Part 16

_Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas..._ Is it possible, Gentlemen, that you can have read one, two, three or more of the acknowledged masterpieces of literature without having it borne in on you that they are great because they are alive, and traffic not with cold celestial certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, doubts, loves, hates, breakings of the heart; the glory and vanity of human endeavour, the transience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on which you and I hold life, the dark coast to which we inevitably steer; all that amuses or vexes, all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and women on this brief and mutable traject which yet must be home for a while, the anchorage of our hearts? For an instance:--

Here lies a most beautiful lady, Light of step and heart was she: I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country. But beauty vanishes, beauty passes, However rare, rare it be; And when I crumble who shall remember That lady of the West Country?

(Walter de la Mare.)

Or take a critic--a literary critic--such as Samuel Johnson, of whom we are used to think as of a man artificial in phrase and pedantic in judgment. He lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, he never saw literature but as a part of life, nor would allow in literature what was false to life, as he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse; could damn Milton because he hated Milton's politics; on any question of passion or prejudice could make injustice his daily food. But he could not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a phrase (however well turned) which struck him as empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifies to this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives.

Now let me carry this contention--that all Literature is personal and therefore various--into a field much exploited by the pedant, and fenced about with many notice-boards and public warnings. _'Neologisms not allowed here,' 'All persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit of originality....'_

Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying that, literature being personal, and men various--and even the "Oxford English Dictionary" being no Canonical book--man's use or defiance of the dictionary depends for its justification on nothing but his success: adding that, since it takes all kinds to make a world, or a literature, his success will probably depend on the occasion. A few months ago I found myself seated at a bump-supper next to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, suggested thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, that, the bonfire (which of course he called the 'bonner') being due at nine-thirty o'clock, there was little more than bare time left for 'langers and godders.' It cost me, who think slowly, some seconds to interpret that by 'langers' he meant 'Auld Lang Syne' and by 'godders' 'God Save the King.' I thought at the time, and still think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster, that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though not to be recommended for essays or sermons, did admirably suit the time, place, and occasion.

Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied as it is, so much must ever depend on _who_ speaks, and to _whom_, in what mood and upon what occasion; and seeing that Literature must needs take account of all manner of writers, audiences, moods, occasions; I hold it a sin against the light to put up a warning against any word that comes to us in the fair way of use and wont (as 'wire,' for instance, for a telegram), even as surely as we should warn off hybrids or deliberately pedantic impostors, such as 'antibody' and 'picture-drome'; and that, generally, it is better to err on the side of liberty than on the side of the censor: since by the manumitting of new words we infuse new blood into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing from Shakespeare's audacity) our first pride should be that it is flexible, alive, capable of responding to new demands of man's untiring quest after knowledge and experience. Not because it was an ugly thing did I denounce Jargon to you, the other day: but because it was a dead thing, leading no-whither, meaning naught. There is _wickedness_ in human speech, sometimes. You will detect it all the better for having ruled out what is _naughty_.

Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty. I came, the other day, upon this passage in Mr Frank Harris's study of 'The Man Shakespeare':--

In the last hundred years the language of Molière has grown fourfold; the slang of the studios and the gutter and the laboratory, of the engineering school and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts. French is now a superb instrument, while English is positively poorer than it was in the time of Shakespeare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle class.[1]

Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any more than over other prophecies of our national decadence. The "Oxford English Dictionary" has not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are ample enough to enfold us in seven words for every three an active man can grapple with. Yet the warning has point, and a particular point, for those who aspire to write poetry: as Francis Thompson has noted in his Essay on Shelley:--

Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try for the best word. But practically, the habit of excessive care in word-selection frequently results in loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of always taking the best word too easily becomes the habit of always taking the most ornate word, the word most removed from ordinary speech. In consequence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the precise combinations into which the pieces will be shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose prescriptive aid is invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple.... Against these it is time some banner should be raised.... It is at any rate curious to note that the literary revolution against the despotic diction of Pope seems issuing, like political revolutions, in a despotism of his own making;

and he adds a note that this is the more surprising to him because so many Victorian poets were prose-writers as well.

Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet's diction, should save him from falling into the hands of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin for its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out of our treasuries new things and old.

Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and perhaps not the most important part. So I revert to the larger question, 'What is Style? What its [Greek: to ti en einai], its essence, the law of its being?'

Now, as I sat down to write this lecture, memory evoked a scene and with the scene a chance word of boyish slang, both of which may seem to you irrelevant until, or unless, I can make you feel how they hold for me the heart of the matter.

I once happened to be standing in a corner of a ball-room when there entered the most beautiful girl these eyes have ever seen or now--since they grow dull--ever will see. It was, I believe, her first ball, and by some freak or in some premonition she wore black: and not pearls--which, I am told, maidens are wont to wear on these occasions--but one crescent of diamonds in her black hair. _Et vera incessu patuit dea._ Here, I say, was absolute beauty. It startled.

I think she was the most beautiful lady That ever was in the West Country. But beauty vanishes, beauty passes....

She died a year or two later. She may have been too beautiful to live long. I have a thought that she may also have been too good.

For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw led up and presented among others the man who was to be, for a few months, her husband: and then, as the men bowed, pencilling on their programmes, over their shoulders I saw her eyes travel to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you remember Crossjay in Meredith's "The Egoist"? It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. Promptly with a laugh, she advanced, claimed him, and swept him off into the first waltz.

When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, and I felicitated him; my remark (which I forget) being no doubt 'just the sort of banality, you know, one does come out with'--as maybe that the British Navy kept its old knack of cutting out. But he looked at me almost in tears and blurted, 'It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? It's--it's--my God, it's the _style_!'

Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, or at any rate inadequate, cry of the heart in my young seaman; as you may think it inadequate in me, and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure you (as I do) that the first and last secret of a good Style consists in thinking with the heart as well as with the head.

But let us philosophise a little. You have been told, I daresay often enough, that the business of writing demands _two_--the author and the reader. Add to this what is equally obvious, that the obligation of courtesy rests first with the author, who invites the séance, and commonly charges for it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing we have an obligation to put ourselves into the hearer's or reader's place? It is _his_ comfort, _his_ convenience, we have to consult. To _express_ ourselves is a very small part of the business: very small and almost unimportant as compared with _impressing_ ourselves: the aim of the whole process being to persuade.

All reading demands an effort. The energy, the good-will which a reader brings to the book is, and must be, partly expended in the labour of reading, marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the author means. The more difficulties, then, we authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless writing, the more we blunt the edge of his attention: so that if only in our own interest--though I had rather keep it on the ground of courtesy--we should study to anticipate his comfort.

But let me go a little deeper. You all know that a great part of Lessing's argument in his "Laoköon", on the essentials of Literature as opposed to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this--that in Pictorial Art or in Sculpture the eye sees, the mind apprehends, the whole in a moment of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that this moment of time is fixed and stationary; whereas in writing, whether in prose or in verse, we can only produce our effect by a series of successive small impressions, dripping our meaning (so to speak) into the reader's mind--with the correspondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that our picture keeps moving all the while. Now obviously this throws a greater strain on his patience whom we address. Man at the best is a narrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit of speech he can utter--as you, my hearers, can receive--only one word at a time. In writing (as my old friend Professor Minto used to say) you are as a commander filing out his battalion through a narrow gate that allows only one man at a time to pass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, has to re-form and reconstruct them. No matter how large or how involved the subject, it can be communicated only in that way. You see, then, what an obligation we owe to him of order and arrangement; and why, apart from felicities and curiosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid such stress upon order and arrangement as duties we owe to those who honour us with their attention. '_La clarté,_' says a French writer, '_est la politesse._' [Greek: Charisi kai sapheneia thue], recommends Lucian. Pay your sacrifice to the Graces, and to [Greek: sapheneia]--Clarity--first among the Graces.

What am I urging? 'That Style in writing is much the same thing as good manners in other human intercourse?' Well, and why not? At all events we have reached a point where Buffon's often-quoted saying that 'Style is the man himself' touches and coincides with William of Wykeham's old motto that 'Manners makyth Man': and before you condemn my doctrine as inadequate listen to this from Coventry Patmore, still bearing in mind that a writer's main object is to _impress_ his thought or vision upon his hearer.

'There is nothing comparable _for moral force_ to the charm of truly noble manners....'

I grant you, to be sure, that the claim to possess a Style must be conceded to many writers--Carlyle is one--who take no care to put listeners at their ease, but rely rather on native force of genius to shock and astound. Nor will I grudge them your admiration. But I do say that, as more and more you grow to value truth and the modest grace of truth, it is less and less to such writers that you will turn: and I say even more confidently that the qualities of Style we allow them are not the qualities we should seek as a norm, for they one and all offend against Art's true maxim of avoiding excess.

And this brings me to the two great _paradoxes_ of Style. For the first (1),--although Style is so curiously personal and individual, and although men are so variously built that no two in the world carry away the same impressions from a show, there is always a norm somewhere; in literature and art, as in morality. Yes, even in man's most terrific, most potent inventions--when, for example, in "Hamlet" or in "Lear" Shakespeare seems to be breaking up the solid earth under our feet--there is always some point and standard of sanity--a Kent or an Horatio--to which all enormities and passionate errors may be referred; to which the agitated mind of the spectator settles back as upon its centre of gravity, its pivot of repose.

(2) The second paradox, though it is equally true, you may find a little subtler. Yet it but applies to Art the simple truth of the Gospel, that he who would save his soul must first lose it. Though personality pervades Style and cannot be escaped, the first sin against Style as against good Manners is to obtrude or exploit personality. The very greatest work in Literature--the "Iliad," the "Odyssey," the "Purgatorio," "The Tempest," "Paradise Lost," the "Republic," "Don Quixote"--is all

Seraphically free From taint of personality.

And Flaubert, that gladiator among artists, held that, at its highest, literary art could be carried into pure science. 'I believe,' said he, 'that great art is scientific and impersonal. You should by an intellectual effort transport yourself into characters, not draw _them_ into _yourself_. That at least is the method.' On the other hand, says Goethe, 'We should endeavour to use words that correspond as closely as possible with what we feel, see, think, imagine, experience, and reason. It is an endeavour we cannot evade and must daily renew.' I call Flaubert's the better counsel, even though I have spent a part of this lecture in attempting to prove it impossible. It at least is noble, encouraging us to what is difficult. The shrewder Goethe encourages us to exploit ourselves to the top of our bent. I think Flaubert would have hit the mark if for 'impersonal' he had substituted 'disinterested.'

For--believe me, Gentlemen--so far as Handel stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, even so far stand the great masculine objective writers above all who appeal to you by parade of personality or private sentiment.

Mention of these great masculine 'objective' writers brings me to my last word: which is, 'Steep yourselves in _them_: habitually bring all to the test of _them_: for while you cannot escape the fate of all style, which is to be personal, the more of catholic manhood you inherit from those great loins the more you will assuredly beget.'

This then is Style. As technically manifested in Literature it is the power to touch with ease, grace, precision, any note in the gamut of human thought or emotion.

But essentially it resembles good manners. It comes of endeavouring to understand others, of thinking for them rather than for yourself--of thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the head. It gives rather than receives; it is nobly careless of thanks or applause, not being fed by these but rather sustained and continually refreshed by an inward loyalty to the best. Yet, like 'character' it has its altar within; to that retires for counsel, from that fetches its illumination, to ray outwards. Cultivate, Gentlemen, that habit of withdrawing to be advised by the best. So, says Fénelon, 'you will find yourself infinitely quieter, your words will be fewer and more effectual; and while you make less ado, what you do will be more profitable.'

[Footnote 1: 'An oration,' says Quintilian, 'may find room for almost any word saving a few indecent ones (_quae sunt parum verecunda_).' He adds that writers of the Old Comedy were often commended even for these: 'but it is enough for us to mind our present business--_sed nobis nostrum opus intueri sat est._']

INDEX

Abelard 203, 205, 212 Abercrombie, Lascelles 18 Addison, Joseph 124, 172 Alcuin 199, 200, 204, 205 Alfred, King 186 Aristophanes 192 Aristotle 128, 203, 227 Arnold, Matthew 35, 76, 139, 186, 202 "Arte of Rhetorique," Wilson's 118 Ascham, Roger 121, 188 Augustine 199

Bacon, Lord 6, 7, 10, 220, 231 Bagehot, Walter 216 "Ballata" 45 Barbour, John 112 Barrie, Sir James Matthew 17, 135 Bede 204 Beerbohm, Max 222 Belisarius 175 Bentham, Jeremy 97 "Beowulf" 159-165 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 45 Berners, Lord 108-110,120 Bible, The: Authorised Version 53, 97, 110, 122 et seq., 141, 143, 190 Revised Version 131-133 Blair, Wilfred 80 Blake, William 12 Boccaccio 184 Boethius 203 Bologna, University of 200-1, 206 Borneil, Giraud de 181 Boswell, James 238 Bridges, Robert 19 Brooke, the Rev. Stopford A. 159 Brougham, Ld 47, 101 Browne, Sir Thomas 10, 51, 124, 168, 232 Browning, Robert 39, 186 Buffon 245 Bunyan, John 124 Burke, Edmund 27, 28, 46, 47-52, 101 Burns, Robert 45 Butler, Arthur John 20

Caedmon 163 Cambridge 201 _et seqq._ Campion, Thomas 185, 188 Carducci, Giosué 154-5 Carlyle, Thomas 18, 103, 245 Cellini, Benvenuto 41 Cervantes 7, 25 Chadwick, Professor H. M. 163 Chair of English Literature, University Ordinance 7 Chambers, E. K. 199 Champeaux, William of 205 Chaucer, Geoffrey 10, 110-111, 163, 183, 184, 219 Chesterton, Gilbert K. 233 Chichester, Richard of 211 Cicero 28, 49 Clare, John 39 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 41, 64, 65 Conington, John 171-2 Courthope, W. J. 13, 158, 184, 199 Coverdale, Miles 124 Cowley, Abraham 185 Cowper, William 186 Crewe, Ld Chief Justice 7 Cynewulf 163

Daniel, Samuel 185, 188 Dante 77, 184 Darwin, Charles 221 Defoe, Daniel 61, 75. Dekker, Thomas 65 De La Mare, Walter 237 De Quincey, Thomas 54 Desiderius, Archbishop 199 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 28 Donne, John 102, 106, 185 Dryden, John 172, 186, 227 "Duchess of Malfy," Webster's 99 Dunbar 10

'Eliot, George' 11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 11

Falconer, William 79 Falkner, J. Meade 168-9 Fénelon 248 FitzGerald, Edward 97 Flaubert, Gustave 247 Fletcher, John 13 Fowler, W. H. and F. G. 90, 137 Freeman, Professor E. A. 158, 160, 174-179, 186 "Froissart," Berners' 108 Froude, James Anthony 78 Fuller, Thomas 206

Gibbon, Edward 124, 216 Gildas 175 Goethe 103, 247 Gray, Thomas 11, 16, 136, 157-8, 162 Green, J. R. 158 Green, T. H. 8 Gregory the Great, Pope 199 Grierson, Professor H. J. C. 185

Hamilton, Sir William 213 Hardy, Thomas 18 Harris, Frank 240 Harvey, Gabriel 185, 216-7 Heine, Heinrich 45 Herbert, George 133 "Hero and Leander," Marlowe's 98 Herodotus 44, 63 Homer 25, 64, 69, 76-78, 80, 81, 161, 190, 228 Horace 171-2 Housman, Professor A. E. 222

Ibsen 96 Irnerius 206 Isaiah 130-133

Jackson, Dr Henry 213 Johnson, Samuel 11, 37, 69, 121, 172, 238 Jonson, Ben 129, 146, 185, 219, 220 Jowett, Benjamin 29 Jusserand, J. J. 182 Juvenal, 172

Keats, John 16, 39, 186 Kempis, Thomas à 15 Ker, Professor W. P. 160, 199 Kipling, Rudyard 61

Lamb, Charles 41 Lessing 81, 227, 244 Lindsay, the Rev. T. M., D.D. 118 Lloyd George, the Right Hon. David 137-8 Lucian 6, 160, 192, 228, 245 Lucretius 193

Malory, Sir Thomas 107-110, 120 Marlowe, Christopher 98-9, 185, 220 Marvell, Andrew 185 Mason, William 157 Masson, David 12 McKenna, the Right Hon. Reginald 137-8 Meredith, George 243, 247 Milton, John 1, 10, 16, 43, 56-62, 74-76, 124, 152, 185, 195, 238 Minto, Professor William 245 Moore, Thomas 45 Morris, William 188 Mullinger, J. Bass 205, 219 Murray, Professor Gilbert 193

Nashe, Thomas 120 Newman, Cardinal 5, 30, 31-2, 115, 134, 144, 147, 234 Newton, Sir Isaac 221 Noyes, Alfred 78 "Nut-Brown Maid, The" 111

Oates, Captain 42 Origen 195, 202 Oxford 201 _et seq._

Paris, University of 200, 205 Pater, Walter 77, 222 Patmore, Coventry 245 Payne, E. J. 100-103 "Pervigilium Veneris" 151, 194 Pheidias 14 Philosophy and Poetry 1 Piers Plowman 163, 182 "Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The" 217-220 Plato 1-4, 150, 205 Pliny 152-3 Podsnap (_see_ Freeman) Poggio 205 Pope, Alexander 157, 162 Powell, F. York 159 Provençal Song 181-183 Pythagoras 208

Quintilian 29, 140, 240

Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter 9 Rashdall, Hastings 208-213 Remigius 206 Renan 1 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 23-25

Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustus 20 Saintsbury, Prof. George 55, 56, 187 Salamanca, University of 200 Scott, The Antarctic Expedition 42 Severus, Sulpicius 199 Shakespeare, William 15, 41, 50, 51-2, 97-100, 113, 129, 185, 190, 197, 219, 229, 246 Shaw, George Bernard 72 Shelley 40 Shirley, James 106 Sidgwick, Henry 232 Sidney, Sir Philip 41-2 Skeat, Walter W. 12 "Sonata" 45 South, Robert 102 Spenser, Edmund 185, 206, 217, 219 Stevenson, Robert Louis 133 Stubbs, Bishop W. 44 'Student's Handbook, The' 72-3 Swift, Jonathan 61 Swinburne, Algernon 196

Taylor, Jeremy 68-9 Tennyson, Lord 75, 186 Tertullian 195, 198, 202 Thackeray, William Makepeace 124 Thompson, Francis 241 Thomson, James 39 Toulouse, University of 208 Tyndale, William 122, 126, 127

Vacarius 206 Ventadour, Bernard de 181 "Venus and Adonis" 98-9 Verrall, Dr A. W. 7 Vigfússon, Gudbrand 159 Virgil 25, 80, 194, 200 Voltaire 192

Waller, Edmund 85 Walpole, Horatio 173 Walton, Isaak 70-1, 124, 201 Warton, Thomas 158 Watson, E. J. 155 Watson, William 16 Webster, John 99 Wendell, Barrett 97 Whistler, James McNeill 236 Whitman, Walt 53, 56 "Widsith" 60 Wolfe, General 134 Wood, Anthony 184 Wordsworth, William 11, 12, 55, 67, 68, 129, 146, 186, 204, 210 Wright, Aldis 12 Wyat, Sir Thomas 115-118, 184 Wyclif, John 124, 127

Yeats, William Butler 143 Young, Arthur 171

Cambridge: Printed by J. B. Peace, M.A., at the University Press.

End of Project Gutenberg's On the Art of Writing, by Arthur Quiller-Couch