more and more closely toward that complete transmission
of meaning which is forever unattainable while the barriers of human
individuality stand between mind and mind.
We recognize this fact as soon as we reflect. Bob, thinking of Betty,
remarks to Jack that he does admire a pretty girl; and Jack, fondly
recalling the features of Jane, receives the idea with all the
variations which belong to an altogether different idea of feminine
loveliness. Tom, Dick, and Harry, returning from the races, declare to
one another that it has been a jolly day. Each accepts the statements
of his companions according to his individual experiences, and no one
has imparted precisely the thought which was in his own mind. We praise
a picture, a piece of music, a sunset, and the friend to whom we speak
listens with a temperament and cultivation so different from our own
that our words inevitably mean one thing to us and another to him. The
ear which hears has always its share in the impression produced as
surely as has the tongue that speaks.
The result might be much the same whether the words in these cases were
spoken or written; but there is another element which makes an immense
difference between oral and written communication. The speaker adds to
his words a language of emphasis, of inflection, of facial expression,
of gesture, of mien. He modifies what he says by what he looks; his
bearing has as important a share in the work of conveying impressions
as have his words. Two actors taking the same text will give characters
so different as hardly to seem to have anything in common. A speaker
may so contradict and override his speech that his hearer believes not
the tongue that speaks, but the personality and manner which declare
the contrary. You remember how Emerson puts this: “What you are stands
over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to
the contrary.”
Now the writer is confronted by the necessity of making himself
intelligible without the many aids by which the speaker may help
out or modify his oral communication. The novelist, it is true, may
avail himself of the simple device of describing the manner in which
his characters speak. He tells us that this was said with a sly look
of coquetry, while that was uttered in a voice of utter misery, and
the other thundered forth in tones of overmastering determination.
My washing came home in London last summer wrapped in a newspaper
containing an installment of a blood-curdling tale which began thus:
“Eleanore shot at Reginald from under her pellucid brows a lingering
look of lurid hate.” All this, however, is at its best ineffective
and unsatisfactory, even when heroines have pellucid brows and the
author is master of the art of alliteration. Some things are within the
province of language and some are not.
Words may describe form, color, sound, and motion, but they can
reproduce none of them. What they can do is to call up in the mind of
the reader something which he has seen; or aid him to construct from
material in his memory some new image. If one read a description of a
landscape, for instance, he unconsciously selects bits of nature which
he remembers and arranges them as nearly as may be after the pattern
which the author gives. On the first page of “Westward Ho!” there is a
description of--
the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upward from its
broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old
bridge where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant
upland on the west. Above the town hills close in, cushioned
with deep oak woods, through which juts here and there a crag of
fern-fringed slate; below they lower, and open more and more in
softly-rounded knolls, and fertile squares of red and green, till
they sink into the wide expanse of hazy flats, rich salt marshes
and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins her sister Tor, and
both together flow quietly toward the broad surges of the bar, and
the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.
The reader constructs the picture as he goes on; but unless he has
actually seen “the little white town of Bideford” the picture in his
mind is likely to bear no very close resemblance to the reality.
The broad tide-river which his fancy sees is some stream of his
boyhood’s home, and far enough from North Devon; the many-arched old
bridge may be one which he knows or which comes to his memory from a
picture,--perhaps from a photograph that a friend has brought from
abroad of some hoary stone structure spanning a French river or a
stream of Italy. The hills and the fern-clad cliffs are recalled in
the same way, their outlines identical with the curves of some spot
in the Catskills, in Wales, in Brittany, or wherever the reader is
most familiar or has been most impressed. It is evident that the most
carefully elaborate verbal description could not enable the artist to
reproduce a scene; and herein is manifest the limitation of words in
this direction.
The inadequacy of words becomes the more evident when it comes to
matters intellectual. Who has not, even in conversation, experienced
that baffled and hopeless feeling which comes from not being able to
make another understand? Who does not know the sensation of being
shut in as by walls of stone, so that it is impossible to reach the
comprehension of the one addressed? Yet the speaker has a hundred
advantages over the writer. He has at command all the resources of
gesture, of look, accent, tone, mien. No man has written much and
written earnestly without experiencing moments of complete despair in
regard to being able to convey to his readers that which it is in his
heart to say.
How far it is possible to overcome the obstacles which hinder
communication is the study of the literary--as of every--artist. We
human beings are prisoned in the solitary confinement of the body,
and must needs devise means of sharing our thoughts, as political
convicts in the Russian prisons strive to communicate by rapping on the
walls. Every device by which intelligence may be carried more safely
and surely is an addition to the intellectual resources and strength
of the race. On this power of mutual transference and understanding
of thought depends the whole intellectual progress of men, and on
individual mastery of it rests the ability to share that progress.
It is only by the most careful and patient labor, the most rigid
self-discipline, that advance can be made in a matter so difficult and
so delicate. If you have supposed that the art of composition is one
easily acquired, I beg you to lay aside that idea at the start. It is
true that any person who has had an ordinary school training may write
a poor letter or a badly bungled paragraph. Some even attain to a
respectable facility in the superficial expression of ordinary ideas.
To go beyond this, however, to arrive at being able really to write,
to be capable of expressing with the pen genuine thoughts and real
emotions with a reasonable hope that these will reach the reader not
entirely distorted out of all resemblance to what they were when they
left the mind of the writer,--this requires labor long and strenuous.
The devils of incoherence, obscurity, and incompetency go not out save
by untiring striving and watching.
This is strikingly illustrated by the great gulf between amateur
and professional work. Many newspaper reporters are ignorant and
intellectually untrained; yet merely from continuous and earnest
practice they become so dexterous in the use of words as to be able to
serve their needs with surprising facility. I have had well educated
and cultivated men come into my office when I was an editor, and spend
an hour in trying satisfactorily to phrase some simple announcement
which they wished printed. All that there was to do was to say that
such a charity needed funds, that a subscription had been opened, or
some learned society was to meet at such a time and place; yet the
amateur would struggle with the paragraph in an agony of ineptitude
which was alike pathetic and farcical. When at last the conflict
between mind and matter ended from the sheer exhaustion of the mind,
there would be handed to me a scrawled sheet, recrossed and rewritten,
and in the end a miracle of obscurity and awkwardness,--the art of how
not to say it illustrated to perfection. Then after the visitor had
taken himself off, in a condition not far from nervous exhaustion, it
was only necessary to say to a reporter: “Make a paragraph of these
facts.” In a couple of minutes the slip would be ready to send to the
printer, written in English not elegant, but easy and above all clear.
The reporter had very likely not a hundredth part of the information
or the experience of life of the amateur, but he had had continued
business-like drill. He had written as a matter of steady work, with
the improving consciousness of an editorial blue pencil ever before his
mind. I have seen many definitions of the difference between amateur
and professional work. To my own mind it has always seemed sufficient
to say that the professional is one who has learned how to do a thing
while the amateur is one who has not.
Closely connected with the difficulty of saying a thing is the
difficulty of knowing when it is said. Anybody may write, but only
the trained writer is able to be sure that what he has written says
what he supposes it to say. This is of course doubly true from the
need that there is of making words impart mood as well as meaning, the
atmosphere as well as the facts. If it is hard to express ideas, it is
doubly hard to embody also the state of mind from which they spring and
which must be understood before their real value and significance can
be appreciated. Not only is it far from easy to know when the written
word will express what is meant; it is no less hard to be sure how much
of a thought is actually on paper. It requires great effort to realize
that the sentence or the paragraph which we write will not mean to the
reader all that we wish him to understand. The thought in our mind is
so vivid, so poignant, so vital, that for us the words brim over with
significance as a full honeycomb drips with honey. The emotion which
we feel in writing seems to belong inevitably to what is written, and
to be inseparable from it. It is of all things most difficult for the
author, especially in an impassioned mood, to put himself in the place
of the cool and unmoved public; yet in no other way is it possible to
judge how that public will be affected; in no other way is it possible
to compare what is written with what is intended; to estimate the power
of those poor black conventional signs there on the paper to express
the thought and the mood, the glow and the fervor of head and of heart
which it is their mission to carry vibrating and alive to the mind and
the spirit of the reader.
It has often been remarked that authors are apt to be most fond of
works which are not their best, and it is notorious that the most
passionately poetic mood may be that in which a writer produces his
least effective compositions. It is easy to see how this is connected
with the point under consideration. In the aroused, imaginative,
ecstatic mood every word is suggestive, every phrase full of meaning,
each sentence rich with emotion. The writer who is carried away by
his feelings is apt to go beyond the range of his judgment. He puts
down the sign of his mood in language intelligible only to himself. He
writes a sort of emotional shorthand, illegible to every eye except
his own. To him it may remain beautiful because to him it recalls
the exalted mood which produced it. To him it is the significant and
sufficient memorandum of a thing beautiful and sublime; to others it is
but a mass of words left by the elusive
Fancies which broke through language and escaped.
Dr. Holmes has said, with that quaint mingling of wit and wisdom which
made him unique, that writing a poem is like pouring syrup out of
a pitcher,--some of it always sticks to the pitcher. The principle
holds good of all composition, and by no means the smallest thing to
be learned is to judge how completely the syrup has been poured out.
Often it is necessary to let the mood pass away entirely before one
can estimate work. It is frequently well to let a manuscript lie by
until the original enthusiasm of creation has faded fully, whether this
process requires more or less time than the nine years which Horace
recommended as the proper period during which a poem should remain
unpublished.
It is perhaps not necessary to speak much of the value of a mastery
of the art of composition; but there is one point which needs to be
touched upon. There is a prevalent if not generally spoken idea that
while this skill is an excellent thing, it is really necessary to
nobody save professional writers; that while persons who give their
lives to writing must of course master technique, it is not at all
worth while for others to bother about a thing so difficult. That this
error is less wide-spread than of old is evident from the increased
attention which is everywhere given to composition in all modern
schemes of education; but it survives in popular misapprehension. The
truth is, on the contrary, that as society is organized to-day it is
essential that every man or woman who hopes to make his or her way,
at least to anything like eminence even comparative, shall be able
to write fairly good English. In a world so largely dominated by the
printing-press as is ours in these modern days, not only has the man
who can express himself in ink a manifest advantage, but he who cannot
is hampered from the start. The highest skill in composition which
can be acquired is of instant practical value in every profession.
Students of technical and scientific subjects seem to me to be as
truly acquiring practical training when they are improving their skill
in writing as when they are performing experiments in the laboratory or
smelting ores at the furnaces. In reports to corporations, papers on
sanitary engineering addressed to city officials, schemes for railroads
or telegraphs laid before legislative committees, they will have need
of all the literary cleverness that they can compass, all the literary
skill which they are able to acquire. Competition is fierce all along
the line, and facility in the use of the pen counts in every trade and
in every profession no less truly than it does among avowed writers.
Nor is this the whole of the matter. Into every-day, common experience
has the modern habit of life brought the need of being master of
expression; and even he who does not put pen to paper--if it is
possible to suppose such a person to exist among intelligent people--is
under the necessity of cultivating his knowledge of the art of
expression to the end that he may read more intelligently and more
sensitively. There is great need of establishing communication with
our fellow-men; there is hardly less need of learning to establish
communication with ourselves. It seems sometimes as if our beings were
like those Chinese carved balls which Tennyson calls
Laborious orient ivory sphere in sphere.
We strive to make our different selves know one another, but we find
it hard. We are conscious of feelings, of ideas, of emotions, which
some sphere of our manifold being knows, yet which to us--to the
outer sphere, to the external Ego, so to say--are vague and distant
however keenly we long to understand. The ability to phrase for others
is soon found to be ability to phrase for ourselves. By no means the
least of the advantages, as it is one of the greatest of the delights,
of conquering expression, is the power of interpreting ourselves to
ourselves.
There is a crude popular idea that the refinements of literary art are
wasted, at any rate upon the general reader. So many books succeed, at
least temporarily, which can make no slightest pretense to any grace of
manner, and which have not even the merit of reasonable accuracy, that
the student is apt to feel that these things are superfluous.
Of course the ordinary reader does not perceive delicate shades of
expression, fine distinctions of phrase, or subtile beauties of style.
Very likely he does not pause to consider whether a style is good or
bad; and certainly he would be unable to analyze its merits if he
attempted this. It does not follow that these graces do not touch him.
It is by means of them that deep and lasting effects are produced.
Susceptibility to artistic beauty is not necessarily conscious.
Frankly, it is to be admitted that for the instant, evanescent,
lurid success of sensational popularity it is not necessary to write
good English. Books outside of the furthest stretch of charity in
workmanship and style have, each in its day, the dazzling, however
transient, success of a Roman candle or a rocket. In far too many
newspapers one may see how flippant pertness and vulgar sharpness can
dispense with the smallest shred of good style, may ignore syntax,
scorn accuracy, and outrage decency itself.
Once for all it must be allowed that whoever seeks this sort of success
need not waste his time in the study of English composition. The
author of the latest scandalous novel never experiences the necessity
of any exhaustive acquaintance with rhetoric, or even of knowing much
more than the outside of the English grammar. The young women who are
employed by enterprising journals to scramble around the world in the
briefest possible time with a hand-satchel for luggage are apt to be as
little encumbered with syntax as with trunks. The purveyors of gossip
to society papers are not in the least obliged to know the language in
which they attempt to convey their precious information. If they can
discover that Mrs. Cholmondely-Jones is at the Sea View House, their
readers are not troubled at the declaration that this leader of fashion
is “stopping at the hotel for a week;”--confusingly impossible as such
a feat may appear.
All this has been said over and over, and I repeat it here simply by
way of reminder that there is no claim that popular success is not to
be won without literary merit; any more than it could be claimed on the
other hand that popular success is insured by it. It is certain that no
permanent literary work can be accomplished without the mastery of a
good English style; and it is equally certain that command of written
language is of the highest value and use. Sensational books make their
way not because of their crudities of style and their inaccuracies,
but in spite of them. If to the qualities which have given them vogue
had been added literary merit, they might have reached to permanent in
place of temporary success. Certainly if a writer desires to impress,
to persuade, to move, to arouse; if he have a report to write which he
hopes may be adopted, a theory to state which he is in earnest to have
received; a history to relate that he would have believed; an appeal
that he longs to have heeded, a creation of the imagination by which he
aims to touch the emotions of his fellow-men, he cannot too carefully
cultivate the art of communicating it. In any of these cases mastery of
literary technique is as essential to success as is air to breathing or
light to seeing.
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] 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]
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_.
If we say “is true only of him who as an observer,” we shall mean one
thing,--and I confess to a suspicion that this is the thing which
Lowell intended!--whereas the passage as it stands asserts that the
theory is true considering the poet as merely an observer.
It is not necessary to multiply examples. Every student who attempts
careful expression will come upon illustrations enough in his own work.
The important thing is to be clearly aware of what is to be said, and
then to be sure that it is said, and said unmistakably.
In the construction of sentences the coherent arrangement of words is
frequently hindered by the grammatical relations; no such limitation
prevents the proper placing of sentences in the formation of
paragraphs. In the construction of paragraphs, however, even more than
in the construction of sentences, is necessary the utmost clearness
of ideas. It is here essential to know not only what one has to say,
but the relative strength which should be given to each link in the
chain of thought. The question of proportion must here have the fullest
answer. The relative stress which is to be given by position and the
relative stress which is to be imparted by proportion are alike of the
greatest importance in the making of the paragraph.
Something of this may be shown by an example. The following is a
paragraph from the essay by Jeffrey on “The Characters in Shakespeare’s
Plays:”--
Everything in him [Shakespeare] is in unmeasured abundance and
unequaled perfection,--but everything so balanced and kept in
subordination, as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of
another. The most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and
descriptions, are given with such brevity, and introduced with
such skill as merely to adorn without loading the sense they
accompany.... All his excellences, like those of nature herself,
are thrown out together; and instead of interfering with, support
and recommend each other.
Let this now be read with a transposition of sentences:--
Although in Shakespeare everything is so balanced and kept in
subordination as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of
another, and is in unequaled perfection, yet everything is in an
unmeasured abundance. He gives with such brevity and introduces
with such skill as to adorn without loading the sense they
accompany, the most exquisite poetical conceptions, images, and
descriptions. All his excellences, although they support and
recommend instead of interfering with each other, are thrown out
together like those of nature herself.
The words and phrases are identical in these two paragraphs, save for
the slight alterations and changes of connectives made necessary by
transposition; and yet the effect is distinctly different. The first,
as Jeffrey intended, remarks that in spite of the great luxuriance of
Shakespeare’s work it is always well ordered; the second declares that
although well ordered the poet’s work is as luxurious as nature herself.
If the proportion were changed, the effect would be varied again.
Cutting out a few clauses from the original, we have:--
Everything in Shakespeare is so balanced and kept in subordination
as not to jostle or disturb or take the place of another. The most
poetical conceptions are given with such brevity and introduced
with such skill as merely to adorn without loading the sense
they accompany. All his excellences are thrown out together, and
instead of interfering with, support and recommend each other.
Here Shakespeare’s fine ordering of his style is made more emphatic
than in the original, and a glance will show how, by the suppression
of other phrases, the luxuriance of his work could have been given the
more prominence. A writer must know which of many possible shades of
meaning is the one which he desires to convey, and he is likely to be
successful in his work or the reverse according to the sharpness of
his own apprehension of what he is aiming at. The gunner who shuts his
eyes when he fires is more likely to hit the mark than is the writer
who vaguely endeavors to say something likely to succeed in accurately
saying anything.
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 2: Disraeli: _Lothair_. Quoted by Professor Hill.]
IV
DETAILS OF DICTION
The student who endeavors to apply to words the tests of Good Use
finds himself confronted with some questions which are very easily
answered and with others so difficult that even the experts of language
may disagree concerning them. It is of course to be supposed that
we have all mastered the canons which forbid the use of Barbarisms,
Improprieties, and Solecisms,--however much we allow ourselves to be
influenced by the newspapers into the habit of violating them. We have
not got through our early school years without having our attention
called to the difference of effect produced by long and short words.
Most of us have had more or less confusing instruction on the subject
of the use of Latin words and words which are somewhat inexactly termed
Anglo-Saxon. We have all known brief but bewildered intervals during
which we endeavored to live up to a noble resolution to make our
vocabulary strongly Anglo-Saxon; and we are most of us conscious in our
secret hearts that we neither did this ever, nor ever for a moment knew
how to set to work to do it.
It is as well for the written language of to-day that there has never
been possible a practical revision of the tongue by the dropping
of words of Latin origin. It is a most mistaken notion which turns
attention to the race origin of words instead of directing study to
their actual force in use. It sounds admirably learned to talk of a
diction which is too strongly Latin or which is markedly Anglo-Saxon;
it is possible enough to see that in general a preponderance of
classical words imparts dignity and that an abundance of Saxon gives
terseness to a style; but the man who in desiring to secure the one
effect or the other goes to work to select his language on this basis
is utterly ignoring the very first principles of practical composition.
Words are to be chosen with reference to a desired effect, and their
pedigree is of no more consequence than is that of the players on
a foot-ball team. The boys of one descent may do better than those
of another, and words of one or of another derivation may produce a
desired effect,--but the contrary may be true, so that such a principle
of selection is as absurd in one case as in the other.
Of long and short words much the same might be said. We are pretty well
out of the days when it was still needful to insist upon the admonition
of Frere:--
And don’t confound the language of the nation
With long-tailed words in _osity_ and _ation_.
The childish love of fine words which belongs to the infancy of
literature is generally outgrown. It is recognized that words are to be
selected solely for their effect, and not for extraneous pretensions.
In this way is to be made the choice between words general and
specific, and of words literal or figurative.
A consideration which is of importance in the choice of words, and
one with which we shall be concerned later on, is that of denotation
and connotation. A word denotes what it expresses directly; it
connotes what it expresses indirectly; it denotes the idea which it
names, and connotes the idea that it implies; it denotes what it
says, and connotes what it suggests. The word “Washington” denotes a
particular man, whose history we know, but with that history go so
many suggestions and associations that the name connotes the idea
of patriotism, military skill, and devotion to the nation from the
very hour of its birth. The word “treason” denotes a specific offense
against the government; while it connotes all the shame with which men
regard one who betrays his country. In the familiar line of Wordsworth,
A violet by a mossy stone,
the words denote a certain common flower beside a stone covered with
another common and ordinary vegetable growth; they connote all the
beauty of the azure blossom, the sweetness of the springtide, the
quietude of a sylvan scene, all those lovely and touching associations
which can be expressed only by suggestion. It is in the fact that
certain sentiments can be conveyed by indirect means only that the
value of connotation lies. To suggest by the choice of words those
delicate and subtle ideas which are like a fragrance or like the
iridescent sheen of nacre is one of the highest triumphs of literary
art; and the nice artist in words is certainly not less careful in
regard to the connotation of words than he is of their denotation.
One of the things which often puzzles beginners is how to increase
their vocabulary. Of course reading is one of the most effective means
of enlarging one’s knowledge of the language,--but it is only careful
reading, reading in which are studied the force and the color of terms
as well as their literal meaning, that is of any marked value in this
direction. It is said that Thackeray was in the habit of studying the
dictionary with a frank purpose of adding to his knowledge of words. I
have known two literary men who followed this practice, but they both
deliberately selected unusual and bizarre examples with the avowed
object of adding a unique and whimsical flavor to their journalistic
work. Such an example is of course to be shunned, but in general there
is far too little stress laid upon the use of the dictionary. There
should be in every preparatory school a regular exercise in the use of
the dictionary, and in it all students should be required to join. The
teacher should read an extract or a sentence, or should give out words
to the class, and have the meanings and derivations actually looked up
at the moment. The differing values of synonyms should be examined; and
if possible something of the history of the words given. The aim should
be to encourage the student in the habit of having a lexicon at hand
and of using it constantly.
Another important means of increasing one’s command of language
is conversation, and the value of conversation in this respect as
in every other is in direct ratio to its character. To talk is not
enough; it is necessary that the talker exert himself to do his best.
Chatter is of no value as intellectual training; it is the exercise
of the mind which tells. The subject of conversation may be as light
as possible; but it is important that whatever is said is said well,
whether it be a compliment to a mistress’ eyebrow, a discussion of the
deepest philosophy of life, or the latest bon-mot of the clubs. “Every
variety of gift,” Emerson says truly,--“science, religion, politics,
letters, art, prudence, war, or love,--has its vent and exchange in
conversation,” and it follows that conversation properly conducted
helps to the power of expression in all of these.
Better than all other means of increasing the vocabulary, however,
is writing. Always the way to learn to write is to write. The way to
increase one’s power of expression is to strive to express. The habit
of seeking constantly for the right word results in ability to find the
right word. It acts not only directly, widening one’s domain in the
realm of language, but it renders a hundred-fold more effective the
use of reading and of talk. It puts the mind into an attentive mood
so that when a new term is met with it is remembered. The perception
on the alert for words becomes susceptible to them, so that they are
appreciated and retained. Cultivate the habit of putting things into
words and the words will come unconsciously; practice phrasing thought
and the means of phrasing it will not long be wanting.
* * * * *
When we go on from the consideration of words to that of sentences we
find that here Good Use is more clearly defined. The rules for the
construction of sentences are to a large extent more formal than those
which govern the choice of terms, and the most obvious of them are
conveniently collected and arranged under the name of Grammar.
Grammar is the account-book of custom; it is in reality a reckoning
up of the popular suffrages in regard to verbal proprieties. In other
words, grammar is the formal statement of the decisions of Good Use
in so far as they apply to the relative forms of words. It is of
course not necessary to speak here in detail of these. I only wish to
call attention to the rules of the grammarian as a particularly well
defined example of the supremacy of Good Use in all matters relating to
language and its employment in literature. It is because the general
consent has decided that a certain form of the verb shall be plural
that the grammarian declares it to be in that number. Grammars follow
and formulate custom; they neither precede nor dictate.
The inability of the grammarian to dictate to custom is made especially
evident when we consider that thing more subtle than syntax and in
composition no less important, which we call Idiom. That a writer
shall be idiomatic is as essential to writing well as the avoidance of
solecisms, yet every student of the language knows how elusive and
difficult of attainment is a sound understanding of the idioms of any
tongue.
An idiom is the personal--if the word may be allowed--the personal
idiosyncrasy of a language. It is a method of speech wherein the genius
of the race making the language shows itself as differing from that of
all other peoples. What style is to the man that is idiom to the race.
It is the crystallization in verbal forms of peculiarities of race
temperament--perhaps even of race eccentricities.
It is customary to define an idiom as the form of language which cannot
be translated into another tongue; and the example which is commonly
given is the habit English-speaking peoples have of saying: “You are
right,” whereas the Latin form--literally translated--would be: “You
speak rightly,” the French: “You have reason,” and the German: “You
have right.” An idiom is independent of grammatical rules,--sometimes
is in distinct violation of them. It makes us say: “A ten-foot pole,”
“A two-dollar bill,” “A five-acre lot,”--where a plural adjective
modifies a singular substantive, or to speak more accurately is
compounded with it. It decides that we shall write: “More [friends]
than one friend has told me,”--although the subject of “told” is
“friends” understood. An idiom boldly ignores the derivation of words.
Since “circumstances” means “things standing around,” it is evidently
logical to use the phrase, “in these circumstances.” The genius of the
language decides that the form shall be, “under these circumstances;”
and whoever writes “in” for “under” not only uses unidiomatic English,
but lays himself open to the charge of pedantry. Untranslatable and
above rules, Idiom is as inviolable as the laws of the Medes and the
Persians, and for him who sins against it there is no pardon.
For idioms there is no law save that of Good Use, and perhaps in the
discernment of no other rules is required so critical and so nice a
discrimination. English which is not idiomatic becomes at once formal
and lifeless, as if the tongue were already dead and its remains
embalmed in those honorable sepulchres, the philological dictionaries.
On the other hand, English which goes too far, and fails of a delicate
distinction between what is really and essentially idiomatic and what
is colloquial, becomes at once vulgar and utterly wanting in that
subtle quality of dignity for which there is no better term than
distinction. The grammarian, moreover, wageth against Idiom a warfare
as bitter as it is unceasing. It is distinctly idiomatic to use in
certain cases what is known as the “flat adverb,”--the adverb in the
adjective form without _ly_. The man who writes “speak loudly,” “speak
more loudly,” “speak plainly,” “walk fastly,” “drink deeply,” “speak
lowly,” “the moon shines brightly,” “the sun shines hotly,” may have
the applause of grammarians and his own misguided conscience, but he
is not writing idiomatic English. His virtue must be its own reward,
since he can never win the approval of lovers of sound, wholesome,
living English. Those who use the language idiomatically write “speak
loud,” “speak louder,” “speak plain,” “walk fast,” “drink deep,” “speak
low,” “the moon shines bright,” and “the sun shines hot.” Yet these
idiomatic distinctions are often very delicate. An adverb is sometimes
properly used in its flat form with an imperative when in other cases
the form in _ly_ is proper. We say, for instance, “walk slow, walk
slower;” but “He walked slowly across the field and more slowly over
the bridge.” Nothing but the careful training of the perceptions avails
for distinctions such as these.
Another idiomatic construction against which the purist waggeth his
tongue and gritteth his teeth is the ending of a sentence with a
particle. Instead of the good old idiomatic “Where does it come from?”
he would have us say “Whence does it come?” For “Where is it going to?”
he offers “Whither is it going?” Both of his phrases are eminently
respectable, but there is sometimes a lack of vitality in too eminent
respectability! Do not be afraid to say: “The subject which I spoke to
you about;” “The conclusion that we came to;” “The man whom I talked
with;” “This is a cause to stand up for;” “It is worth living for;”
“A name to conjure with;” and the allied phrases which would never
have been tolerated for an instant if the language had been made in
libraries instead of having grown up in the lives of peoples and on the
tongues of breathing men.
Professor Reed, of the University of Pennsylvania, admirably says:--
The false fastidiousness which shuns a short particle at the end
of a sentence is often fatal to a force which belongs to the
language in its primal character.
He points out that only the misapplication of analogies from
Continental languages has brought into discredit this characteristic
English idiom. He quotes Bacon, “Houses are built to live in, and not
to look on;” Donne, “Hath God a name to curse by?” and Burke, “The
times we live in.” He might have gone to contemporary authors, and
cited Stevenson, “After expedients hitherto unthought of,” “He was all
fallen away and fallen in;” James, “The different bedrooms she has
successively slept in,” “There is almost literally nothing he does not
care for;” Newman, “The elect are few to choose out of;” Lowell, “In
accomplishing what he aimed at,” “The words are chosen for their value
to fill in,” “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good
to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and be buried in.” It
would not be difficult to extend the list until it should include all
the writers of idiomatic English.
It is necessary, however, to add here a word of warning. Allowing a
particle to come at the end of a sentence or clause because it belongs
there idiomatically is one thing; letting the particle drag loosely
along behind from a lack of skill or energy sufficient to manage the
construction properly is quite another. Idiom is a cloak which may
be made to cover as many vices as virtues. The beginning and end of
clause or sentence are the emphatic parts, and to give the close to an
unimportant word is to waste an opportunity and weaken the effect of
the whole. The reason why the idiomatic final particle is permissible
is because it really belongs to the emphatic idea or is practically a
part of the verb which precedes it. In the phrase “the times we live
in,” it is evident that “in” is in intention part of the idea expressed
by the verb, so that the sentence does not close with the particle “in”
but with the verb “live in;” and so on for the other examples which
have been quoted.
A common instance of unidiomatic use of a particle at the end of a
sentence is that of closing with the sign of the infinitive. “Do as you
have a mind to” is bad English because the words “mind” and “to” do
not in idea belong together. Either the verb should be expressed,--“Do
as you have a mind to do,” or the sentence should be recast. However
strong colloquial precedent may seem, do not allow that forlornly
orphaned sign of the infinitive to come trailing along alone as a last
word.
The idiomatic use of conjunctions is one mark of a finished and careful
style. It is perhaps too much to say that if a writer takes care of
his particles the other parts of speech will take care of themselves,
but it is at least true that no style can be lucid and polished in
which the particles--and especially the conjunctions--have not been
looked to most carefully. Amateur writers are apt to seem aware of
the existence of only two conjunctions, “and” and “but;” while they
are especially careful to omit the conjunction “that.” It has been
remarked that one of the important means by which the French masters
secure that wonderful clarity and vivacity of style which so few
English authors have been able to approach is a careful and explicit
discrimination of the value of connectives. A stylist might be not very
inaccurately defined as a writer who is always conscientious in his
choice of conjunctions. Coleridge’s remarks on this point have often
been quoted:--
A close reasoner and a good writer in general may be known by
his pertinent use of connectives. Read that page of Johnson;
you cannot alter one conjunction without spoiling the sense.
It is in a linked strain throughout. In your modern books for
the most part, the sentences in a page have the same connection
with each other that marbles have in a bag; they touch without
adhering.--_Table Talk_, May 15, 1833.
This is impatiently inexact, it may be, but the modern tendency,
especially in careless newspaper work, is to do away with connectives
for the sake of securing briskness. The result is abruptness always
and confusion generally. Insignificant as they seem, connectives are
the articulations of the skeleton of a composition, and unless they be
flexible and delicately adjusted there is no possibility of freedom of
movement in the whole.
Certain weak idioms which are common in conversation are apt to creep
into the writings of those not over sensitive to literary effects,
but these colloquialisms are religiously avoided by careful writers.
An example of this sort of thing is the detestable use of “got”--as
a substitute for “have” or as a superfluous appendage to it,--which
is so conspicuous a vice in England. In America this is at least
theoretically frowned upon, and indeed it is protested against by the
best authorities on the other side of the water.
Of course I have not space to take up one by one all the idiomatic
expressions of the language. These given will serve as examples, and
I have but to add that there is perhaps no better way of becoming
sensitive to idiom than by conversing with rustics and reading the
English classics. Neither method is of value without the restraining
and enlightening influence of sound good judgment, but the student
who is able to criticise his own work and compare it with that of the
masters will find the talk of country folk and the works of the old
masters alike helpful in the formation of an idiomatic style.
* * * * *
The matter of long sentences or short sentences is practically the same
as that of long or short words. The question is what effect the writer
wishes to produce. If he desires to treat a subject with dignity,
to impress by gravity of manner, or to produce a mood of solemnity
or melancholy, it is all but essential that his sentences shall be
long. If on the other hand it is his object to produce an effect of
lightness, to induce a feeling of gayety, of briskness, to make the
blood run swiftly in the veins, his style will be crisp with short
sentences. With even a limited amount of literary training the choice
of length in sentences becomes almost instinctive.
Something of the same principle is to be applied to sentences loose and
sentences periodic. A loose sentence is one in which the meaning and
the grammatic structure are complete at some point before the end; a
periodic sentence is one in which sense and sentence end together. If
I say, “We all praise periodic sentences, but few of us write them,” I
have given an example of the truth of the statement. The sense and the
grammatic construction are both complete at the middle of the sentence.
If this be rewritten so as to read, “Although we all praise periodic
sentences, few of us write them,” we have a periodic form in which
sense and construction are alike incomplete until the close.
That closeness of structure which in an inflected language is imparted
by the form of words must in English depend upon word arrangement;
and from this it follows that the question of making the sentence
periodic must be subordinate to the matter of bringing the right words
together. The tendency of the language is toward a loose structure; but
between the two sorts of sentences that we are considering there is the
difference that there is between giving to a person a thing in pieces
and giving it to him whole. In the loose sentence you present to him
one portion after another, often in a way which leaves him uncertain
at the end of the different parts whether there is or is not more to
come; in the periodic, you offer to him the whole at once. Evidently
the latter is the more definite, the more precise, the more finished.
It is, however, so often impossible to make a sentence periodic without
apparent effort that no style could be wholly periodic without seeming
elaborately and even painfully studied; hence as a matter of fact
all good style consists of a judicious mingling of the two kinds of
sentence.
The danger in a style too uniformly periodic is that of appearing stiff
and formal; and it seems to be true that the best and most flexible
English contains a larger portion of loose sentences than of periodic.
Reaching out my hand for volumes which chance to be within arm’s length
of my writing-table, I find that of the first fifteen sentences in
Lowell’s essay on Chaucer, ten are loose and five periodic; of the same
number at the beginning of Henry James’ essay on Balzac, nine are loose
and six periodic; at the commencement of Stevenson’s paper on Burns
the loose are to the periodic eight to seven; Saintsbury’s essay on De
Quincey begins with the same proportions; while that by the same author
on Sydney Smith opens with thirteen loose relieved but by two periodic.
Of course such examples are not conclusive, but they are at least
illustrative.
In all these matters the important thing is to train one’s self to do
whatever it seems well to do, by the use of the form most apt for the
effect desired. Since the natural tendency of the untrained writer is
towards loose sentences, it is well to conquer the art of writing
periodically. In this, as in all points of the study of composition,
the thing aimed at is to be able to do with language whatever is
desired; to become as absolutely master of it as the cunning sculptor
is master of the modeling-clay, which is as plastic under his hand as
if it were a part of his very thought.
V
PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY
When an architect builds a palace, or an edifice no matter how much
humbler, he first attends to the unity, the proportions, and to the
strength of the structure; after that he has to consider the harmony,
the finish, and the adornment. According to the nature and purpose of
the building, it may be given a coat of mineral paint, such as that
which made the transient fortune of Silas Lapham, it may be set with
clustering statues like an Old World cathedral, or it may be jeweled
with precious marbles and flower-bright mosaics like the Taj Mahal.
The analogy between this process and that of the writer is close enough
to excuse the somewhat florid comparison. First is to be considered
the mechanical form of what is written; unity, proportion, and
texture must be looked to, and afterward there must be thought of the
harmony, finish, and adornment. When we have studied the Principles of
Structure,--Unity, Mass, and Coherence,--we have next to do with the
Principles of Quality.
Whatever work interests a reader may be said to touch him in one of
three ways: it may appeal to his understanding, to his emotions, or to
his imagination. In other words, it may affect him by its intellectual,
by its emotional, or by its imaginative or æsthetic quality. Bearing
in mind that any nomenclature is a matter of convenience, and that we
use names chiefly as a means of dividing the subject into portions
which may be handled less awkwardly than the whole, we may call these
three qualities Clearness, Force, and Elegance.
If we examine our feelings in regard to anything which we read, we
find that it has been easily intelligible, or that it has bothered
our comprehension; it has interested us, stirred us, or has left
us indifferent or bored; and it has or has not produced in us a
sense of beauty and elevation of mood. Neither these sensations nor
the qualities which produce them are sharply separable; but the
distinctions perceptibly exist, so that for purposes of study the
qualities may conveniently be treated one at a time. It is easy to see
that in understanding the meaning of a thing we most markedly use the
intellectual faculties; that in liking or disliking we respond to an
appeal to the emotions; and that in feeling beauty and appreciating
the æsthetic, we necessarily employ the imagination. The first is a
question of comprehension; the second of feeling; and the third of
taste. Clearness is the intellectual principle of style; Force the
emotional; and Elegance the æsthetic.
The Principles of Structure must precede and underlie those of Quality.
Speaking broadly, we may say that it is idle to attempt to give to a
composition or to a sentence Clearness, Force, or Elegance, unless it
is already satisfactory in Unity, Mass, and Coherence. The closest
attention to the laws of mechanical form, however, is not sufficient
to secure quality. For the secret of that it is needful to go further.
It is in Clearness that the Principles of Quality are most obviously
associated with those of Structure. If an author has carefully
considered the Unity of his composition, if he has massed it properly
in parts and as a whole, if he has looked well to its Coherence,--it
is hardly possible that he should fail of being readily understood.
Close attention to the mechanics of style will generally make a
writer intelligible, provided always that he wishes his meaning to be
apprehended easily, and that he himself knows what he is attempting to
say.
These two considerations are of much practical importance. Sometimes
writers do not choose to be clear. George Meredith seems often to write
with the deliberate intention of forcing the reader to go slowly,--as
if from the feeling that what can be read rapidly is in danger of
being merely skimmed over. There are others, like Thomas Carlyle, who
deliberately obscure what they write, apparently in the hope of adding
by complexity an air of mystery to commonplaces and a meretricious
dignity to wisdom.
Take, for instance, this sentence:--
If for the present, in our Europe, we estimate the ratio of Ware
to Appearance of Ware so high even as One to a Hundred (which,
considering the Wages of a Pope, Russian Autocrat, or English
Game-Preserver, is probably not far from the mark),--what almost
prodigious saving may there not be anticipated, as the Statistics
of Imposture advances, and so the manufacture of Shams (that of
Realities rising into clearer and clearer distinction therefrom)
gradually declines, and at length becomes all but wholly
unnecessary!--Carlyle: _Sartor Resartus_, ii. 3.
Here the lack of lucidity is intentional. The author has sacrificed
it to the particular effect which he wished to produce. He sought to
give to what he wrote an air of bizarre and piquant individuality,
and it is for this that he so distorts and convulses his sentences.
The purpose is as conscious as that which informs the gyrations of an
acrobat. There is the same relation between a page of “Sartor Resartus”
or the “French Revolution” and a page of ordinary prose that there is
between the marvelous distortions of a contortionist and the walk of a
gentleman,--each, of course, being well in its place.
Compare with the sentence just given, this passage from an
undergraduate’s theme:--
Chaucer’s influence on the language was great, and he helped to
put the language before the people in a way that had not been done
before, so that it is evident that there was a great result from
this. This was because he helped to change the English language,
and in this way he was very influential in affecting the language.
Here an unhappy youth, engaged in all but mortal combat with an
examination paper, was endeavoring to say something when he had nothing
to say. Of course he could not but fail, since it is impossible to show
clearly what one does not see clearly.
With these put also this, which again is from an undergraduate’s
theme:--
If the student respects a professor, as many do, he can show his
respect in many ways; if he does not, and there are teachers who
do not command the respect of students (I do not consider the
question to be confined to this school, and in some colleges there
are men on the Faculty who are not respected, nor do they deserve
to be) and I think a man should raise his hat only to ladies or to
gentlemen that have ladies with them.
Here the writer knew fairly well what he wished to say, although he had
not taken the trouble to think it out very sharply. His difficulty was
that he lacked technical skill in expression.
These examples illustrate the causes from which obscurity may arise.
The first is legitimate. Whether we agree that Carlyle or George
Meredith or Browning has carried obscurity beyond the farthest limit
at which it is permissible has nothing to do with the fact that there
are times when it is the right of an author to sacrifice Clearness to
some other effect which he seeks. It is, however, fair to say that in
ordinary experience these emergencies are pretty nearly as rare as the
appearance of white blackbirds; and that at least no writer has a right
to discard Clearness until he has secured it. Certainly no one can
successfully employ obscurity as a means of producing literary effect
until he has acquired the art of writing with transparent simplicity.
Of the second cause it is sufficient to say here that no outward aid
can enable the student to overcome it. To think sharply and lucidly is
the result of self-discipline. It is a matter of mental exercise, and
while a student may be sent to a mental as to a physical gymnasium,
all strengthening of the mind as of the muscles must be the result of
individual exertion. There has as yet been discovered no system of
intellectual _massage_, by means of which the understanding may attain
to the benefits of work without doing anything.
While rules or wise maxims help little in this matter of mental
clearness, it is a thing so important and so universally essential in
all intellectual training that it is difficult to pass it without a
word more. If a new Dante were to people a new Inferno with sinners
guilty of crimes intellectual, as the stern old Florentine peopled his
with those who violated moral laws, the most populous circle would
be devoted to those who mistakenly think themselves to think. There
is a discouragingly large portion of mankind whose mental processes
are apparently those of the oyster. They are mentally so indolent or
incapable that the labor of reflecting is entirely beyond them. No
student can afford to remain in doubt as to whether he really thinks,
or merely indulges in vague mental impressions which are to genuine
thought as is the dull smouldering of a heap of wet leaves in a
November fog to a brisk beech-wood fire on a wide hearth in a winter
night.
Macaulay is right when he says: “Propriety of thought and propriety
of diction are commonly found together.... Obscurity of expression
generally springs from confusion of ideas.” He might have added that
it is of great importance that the writer be able to think of his
subject as a whole. It is easy for the mind to grasp a small thing
and it is proportionately harder for it to seize upon a greater; yet
upon the power to hold work in the mind in its entirety must as surely
depend success in writing as does all vigorous mental development.
The third cause of obscurity, inability to express the thought which
one has, is at once the most common, and the most inexcusable. Here we
are dealing with a tangible thing, to a great extent a matter of rule,
and, at most, largely a question of study. There is no reason why a
person of ordinary intelligence should not be able to express whatever
he is able to think. Indeed, whoever has fully thought out an idea has
already phrased it, and if he has even a moderate amount of training in
composition should have no difficulty in expressing it on paper if he
will but take the necessary pains.
It is evident that what is clear to one reader may be obscure to
another. It follows that the first question to be decided is to what
audience a composition is to be addressed. Few of us can understand
this sentence from a treatise on comparative embryology.
The inner wall of each of the paired cavities forms a
splanchnopleuric mesoblast, and the outer wall of the whole the
somatic mesoblast.
This is clear to readers who understand the technical language of
embryology; and for them the author wrote. Parallel examples might be
given which would show how many sorts of writing there are which are
clear to a limited audience only. The reports of base-ball games are
unintelligible to the average English reader, while to the American the
notes on cricket are equally meaningless. The criticisms of artists
upon pictures seldom convey a definite impression to those not versed
in the technical language of painting; and the same principle holds
throughout all sorts of literature.
The whole matter then resolves itself into the simple maxim: Use the
language of those addressed. There is somewhere a story of a lady who
always spoke to her maid in French, because in taking the situation
the girl had wrongfully claimed to know that tongue. The mistress
held stubbornly to the position that the maid should understand, and
she endured the discomforts of never being well served rather than
abandon it. Much writing and not a little talking is all but as absurd.
Constantly authors address themselves to the general public in language
which they know or might know the general public will not understand.
Whatever else the human race may be, it is not logical; there are few
of us free from the fault of sometimes acting upon assumptions which we
know to be false; and nowhere is this fact more strikingly illustrated
than in composition.
This question of using the language of those addressed is one which
meets every teacher at the very threshold of the class-room. The best
instructor is not he who knows most, but he who imparts most; and he
imparts most who most perfectly speaks the language of his pupils. It
is of no use daily to fire over the heads of children all the wisdom
of Solomon if it be embodied in a language which is not theirs. The
teacher who really teaches does not take the attitude of the lady whose
maid should have known French; he does not assume that pupils should
understand what he says; he simply considers whether as a matter of
fact they do understand. If they do not, he sets himself with patience
to re-phrase it, and, if need be, re-phrase again, until he has put
it into language which the children cannot fail to comprehend. It is
not a question of what might be understood but of what must be. It is
true that this calls for a patience which is almost divine, and there
are teachers in the common schools to-day who are only preserved to us
because the age of translation to heaven is past. There are unhappily
others who do not understand that this patient and laborious seeking
after the intellectual dialect of the pupil is the only possible means
of imparting instruction; and thus it happens that some schools are
taught in a language which, while it is English, is yet hardly more
intelligible to the students than would be Choctaw or the speech of
Borrioboola-Gha.
In writing, the safest guide in this respect is sound, homely common
sense. Write without nonsense in the way of self-consciousness or
affectation. Make it always a rule in general composition to aim at
the simple, average man; to write so that the traditionally foolish
wayfaring man need not err therein. Remember that the aim is not to
write so that one may be understood, but to write so that one cannot
be misunderstood.
Absurdly enough, human vanity comes in here. Untrained writers are apt
to feel that they lower themselves if they condescend to write for
the intellectual bourgeoisie. Many a clever young author has come to
grief because he could not bring himself to use simple language lest
it should seem that he had not command of a more elaborate diction.
He has failed because he could not be willing to address the ordinary
reader lest he thereby might appear to show that he had not the gift of
speaking to the learned. The great writers are men who are free from
this weakness; who are intent upon making their message understood, and
not upon preserving a foolish appearance of superiority. Shakespeare
did not disdain to write for the London apprentices brawling in the
pit, or Homer to sing for semi-barbarians half-drunken at the feast.
The masterpieces of literature which have been addressed to the
educated few are revered; those which have been confessedly for the
many have been read and lived upon. To take as instances two works
written at about the same time: “Paradise Lost” has been commended by
critics and admired by scholars; “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been and is
the favorite book with thousands. The one has always been profoundly
admired and the other has been loved. I do not mean that this is all
that might be said of these classics, or that there are no other
considerations in determining their worth, but they do serve to make
more clear the fact that to reach the general reader it is necessary
to write for the general reader.
Speaking the language of the average man includes also the confining
of allusions to the range of his probable knowledge, the taking for
granted nothing which he may not reasonably be supposed to know. The
temptation to show erudition is at the elbow of every writer. When,
near the beginning of this lecture, I referred in an easy manner to the
Taj Mahal, I was instantly conscious that I had used the comparison
with a pleasant sense of the air of superior knowledge which it might
give. However it may be with you, the probabilities are that the
ordinary reader would not be sufficiently familiar with the elaborate
ornamentation of that wonder of the East to make my comparison to its
jewelled walls effective, and I left it only because I wanted to use it
here as an illustration.
It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional experiences
of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. It must be
remembered that all art is based on the assumption of a community of
human feelings; in other words, upon the theory that the fundamental
emotions are shared by all mankind. The more closely a writer holds to
common humanity, to common human experience, the more wide will be the
range of his work, and the more clear will he be in those very matters
where clearness is most difficult of attainment. The more subtile and
remote from ordinary human life are the emotions and the passions to
be portrayed, the more absolute is the necessity of conveying them in
terms of simple and common experience. Analyze one of the tragedies
of Shakespeare or of the old Greek dramatists, and you will find that
its tremendous effects are produced by means essentially simple. By
keeping always within the range of the sympathies and feelings common
to humanity, the masters are able to make every stroke tell; and
this method is in the nature of things the only possible one. Common
humanity can comprehend only what it has felt.
To gain Clearness it is necessary first to avoid all vagueness of
thought and all vagueness of expression. It is needful to shun
ambiguity of word or of phrase, and that more subtle ambiguity which
may arise from ill-considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from
bad arrangement of the parts of a composition. It is no less important
to write with a constant remembrance of the audience addressed; to use
their language, and to appeal to the emotions and experiences which are
likely to be common to the average individual of the class for which
one writes. Inexperienced writers may make the mistake of supposing
that this is the rule by which mediocrity is to be reached; but as a
matter of fact these are the principles upon which have been written
the masterpieces of the world.
VI
PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED
Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions.
Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are
conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work,
yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value
despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying
phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this
qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as
they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of
what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as
they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of
the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has
been lost.
We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a
signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given
to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of
literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us
to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages
of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the
fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and
intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the
term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has
of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance--the
antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular
person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so
on--might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have
nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which
certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour,--the
prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways
decent or indecent,--have not in themselves anything that can be called
Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention,
but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.
“The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he
goes on to exemplify this thus:--
Compare these three simple statements: “I found him very agreeable
one afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon;” “I
found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house.”
Now all that the word “wet” says is that the afternoon was watery;
but it clearly implies that it was an afternoon when you would
not care to be out of doors. All that the words “in a country
house” state is a simple fact of locality; but they imply that
you were in a place where not to be out of doors was probably a
serious trial to the temper. So the last statement as a whole, “I
found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house,”
suggests, though it does not state, that the person spoken of was
one whose charms could overcome a pretty bad temper. At the same
time it is a phrase which I fancy anybody would admit to hold the
attention more strongly than either of its predecessors; and its
superiority in force lies not so much in the bare facts which
it adds to the first statement as in the thoughts and emotions
it suggests. Still again, take this sentence from one of M. de
Maupassant’s stories: “It was the 15th of August--the feast of
the Holy Virgin, and of the Emperor Napoleon.” He states only
two facts about the 15th of August, and these in the simplest
of words. Neither by itself would hold one’s attention enough
to remain long in memory. But put them together; think what
the Holy Virgin means to Catholic Europe, and what the Emperor
Napoleon means to those who are not subdued by the magic genius
of Bonaparte,--and you have a sentence that when mid-August comes
about will hover in your head. Yet the force of this--so greatly
superior to the force of either statement by itself--lies not in
what is actually said, but wholly in what is implied, suggested,
connoted, in this sudden, unexpected antithesis.
The thing which the writer has caused the reader to think--or even
to suppose himself to think--is sure to interest him. The dullest of
bores is absorbed in his own words, and in effect that which the reader
receives by suggestion is his own thought. What is denoted is the word
of the writer; what is connoted is for the time being the thought of
the reader.
It is not difficult to see that Clearness is an aid to Force; or, to
put it more exactly, that a lack of Clearness will interfere with
Force. Yet the one is by no means essential to the other. The diction
of “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” that book so strong that it
wrings the heart almost like a fierce personal sorrow, is in passages
so obscure as to have given rise to the rather cheap _mot_ that the
novel would be successful if it were translated into English. Almost
any page of Carlyle might also be cited in illustration; while that
Clearness may fail to secure Force is proved by the pellucidly stupid
lucubrations of an innumerable company of authors whom nobody could
fail to understand if it were possible to keep awake to read them.
Connotation may be the result of various causes. It may be produced
by a swiftness and briskness of motion which so awakens and quickens
the mind that the reader is aroused to thought, and seizes each idea
presented as if he had himself originated it. It is this sort of force
that we mean when we speak of the vivacity or the brilliancy of a work.
The secret lies chiefly in passing quickly from one significant point
to another. This involves, it is apparent, the power of selecting the
significant, and of bringing this out while avoiding the unessential.
The effectiveness of the sensational story depends largely upon
a quality closely allied to this, although here it is a matter
not so much of style as of material. The tale which moves rapidly
from situation to situation, so that the reader seems to share the
adventures of the characters, often owes as much to the swiftness of
its progress as to the nature of the story told. It owes more, as a
general thing, to the vividness with which the exciting situations
are imagined and presented. The more real a thing seems to the reader,
the more suggestive it must be to him, and the more likely is he to
share the sensations set down, so that for the moment it seems as if
he were actually experiencing them. In other words, the more real the
narrative, the more suggestive it becomes.
One great means of producing this sense of reality either in narrative
or in any other kind of composition, whether in the setting forth of
thoughts, or in the telling of events, is in making what is written
specific. The specific term is apt to be more suggestive than the
general from the fact that it presents to the mind an idea which can be
grasped readily. When one reads that the Indians are on the war-path
and are ravaging the country, one has a vague feeling of horror; but
if one is told that the Red Men have crossed the bounds of Big Lick
Reservation, have murdered and scalped a settler named John Thing, have
burned his cabin, and carried off his wife and children, there is no
vagueness about it. The impression becomes at once vivid and forceful
in what it denotes, and stirring in what it connotes.
It is from a misapplication of this fact that modern fiction has fallen
into that vice which has been known as Realism--perhaps because it is
less real than any other sort of fiction ever devised. It is apparently
by a perception of the effectiveness of the specific, that Realists
have been led into the error of believing in the effectiveness of the
minute.
Before leaving the quality under discussion it is well to say a word
about what is called “reserved force.” Our respect for a writer is
always increased by feeling that he might do more than he is doing. We
are led on by a desire to see what greater things he will accomplish.
The feeling in reading an author who is evidently doing his utmost
is not unlike that felt in crossing a bridge which shakes with the
footfall. It may carry us over the stream, but on the other hand it may
break under us. I once heard a lady explain her dislike for a certain
youth by saying: “I never could endure a man who is always doing his
darnedest!” The expression is unhappily vulgar, but it does seem to me
to be humanly expressive. We do not like to feel that we have come to
the end of the resources of a friend or of an author.
How then does a writer produce an impression of reserved force? The
phrase meets one in book reviews, and to inexperienced writers is
apt to convey little but bewilderment. One way in which the finished
literary craftsman secures the impression of reserved power is by
deliberately making the minor parts of his work weaker than those more
important. In other words, he gains the effect of reserved strength by
reserving strength. Often it is well in the revision of a composition
to lessen the stress of expression in unimportant passages; to soften
down, as it were, all portions except the high lights. The natural
tendency of every earnest writer is to express himself as vigorously as
possible, and in the first draft this is well,--provided always that
he has the self-control and the skill so to modify in revision the
less important parts that the emphasis shall be properly proportioned.
Shading in literature is a matter which it is not easy to explain
without examples much longer than it is possible to use here. It must
be learned by the study of masterpieces. It is well to keep in mind,
however, that it is oftener the result of a clever softening of minor
passages than of a heavier emphasis upon important portions; and
above all that the secret of shading and of reserved force as well
is proportion. It is rather comparative than absolute stress which
is effective. Vehemence is not vigor. Make up your mind clearly what
points you wish to bring out most sharply; that is half of the process:
then see to it that the remaining parts of the composition are kept
subordinate to these; that is the rest of it.
Largely, too, is a sense of reserved force imparted by smoothness and
ease of style. A style which is rough generally seems hard and labored.
To carry the reader forward easily seems to be to carry him surely, and
gives the impression that the writer could go faster and farther if he
but chose.
One of the secrets of smoothness is the art of easy transition from one
paragraph to another, from one sentence to another, from one thought
to another. In Macaulay’s essay on “Machiavelli,” for instance, after
speaking of the correspondence of the Italian, the author continues:
It is interesting and curious to recognize, in circumstances which
elude the notice of historians, ... the fierce and haughty energy
which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and
graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the
implacable hatred of Cæsar Borgia.
We have mentioned Cæsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for
a moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of
Italy was so strongly personified, etc.
And so the essayist goes on to draw a comparison between Cæsar Borgia
and Machiavelli, which he had of course intended from the first, but
which he has had the art to introduce as if it were a sudden thought.
The effect is as if the name of Borgia had suggested the parallel; and
not only does this give an air of spontaneity, but it also impresses
the reader with a feeling of security in the resources of the writer.
If the mere mention of a famous name can bring so much from his mind,
it is evident that that mind must be most abundantly stored.
More subtle, and therein so much the more admirable, is the art which
links together the parts of a composition simply by closeness of
meaning. To illustrate it would take too much room, but all the great
essayists afford examples, and it is in them that this detail of
literary skill may most conveniently be studied.
Another matter closely connected with Force is that of beginning and
ending well. If the opening sentence of a composition interest the
reader he is ready to go on, while an effective close leaves him with
a pleasant impression of what he has been reading. In a composition
divided into parts or chapters, it is especially important to see to it
that the separate portions end effectively. The general verdict upon
a book is largely made up of the sum of impressions received from the
endings of sections. Here again the reader will find examples in all
the masters, but a few may be given. In a vein almost familiar, but in
entirely good taste, Lowell begins his superb essay on Chaucer:--
Will it _do_ to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope
to say anything, not new but even fresh, on a topic so well worn?
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 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.
I noticed that the hat was of soft felt, and one might easily
guess that it had been bought at a bargain sale. It lent a
comfortable sense of satisfaction to its owner, and suggested to
him the idea of going to church.
In the former, the writer’s point of view is that of one looking out
of a window at a crowd, and it is proper that he should say “turns,
departs;” but after the crowd has departed he cannot see whether
it disintegrates or not. If he should say, “Turns, disintegrates,
departs,” one could find no fault. In the second example, the point of
view is at first that of an observer who sees the hat on the head of
a stranger; then, without warning, it is shifted to the mind of any
observer,--“one,”--and then, in a twinkling, to the thought of the
wearer himself, which has been by the hat turned to the idea of going
to church.
We shall have to do later with the point of view in its application to
the various sorts of composition. Here it is enough to add the warning
to inexperienced writers: Do not write to discover what you think, or
how you feel about a subject. These questions are to be settled before
writing is begun. In half the themes which I read, it is apparent that
the writer has been going ahead in a sort of forlorn hope of ultimately
learning his own opinions. To be in doubt when one begins, either of
where one is bound or of how the attempt to get there is to be made,
is as fatal in writing as in horse-racing. There is a good deal of
what might be called the June-bug style of composition. Just as a
beetle bangs his clumsy thick head against a window or a netting in
hope that he may chance to strike a place where he can get through to
the lamp within, so the June-bug writer goes banging absurdly down his
page, bumping against any obstacle, trusting to fate and the chapter
of accidents to show somewhere and somehow a way through. The man who
has learned to write does not begin until he has an idea what his way
through is to be. This being clear in his mind, he goes consistently
toward it, and his consistency is what is called keeping the point of
view.
The point of view being selected, it is often necessary to give the
reader a clue to it. Sometimes it is needful to use no inconsiderable
amount of skill to bring him to accept it. The well-trained reader
always endeavors to put himself into complete sympathy with an author.
The author is bound to make this as easy as possible, and even, if may
be, to render it inevitable, to the end that the reader shall be forced
to share the outlook of the writer, whether with conscious willingness
or not. In obvious matters, like descriptions, the simple device of
naming the point of view is enough. When Keats begins a poem,--
I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,--
he gives the point of view. So does Spenser when he opens the “Faerie
Queene:”--
A gentle knight was pricking on the plain.
Equally is Lowell giving the point of view in the opening of the
essay on Chaucer, already quoted: “Will it _do_ to say anything more
about Chaucer?” Here he at once puts the reader into the attitude
of examining with fresh attention a subject which has been greatly
discussed; by implication he intimates that there is still enough wheat
in the often-threshed straw to make it worth while once more to turn it
over. With equal skill and felicity he puts the reader into the mood in
which he writes of Carlyle by the first sentence of another essay:--
A feeling of comical sadness is likely to come over the mind of
any middle-aged man who sets himself to recollecting the names of
the authors that have been famous, and the number of contemporary
immortalities whose end he has seen since coming to manhood.
The reader perceives at once that the subject which is to be treated
is to be regarded as of less assured permanence of importance than has
been sometimes held. Evidently Lowell would not allude to the many
transient so-called immortalities if he had not at least a suspicion
that the contemporary reputation of Carlyle is likely to be lessened
by time. The key-note is struck, and what follows is governed by it.
The secret of holding the reader to the point of view consists largely
of keeping strictly to it in writing. If the author does not change
his position, the reader is unconsciously drawn to it. There is a
persuasive power in mere persistency which is recognized by any one
who has had to do with an obstinate person, and this power tells in
literature as fully as in domestic life.
* * * * *
We come next to figurative language, so called; and at this point it
used to be the fashion to overwhelm the student with a list of dreadful
names which was in itself enough to paralyze the mental processes, and
to discourage at once and forever all aspiration after excellence. The
appalling words _synecdoche_, _metonymy_, _antonomasia_, _asyndeton_,
_anacolouthon_, _parrhesia_, _onomatopoeia_, and the rest, seemed
to fascinate the soul of writers on composition as completely as
they dazed and stupefied the understanding of the unhappy student.
Pedants have amused themselves by darkening wisdom with words without
knowledge, until it is all but impossible to come at anything practical
in the old-fashioned books,--which were invariably called “treatises.”
It has been found that this is idle, and for the most part it has been
laid aside. A few terms are for convenience still used, but in these
days the effort, instead of being to give learned and pompous-sounding
treatises on the art of composition, is if possible to set down what
will assist the student in learning literary expression.
One of the first literary devices of which man’s mind availed itself in
its efforts to communicate ideas, was the use of figures. The thought
moves naturally from the near to the remote, and from that which is
known to that which is unknown. If we attempt to describe or explain a
thing, we instinctively compare it to something which is familiar. “It
is like this,” we say; “it is similar to that thing which you know.”
It has often been remarked that all language is full of what Trench
happily calls the fossil remains of metaphors,--words which were once
used to convey an idea by comparing it to something known, but of which
the figurative force is now forgotten. It is hardly necessary to give
examples, because every student has had his attention called to this
class of words; but their number illustrates how natural comparisons
are, and how constantly they are called to aid expression.
To comparison it is customary to give two names, according as the
likeness is stated explicitly or is implied. If a writer says, “The
officer followed his victim like a sleuth-hound,”--a phrase which
used to come into all the detective stories,--he makes an explicit
comparison between the officer and a hound. If he writes, “The
sleuth-hound of justice followed the track of his prey,”--a phrase
still to be met with in newspapers of a certain class,--the comparison
is the same, but it is assumed instead of being explicitly stated.
To the expressed comparison is given the name “simile;” to the
comparison assumed, the name “metaphor.” It is of no great practical
importance--unless in the line of encouraging carefulness in the
discrimination of words--whether the distinction of names is carefully
observed or not, but it is of some convenience in study.
The object of using figures is to add Clearness, or Force, or
Elegance--or all of these--to the presentation of an idea. Constantly
it happens that, by declaring that an unknown thing is like some known
thing, the writer enables the reader to form an idea of it as it is.
When in Job we read the beautiful simile, “My days are swifter than
a weaver’s shuttle,” we are impressed by the passage of life with a
vividness which could not be secured by any mere assertion, no matter
how strong. The physical fact is so easily grasped that it makes more
clear the intellectual reflection. In the same wonderful poem--and no
one studying literature either for profit or for pleasure can afford to
neglect the book of Job--there are beautiful figures enough to teach
the art of using them were it otherwise forgotten. “Man is born unto
trouble, as the sparks fly upward;” “I caused the widow’s heart to sing
for joy;” “The house appointed for all living;” “He maketh the deep to
boil like a pot;” “Thou shalt come to thy grave in a full age, like as
a shock of corn cometh in in his season,”--it is impossible not to see
how in every case the thought is made more clear by the comparison.
It is evident, too, that in each case cited the expression has gained
not only in Clearness but in Force. The moment a likeness is suggested,
the mind of the reader is led to make the comparison, and is thus alive
and alert; while in each case the figure suggests far more than any
bare statement of fact. Since the secret of Force lies in connotation,
in the suggestiveness which leads the mind onward into the mood so
that it seems to itself to originate the ideas which are really given
to it directly or indirectly by the author, it follows that in the
use of figures is one of the most effectual means of securing this
quality. Job says, “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” and
with the plain statement of the brevity of life come suggestions of the
inevitableness of this brevity; we seem to see man tossed by the hand
of the unseen, as a shuttle is thrown by the hand of the weaver, flung
to and fro without power to stay or to resist. The whole despairing
mood of the afflicted patriarch is summed up in the single simile. To
come nearer to our own times, take that simile which is perhaps the
most beautiful in English literature outside of Shakespeare:--
Fair as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.
What is suggested is all the serenity of the eventide; the hush which
comes between the daylight and the dark; the sense of peace; that
feeling that a mystery is being wrought before our very eyes, when out
of the faintly rose-purple haze of the sky throbs into radiance the
first star. There is, too, that sense of restfulness that belongs to
the twilight coolness, and, in some undefinable way, an idea of purity
and innocence too high and too subtle to be defined. The gain in Force
from such richness of suggestion is evident.
Even more closely than with Clearness or Force is the use of figures
connected with Elegance. More than any other means at the disposal
of the writer does this help to establish the mood which the author
desires to share with his reader. More, perhaps, than any other means
may figures be moulded to manifold uses, and thus they have large share
in that adaptation of the means to an end, in which, as has been said,
lies the secret of Elegance.
The proper use of figures is a thing which it is of the utmost
importance for the student to master thoroughly; and I have ventured to
set down a few rules which may be useful in practical work:--
1. Never use a figure without a definite purpose, and never simply for
its own sake.
2. Never subordinate sense to figure.
3. Make all figures easily comprehensible.
4. Never make a comparison without realizing fully what it is.
5. Never push a figure too far.
The reason for giving the first rule is, that so many young writers--I
say young writers as a matter of courtesy, since there are plenty of
old ones of whom it is no less true!--are given to the fault of piling
up figures in much the same way that a tasteless milliner sometimes
puts on her bonnets all the artificial flowers that can be made to
stick to them, or as a stupid architect kills the design of a building
by overloading it with ornaments. Figures exist for the style, and not
the style for the figures; and from this follows not only the first
rule, but the second also. To make the figure of more importance than
the thing which it is to illustrate or to reinforce is to exalt the
servant above the master.
The third rule is justified by the fact that figures are used to
increase the lucidity of style, and that in a manner all comparisons
are to be looked upon as in the nature of illustrations. It follows
that they must, in order to fulfill their function, be easily
understood themselves. Examine this passage:--
... The Wandering Jew has seen
Men come and go as the fixed Pyramids
Have seen even the steadfast polar star
Shift in its place.
To see any force in this, it is necessary to be aware that, since the
Pyramids were built, the North Star has been altered in the precession
of the equinoxes. A writer has no right to appeal to such special
knowledge. This is one of the reasons why there are so few of the
discoveries of modern science, rich and varied as they are, which can
effectively be used in simile. The allusions would not be commonly
understood. Another reason, equally potent, is that in general the
connotation of scientific facts is too practical and uninspiring to add
to the interest of poetic or imaginative themes. In old days it was the
fashion for minor poets to go as far afield as possible for similes,
which were dragged into verse as a Comanche Indian drags into camp his
captives. Foot-notes were generously provided for the enlightenment
of the reader, and nobody seemed to see the absurdity of illustrating
a thought by a figure so obscure that it had itself to be explained.
The tropes of the minor poets of the last century remind one of the
remark of the Scotch goodwife about a learnedly obscure commentary on
the Scriptures: “’Tis a braw wise book, na dout; an’ the Bible does
explain it wonderfu’.” If a writer will hold to his own experience for
his similes, he will have little difficulty in deciding what is likely
to be readily understood by the general reader; and if he will remember
that, provided that there be nothing vulgar or ludicrous or commonplace
in its suggestion, the more homely an allusion the more effective it is
likely to be, he cannot go far wrong.
The rule never to make a comparison without realizing fully what it is
should be regarded as being as binding as a moral precept. If this be
obeyed, there is no danger of the production of that hybrid microbe
with which the pages of sensational fiction swarm, which is known as
the mixed metaphor. I took up in the smoking-room of a steamer not
long ago a novel called “Half a Million of Money,” by Miss Amelia B.
Edwards. I opened to a page on which was this sentence:--
Trefalden cast a hasty glance about the room, as if looking for
some weapon wherewith to slake the hatred that glittered in his
eye.--Chap. xciv.
I give carefully the origin of this, since it seems like an absurd
mock simile manufactured for the occasion. If the author had felt the
force of the word “slake,” and how it involves the idea of thirst, she
could not have coupled it with “weapon” or with “glittered in his eye.”
A thirst which is slaked with a sword and glitters in the eye needs
only to be realized to be cast aside.
Goethe, in speaking of Klopstock, once said:--
An ode occurs to me where he makes the German muse run a race
with the British; and indeed, when one thinks what a picture
it is, where the girls run one against the other, throwing
about their legs, and kicking up the dust, one must assume that
the good Klopstock did not really have before his eyes such
pictures as he wrote, else he could not possibly have made such
mistakes.--_Conversations of Goethe_, November 9, 1824.
Of these lines of Montgomery,--
The soul aspiring pants its source to mount,
As streams meander level to their fount,--
Macaulay observes:--
We take this to be, on the whole, the worst similitude in the
world. In the first place, no stream meanders or can possibly
meander level with the fount. In the next place, if streams did
meander level with their founts, no two notions can be less
like each other than that of meandering level and mounting
upward.--Cited in Bartlett’s _Familiar Quotations_.
It would be easy and it would be amusing to go on with examples of
mixed figures and figures which are ineffective, but the point hardly
needs further illustration.
Pushing a figure too far is a fault less common in these days than
it has been at some periods of our literary history when fashions in
writing were more ornate than at present. If a writer realizes what a
simile means, he is not likely to fall into this error. It is when he
introduces a figure for the sake of the figure, and not for the purpose
of strengthening or making more clear what he is saying, that this
fault occurs.
These lines of Cowper may serve as an example:
Man is a harp, whose chords elude the sight,
Each yielding harmony disposed aright;
The screws reversed (a task which, if He please,
God in a moment executes with ease),
Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose,
Lost, till He tune them, all their power and use.
If this stopped with the second line, it might do well enough; but when
the attention is forced to the consideration of the mechanical details
of the harp, and the image of ten thousand thousand strings and a
corresponding number of screws, and the notion applied to a man bereft
of his wits, the idea becomes absurd, and whatever value the figure
might have is entirely lost.
A clear realization of what he is doing will also prevent the writer
from mingling figure and fact. “He was the guardian genius of Ireland,
and had served with eloquence and credit in legislative halls,” could
hardly have been written by one who felt clearly the meaning and
significance of the figure. To realize how a guardian genius would look
in legislative halls would have brought him at once to his senses. It
is always necessary to have sharply defined in the brain whatever one
is saying, but this is especially true of any use of language which
invites the reader to loose his grasp upon absolute, literal fact.
The difference between simile and metaphor is one which need not be
pressed very sharply. It is to be observed that as writing becomes
more excited or impassioned there is less need of insisting upon
formalities; so that as the writer warms his readers, he may assume
a likeness instead of explicitly stating it. At the beginning of
a passage it may be better to say, “Napoleon swept like a tempest
over Europe,” whereas later, the reader having become interested in
the theme, it is fitting to write, “Napoleon, the tempest which was
sweeping over Europe.” There is probably no better rule than for the
writer to do that which at the moment seems to him most natural, and
then in revision to see if it strikes him as it did when he wrote it.
Personification may be conveniently regarded as classed with simile
and metaphor. It is somewhat out of fashion, but if it is used it is
to be governed by the rules given above. One who realizes what he is
saying in the phrase, “Hope told a flattering tale,”--who sees that
he is representing Hope as a beautiful and seductive being,--is not
likely to go on to add, “but this hope was founded upon a delusion,”
because he cannot conceive a young nymph or goddess as being founded
upon anything. He will naturally and without effort carry out the
figure, and say, “but she beguiled us;” or, “but all her flatteries
were delusions.” The truth is, that the mind will generally go in the
right direction if it is given a fair chance. It is only when we hamper
it with rules not understood, when we force it to go in paths which we
suppose to be laid out by conventions, or when we endeavor to make it
pace according to our vanity, that it goes astray. Be natural in the
use of figures, and you will seldom be wrong.
VIII
MEANS AND EFFECTS CONTINUED
Few means of literary effect are more subtle than Variety. It must
pervade all parts of a composition, yet it is to be perceived only by
its effects. Its absence is at once noted, and at once destroys the
beauty and attractiveness of any work; yet to define Variety is as
difficult as to tell how it is to be secured. Stevenson gives a rule
as wise as it is hard to follow: “The one rule is to be infinitely
various.”
The need of variety in the use of words is evident. The fault of
repetition is sufficiently obvious, yet it is very easily committed.
The fact that a sentence has been written in a given form often makes
that seem the only correct way of expression. No one but a thoroughly
trained writer can be as sensitive to errors in his own work as to
mistakes in the writings of others; and so it happens that unless
one is very careful the same word may appear two or three times in
a passage where synonyms would be better than the repetition. That
richness in synonyms which is one of the finest characteristics of
English does away with any necessary difficulty in attaining variety in
diction. In writing, and yet more in revising, the value and force of
synonymous terms cannot be too constantly kept in mind. A knowledge
of these, with that cardinal virtue of writers, the dictionary-habit,
should carry any student triumphantly past all dangers of monotony in
words.
One caution should perhaps be added: Do not be afraid to repeat a word
as often as is really necessary. I quoted in an earlier chapter a
sentence from Lowell which illustrates what I mean:
The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born
on, good to live on, good to die for and be buried in.
Or notice the repetition of “man” and of “department” in this from
Macaulay:--
A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of
sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man
who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who
in that department succeeded preëminently.--_On John Dryden._
Here the judicious repetition of the subject holds the whole closely
together, and saves the attention of the reader from fatigue. It
serves, also, to mark the distinction between the first half, which
is a specification of the causes of failure, and the second half,
which states the effects that followed from them. The recurrence
of “department” adds to the emphasis in a way which may easily be
appreciated by replacing it by a pronoun. Repetitions so cleverly used
as this are of course not defects but beauties.
The variation of form is an art more cunning than that of the changing
of the word. Look at this sentence from Stevenson, and notice how much
is gained by the alteration of the construction:--
How often and willingly do I not look in fancy on Tummel, or
Manor, or the talking Ardle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the
bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks
in the den behind Kingussie!--_Pastoral._
To put “talking” before its noun and “swirling” after the substantive
it modifies, to see to it that no two phrases shall have the same form,
may seem small matters, and yet it is by devices of this sort that the
skillful artificer of words gives to his style finish and charm.
The ability to command a variety of forms gives to the writer the power
of repetition without seeming to repeat. Often it happens that it is
well to re-say a thing, either for the sake of putting it in a light
somewhat different from that of its first presentation, or to enforce
it more strongly. This is especially true, it may be, of writing which
is expository or argumentative, but the need of repetition of ideas is
common to composition of all sorts. To vary the cadence of the sentence
so that the ear shall never be wearied by monotony, cunningly to mix
long and short paragraphs so that no single form constantly repeated
shall tire the attention, is indeed a difficult art to acquire. No rule
can be given for variety; the very idea of rule for variation involves
a contradiction of terms, since it is the essence of variation to be
irregular. The student must train his ear and his mind by reading
the best authors; but the most that instruction can do is to call
attention to this matter, and thus to afford a clue to what may be the
real if unsuspected cause of a writer’s dissatisfaction when his work
appears vaguely dull and unattractive. Variety is closely connected
with Elegance. The adaptation of the sentence structure to the thought,
and yet more the subtler adaptation to the mood, are refinements of
composition which it takes long to acquire; but with every advance
toward a mastery of them the learner has come nearer to the secret of
that consummate skill in fitting means to effects which is the soul
of the highest style. Each must do it for himself; for the secret of
variety cannot be told farther than it is revealed in the words of
Stevenson, with which we began: “The one rule is to be infinitely
various.”
Upon variety depends largely that delightful and elusive quality
which we call Euphony. No writer or reader can be long insensible to
that music of words which is as intangibly tangible in prose as in
poetry,--different in the one from the other, but as real and truly a
source of delight in speech as in song, in prose as in verse. It is
true that what is written is not necessarily read aloud. It is written
in silence, and untrained writers fail to realize that although it be
read in silence, the eye is the ear of the mind, and all melody or lack
of melody will be subtilely felt in the soundless perusal. All that has
been said of variety applies as well to this quality; and, indeed, it
is perhaps hardly necessary to give two names where the two things are
so closely interwoven.
Intangible as this quality may seem, it is yet one of the most striking
in literature. Take this sentence from Walt Whitman, and see if it is
possible for any reader not to be offended by its close:--
Nor shades of Virgil, nor myriad memories, poems, old
associations, magnetize and hold on to her.
Or suppose one said:--
If for the city of Athens nature did much, it is not to be denied
that art did a great deal more.
The ear is dull which does not perceive the difference between this and
the sentence as Newman wrote it:--
If nature did much for Athens, it is undeniable that art did much
more.
Examples might be multiplied indefinitely, but it is better that
the student find them for himself. Sensitiveness to euphony and the
practical acquirement of a euphonious style are greatly aided by the
habit of reading aloud the works of men who are masters, and it is well
to test in the same way whatever is written. The ear is more readily
trained by the voice than by any other means. It is possible to suppose
that what we have written must sound well as a matter of course; but
if we read or hear it read aloud, and find that it does not please
the ear, only one stupid with self-conceit will leave it unaltered.
A melodious diction is apt to be made up more largely of short words
than of long ones, and of words easily pronounced than of those trying
to the tongue; yet it is no more possible to achieve a euphonious
style simply by using words short and easily pronounced than it is to
make a beautiful brook by digging a channel which shall be entirely
straight and free from obstructions, or to build a beautiful temple by
collecting exquisite marbles. Construction is more than material.
One of the means by which it was formerly the fashion to strive after
pleasing sound in diction was the use of alliteration. This device is
somewhat in disrepute in these days, because it has been so notoriously
abused. The sensational novelist could no more do without alliteration
than without the historical present tense. The patent medicines are
alliteratively labeled; comic operas and pseudo-Queen Anne cottages at
little watering-places have been baptized with titles with reduplicated
initials, until the writer who indulges in alliteration feels something
as does the professor who sees his title blazoned on the shingle of the
barber and the boot-black.
Yet this pleasant device cannot be spared. There is in our blood
some trace of the fondness for it which made it serve the old bards
instead of rhyme. It must be employed more cunningly than of old, and
as it were slipped into the literary web surreptitiously. Here are
instances:--
A man is a bundle of _r_elations, a knot of _r_oots, whose
_f_lower and _f_ruitage is the world.--Emerson: _History_.
In making edu_c_ation not only _c_ommon to all, but in some sense
_c_ompulsory on all.--Lowell: _New England Two Centuries Ago_.
All the beautiful _s_entiments in the _w_orld _w_eigh less than a
_s_ingle lovely action.--_Id._: _Rousseau and the Sentimentalists_.
Here there is little more than the repetition of the initial of a
prominent word, marked by the same place in successive cadences. Often
alliteration in modern prose of the best sort is carried much farther.
Here are a couple of examples from Stevenson:--
I know a child of Suffolk whose fancy still _l_ingers about the
_l_i_l_ied _l_ow_l_and waters of that shire.--_Pastoral._
A task in _r_ecitation that _r_eally merited _r_eward.--_The
Manse._
Of course I am speaking only of prose. The diction of poetry is
governed by different laws, and the reduplication of sound is a
recognized and not infrequent ornament of verse used to a degree which
would not be tolerated in prose. In the latter it is important that
alliteration shall appear to be rather the consequence of the subject
than an extraneous ornament. Once a writer introduces into prose a word
which is evidently or even apparently chosen for its initial, he has
given the reader a suspicion of artificiality which is fatal to the
best effect.
Alliteration is, however, more readily allowed in epigram and
antithesis than in plain, straightforward passages. The writer is
permitted some especial graces of ornament when he attempts either
of these, as a child may without remark wear its best raiment to a
party when its companions would jeer at such display at school. “Forms
are the food of faith,” writes Newman. “All mankind love a lover,”
Emerson says. These epigrams are openly alliterative. No less so is the
well-known antithesis of Macaulay, “The Puritans hated bear-baiting,
not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to
the spectator.”
The epigram has the great advantage of recalling the proverb; and
proverbs will ever be dear to the heart of man as the purses in which
have been preserved the homely wisdom of the world. It is perhaps in
part because of its family likeness to the proverb that it seems not
unfitting for the epigram to balance word against word in a way which
would seem artificial in any other form of expression.
The mention of epigram and antithesis reminds us that it is well to
speak briefly of both.
Antithesis is the setting formally against each other of contrasting
thoughts. I might make an example if I wrote: Epigram is a sword with
one edge; but antithesis is a blade with two. I should at the same
time be expressing to some extent the characteristics of these verbal
forms. Antithesis defines by differences; epigram emphasizes a single
idea. One confesses its artificiality by its balanced structure; the
other endeavors to hide it under an appearance of lucky spontaneity.
Antithesis is obviously deliberate; epigram must have an air of
quickness, as if it were the birth of the moment. The former belonged
to the elaborate style of a more ceremonious age; the latter has been
cultivated in the prose of our own time until it has almost become a
vice.
The above paragraph, which is largely antithetical, shows the
limitation of this form. It is not possible long to continue this sort
of writing without wearying the reader with a sense of artificiality.
Such pleasure as the present age is willing to take in undisguised
effort in prose is largely confined to the epigram.
An epigram is a notion rounded like a snowball for throwing. Looked at
in another way, it is a thought packed for quick transportation. It is
wit or wisdom given wings; or, if it be neither, it is at least an idea
with its loins girt for running. Sometimes it is a base or worthless
reflection set in terse phrase, like a fly in amber; or a cruel
insinuation wounding like a wasp with envenomed sting. At its best it
is a jewel of price; at its worst it is a drop of subtle poison.
Here, somewhat at the risk of confusing by a variety of images, I
have tried to write a short paragraph which is practically all in the
form of epigrams. It is in turn evident that although less obviously
artificial than antithesis, epigrams are apt to lack spontaneity, no
matter how much they strive for it. It is difficult to incorporate them
into ordinary prose so that they shall seem really to be an integral
part of it. An epigram is apt to be like a shell, so complete and
individual in itself that it is hard to make it appear to be a part
of any other whole. Skillfully handled, the epigram gives crispness
and vigor to a style, but by so much the more as it is effective
if successful it is damaging if it fails. It is to be remembered,
too, that the habit of striving for any especial verbal form is a
dangerously fascinating one. It is easy to fall into the way of making
phrases for their own sake, instead of for the purpose of expressing
what one has to say. An epigram is valuable and commendable only in so
far as it serves the purpose for which it is contrived. The Greeks used
the word originally to signify a verse inscribed on a tomb, and not a
few modern epigrams are the epitaphs of thoughts killed in making them.
We are accustomed to-day to employ the word for any concise and terse
expression of thought, and to call that style epigrammatic which is
distinguished by conciseness and by brief and pregnant sentences.
Broadly speaking, so long as the writer keeps in mind that the epigram
is to aid expression, and that intention is never to be sacrificed
to form, the more of these qualities his style has the better. He
must remember, moreover, that the ear must be relieved by sentences
of varied length. The successful epigram is almost always brief, and
it must contain an element of novelty. One of its chief claims to
attention is that it puts its thought in a form which excites surprise.
It is like the German bonbon, which parts with a startling snap and
discloses a gift within. The more it has the air of being the result
of an instantaneous, happy inspiration, the more effective is it. An
epigram must seem at least to be like the poet, born and not made.
This matter of novelty concerns more than epigram. Words and phrases
become worn as surely as coins which have long passed from hand to
hand. Epithets which have been constantly repeated lose the force of
their original intent and fail to produce their first effect. The
masters of style do not hesitate now and then to coin new words with
which to serve themselves in the attempt to produce pungent effects
which old terms no longer yield. Carlyle is an extreme example of this,
and a list of the extraordinary novelties which he boldly made for his
own use would fill pages. He exposed himself to the danger of losing
the impression which he produced as soon as the words invented lost
their first novelty, and no doubt something of the diminution of the
influence of Carlyle which we have lived to see is due to this very
cause. The ordinary writer is not allowed thus to serve his need by
invention. He must be content to take words already in use, and must
display his ingenuity by contriving so to employ them that from old
terms he brings freshness of effect.
The novelty which is within the reach of all is that of originality. It
seems at first startling to speak of originality as within common reach
when we take up every day books wherein the writers show so absolute a
lack of all originality that they shake one’s very belief in original
sin. Yet remember what Flaubert said to De Maupassant: “The smallest
thing has in it something unknown. Discover it.... That is the way to
become original.” Life can never appear the same to any two human
beings, because no two look at it with the same eyes or with the same
mind. The original writer is he who sets down his own thoughts, who
shows to others what is exactly in his own brain and heart. It is not
within the power of every author thus to create profoundly fresh and
inspiring works; but it is within the reach of all to say something
which shall be at once new and individual and vital.
What is called individuality is the result of this frank and sincere
speaking of the thought which comes to the writer and as it comes to
the writer. It is needful to be on one’s guard lest sometimes instead
of being guided by sincerity and natural honesty one fall into the
trick of using particular forms of diction or construction. We are
all exposed to the danger of imitating ourselves. Having once written
a thing which by its honesty and frankness was impressive, there
is a temptation to go on repeating the same thing or to try to do
something which shall seem like it. In this way arise what are known as
mannerisms. The difference between individuality and mannerism is that
between sincerity and egotism; between personality and affectation.
Individuality in style is an honest embodying of that which makes the
writer different from any other man alive; mannerism is the sham--if
unconscious--effort to appear different. Be truthfully exact in saying
nothing but what is really felt, and individuality is as sure as
mannerism is impossible.
Read what Lowell says of Chaucer:--
Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most purely original
of poets.... He is original not in the sense that he thinks and
says what nobody ever thought or said before, and what nobody
can ever think and say again, but because he is always natural;
because, if not absolutely new, he is always delightfully fresh;
because he sets before us the world as it honestly appeared to
Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it seemed proper to certain
people that it ought to appear.
There you have the whole of it. He who is least concerned about being
original, and most engrossed in expressing precisely the thought and
the feeling which have come to him, is in the end the writer who is
most vitally and perennially fresh. Think new thoughts always if
you can; but above all do not put a thought upon paper unless you
so honestly and sincerely think it that it does not occur to you to
consider whether anybody else has or has not said this thing before.
IX
CLASSIFICATION
Thus far we have spoken of the general principles of composition, and
of qualities which are common to all attempts to express thought by
written language. There are so many ways, however, in which composition
may be employed, that for further consideration it is convenient to
divide it into classes. We have come to the place where it is well to
serve ourselves with some division of the sorts of writing, just as we
before found it well to serve ourselves by the separation of general
principles.
Classification is necessary in any study, not only for convenience
in handling, but for clearness of conception. If ideas are arranged
systematically, they not only are remembered more easily, but their
mutual relations are discovered, and their relative values more
accurately estimated. It is of importance, however, to recognize
that in all investigations classification is not an end, but a
means. He who classifies clears the way for future work, either of
his own or of others, but he does not necessarily reach anything
permanent or effective in itself. The student of botany may analyze
and tabulate all the plants in the land; but if he has not reached
out toward general truths and fundamental principles, it cannot be
said that he has learned much. He has amused himself, perhaps has had
a good deal of healthful out-of-door life, and a certain amount of
mental gymnastics,--but that is the whole of it. Classification, and
especially classification which is not original, is not the attainment
of knowledge in any high sense.
I pause to comment upon this at more length than the connection
warrants, strictly speaking, because the subject is one of so great
general importance. Everywhere in his studies the learner finds
classification set up as a ladder by means of which he may climb to
knowledge. Most students fall to counting the rungs of the ladder, to
measuring the spaces between them, to informing themselves carefully
who made it. Unless in the waste of time there is no harm in this,
if, after all, the ladder be really used, and if the learner be
clear-headed enough to realize that all this is of no more than
relative value. Classification is the means by which the mind is able
to master a subject, but it is not the subject itself. To classify
originally it is necessary to understand the relations of things,
and the investigators by whom classes are defined must of course be
thoroughly well informed in regard to the facts upon which arrangement
is based. The ordinary student is constantly in danger of accepting the
formal schedule instead of the truths which it represents; of filling
his mind with nomenclature instead of principles; of being, in a word,
satisfied with system in place of knowledge.
All essential and ultimate knowledge is natural, and all
classification is artificial. Classification is founded upon natural
facts, but it is an enumeration rather than an elucidation. It
arranges; it does not explain.
Understand that I do not undervalue classification. The student can no
more advance without it than he could climb to a roof without a ladder.
I merely wish to impress upon you the fact that in all work--and
perhaps especially in scientific work--it is of the highest importance
to keep steadily in mind that it is not the ladder but the ascent which
is of consequence; that the aim is not the schedule but the secrets of
wisdom to which it helps us.
Thus it is that it is not for any value in the distinction itself, but
solely as an expedient for our convenience in acquiring knowledge which
is of worth, that we divide the sorts of composition. We classify, as
in microscopy it is necessary to make sections for ease of examination.
Do not fail to classify; but do not fail also to remember that
nomenclature is not knowledge, that classification is not wisdom.
* * * * *
It is hardly necessary to remark how varied are the effects which
writers may endeavor to produce. One is intent simply upon giving a
clear and prosaic account of some matter; making a straightforward
appeal to the understanding, and not troubling himself to go beyond
this. A second is bent upon conveying to his readers some emotion,
overpowering or delicate, painful or joyous, as the case may be.
A third aims only to amuse; a fourth is determined to convince, to
persuade, or to overcome; and so on through the long list of objects
which are conceivable as coming within the scope of the writer’s range
of intention.
Obviously, the treatment must be varied as the effect sought alters,
and we divide compositions into classes by their most strongly marked
characteristics. Different authorities have varied the number of
divisions, and I have not felt bound to follow any of them. It seems
to me well to assume that the kinds of composition are Exposition,
Argument, Description, and Narration; and to take up their examination
in this order.
From the classification commonly received this differs in a change of
order and in the omission of Persuasion. Some writers, indeed, include
here both Criticism and Translation; but Criticism is really a species
of exposition, while Translation is whatever sort of composition its
original may happen to be. That Persuasion should so long have been
retained in the list is curious, although not so strange as might
appear from the name. Persuasion, in the strict sense of the term,
is of course not a kind of composition, but a quality of style.
An argument, an exposition, a narrative, must alike be persuasive
to succeed in winning the reader. Indeed, persuasion is a quality
essential to all art. In the sense of being that which leads others to
submit their personality to the artist, it is necessary to painter,
musician, sculptor, and architect, no less than to writer. As used
to designate a department of composition, Persuasion has been that
which addresses, which appeals to the passions directly.[3] The term
is not a happy one, since it would seem that the vocative--the mood of
address--might include denunciation, or invective, or praise, as well
as persuasion. The obvious explanation of the use of such a division of
composition seems to be that it was made to provide a place of dignity
for oratory. In the days of our forefathers the art of eloquence held
a high station, such as it is not likely to occupy soon again; and it
was evidently felt that there should be a separate department for it
in formal rhetoric. Persuasion as a division of composition seems to
have been provided for oratory, much as a sinecure is established for a
court favorite; but since platform eloquence has fallen somewhat into
obscurity, it has been realized that Exposition and Argument cover
the whole ground. If such a division were to exist still, it would be
better to call it Oratory and be done with it; but if there were to be
a fifth kind of composition, there is more ground for trespassing on
the domain of Narrative and naming it Dramatization.
As a reason for departing from the time-honored custom of putting
Description and Narrative before Exposition and Argument, I might
perhaps content myself with saying that it is being found by
instructors in whose judgment I have the highest confidence that
the new order is the better. This is in part due to the fact that
inexperienced writers naturally suppose that they can describe and
narrate without having had especial training, and it is less difficult
to detach them from bad habits of composition, if they begin with a
sort of writing in which they have not contracted faults already. To
put pupils in advanced composition first upon Description and Narration
is apt to be to expose them to the danger of repeating whatever
bad literary habits they may have, since it is in these forms of
production that they are most likely to have contracted them. Another
point of importance is that Description and Narration are so much
more attractive and easily emotional than Exposition and Argument. I
have already said that technique can be readily mastered only in an
unemotional way. The great performers upon musical instruments have
almost always been those who were trained technically while they were
still so young or so undeveloped that the emotional capabilities of
their nature were not matured. There is great danger in allowing the
emotions to be aroused while training which is merely technical is
going on. Awaken in the pupil all interest in technical perfection
which is possible; to excite his emotional interest in subject or
sentiment is dangerous, and obstructs his progress in the cultivation
of skill in form and technique. Technical facility is gained by work
not in itself inspiring, but done with the most patient exactness for
the sake of the power it gives.
Assuming, then, that it is convenient to consider composition as being
divided into the four sorts named, and that there are sufficient
reasons for taking them in the order given, we find it necessary next
to define. Making broad definitions, and leaving finer distinctions to
be considered later, we may say:--
Exposition is a statement, an explanation, or a setting forth.
Argument is the endeavor to establish the truth or falsity of an idea
or a proposition.
Description is the endeavor to present a picture.
Narration is a record of events.
If a traveler, for instance, should write of the Acropolis at Athens,
he might treat the subject in any one of several ways. If he discuss
its architectural character, its beauty, and the æsthetic feelings of
delight which this awakens, if he explain its use, or make statements
of any sort about it, he is making an Exposition; if he endeavor
to establish the truth or untruth of especial views of its use, of
theories of its age, or of any matters subject to controversy, he
passes into Argument; if he by words strives to call up in the mind
of the reader a picture of that glorious ruin, he is describing it;
while, if he tell the story of the temple, he is evidently dealing in
Narrative.
It is hardly necessary to say that these varieties of composition melt
into one another. In a work of any extent, it is generally probable
that all of them will be employed. As an engraver, cutting his block
of box-wood, uses first one tool and then another, according to the
line demanded by the picture, striving to bring out the effect which
the artist desires, so the skilled writer takes up one variety of
composition after another, employs now this and now that. It is the
old question of adapting the method to the end sought, the effort to
the effect desired. In almost any book there will be found Exposition,
Argument, Description, and Narrative, as in a single rose are sepals,
petals, stamens, and pistils. We study these separately, but always the
art of writing is one as the rose is one.
[Footnote 3: Professor Hill’s definition of Persuasion seems to me to
make it an argument which appeals to selfish prejudices or emotions.]
X
EXPOSITION
Doubtless you all remember the amazement of the “Bourgeois Gentilhomme”
of Molière when he suddenly discovered that he had been speaking prose
all his life without suspecting it. We may be in the same situation
when it first becomes clear to us that without being aware of it we
have been making expositions from the time we began first to speak. The
statements, the explanations, the opinions which we give by hundreds
every day are simply expositions in little. What we have to do now is
merely to discover if possible what are the principles which will make
the same sort of thing effective when it is carried further than in
common speech, and is put in written instead of in spoken words.
To expound is to set forth the nature, the significance, the
characteristics, and the bearing of an idea or a group of ideas.
Exposition therefore differs from Description in that it deals
directly with the meaning or intent of its subject instead of with
its appearance. A good deal which we are accustomed inexactly to call
description is really exposition. Suppose that your small boy wishes
to know how an engine works, and should say: “Please describe the
steam-engine to me.” If you insist upon taking his words literally--and
are willing to run the risk of his indignation at being willfully
misunderstood,--you will to the best of your ability picture to him
this familiarly wonderful machine. If you explain it to him, you are
not describing but expounding it; you are not making a Description but
an Exposition, in so far as these words are applied in our present
sense. The exact boundary lines of Exposition--or, for that matter,
of any sort of composition--it is impossible to draw sharply. Not
everything which claims to explain really makes clear, any more than
all which wears the air of virtue shall escape scorching in “the
everlasting bonfire.” One thing merges into another, and in the end all
composition, as has been said and repeated already, is an indivisible
whole.
The inexactness with which all terms of classification are used and
must be used in literature is illustrated by the extension of the word
“essay,” under which are grouped so many sorts of expositions. It has
become the custom to apply this name to almost any brief monograph of
leisurely or reflective character. The critical papers of Hazlitt, the
historical orgies of Macaulay, the humorous confidences of Charles
Lamb, and the argumentative tracts of Newman on theology or of Ruskin
upon social questions, are all loosely classed together as essays.
In contemporary writings, the suggestive mediæval studies of Vernon
Lee, papers by Walter Pater from which the life has been exquisitely
elaborated, the intimate revelations of nature by Richard Jefferies
or John Burroughs, the delightful word-sonatas of Stevenson, and
the criticisms of Leslie Stephen, fine and scholarly, are all given
the same convenient name. The term “essay” is not unlike that useful
contrivance known to travelers as a “hold-all,” into which may be
huddled whatever there is not room for in more dignified receptacles.
Fortunately the harm done is too small to matter. If a thing is good it
is of no great consequence what we call it.
In an age like this, when the magazine flourishes and newspapers are
thick strewn like sodden leaves in a November storm, the exposition
is naturally one of the most common and one of the most practically
useful of all forms of composition. The modern endeavor to make all men
understand everything of course renders necessary an enormous amount
of expository writing; so that the press turns out daily and hourly an
innumerable number of small essays upon all imaginable topics. We live
in an expository era. The scientific spirit demands that all knowledge
shall be set forth, often to the discouragement of more imaginative
forms of composition. This sort of work is certainly the one for which
there is to-day the most constant and urgent call. The utilitarian
would get along pretty much to his own satisfaction if no other form of
writing than Exposition had been invented; and this is a utilitarian
age.
* * * * *
Of all the qualities which we have hitherto considered, the one most
likely to tell in Exposition is Clearness. In practical work the
essential thing here is to make accurately intelligible the meaning
which the writer would convey. In all more delicate matters this is
impossible without recourse to the higher arts of literary technique;
but in general all grace of style, all persuasiveness of presentation,
all elegance of proportion and of manner, are subordinated to this
primary necessity of lucidity. If one is striving to produce permanent
literature these must not be neglected; but as far as common,
practical, workaday prose is concerned, everything else is considered
as of less importance than the conveying to the reader with sharpness
the exact significance of what the writer is endeavoring to phrase.
Two things may be briefly remarked in passing: First, that this
characteristic need of clear-cut accuracy makes especially appropriate
the taking up of Exposition at the start; and second, that this sort of
composition is of great help in intellectual growth. It is not that the
other forms of expression do not call for accuracy. There is as much
need for exactness in the imparting of fine shades of emotion suggested
by a description or by a narrative as in the statement of an opinion.
It is more easy, however, for the student to grasp the more tangible
matter than the more subtile. He more readily appreciates the process
of direct expression than that of delicate implication. It is true that
Exposition in its higher forms deals with thought and emotion; but even
there it handles them rather in a direct than in an indirect manner,
rather by statement than by suggestion.
It is not difficult to see how the practice of this sort of composition
is an aid to intellectual progress. Indeed, education is after all
largely the phrasing for ourselves a statement of the truths of life
and of the world about us. This sort of writing forces the learner to
think sharply and clearly, to realize his thoughts. Exposition leads
the student really to think instead of contenting himself with that
mental muddlement in which the mind goes around and around, playfully
like a ki
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