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Title: The Handling of Words,
   and Other Studies in Literary Psychology
Author: Lee, Vernon [Paget, Violet] (1856-1935)
Date of first publication: 1923
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1923
   (first edition)
Date first posted: 10 February 2010
Date last updated: 10 February 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #478

This ebook was produced by: Delphine Lettau
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




THE HANDLING OF WORDS
AND
OTHER STUDIES IN
LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY

BY

VERNON LEE


LONDON JOHN LANE
THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED


_First Published in 1923_

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH




 TO
 THE MANY WRITERS I HAVE READ
 AND
 THE FEW READERS WHO HAVE READ ME
 LET ME GRATEFULLY DEDICATE
 THESE STUDIES IN
 WRITING AND READING




INTRODUCTION


In the course of revising these so variously dated essays and notes, I
have become aware, not only of changes of opinion which are sufficiently
corrected by each other, but likewise of omissions on important points.
Of these, according as space may allow, I shall try and make good one or
two in a concluding chapter.

As regards the rest of the subjects discussed in this volume, and which
range from the engineering of a whole narrative to the construction of
single sentences, I shall leave the Student to discover their inner,
though, as it seems to me, quite evident relationship.

Half a lifetime of additional reading and writing, and of ruminating
over what I have read and have written, has brought some general
conclusions clearer and clearer to my mind, the implicit growing
explicit. And of course, and despite vehement self-reproach, I have
fallen a victim to the lazy temptation of explaining too many effects
by too few causes. Perhaps by one cause only! Namely: the fact that
the efficacy of all writing depends not more on the Writer than on
the Reader, without whose active response, whose output of experience,
feeling and imagination, the living phenomenon, the only reality, of
Literary Art cannot take place. This fundamental fact of literary
psychology, indeed of all psychological sthetics, appears to me both so
all-important and so universally neglected that I am quite content that
the make-up of this volume out of disconnected essays and lectures,
should have resulted in the repetition thereof half a hundred times and
in its exhibition from half a dozen angles. I may be stupider than some
people, but surely not than all, and it is my experience that I have
never really grasped any new or nearly new idea until I had been shown
several different applications thereof. Which personal confession bears
out my belief that so far as concerns the things of the spirit, there is
no saying truer than Goethe's counsel:

  "Was du ererbt von deinen Vtern hast,
   Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen."

Or put in less epigrammatic form: that we must not expect to understand
what others can tell us without extracting its significance for ourselves,
and without making their ideas into our own.

So it is just as well for my alert student, besides being far more
convenient for my rather weary self, that it be left to him to put
such order as may be lacking into this bundle of random studies.

 CHIPCHASE, NORTH TYNE,
 _26th August_ 1922.




CONTENTS
                                                PAGE

       INTRODUCTION                              vii

    I. ON LITERARY CONSTRUCTION                    1

   II. ON STYLE                                   34

  III. STHETICS OF THE NOVEL                     66

   IV. THE NATURE OF THE WRITER                   73

    V. STUDIES IN LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY--

       (A) The Syntax of De Quincey              136
       (B) The Rhetoric of Landor                157
       (C) Carlyle and the Present Tense         174

   VI. THE HANDLING OF WORDS                     187

       (A) Meredith                              192
       (B) Kipling                               200
       (C) Stevenson                             213
       (D) Hardy                                 222
       (E) Henry James                           241
       (F) Maurice Hewlett                       251

  VII. "IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE"                 275

 VIII. CAN WRITING BE TAUGHT?                    287

   IX. WHAT WRITERS MIGHT LEARN                  302

    X. CONCLUSION                                314




THE HANDLING OF WORDS

I

ON LITERARY CONSTRUCTION


The craft of the Writer consists, I am convinced, in manipulating
the contents of his Reader's mind, that is to say, taken from the
technical side as distinguished from the psychologic, in construction.
Construction is not only a matter of single words or sentences, but of
whole large passages and divisions; and the material which the Writer
manipulates is not only the single impressions, single ideas and
emotions, stored up in the Reader's mind and deposited there by no act
of the Writer's: the Writer deals likewise with those very moods and
trains of thought into which the Writer, by his skilful selection of
words and sentences, has grouped the already existing single impressions,
the very moods and trains of thought which were determined by the Writer
himself.


I

We have all read Mr. Stevenson's _Catriona_. Early in that book there is
a passage by which I can illustrate my meaning. It is David Balfour's
walk to Pilrig:

    "My way led over Mouter's Hill, and through an end of a clachan on
    the braeside among fields. There was a whir of looms in it went from
    house to house; bees hummed in the gardens; the neighbours that I
    saw at the doorsteps talked in a strange tongue; and I found out
    later that this was Picardy, a village where the French weavers
    wrought for the Linen Company. Here I got a fresh direction for
    Pilrig, my destination; and a little beyond, on the wayside, came
    by a gibbet and two men hanged in chains. They were dipped in tar,
    as the manner is; the wind span them, the chains clattered, and the
    birds hung about the uncanny jumping jacks and cried."

This half-page sounds as if it were an integral part of the story, one
of the things which happened to the gallant but judicious David Balfour.
But in my opinion it is not such a portion of the story, not an episode
told for its own sake, it is qualifier of something else; in fact,
nothing but an adjective on a large scale.

Let us see. The facts of the case are these: David Balfour, after the
terrible adventures recorded in _Kidnapped_, having at last been saved
from his enemies and come into his lawful property, with a comfortable
life before him and no reason for disquietude, determines to volunteer
as a witness in favour of certain Highlanders, whom it is the highest
interest of the Government to put to death, altogether irrespective of
whether or not they happen to be guilty in the matter about which they
are accused. In order to offer this testimony in what he imagines to be
the most efficacious manner, David Balfour decides to seek an interview
with the Lord Advocate of Scotland; and he is now on his way to his
cousin of Pilrig to obtain a letter from him for that terrible head of
the law. Now if David Balfour actually has to be sent to Pilrig for the
letter of introduction to the Lord Advocate, then his walk to Pilrig is
an intrinsic portion of the story, and what happened to him on his walk
cannot be considered save as an intrinsic portion also. This would be
true enough if we were considering what actually could or must happen to
a real David Balfour in a real reality, not what Stevenson wants us to
think did happen to an imaginary David Balfour. If a real David Balfour
was destined, through the concatenation of circumstances, to walk from
Edinburgh to Pilrig by that particular road on that particular day, why,
he was destined also--and could not escape his destiny--to come to the
gibbet where, on that particular day, along that particular road, those
two malefactors were hanging in chains.

But even supposing that Stevenson had been bound, for some reason, to
make David Balfour take that particular day the particular walk which
must have brought him past that gibbet, Stevenson would still have been
perfectly free to omit all mention of his seeing that gibbet, as he
evidently omitted mentioning a thousand other things which David Balfour
must have seen and done in the course of his adventures, because the
sight of that gibbet in no way affected the course of the events which
Stevenson had decided to relate, any more than the quality of the
porridge which David had eaten that morning. And as it happens, moreover,
the very fact of David Balfour having walked that day along that road,
and of the gibbet having been there, is, as we know, nothing but a
make-believe on Stevenson's part, and so there can have been nothing
unavoidable about it. Therefore, I say that this episode, which leads to
no other episode, is not an integral part of the story, but a qualifier,
an adjective. It acts, not upon what happens to the hero, but on what is
felt by the Reader. Again, let us look into the matter. This beginning
of the story is, from the nature of the facts, rather empty of tragic
events; yet tragic events are what Stevenson wishes us to live through.
There is something humdrum in those first proceedings of David Balfour's,
which are to lead to such hairbreadth escapes. There is something not
heroic enough in a young man, however heroic his intentions, going to
ask for a letter of introduction to a Lord Advocate. But what can be
done? If adventures are invented to fill up these first chapters, these
adventures will either actually lead to something further complicating a
plot already quite as complicated as Stevenson requires; or--which is
even worse--they will come to nothing, and leave the Reader disappointed,
incredulous, less willing to attend after having wasted expectations and
sympathies. Here comes in the admirable invention of the gibbet. The
gibbet is, so to speak, the shadow of coming events cast over the smooth
earlier chapters of the book. With its grotesque and ghastly vision, it
puts the Reader in the state of mind desired: it means tragedy. "I was
pleased," goes on David Balfour, "to be so far in the still countryside;
but the shackles of the gibbet clattered in my head.... There might
David Balfour hang, and other lads pass on their errands, and think
light of him." Here the Reader is not only forcibly reminded that the
seemingly trifling errand of this boy will lead to terrible dangers; but
he is made to feel, by being told that David felt (which perhaps at that
moment David, accustomed to the eighteenth-century habit of hanging
petty thieves along the roadside, might not feel) the ghastliness of
that encounter.

And then note how this qualifier, this adjectival episode, is
itself qualified. It is embedded in impressions of peacefulness: the
hillside, the whir of looms and hum of bees, and talk of neighbours on
doorsteps; nay, Stevenson has added a note which increases the sense of
peacefulness by adding an element of unconcern, of foreignness, such as
we all find adds so much to the peaceful effect of travel, in the fact
that the village was inhabited by strangers--Frenchmen--to whom David
Balfour and the Lord Advocate and the Appin murder would never mean
anything. Had the gibbet been on the Edinburgh Grassmarket, and
surrounded by people commenting on Highland disturbances, we should
have expected some actual adventure for David Balfour; but the gibbet
there, in the fields, by this peaceful foreign settlement, merely puts
our mind in the right frame to be moved by the adventures which will
come slowly in their due course.

This is a masterpiece of constructive craft: the desired effect is
obtained without becoming involved in other effects not desired, without
any debts being made with the Reader; even as is the case of the properly
chosen single adjective, which defines the meaning of the noun in just
the desired way, without suggesting any further definition in the wrong
way.

Construction, that is to say, co-ordination. It means finding out what
is important and unimportant, what you can afford and cannot afford to
do. It means thinking out the results of every movement you set up in
the Reader's mind, how that movement will work into, help, or mar the
other movements which you have set up there already, or which you will
require to set up there in the future. For, remark, such a movement
does not die out at once. It continues and unites well or ill with its
successors, as it has united well or ill with its predecessors. You must
remember that in every kind of literary composition, from the smallest
essay to the largest novel, you are constantly introducing new _themes_,
as in a piece of music, and working all the themes into one another. A
theme may be a description, a line of argument, a whole personage; but
it always represents, on the part of the Reader, a particular kind of
intellectual acting and existing, a particular kind of mood. Now, these
moods, being concatenated in their progression, are thereby altered by
the other moods they meet; they can never be quite the same the second
time they appear as the first, nor the third as the second; they must
have been modified, and they ought to have been strengthened or made
more subtle by the company they have kept, by the things they have
elbowed, and been--however unconsciously--compared and contrasted with:
they ought to have become more satisfactory to the Reader as a result
of their stay in the Reader's own mind.

A few very simple rules might be made, so simple as to sound utterly
childish; yet how many Writers observe them? For instance:

Do not, if you want Tom to seem a villain, put a bigger villain, Dick,
by his side; but if, for instance, like Tolstoi, you want Anatole to
be the trumpery wicked Don Juan, put a grand, brilliant, intrepid Don
Juan--Dologhow--to reduce him to vulgar proportions. Do not, again,
break off in the midst of some event, unless you wish that event to
become important in the Reader's mind and to react on future events: if,
for instance, you have had to introduce a mysterious stranger, but do
not wish anything to come of his mysteriousness, be sure you strip off
his mystery as prosaically as you can, before leaving him in the
Reader's charge. And, of course, _vice versa_.

I have compared literary themes to musical ones. The novel may be
considered as a tragic symphony, opera, or oratorio, with a whole
orchestra. The essay is a little sonata, trio, sometimes a mere
little song. But even in a song, how many melodic themes, harmonic
arrangements, accents, and so forth! I could wish young Writers, if they
have any ear, to unravel the parts of a fugue, the themes of a Beethoven
sonata. By analogy, they would learn a great many things.

Leaving such learning by musical analogy alone, I have sometimes
recommended to young Writers that they should draw diagrams, or rather
_maps_, of their essays or stories. This is, I think, a very useful
practice, not only for diminishing faults of construction in the
individual story or essay, but, what is more important, for showing the
young Writer what amount of progress he is making, and to what extent he
is becoming a craftsman. Every one will probably find his own kind of
map or diagram. The one I have made use of to explain the meaning to
some of my friends is as follows: Make a stroke with your pen which
represents the first train of thought or mood, or the first group of
facts you deal with. Then make another pen-stroke to represent the
second, which shall be proportionately long or short according to the
number of words or pages occupied, and which, connected with the first
pen-stroke, as one articulation of a reed is with another, will deflect
to the right or the left according as it contains more or less new
matter; so that, if it grow insensibly from stroke number one, it
will have to be almost straight, and if it contain something utterly
disconnected, will be at right angles. Go on adding pen-strokes for
every new train of thought, or mood, or group of facts, and writing the
name along each, and be careful to indicate not merely the angle of
divergence, but the comparative length of lines. And then look at the
whole map. If the Reader's mind is to run easily along the whole story
or essay, and to perceive all through the necessary connection between
the parts, the pattern you will have traced will approximate most likely
to a circle or ellipse, the conclusion reuniting with the beginning as
in a perfect logical exposition; and the various pen-strokes, taking you
gradually round this circle or ellipse, will correspond in length very
exactly to the comparative importance or complexity of the matter to
dispose of. But in proportion as the things have been made a mess of,
the pattern will tend to the shapeless; the lines, after infinite
tortuosities, deflections to the right and to the left, immense bends,
sharp angles and bags of all sorts, will probably end in a pen-stroke
at the other end of the paper, as far off as possible from the beginning.
All this will mean that you have lacked general conception of the
subject; that the connection between what you began and what you ended
with is arbitrary or accidental, instead of being logical and organic.
It will mean that your mind has been rambling, and that you have been
making the Reader's mind ramble hopelessly, in all sorts of places you
never intended; that you have wasted his time and attention, like a
person pretending to know his way in an intricate maze of streets, but
not really knowing which turning to take. Every one of those sharp
angles has meant a lack of connection, every stroke returning back upon
itself a useless digression, every loop an unnecessary reiteration; and
the entire shapelessness of your diagram has represented the atrocious
fact that the Reader, while knowing what you have been talking about,
has not known why you have been talking about it, and is, but for a
number of random pieces of information which he must himself rearrange,
no wiser than when you began.

What will this lead to? What will it make the Reader expect? What will
it actually bring the Reader's mind to? This is the meaning of the
diagrams. For, remember, in literature all depends on what you can set
the Reader to do; if you confuse his ideas or waste his energy, you can
no longer do anything with him.


II

I mentioned just now that in a case of bad construction the single items
might be valuable, but that the Reader was obliged to rearrange them.
Such rearrangement is equivalent to rewriting the book; and, if any one
is to do that, it had better not be the Reader, surely, but rather a
more competent Writer. When the badly arranged items are themselves
good, one sometimes feels a mad desire to hand them over thus to some
one else. It is like good food badly cooked. I think I have scarcely
ever been so tormented with the wish to get a story rewritten by some
competent person, or even to rewrite it myself, as in the case of one of
the little volumes of the Pseudonym Series, a story called _A Mystery of
the Campagna_. I should like every young Writer to read it, as a perfect
model of splendid material, imaginative and emotional, of notions and
descriptions worthy of Mrime (who would have worked them into a
companion piece to the wonderful _Vnus d'Ille_), presented in such a
way as to give the minimum of interest with the maximum of fatigue. It
is a thing to make one cry merely to think of: such splendid invention,
such deep contagious feeling for the uncanny solemnity, the deathly
fascination of the country about Rome, worked up in a way which leaves
no clear impression at all, or, if any, an impression of trivial student
life in restaurants.

One of the chief defects of this unlucky little book of genius is that
a story of about a hundred pages is narrated by four or five different
persons, none of whom has any particular individuality, or any particular
reason to be telling the story at all. The result is much as if you were
to be made to hear a song in fragments, fragments helter-skelter, the
middle first and beginning last, played on different instruments. A
similar fault of construction, you will remember, makes the beginning
of one of our greatest masterpieces of passion and romance, _Wuthering
Heights_, exceedingly difficult to read. As if the step-relations and
adopted-relations in the story were not sufficiently puzzling, Emily
Bront gave the narrative to several different people, at several
different periods, people alternating what they had been told with what
they had actually witnessed. This kind of construction was a fault, if
not of Emily Bront's own time, at least of the time in which many of
the books by which she had been most impressed were written, notably
Hoffman's, from whose _Majorat_ (Rolandsitten) she borrowed much for
_Wuthering Heights_. It is historically an old fault for the same reason
which makes it a fault with beginners, namely, that it is undoubtedly
easier to narrate in the first person, or as an eye-witness; and that it
is easier to co-ordinate three or four sides of an event by boxing them
mechanically as so many stories one in the other, than to arrange the
various groups of persons and acts as in real life, and to change the
point of view of the Reader from one to the other. These mechanical
divisions also seem to give the Writer courage, like the series of ropes
which take away the fear of swimming: one thinks one might always catch
hold of one of them, but, meanwhile, one usually goes under water all
the same. I have no doubt that most of the stories, of the older
generation at least, we have all written between the ages of fifteen and
twenty were either in the autobiographical or the epistolary form; that
they had introduction set in introduction like those of Scott, that they
shifted narrator as in _Wuthering Heights_, and altogether reproduced,
in their immaturity, the forms of an immature period of novel-writing,
just as Darwinians tell us that the prehensile feet of babies reproduce
the feet of monkeys. For, odd as it is to realize, the apparently
simplest form of construction is by far the most difficult; and the
straightforward narrative of men and women's feelings and passions,
of anything save their merest outward acts, the narrative which makes
the thing pass naturally before the Reader's mind, is by far the most
difficult, as it is the most perfect. You will remember that Julie and
Clarissa are written in letters, Werther and Adolphe as confessions with
postscripts; nay, that even Homer and the _Arabian Nights_ cannot get
along save on a system of narrative within narrative; so long does it
take to get to the straightforward narrative of _Vanity Fair_ (since
even Thackeray is not always absolutely direct in the _Newcomes_), let
alone that of Tolstoi.

But a narrative may be in the third person, and may leave out all
mention of eye-witness narration, and yet be far from what I call
straightforward. Take, for instance, the form of novel adopted by
George Eliot in _Adam Bede_, _Middlemarch_, _Deronda_--in all save her
masterpiece, which has the directness of an autobiography--_The Mill on
the Floss_. This form I should characterize as that of _the novel
built up in scenes_, and it is well worth your notice because it is
more or less the typical form of the former English three-volume
novel. It represents a compromise with that difficult thing,
straightforward narrative; and the autobiographical, the epistolary, the
narration-within-narration dodges have merely been replaced by another
dodge for making things easier for the Writer and less efficacious for
the Reader, the dodge of arranging the matter as much as possible as in
a play, with narrative or analytic connecting links. By this means a
portion of the story is given with considerable efficacy; the dialogue
and gesture, so to speak, are made as striking as possible; in fact,
we get all the apparent lifelikeness of a play. I say the _apparent_
lifelikeness, because a play is in reality excessively unlifelike, owing
to the necessity of things which could not have happened together being
united in time and place, to quantities of things being said which never
could have been said nor even thought; the necessity of scenes being
protracted, rendered explicit and decisive far beyond possibility,
merely because of other scenes (if we may call them scenes), the hundred
other fragments of speech and fragments of action which really made the
particular thing happen, having to be left out. This is a necessity on
the stage because the scene cannot be changed sufficiently often, and
because you cannot let people remain for an instant without talking
either to some one else or to themselves. But this necessity, when
applied to a novel, actually mars the action; and, what is worse, alters
the conception of the action, for the form in which any story is told
inevitably reacts on the subject.

Take _Adam Bede_. The hero is supposed to be exceedingly reserved, more
than reserved, one of these strenuous natures who cannot express their
feelings even to themselves, and run away and hide in a hole whenever
they do know themselves to be feeling. But, owing to the division of
the book into scenes, and connecting links between the scenes, one
as the impression of Adam Bede perpetually _en scne_, with appropriate
background of carpenter's shop, and a chorus of village rustics; Adam
Bede always saying something or doing something, talking to his dog,
shouldering his tools, eating his breakfast, in such a way that the
dullest spectators may recognize what he is feeling and thinking. Now,
to make an inexplicit personage always explain himself is only equalled
by making an unanalytical person perpetually analyse himself; and, by
the system of scenes, by having to represent the personage walking
immersed in thoughts, hurrying along full of conflicting feelings,
this is the very impression which we get, on the contrary, about Arthur
and Hetty, whose misfortunes were certainly not due to overmuch
introspection.

Now you will mark that this division into scenes and connecting links
occurs very much less in modern French novels: in them, indeed, when a
scene is given, it is because a scene actually took place, not because a
scene was a convenient way of showing what was going on; and I think you
will all remember that in Tolstoi's great novels one scarcely has the
sense of there being any scenes at all, not more so than in real life.
Pierre's fate is not sealed in a given number of interviews with Hlne;
nor is the rupture between Anna and Wronsky--although its catastrophe
is brought about, as it must be, by a special incident--the result of
anything save imperceptible disagreements every now and then, varied
with an outbreak of jealousy. Similarly, in Tolstoi you never know how
many times Levine went to the house of Kitty's parents, nor whether
Pierre had twenty or two thousand interviews with Natacha; you only know
that it all happens as it inevitably must, and happens, as most things
in this world do, by the force of accumulated action.

There are some other questions of construction in novels connected with
this main question of the really narrative or partially dramatic form of
construction, of the directness or complication of arrangement. One of
these is the question of what I would call the _passive_ description, by
which I mean the setting up, as it were, of an elaborate landscape, or
other background, before the characters are brought on the stage. The
expression I have just used, "brought on the stage," shows you that I
connect this particular mode of proceeding with the novel in scenes. And
it is easy to understand that, once the Writer allows himself to think
of any event happening as it would on the stage, he will also wish
to prepare a suitable background, and, moreover, most often a chorus
and set of supernumeraries; a background which, in the reality, the
principal characters would perhaps not be conscious of, and a chorus
which, also in the reality, would very probably not contribute in the
least to the action. Another drawback, by the way, of the construction
in scenes and connecting links is, that persons have to be invented to
elicit the manifestation of the principal personage's qualities: you
have to invent episodes to show the good heart of the heroine, the
valour of the hero, the pedantry of the guardian, etc., and meanwhile
the real action stops; or, what is much worse, the real action is most
unnaturally complicated by such side business, which is merely intended
to give the Reader information that he either need not have at all,
or ought to get in some more direct way. Note that there is all the
difference in the world between an episode like that of the gallows on
the road to Pilrig, which is intended to qualify the whole story by
inducing a particular frame of mind in the Reader, and an episode like
that of Dorothea (in _Middlemarch_) sharing her jewels with her sister
on the very afternoon of Mr. Casaubon's first appearance, and which is
merely intended to give the Reader necessary information about Dorothea;
information which might have been quite simply conveyed by saying,
whenever it was necessary, "Now Dorothea happened to be a very ascetic
person, with a childishly deliberate aversion to the vanities." This
second plan would have connected Dorothea's asceticism with whatever
feelings and acts really sprang from it; while the first plan merely
gives you a feeling of too many things happening in one day, and of
Mr. Casaubon appearing, not simply as a mere new visitor, but as the
destined husband of Dorothea. For, remember that the Reader tends to
attribute to the personages of a book whatever feelings you set up in
him, so that, if you make the Reader feel that Casaubon is going to be
the bridegroom, you also, in a degree, make Dorothea feel that she is to
be the bride. And that, even for Dorothea, is rather precipitate.

Another question of construction is the one I should call the question
of _retrospects_. The retrospect is a frequent device for dashing into
the action at once, and putting off the evil day of explaining why
people are doing and feeling in the particular way in which we find
them, on the rising of the curtain. This, again, is a dramatic device,
being indeed nothing but the narrative to or by the confidants which
inevitably takes place in the third or fourth scene of the first act of
a French tragedy, with the author in his own costume taking the place
of the nurse, bosom friend, captain of the guard, etc. The use of this
retrospect, of this sort of folding back of the narrative, and the use
of a number of smaller artifices for foreshortening the narrative, seems
to me not at all disagreeable in the case of the short story. The short
story is necessarily much more artificial than the big novel, owing to
its very shortness, owing to the initial unnaturalness of having isolated
one single action or episode from the hundred others influencing it,
and to the unnaturalness of having, so to speak, reduced everybody to
be an orphan, or a childless widow or widower, for the sake of greater
brevity. And the short story, being most often thus artificially pruned
and isolated, being in a measure the artificially selected expression of
a given situation, something more like a poem or little play, may even
actually gain by the discreet display of well-carried-out artifices.
While, so far as I can see, the big novel never does.

There is yet another constructive question about the novel--the most
important question of all--whose existence the lay mind probably does
not even suspect, but which, I am sure, exercises more than any other
the mind of any one who has attempted to write a novel; even as the
layman, contemplating a picture, is apt never to guess how much thought
has been given to determining the place where the spectator is supposed
to see from, whether from above, below, from the right or the left, and
in what perspective, consequently, the various painted figures are to
appear. This supreme constructive question in the novel is exactly
analogous to that question in painting; and in describing the choice by
the painter of the point of view, I have described also that most subtle
choice of the literary craftsman: choice of the point of view whence
the personages and action of a novel are to be seen. For you can see a
person, or an act, in one of several ways, and connected with several
other persons or acts. You can see the person from no particular body's
point of view, or from the point of view of one of the other persons,
or from the point of view of the analytical, judicious author. Thus,
Casaubon may be seen from Dorothea's point of view, from his own point
of view, from Ladislaw's point of view, or from the point of view of
George Eliot; or he may be merely made to talk and act without any
explanation of why he is so talking and acting; and that is what I call
nobody's point of view. Stories of adventure, in which the mere incident
is what interests, without reference to the psychological changes
producing or produced by that incident, are usually written from
nobody's point of view. Most sensational books and books for children;
much of Wilkie Collins, even when there is a sequence of narrative as in
the _Moonstone_, is virtually written from nobody's point of view; and
so are the whole of the old Norse sagas, the greater part of Homer and
the _Decameron_, and the whole of _Cinderella_ and _Jack the Giant
Killer_. We moderns, who are weary of psychology--for poor psychology is
indeed a weariness--often find the lack of point of view as refreshing
as plain water compared with wine, or tea, or syrup. But once you get
a psychological interest, once you want to know, not merely _what_ the
people did or said, but what they _thought_ or _felt_, the point of view
becomes inevitable, for acts and words then come to exist only with
reference to thoughts and feelings, and the question arises, Whose
thoughts or feelings?

This is a case of construction, of craft. But it is a case where
construction is most often determined by intuition, and where craft
comes to be merged in feeling. For, after having tried to separate the
teachable part of writing from the unteachable, we have come at last
to one of the thousand places--for there are similar places in every
question, whether of choice of single words or of construction of whole
books--where the teachable and the unteachable unite, where craft itself
becomes but the expression of genius. So, instead of trying to settle
what points of view are best, and how they can best be alternated
or united, I will now state a few thoughts of mine about that which
settles all questions of points of view, and alone can settle them
satisfactorily--the different kinds of genius of the novelist.


III

I incline to believe that the characters in a novel which seem to us
particularly vital are those which to all appearance have never been
previously analysed or rationally understood by the author, but, on
the contrary, those which, connected always by a similar emotional
atmosphere, have come to him as realities; realities emotionally borne
in upon his innermost sense.

Some day mental science may perhaps explain by the operation of stored-up
impressions, of obscure hereditary potentialities, and all the mysteries
of the subconsciousness, the extraordinary phenomenon of a creature being
apparently invaded from within by the personality of another creature,
of another creature to all intents and purposes imaginary. The mystery
is evidently connected, if not identical, with the mysterious
conception--not reasoned out, but merely felt, by a great actor of
another man's movements, tones of voice, states of feeling. In this
case, as in all other matters of artistic activity, we have all of us,
if we are susceptible in that particular branch of art (otherwise
we should not be thus susceptible) a rudiment of the faculty whose
exceptional development constitutes the artist. And thus, from our own
very trifling experience, we can, perhaps, not explain what happens to
the great novelist in the act of creation of his great characters, but
guess, without any explanation, at what is happening in him. For, in
the same way that we all of us, however rudimentally, possess a scrap
in ourselves of the faculty which makes the actor; so also we mostly
possess in ourselves, I think, a scrap of what makes the novelist; if we
did not, neither the actor nor the novelist would find any response in
us. Let me pursue this. We all possess, to a certain small degree, the
very mysterious faculty of imitating, without any act of conscious
analysis, the gestures, facial expression, and tone of voice of other
people; nay, more, of other people in situations in which we have never
seen them. We feel that they move, look, sound like that; we feel that,
under given conditions, they would necessarily move, look, and sound
like that. Why they should do so, or why we should feel that they do so,
we have no notion whatever. Apparently because for that moment and to
that extent we _are_ those people: they have impressed us somehow, so
forcibly, at some time or other, they or those like them, that a piece
of them, a pattern of them, a word (one might think) of this particular
vital spell, the spell which sums up their mode of being, has remained
sticking in us, and is there become operative. I have to talk in
allegories, in formul which savour of cabalistic mysticism; for I am
not trying to explain, but merely to recall your own experiences; and I
am sure you will recognize that these very mysterious things do happen
constantly to all of us.

Now, in the same way that we all feel, every now and then, that the
gestures and expressions and tones of voice which we assume are those of
other people and of other people in other circumstances; so likewise do
we all of us occasionally feel that certain ways of facing life, certain
reactions to life's various contingencies--certain acts, answers,
feelings, passions--are the acts, answers, feelings, passions, the
reactions to life's contingencies of persons not ourselves. We say,
under the circumstances, _I_ should do or say so and so, but Tom, or
Dick, or Harry will do or say such another thing. The matter would
be quite simple if we had seen Tom, Dick, or Harry in exactly similar
circumstances; we should be merely repeating what had already happened,
and our forecast would be no real forecast, but a recollection. Now the
point is, that we have _not_ seen Tom, Dick, or Harry doing or saying in
the past any of what we thus attribute to him in the future. The matter
would also be very simple if we attained to this certainty about Tom,
Dick, or Harry's sayings and doings by a process of conscious reasoning.
But we have not gone through any conscious reasoning; indeed, if some
incredulous person challenges us to account by analysis for our
conviction, we are most often unable to answer; we are occasionally even
absolutely worsted in argument. We have to admit that we do not know why
we think so, nay, that there is every reason to think the contrary;
and yet there, down in our heart of hearts, remains a very strong
conviction, a conviction like that of our own existence, that Tom, Dick,
or Harry would, or rather will, or rather--for it comes to that--_does_
say or do that particular thing. If subsequently Tom, Dick, or Harry is
so perverse as not to say or do it, that, oddly enough, does not always
obliterate the impression of our having experienced that he _did_ say or
do it, an impression intimate, warm, unanalytical, like our impressions
of having done or said certain things ourselves. The discrepancy between
what we felt sure must happen and what actually did happen is, I think,
due to the fact that there are two persons existing under the same name,
but both existing equally--Tom, Dick, or Harry as felt by himself, and
Tom, Dick, or Harry as felt by us; and although the conduct of these two
persons may not have happened to coincide, the conduct of each has been
perfectly organic, inevitable with reference to his nature. I suppose it
is because we add to our experience, fragmentary as it needs must be, of
other folk, the vitality, the unity of life, which is in ourselves. I
suppose that, every now and then, whenever this particular thing I am
speaking of happens, we have been tremendously impressed by something
in another person--emotionally impressed, not intellectually, mind; and
that the emotion, whether of delight or annoyance or amusement, which
the person has caused in us, in some way grafts a portion of that person
into our own life, into the emotions which constitute our life; and that
thus our experience of the person, and our own increasing experience of
ourselves, are united, and the person who is not ourselves comes to
live, somehow, for our consciousness, with the same reality, the same
intimate warmth, that we do.

I hazard this explanation, at best an altogether superficial one, not
because I want it accepted as a necessary premiss to an argument of
mine, but because it may bring home what I require to make very
clear--namely, the absolutely sympathetic, unanalytic, subjective
creation of characters by some novelists as opposed to the rational,
analytic, objective creation of characters by other novelists; because I
require to distinguish between the personage who has been borne in upon
the novelist's intimate sense, and the personage who has been built up
out of fragments of fact by the novelist's intelligent calculation.
Vasari, talking of the Farnesina Palace, said that it was not "built,
but really born,"--_non murato ma veramente nato_. Well, some personages
in novels are built up, and very well built up; and some--some
personages, but how few!--are really _born_.

Such personages as are thus not built up, but _born_, seem always to
have been born (and my theory of their coming into existence is founded
on this) of some strong feeling on the part of their author. Sometimes
it is a violent repulsion--the strongest kind of repulsion, the organic
repulsion of incompatible temperaments, which makes it impossible, for
all his virtues, to like our particular Dr. Fell; the reason why, we
cannot tell. Our whole nature tingles with the discomfort which the
creature causes in us. Such characters--I take them at random--are (for
myself at least) Tolstoi's Monsieur Karnine and Henry James's Olive
Chancellor. But the greater number, as we might expect, of these
really _born_ creatures of unreality are born of love--of the deep,
unreasoning, permeating satisfaction, the unceasing, ramifying delight
in strength and audacity; the unceasing, ramifying comfort in kindliness;
the unceasing, ramifying pity towards weakness; born of the emotion
which distinguishes the presence of all such as are, by the necessity of
our individual nature and theirs, inevitably, deeply, undyingly beloved.
These personages may not happen to be lovable, or even tolerable, to the
individual Reader--the Reader may thoroughly detest them. But he cannot
be indifferent to them; for, born of the Writer's real feeling, of the
strongest of real feelings, the love of suitable temperaments, they
are real, and awaken only real feeling. Such personages--we all know
them!--such personages are, for instance, Colonel Newcome, Ethel
Newcome; Tolstoi's Natacha, Levine, Anna, Pierre; Stendhal's immortal
Duchess and Mme de Rnal; and those two imperfect creatures, pardoned
because so greatly beloved, Tom Jones and Manon Lescaut. Their
power--the power of these creatures born of emotion, of affinity, or
repulsion--is marvellous and transcendent. It is such that even a lapse
into impossibility--though that rarely comes, of course--is overlooked.
The life in the creatures is such that when we are told of their doing
perfectly incredible things--things we cannot believe that, being what
they were, they could have done--they yet remain alive, even as real
people remain alive for our feelings when we are assured that they have
done things which utterly upset our conception of them. Look, for
instance, at Mr. James's Olive Chancellor. It is inconceivable that
she should have ever done the very thing on which the whole book
rests--taken up with such a being as Verena. Yet she lives. Why? Because
the author has realized in her the kind of temperament, the mode of
feeling and being most organically detestable to him in all womankind.
Look again at Meredith's adorable Diana. She could not have sold the
secret, being what she was. Well, does she fall to the ground? Not a
bit. She remains and triumphs, because she triumphed over the heart of
her author. There is the other class of personage--among whom are most
of the personages of every novel, most of the companions of those not
built up, but born; and among whom, I think, are all the characters
of some of those novelists whom the world accounts as the greatest
philosophers of the human heart--all the characters, save Maggie and
Tom, of George Eliot; all, I suspect, of the characters of Balzac.

Such are the two great categories into which all novelists may, I think,
be divided, the synthetic and the analytic, those who feel and those who
reason. According as he belongs to one category or the other, the
novelist will make that difficult choice about points of view. The
synthetic novelist, the one who does not study his personages, but
_lives_ them, is able to shift the point of view with incredible
frequency and rapidity, like Tolstoi, who in his two great novels really
_is_ each of the principal persons turn about; so much so, that at first
one might almost think there was no point of view at all. The analytic
novelist, on the contrary, the novelist who does not _live_ his
personages, but studies them, will be able to see his personages only
from his own point of view, telling one what they are (or what he
imagines they are), not what they feel inside themselves; and, at most,
putting himself at the point of view of one personage or two, all the
rest being given from the novelist's point of view; as in the case of
George Eliot, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola, whose characters are not so
much living and suffering and changing creatures, as illustrations of
theories of life in general, or of the life of certain classes and
temperaments.

It is often said that there are many more wrong ways of doing a thing
than right ones. I do not think this applies to the novel, or perhaps to
any work of art. There are a great number of possible sorts of excellent
novels, all very different from one another, and appealing to different
classes of minds. There is the purely human novel of Thackeray, and
particularly of Tolstoi--human and absolutely living; and the analytic
and autobiographical novel of George Eliot, born, as regards its
construction, of the memoir. There is the analytic, sociological novel
of Balzac, studying the modes of life of whole classes of people. There
is the novel of Zola, apparently aiming at the same thing as that of
Balzac, but in reality, and for all its realistic programme, using the
human crowd, the great social and commercial mechanisms invented by
mankind--the shop, the mine, the bourgeois house, the Stock Exchange--as
so much matter for passionate lyrism, just as Victor Hugo had used the
sea and the cathedral. There is the decorative novel--the fantastic idyl
of rural life or of distant lands--of Hardy and Loti; and many more
sorts. There is an immense variety in good work; it appeals to so many
sides of the many-sided human creature, since it always, inasmuch as it
is good, appeals successfully. In bad work there is no such variety. In
fact, the more one looks at it, the more one is struck at its family
resemblance, and the small number of headings under which it can be
catalogued. In examining it, one finds, however superficially veiled,
everlastingly the same old, old failings: inefficacious use of words,
scattered, illogical composition, lack of adaptation of form or thought;
in other words, bad construction, waste, wear and tear of the Reader's
attention; incapacity of manipulating his mind; the craft of writing
absent or insufficient. But that is not all. In this exceedingly
monotonous thing, poor work (as monotonous as good work is rich and
many-sided), we find another fatal element of sameness: lack of the
particular emotional sensitiveness which, just as visual sensitiveness
makes the painter, makes the Writer.


IV

For writing--I return to my original theory, one-sided, perhaps, but
certainly also true in great part--is the art which gives us the
emotional essence of the world and of life; which gives us the moods
awakened by all that is and can happen, material and spiritual, human
and natural, distilled to the highest and most exquisite potency in the
peculiar organism called the Writer. As the painter says: "Look, here is
all that is most interesting and delightful and vital, all that concerns
you most in the visible aspect of things, whence I have extracted it for
your benefit"; so the Writer on his side says: "Read; here is all that
is most interesting and delightful and vital in the moods and thoughts
awakened by all things; here is the quintessence of experience and
emotion; I have extracted it from the world and can transfer it to your
mind." Hence the teachable portion of the art of writing is totally
useless without that which can neither be taught nor learned--the
possession of something valuable, something vital, something essential,
to say.

We all of us possess, as I have remarked before, a tiny sample of the
quality whose abundance constitutes the special artist; we have some of
the quality of the philosopher, the painter, the musician, as we have
some of the quality of the hero; otherwise, philosophy, painting, music,
and heroism would never appeal to us. Similarly, and by the same proof,
we have all in us a little of the sensitiveness of the Writer. There
is no one so dull or so inarticulate as never in his or her life--say,
under the stress of some terrible calamity--to have said or written some
word which was memorable; not to be forgotten by him who read or heard
it: in such moments we have all had the power of saying, because
apparently we have had something to say; in that tremendous momentary
heightening of all our perceptions we have attained to the Writer's
faculty of feeling and expressing the essence of things. But such
moments are rare; and the small fragments of literary or artistic
faculty which we all are born with, or those are born with to whom
literature and art are not mere dust and ashes, can be increased and
made more efficient only to a limited degree. What we really have in
our power is either to waste them in cumbering the world with work
which will give no one any pleasure; or to put them to the utmost profit
in giving us the highest degree of delight from the work of those who
are specially endowed. Let us learn what good writing is in order to
become the best possible Readers.




II

ON STYLE


I

I must begin by saying that what I am about to attempt will be, at best,
a very partial account of the great thing we mean by Writing. I shall
have to omit a good many sides of the subject; and a good many other
sides, which certainly must exist, I do not probably even suspect of
existing. In intellectual vision, as in physical, the possible points of
view are several; and according to which of these points of view we
make our own, we shall see the subject in one of a variety of possible
arrangements of perspective: the central point, whence all radiates or
whither all converges, will shift, even as the apparent centre of a
scene seen now from one hill, now from another; lines will connect or
not connect, and certain tracts will occupy a greater or smaller portion
of the visual field, quite irrespective of their absolute proportions.
Hence, according to the point of view, all relative importance varies,
and items are omitted, telescoped, enlarged, or made conspicuous. As
regards the present case, I had better say at once that the point of
view from which, as a matter of individual preference perhaps, I look
upon the subject of Writing, is the one which would be roughly defined
as psychological. What interests me, what I have thought about, are
the relations of the Writer and the Reader. All literary problems, all
questions of form, logic, syntax, prosody, even of habit and tradition,
appear to me to depend upon the question of Expression and Impression;
and Expression and Impression mean merely the Writer and the Reader. I
conceive that literature, whenever it is a free art and not merely a
useful process, is the art of evoking in the Reader images and feelings
similar to those which outer circumstances have evoked and inner
peculiarities have brought forward in the Writer. I conceive the actual
book or poem or essay to be but a portion of the complete work of
literary art, whose completion depends upon the response of the Reader
to the suggestions of the Writer; I conceive therefore--but I had better
not forestall the conclusions which are beginning to force themselves
upon me about the finality of the written thing. Just now I will merely
sum up, for the easier following of what must necessarily be disjointed
remarks, that I conceive Writing to be, spiritually: the art of high and
delightful perception of life by the Writer; and technically: the craft
of manipulating the contents of the Reader's mind. Hence I consider
Writing as, in very special sense, an emotional art.

In a totally different sense from the visual arts, and even music,
Writing is an art of emotion, because whereas every art aims at
awakening its own specific emotion of pleasure, and even occasionally
subordinates everything to the awakening of some other kind of emotion
besides that, Writing (inasmuch as a free art, and not a mere mechanism
for transferring facts or theories) also employs emotion as the actual
material for producing more emotion. The Writer, in so far as an artist,
does not aim at producing either a complete picture or a convincing
syllogism; he does not try to reproduce things either in their relations
in space, or their relation in time, or, save when he now ceases to be
an artist and becomes a scientific worker, in their relations of cause
and effect. The relations between things which he feels impelled to
register, the relations which he desires to transfer from his own
consciousness to his Readers, are the relations which we call a _frame
of mind_, a _mood_, an _emotion_. This frame of mind is produced in
himself by a great many items--sights, sounds, words, gestures, and his
own vague conditions of being. But--and here we come to an important
distinction between Writing and the visual arts, it is not produced by
the _whole of anything_. These items come in contact with the Writer
only at limited points; their whole import is not needed, or at all
events is not felt to be operative. His consciousness carries, so to
speak, only fragments on its surface, instead of the complete visions
of the painter or sculptor; and fragments, moreover, quite heterogeneous,
called up by all the senses we know of, and often by more senses than
we can account for. But these fragments contain the active essence, the
taste, perfume, _timbre_, the something provocative of the mood. And it
is among these fragments that he selects when he wishes to pass on his
mood to others, or to preserve it for himself. Therefore, while Hegel
said that all art tends to the condition of music, we might say, more
truly, that all Writing, in the highest artistic sense, tends to the
condition of the Lyric.


II

This great emotional art of Writing, emotional in its aims and in its
means, can be divided, like every other art, into two parts, one which
cannot be taught, and one which can. You cannot teach the Writer to
_feel life_ in such a manner as to make it desirable that his feelings
be communicated to others; but you can teach the Writer to communicate
such feelings as he may already have, worthy or not of communication, by
manipulating the contents of the Reader's mind. In order to make this
distinction as clear as possible, let us consider the two totally
different meanings in which we are accustomed to use the word _Style_.

The first sense in which this word is used, for instance in the famous
saying, "_Le style, c'est l'homme_," relates to the unteachable portion
of the art of Writing. Style in this sense means, not a method of
presenting the Writer's ideas to the Reader, but the quality of the
Writer's ideas, and the manner in which they present themselves to the
Writer; a quality and a manner which can be mimicked as we mimic a man's
gait, disposition, and temper, but cannot be taught any more than we
can teach a man to have such or such relations of arms and legs, liver,
heart, and brain. It is, in fact, so much of the man's individual relation
with the universe at large as can by any possibility be conveyed in
words, for there remain the other portions of those relations which
require for their conveying colours and shapes and sounds; moreover,
others which no human being can convey to another, and which remain
pleasurable, painful, or of subdued, vague, mixed quality, locked up,
like his vitality, within himself.

It is, perhaps, only in attempting to analyse style according to its
first meaning, that we learn the extraordinary differences which exist
in man's power and manner of perceiving, of feeling, one might almost
say, of living. These differences sometimes group individuals, however
unlike, into men of the same race, or the same time, like the tendency
to see all things as abstractions, which tempt one to think that the
men of the eighteenth century really wrote about words picked out of
Johnson's Dictionary, not about the shining, coloured, sounding, hot,
cold, bitter, sweet things which must have touched and smitten their
senses; or again, that orderly vision of detail, dab of colour next to
dab of colour, nothing unseen or misty, which distinguishes the French
from the English, and connects men so different as Hugo, Flaubert, Zola,
and Gautier, and which, judged by the Anglo-Saxon, sometimes almost
amounts to visual hypersthesia.

The difference between individuals is more subtle: they may construct
their sentences much in the same way: but their nature is playing each
a different sort of game with the world without. Some men, like Pater,
seem to pass as in trance through the steps of an argument and awake
only at its conclusions; others, like Herbert Spencer, are incapable of
raising their feet so as to clear a single step. Pater seems to perceive
Nature in definite moments and pictures only at rare intervals; out
of a mist there arises a vision, exquisite, but reduced to the bare
essentials, all else blotted away. Pater stands half-way to Stevenson in
the tendency to note rather the emotion caused by an object in himself
than to reproduce the object and trust to its reproducing its impression.
Stevenson tells you what he feels, and his feeling awakens a vision
in you. Another writer, Mary Robinson, in her wonderful little poem
"Stars," for instance, would give you the starry heaven, the depth of
the night, the outline of the trees, the sound of the insects and
breeze, where Stevenson, in an immortal passage (in the _Cvennes_),
sums up the emotions, the suggestions which that night had awakened.
Some men see objects by their movement or the movement they produce in
us; others merely by their visible qualities. There are men who, with
the utmost psychology and the subtlest connections of moods, are yet,
like Browning, far more objective than subjective. Others, like
Wordsworth, tell us little of the Nature they are for ever contemplating,
save the supreme quality of this contemplation. Such differences ramify
in the minutest distinctions: the kind of emotion, the combination of
colour, the effects of light which the man perceives first, those which
he perceives second; how his eye or his soul glances heedlessly over a
foreground, or leaves in vagueness a distant object; what among the many
things he sees and feels, among the very few with which he must strain
his Reader's unwilling attention and sympathy, he rejects; and what he
retains. All these differences, if the man has command over words, his
words will reveal; and that revelation of a peculiar manner of being,
through a peculiar manner of writing, is the heaven-born, unteachable
portion of the art of writing: _Poeta nascitur._

The second sense in which we ordinarily speak of style refers to the
portion of the art of Writing which _can_, to some small extent, be
taught; it is not the quality of the Writer's ideas, but the method of
presenting those ideas to the Reader. It means such a manner of dividing
and arranging a subject, of selecting words, as will convey the meaning
of the Writer to the Reader with the least possible difference between
the effect produced and that intended, and also with the least possible
wear and tear of the Reader's capacity and goodwill.

To this great craft (for it is a craft, that is to say, a teachable
practice explicable by rational, scientific reasons), belongs infinitely
more subtlety than one might guess: it is the triumph of practical good
sense, and self-criticism. It is based upon the psychological fact that,
to a greater extent than in other arts, the literary work of art is
dependent on two persons, the one who speaks and the one who listens,
the one who explains and the one who understands, the Writer and the
Reader. And this resolves itself into the still more fundamental one,
that the words which are the Writer's materials for expression are but
the symbol of the ideas already existing in the mind of the Reader;
and that, in reality, the Reader's mind is the Writer's palette.[1]
The Writer wishes the Reader to realize so far as possible the same
thoughts, emotions, and impressions as himself. To do this he must, as
it were, drive the Reader to a certain goal along a certain road of
his choice; and the Reader is perpetually on the point of stopping, of
turning round, or of going off at a wrong turning, let alone his yawing
from side to side with intolerable loss of time and effort; therefore,
like a horse, he has to be always kept awake, and kept extra awake
whenever any new turn is coming, so that much of the craft of writing
consists in preventing the Reader from anticipating wrongly on the sense
of the Writer, going off on details in wrong directions, lagging behind
or getting lost in a maze of streets. Few persons realize that the
Writer has not only to make his Reader think or feel the right thing,
but also to prevent his perpetually thinking or feeling the wrong one;
for stupidity manifests itself most frequently in laying hold of the
wrong portion of a page or a sentence, just as inattention shows itself
worst in perceiving only one word isolated and in straggling off after
the unimportant, so that the important can never be overtaken. Nor is it
necessary even to suppose either stupidity or inattention. People catch
naturally at what is most familiar to them, as a horse turns naturally
down the streets he knows; and considerable attention on the part of the
literary coachman is required to forestall such effects of habit. So the
Reader must be perpetually forestalled, perpetually kept in the right
path, perpetually kept awake. This is the teachable portion of the art
of writing; this is style as _a craft_; and about this it is, mainly,
that I wish at this moment to talk.

 1: This and other similes occur over and over again in these essays
    and lectures. I let them stand because I want these useful
    formul learned by heart.


III

I believe that all such portion of the literary art, prose or verse, as
does not depend upon the special mode of seeing and living and being of
the individual Writer, but is, on the contrary, susceptible of becoming
the common property of all gifted persons, a thing which can be taught
by explanation and example, improved by practice, and stored up by
tradition--that all _literary craft_ can be summed up under the heading
_Construction_. Now this intellectual construction, which constitutes
the teachable portion of literature, even like the physical construction
of the builder in stone and brick, and whether the object be a single
row of bricks, or an arch or a whole cathedral, will be satisfactory
just in proportion as the craftsman realizes the how and why of carrying
and pushing and pulling in general, and the specific nature of the
materials he is employing in particular. It is a question of mere
common sense; of that common sense which when it acts rapidly and almost
unconsciously we call intuition; and, when it deals unexpectedly with
new, unthought-of combinations, we sometimes call genius.

The material with which the Writer constructs, out of which he builds
the image of his own feelings and thoughts, must be regarded in two
ways--a more external and practical way, and a more intimate and
essential one. The Writer's materials are _words_, and those groupings,
larger and smaller, of words which we all call sentences, paragraphs,
chapters, and also other groupings such as parenthetical passages,
explanations, retrospects, and so forth. The Writer's materials are
words, and it is by arranging these that he copies, so to speak, his
own feelings and ideas. But these words, you must remember, are merely
_signals_ which call up the various items--visual, audible, tactile,
emotional, and of a hundred different other sorts--which have been
deposited by chance in the mind of the Reader. The words are what the
Writer manipulates in the first instance, as the pianist manipulates in
the first instance the keys of his instrument. But behind the keyboard
of the piano is an arrangement of hammers and strings; and behind the
words are the contents of the Reader's memory; and what makes the
melody, the harmony, is the vibration of the strings, the awakening of
the impressions in the consciousness. The Writer is really playing upon
the contents of the Reader's mind, as the pianist, although his fingers
touch only the keyboard, is really playing on the strings. And the
response to the manipulation is due, in both cases, to the quality
of what is at first not visible: the Reader's potential images and
emotions, the string which can be made to vibrate.

The efficacy of any word or class of words depends upon the particular
nature and experience of the individual reader or class of Reader. It is
evident, for instance, that a man born blind will not respond to words
intended to awaken visual images; and that a man in possession of his
sight, but employing it only so far as indispensable for his convenience,
will perceive the efficacy of visual nouns and adjectives only in a
negative way. Moreover, the experiences of each individual Reader will
have given some kinds of stored-up impressions a greater tendency to
reappear in his mind than others; we all know how different people will
single out different passages of the same book. A soldier, for instance,
will be more impressed by those words and sentences in a story by Mr.
Kipling which evoke, or can evoke, images and feelings connected with
barrack life; while a painter, no doubt, will scarcely notice those
words and sentences, but will feel very keenly the passages, the
adjectives and metaphors evoking aspects of sky and water and moving
outlines of figures. Words will be efficacious for various reasons:
chiefly their familiarity on the one hand, and their unfamiliarity on
the other. A word which is very frequently employed and in a very great
variety of circumstances, will tend to become very wide in meaning and
very _massive_, as psychologists express it, in the kind of feeling it
awakens; each successive use of the word, implying, as it does, a state
of mind, a way of thinking or feeling, leaves clinging to that word
something of that state of mind, of that way of thinking and feeling. In
this way the word becomes something like a composite photograph: through
the accumulation of different meanings which have been connected it
will enlarge its general meaning, and enlarge also, to the extent of
sometimes obliterating all special quality, the feeling attached to it.
Think of such a word as _Sea_. It awakens in our mind an incredible
number of possible visual, audible, sensible, and emotional impressions:
wide, deep, wet, green, blue, briny, stormy, serene, a thing to swim or
drown in, connecting or severing countries; moreover, a word which
may awaken in our mind, because it has been accompanied with so many
different ones, feelings of gladness or terror or sorrow. Thus, the
word _Sea_ is one of those which suggest most, but also most confusedly;
and it is a word, also, which we probably none of us hear without a
degree of emotion, more emotion than, say, a word like _Bay_ or _Gulf_,
but an emotion so compounded of different emotions as to be quite
unclassifiable, and perceptible only as a very vague, general excitement.
These images and states of mind, which a word brings up because they have
accompanied it, are what I should wish every Writer to analyse as a
deliberate exercise, unless he is already extremely aware of their
peculiarities; and those are what I mean by the _connotations of words_.

I have now come to the point where I want to direct your attention to
the most important question in all literary craft, the question, if I
may call it so for greater briefness, of the Adjective. I believe that
you will find in dictionaries and grammars that the Adjective _is the
word which serves to qualify a noun_. I am taking it in a much wider
sense, and as including, besides the kind of word grammatically licensed
to qualify nouns, and the other kind of word, namely, the adverb,
grammatically licensed to qualify verbs, every kind of word of
whatsoever category which serves to qualify another word; and also,
every form of speech comparison, metaphor, or even descriptive or
narrative fragment, which does duty to qualify other parts of speech or
statements. For all writing consists in two processes, very distinctly
separate: a process of awakening ideas which are already existing, ready
for combination in the mind of the Reader; and a process of qualifying
those ideas by the suggestion of others, in order that the principal
ideas or sets of ideas be not only matched as closely as possible with
the ideas or sets of ideas occupying the mind of the Writer, but that
these principal ideas or sets of ideas should lead more irresistibly or
easily to the other ideas or sets of ideas which are to follow. For we
must remember always that the business of writing is not with effects
coexistent like the effects of painting, but rather successive, existing
essentially in time, like the effects of music. I have been pointing out
to you that a word taken separately, for instance any noun, awakens an
image in the mind which is apt to be complex and vague, susceptible to
self-contradiction, or at least to alternatives, because every time
that the word has been used it has been used in slightly varying
circumstances, a deposit of each of which has been left, more, or, as
already remarked, less faintly, in the mind. Nearly every word has
meant, turn about, so many different main calls on our attention; the
word _Sea_ has meant, turn about or simultaneously, an impression of
sight, colour, sound, smell, breath, and so forth, and what is more, a
different kind of emotion, so that in order to awaken the particular
impression we want, we have to cut off the possibility of some or all
the others being revived. We have to shut the doors to impressions we do
not want and to canalize, in a particular direction, those which we do
want.

That which thus acts as a door to exclude irrelevancies, as an embankment
to concentrate impressions, and again, as a signpost (forgive this
sequence of metaphors) to indicate the direction of future impression,
nay, as a window through which to catch glimpses of the impressions we
are heading for,--this qualifier, adjective, adverb, or adjectively
or adverbially employed metaphor, simile, or bare fact,--is the chief
instrument by which the Writer can rearrange the thoughts and feelings
of the Reader in such a way as to mirror his own.

Hence one might take it as one of the first precepts of writing _that no
adjective, by which I mean no qualifier, is ever without a result_. You
may, perhaps, waste principal items, facts, nouns, and verbs which are
not acting as qualifiers; but you cannot merely waste an adjective or
qualifier: an adjective, if it does not help you, goes against you.

Adjectives are usually imagined to _add something_ to nouns. What
they really do is to cut off something, some of the possible meanings
of a noun. A noun is almost always the representative of reiterated
experiences of a similar kind, and it is inevitably the representative
of a simultaneous combination of many kinds of impression: it recalls
different modes of perception or emotion, even if it does not recall
different occasions on which these different modes of perception or
emotion have been united. Now, it is most improbable that the Writer
will ever want to recall at once _all_ the impressions grouped
simultaneously under the heading of this noun; and I think I may boldly
say that it is _impossible_ he can ever want to recall at once all the
impressions which, on successive occasions, have become stored up as
part and parcel of it. Consequently, one principal use of the adjective
will be to direct the Reader's attention to the particular portions of
that noun which _are_ to be recalled; the adjective will _limit_ the
noun; so, for instance, when we speak of the stormy sea, or the blue
sea, we are not _adding_ to the impressions conveyed by the word _sea_,
but, on the contrary, diminishing them. It is probably the increasing
richness of connotation of nouns, a richness due to the constant
addition made by every human being's experience, which accounts for
the increasing use of adjectives. The Ancients, the Northern writers
of the Middle Ages, did not require to use adjectives as much as we do,
because their nouns were poor in significance, had, so to speak, few
aspects, and they had no need therefore to limit the significance,
to select the aspect. Much the same applies, as regards all visual
impressions, to the Writers of the eighteenth century: they cared little
for the visible aspects of things, and words therefore suggested to them
but very few visible aspects among which to select: a hill was a hill,
not a rounded hill or a peaky hill, etc. etc., so it was quite enough
to say _hill_, or at most to say that it was a _horrid hill_; since to
those comfortable sedentary people there existed only two kinds of hill:
the hill easy to climb and with a meditative seat at the top, and the
hill without a seat, and, owing to its difficulty of climbing,
practically without a top.

The other way in which an adjective qualifies a noun is by connecting
it with another noun, by extracting, so to speak, from among the
impressions to be evoked by a word that particular impression which
belongs also to some other set of impressions, to be evoked presently
by another word. This is what I have called the canalizing power of
adjectives. Let us suppose, for instance, that you are speaking of the
sky, that the impression which you wish to evoke is that of the sky at
night: if you wish to speak afterwards of the stars, you will do well to
limit, to canalize, your impressions of the night by using the adjective
_clear_, _bright_, or so forth, because, by so doing, you cut off and
throw away at once the other impressions possibly connected by the word
_night_, for instance, the impression of blackness, or of diffused
moonmist; and, when you come to speak of your stars, you will find
them ready, unimpeded by other things, to quiver into existence in
the Reader's mind. This connective power of adjectives, this power of
qualifying what is coming next, is one of the facts which give most
trouble to inexperienced Writers, and which show the finest intuition on
the part of the heaven-born genius. Short of being such a heaven-born
genius, one has to be for ever trying in one's mind the action of
adjectives, calculating their operation, what they will lead to, what
new roads they may force you to diverge into, what vantage grounds,
highly desirable later, they may be cutting you off from. Let us suppose
that we wish to describe a rocket. The better to evoke this rocket,
we will evoke that which is its background, and press our finger down
on the note _sky_. We have now _rocket_ and _sky_. But _sky_ is very
general: there are all sorts of skies; the one we want is a _blue_ sky
for the _gold_ of the rocket does turn the sky peculiarly blue. But the
word _blue_, connected with _sky_, usually evokes the notion of the
sky by day, because most people do not have occasion to remark that,
alongside of lamps, rockets, or even stars, the night sky is often an
intense though different blue. Therefore we should have to say the
night-blue sky. But we want something even more definite in evocation.
Shall we say the starry sky? That gives us the night sky, presumably its
colour also, and the fact of its being a vault, for the impression of
stars brings the impression of a vault, and a vault is exactly what we
want for the parabola of our rocket. Also the stars, thus evoked, are
solidly fastened in heaven; they bring out, by their stability and
eternity, all that is moving, leaping up, falling down, utterly ephemeral
in the poor rocket. So far, _starry_ seems immensely to improve the sky
for our rocket. But ... but the stars are very luminous, and, moreover,
innumerable, and the vision of their splendour utterly dims the wretched
rocket. So we strike out _starry_, having found that, although we gained
much by its use, we also lost what was more essential. Thus, half the
qualifying words, and similes, and sentences which arise in our mind or
are written down on our paper have to be rejected; delightful things
which enhanced the present but jeopardized the future; interesting
lines and colours which spoilt the pattern of the picture or building,
delightful arrangements of orchestration which hampered the rhythm or
modulation of our music. I take it that the heaven-born Writer actually,
at the moment of writing, perceives in his mind only the impressions,
the qualities which aid a given general effect. His very act of feeling
is selective, according to literary necessities. He is a specialized
organism.

The strings of the piano, whose vibrations the pianist selects and
groups into patterns, have been arranged to suit the necessities
of piano playing. They represent the convenience of generations of
pianists. Moreover, the strings of the piano stay quiet when they are
not struck by the hammer which the pianist's finger brings down on them
by touching the keys; and a note does not suddenly ring out, and then
another note, quite unexpectedly, because some third note has been
struck with which they had some affinity unknown to the player. But the
instrument played upon by the Writer, namely, the mind of his Reader,
has not been arranged for the purpose of thus being played upon, and its
strings do not wait to vibrate in obedience to the Writer's touch, but
are always on the point of sounding and jangling uninvited.

The impressions, the ideas and emotions stored up in the mind of
the Reader, and which it is the business of the Writer to awaken in
such combinations and successions as answer to his own thoughts and
moods--these, which you must allow me to call, in psychologist's jargon,
_Units of Consciousness_, have been deposited where they are by the
random hand of circumstance, by the accident of temperament and
vicissitudes, and in heaps or layers, which represent merely the caprice
or necessity of individual experience. From the Writer's point of view,
they are a chaos; and, what is worse for him who wishes to rearrange
them to suit his thought or mood, they are chaos of living, moving
things.

For the contents of our mind, the deposit of our life, have a way of
their own, obey a law on which depends all the success and all the
failure of writing: the law of the Association of Ideas; that is to
say, the necessity, whose cause is one of the great problems of mental
science, of starting into activity, in the relation in which they were
originally stored up, the various items united in our real experience
tending to awaken one another in our memory. We all know this phenomenon:
for instance, a certain impression, say, the shape of a particular
house, when recalled to our memory, will bring with it, not merely in
succession but in actual coexistence sometimes, a particular tone of
voice, a certain philosophical opinion, a vague sense of warmth, a dull
consciousness of sorrow, and perhaps the smell of wet earth or of warm
fir trees; and this because these items of consciousness did really once
come at the same time or in rapid succession, all together into our
life. But, besides this storage of the Reader's thoughts and feelings
(or their rudiments) in layers answering to the accident of life, there
is another typical kind of such storage which will give the Writer,
in his attempts to rearrange the Reader's mind, an equal amount of
trouble, I mean the storage by the process of rough-and-ready practical
classification, which comes as the result of life also. Let me say it
once more: a certain shape of house, a certain tone of voice, a certain
philosophical view, a certain sensation of warmth, a smell of wet earth
or warm fir trees have been stored up together accidentally; but the
operation of constantly comparing and sorting one's own impressions
which the very fact of living, of ordering our conduct, is constantly
forcing on us, and which goes on for ever in the individual and the
race, may have rearranged these impressions in special abstract pigeon
holes; that particular shape of house will have been thrust unconsciously
into the same heap with other shapes of houses; the tone of voice, the
contralto notes, say, will have been bundled together with other tones
of voice, other contraltos, and probably with tenors and basses and
trebles; the philosophical opinion will have been thrown on to the
other philosophical opinions, and the sensations of warmth, the smell
of wet earth or warm fir trees, will be somewhere in the same box as
other sensations of temperature and other smells. Hence, there is as
much possibility of any of these items of consciousness, if touched
by the Writer, if made to vibrate under the pressure of the signalling
word--there is as much probability of any of these items of consciousness
evoking its neighbours in the dull, abstract order of workaday
classification, as in the vivid emotional order of actual individual
experience.

And out of this accidental chaos, out of this rough-and-ready
classification, out of twenty different possibilities of storage and
neighbourhood, the Writer must summon up such items of the Reader's
consciousness as he wants for his particular purposes. The Writer must
select, for the formation of _his_ particular pattern of thought or fact
or mood, such as he requires among these living molecules of memory,
such and such only as he wants--not one other, on pain of spoiling
that pattern. And for this he has to make use of that very fact of
Association of Ideas which seems so much against him, finding the secret
of wakening ideas by other ideas and the secret of putting ideas to
sleep no less.

Here is an illustration: You are writing about a man who, like most of
the heroes of Balzac, is torn between the desire to take a cab and the
knowledge that he cannot afford it. Speaking of this cab, bringing it
forward, making it roll into the Reader's awareness, you may insist upon
various aspects of the cab: you may speak of cabs from the sentimental
point of view, as things which carry people to the places they delight
in, or away from the persons they love; cabs as factors of mere change
of place. Or you may speak of cabs from the side of colour and form, the
yellow wheels of the cab on the lilacky shiny asphalt, etc.; or of cabs
as constructed on such a system, by such a man, with such wheels, tyres,
such or such a system of harnessing, capable of rolling so-and-so. But
you do not happen to want to open up the vista of sentimental change,
for in your story no one is arriving suddenly, or going to meet anyone,
or going to part for ever. On the other hand, in your story you have
no reason to open up the vista, in the Reader's mind, of the possible
picturesqueness of London streets: you do not wish him to think next of
the blue mist closing the view, the vague towers looming far off, or the
network of telegraph wires and advertisements in the sky. Still less do
you want the Reader to compare cabs with broughams, omnibuses, drays,
locomotives, bicycles[2], and to speculate on the laws of the movement
of wheels and the effect of easy locomotion on civilization in general.
You want the Reader to think of the cab in relation to the hero's desires
and his poverty. To do this, you will insist, if you must insist on
something, upon the cab being expensive on the one hand, and convenient
or socially desirable on the other.

 2: Written in the later nineties. How fast have the motor-car and taxi
    dashed into being as the years rolled by!

I have no time to speak of the power of words as mere sounds; and,
although even in prose such sound-power is undoubtedly operative, it
is only in verse that any large and active effects can be obtained by
the arrangement of words with reference to their sound. What I wish
to insist upon is the choice and arrangement of words considered with
reference to their meaning merely, by the selection of their connotative
values, and the action and reaction of these connotative values determined
by the combinations in which we place them. It is by this selection, by
this continual modification of what each word evokes by the thing evoked
by another word, that we obtain in writing the equivalent to texture and
weight and perspective, to what are called _values_ in painting; and to
what is equivalent to phrasing and orchestration in music: the right
presentation of the idea.

It is by this selection and arrangement of the _essential virtues_ (if
I may use the expression) of words that we communicate not merely the
facts of life, but, so to say, the _quality_ of those facts; that we
make the Reader feel that these are facts, not merely of life in general,
but of the life of one particular kind of temperament and not of another.

There are words which, owing to their extreme precision--a precision
demanding time for thorough realization, or to their excessive
philosophical generality, forcing the mind to lose time in long
divagations--there are words which make the Reader think and feel,
in a way make him _live_, slowly; and there are other words which make
the Reader think, feel, and live quickly; and quickly and smoothly,
or quickly and jerkily, as the case may be. Above all, there are
arrangements of words--combinations of action and reaction of word upon
word, which, by opening up vistas or closing them, make the Reader's
mind dawdle, hurry, or bustle busily along. Now, by one of the most
important laws of our mental constitution, whatever kind of movement
a picture, a piece of music, or a page of writing sets up in us, that
particular kind of movement do we attribute to the objects represented
or suggested by the picture, the music, or the writing; it is from no
idle affectation, no mere conventional desire to make things match, that
we resent the lengthy telling of a brief moment, the jerky description
of a solemn fact. We dislike it because two contrary kinds of action are
being set up in our mind; because the fact related is forcing us to one
sort of pace, indeed to what is even more important, one sort of rhythm,
while the words relating that fact are forcing us to another pace, to
another rhythm. Some of the most notable mishaps in literature are due
to the accidental, unconscious meeting of a subject and a selection of
words which reinforce one another too much. Neither the fact nor the
wording is in itself overwhelming, but the joint action of the two
becomes intolerable. Somewhat similarly, Flaubert, by his enormous
abundance of precise visual adjectives, by his obvious elaboration and
finish, turns passing effects into unchanging attributes. On the other
hand, lack of concordance between subject and wording defeats the
Writer's intention: thus there is probably twice as much adventure,
hairbreadth escape, intrigue, and so forth, in _Salamb_ as in the
_Master of Ballantrae_; yet while the personages in Stevenson's story
affect us as in perpetual agitation, the people in Flaubert's great
novel seem never to be doing anything, to be posing in _tableaux
vivants_, or, at the utmost, moving rhythmically for the display of
costumes and attributes, like figures in a grand ballet. Another curious
instance is afforded by d'Annunzio's prose, magnificent though it is.
His long, latinized sentences, where adjectives are rare and verbs
vague, leave the impression of everything happening far slower than it
possibly could in reality; his people take as long to put on their hat
and walk to the door as real mortals to change all their clothes and
walk to the other end of the town; hence a feeling of watching colossal
ghosts or huge, unfinished, barely animated statues; an impression of
something empty, featureless, gaping, but irresistibly emphatic, eerie
and tragic, which allows one to read the most revolting or preposterous
stories without, as one otherwise would, disbelieving in their
possibility outside a madhouse.

On the other hand, George Eliot, with her passion for abstract scientific
terms and scientifically logical exposition, often sacrifices entirely
that evanescent, nay sometimes futile, quality without a degree of which
life would wear us out in six months. And for this reason she conveys a
wrong impression of characters whom, considered analytically, she
understood thoroughly. Thus, Hetty Sorrel, whom we ought to think of as
a poor little piece of cheap millinery, remains for our feelings, for
our nerves, a solid piece of carpentering (please note by the way how
the everlasting reference to carpentering weighs down, ruler-marks, and
compass-measures the whole novel)--a Hetty dove-tailed and glued, nailed
and screwed, and warranted never to give way! Moreover, George Eliot's
scientific dreariness of vocabulary and manner of exposition explains
very largely why her professed _charmeurs_ and _charmeuses_, Tito,
Rosamond Vincy, Stephen Guest, are so utterly the reverse of charming.
They are correctly thought out as mere analyses, and never do anything
psychologically false or irrelevant; but they are wrongly expressed;
although, as I am more and more convinced, and as I hope some day
to prove to you, such wrong expression is due, in the last resort,
to imperfect or wrong emotional conception, as distinguished from
intellectual, analytical comprehension. George Eliot has another
mannerism which alternates with this to create an impression different
from the one she is aiming at; for she has also a little dry, neat,
ironical essay-style (imitated from Fielding and the Essayists) which
creates an impression of the excessive trumperiness of human struggles
and woes which, Heaven knows, she never felt to be trumpery; while at
the same time she is making the limited feelings of obscure individuals
into matters of state of the Cosmos by the use of terminology usually
devoted to the eternal phenomena of the universe.

These peculiarities in the selection of words and their arrangement,
like the even more important peculiarities in modes of exposition of the
whole subject, are, I think, largely matters of inborn tendency; they
express the Writer's way of seeing, feeling, living much more than
we are apt to think. So that the art of the Writer consists less in
adapting his style to the subject, than his subject to his style. George
Eliot--although not one of her books is, from the artistic standpoint, a
great book, had, nevertheless, a side on which she was a great Writer: the
happy passages in her books, for instance the analytic autobiographical
chapters (not unlike Rousseau's) in the _Mill on the Floss_ seem to
indicate what her real field of artistic supremacy might have been.
As it is, the bulk of her work leaves a sense of wearisome conflict,
conflict between what she has determined to say and the manner in
which she is able to say it, and this because she ignored her inherent
peculiarities of style when choosing a subject. Stevenson and Pater,
on the contrary, seem to me to show, in two totally different kinds
of work, the most perfect fusion of style and subject. In Mr. Pater's
_School of Giorgione_, for instance, and in the Bass Rock episodes
of _Catriona_, it is quite impossible to say where style begins and
subject ends. One forgets utterly the existence of either, one is merely
impressed, moved, as by the perfectly welded influences of outer nature,
as by the fusion of a hundred things which constitute a fine day or a
stormy night.

Instead of summing up these remarks on the selection of words, on the
action and reaction which their connotations provoke, I will merely add
that one does not want to _open up side vistas_ in a narrative which is
intended to speed through time; and that one does not want adjectives
which narrow down, nor definite and highly active verbs, in the
description of a mood: it must float, wave, and give the notion of
impalpable transitoriness.

You will have noticed that, in what I have just been saying, I have
gradually, almost unconsciously, slid into speaking of something much
more considerable than the choice of words. I believe have even used
the expression "exposition of the subject." These two merge; while
still speaking of construction in the narrower sense, I am obliged to
forestall the treatment of construction in the wider. For it is all
construction, whether we be manipulating what I called single units of
consciousness, and the words which bid them start forward; or whether
we deal with the whole trains of thought, the whole states of feeling
into which these units of consciousness have been united, and which are
themselves ordered about in groups of sentences, paragraphs, or chapters.
Whatever we may be doing, so long as we are writing, we are manipulating
the consciousness of the Reader.

But why, one asks oneself, why should this rearrangement of the ideas
and feelings of the Reader be such a difficult matter, since all we are
aiming at is, after all, to awaken in the Reader the trains of thought
and the moods which already exist in the Reader? Why all this manipulation
and manoeuvring? Why not photograph, so to speak, the contents of the
mind of the Writer on to the mind of the Reader? Simply because the
mind of the Reader is not a blank, inert plate, but a living crowd of
thoughts and feelings, which are existing on their own account and in
a manner wholly different from that other living crowd of thoughts
and feelings, the mind of the Writer. We are obliged to transmit our
thoughts and feelings to others in an order different from the one in
which they have come to ourselves, for one very important reason; that
they are _our_ thoughts. Being _our_ thoughts means that they are
connected with our life, habits, circumstances, born of them; it means
that they are so familiar that we recognize them whether they come
out head foremost or tail foremost, and into however many and various
splinters they may be broken. To the Reader, on the contrary, they are
unfamiliar, since they are not his; and the habits and circumstances
of the Reader, so far from helping him to grasp them, distract him by
sending up other thoughts and feelings which are his own. Add to this
that the mere activity of original feeling and thinking, of literary
creation in ourselves, puts weight on in a manner which no amount of
merely receptive attention can replace. All writing, therefore, is a
struggle between the thinking and feeling of the Writer and the thinking
and feeling of the Reader. The heaven-born Writer is he whose thoughts,
by some accident of his constitution, tend spontaneously to arise in his
_own_ mind in the order and values most resembling the order and values
in which these thoughts are most easily communicated to other minds.
While the thoroughly schooled Writer is he who is able most quickly
and thoroughly to exchange the order and values in which his thoughts
have come to himself, for the order and values in which experience and
analysis have taught him that these thoughts can best be transmitted to
others.

These are a few of the facts of literary construction of the craft of
manipulating the stored-up contents of other folks' minds, in the very
elementary domain of arrangement of words and sentences, of exposition
of the subject in paragraphs and passages. But all the rest is
construction also, however far we go, although the construction of
a whole book stands to the construction of a single sentence as the
greatest complexities of counterpoint and orchestration stand to the
relations of the vibrations constituting a single just note. It is
always, in small matters and in large, the old question of what
movements we can produce in the Reader's mind; and of what other
movements we must prevent or neutralize in order that those we desire
should have free play.




III

STHETICS OF THE NOVEL


There seems a general notion that wherever literature is cultivated for
its own sake it must become a fine art like painting and music; and that
the novel, more especially, since it gives pleasure, must give the
special pleasure due to beauty, and, as a result, we call many things in
a book beautiful, and imagine them to be analogous to a fine picture or
a lovely song, which, honestly considered, are simply and utterly ugly.

It has taken me years to get rid of this prejudice; and cost me several
pangs to admit to myself that it is otherwise. Yet it ought merely to
prove the richness of human nature thus to find that the novel, for
instance, has ample resources for fascinating our attention without the
help of the very special quality called beauty. In the first place, _we
like words_, and, above all, _we like a statement_; the forms made by
logical thought are full of the special attractions of logic, and the
material in which all that concerns our ego, is expressed, is steeped,
it would seem, in a sort of interesting egotistic solution. Certain
it is that there must be a real pleasure in such things, since it
is sufficient to overcome the effort of gathering up thoughts and
interpreting words. Think of the quite unnecessary statement and
argument in which mankind indulges, and the eager, often delighted
manner in which people will talk and listen about anything, particularly
about nothing at all. The attraction of all kinds of literature is
primarily based upon this double pleasure: the pleasure of using words
and the pleasure of realizing a statement or demonstration; neither of
which pleasures are more sthetic than are those of moving our limbs or
of indiscriminately using our eyes. For this reason we often take up a
book or newspaper, absolutely irrespective of its contents; and if a
book, why not a novel? After this elementary attractiveness of the
spoken or written word come the satisfactions (rather than definite
pleasures) of expectation and fulfilment, of watching movement and of
sympathetic participation therein; of emotional excitement (there is an
undoubted pleasure, for instance, even in being annoyed and certainly
in being angry); the immense and altogether superior satisfaction of
leaving one's own concerns behind and freeing oneself from the routine
of life by identification with other folk; a kind of play, masquerade,
eminently a holiday satisfaction, to which is closely allied the
agreeable sense of irresponsibility which seems to grow with the
perception of the responsibility of the characters we are watching, a
feeling, by the way, in no way connected with fiction as such, since we
have it equally in reading the newspaper, histories, and memoirs; are we
not always ready to consider other folks' affairs as mere inventions,
being delighted to rid ourselves of the perpetual consequences and
complications which prevent our life from being the mere amusing play of
perception and volition which it might be? Add to this, in greater or
lesser degree, the perception, which is pleasant, of skill and tact on
the part of the author; sometimes (what to some critical natures is
equally pleasing) the lack of skill and tact of the author. When we have
summed up these various items of literary satisfaction, we can pass on
to a new kind of factor of pleasure, which is immensely attractive to
certain minds, and which is especially present in the novel--I mean the
gaining (or thinking we gain) a knowledge of mankind and of life. For
when we are young, particularly, we are troubled by a delusive longing
for such knowledge, and hoodwinked by a false sense of capability
whenever we think we have got it.

These are what I should call the non-sthetic attractions of the
novel, attractions frequently sufficient to compensate for the most
rough-and-ready disregard for all our instincts of beauty and harmony.
The sthetic attractions are wholly different. The novelist can
show us beautiful places, make us live in company with delightful
personalities--from Stendhal's Duchess to Tolstoi's Natacha, from
Robinson Crusoe to Diana Warwick. I do not mean merely _ethically
laudable_ persons (no one, I am sure, would care to live with Romola or
Daniel Deronda), but creatures whose vigorous, harmonious personalities,
sometimes mainly physical, the author has felt as he would feel a
melody or a sunset, and, in consequence, conveyed to us not by mere
reproduction of their characteristics, but by the far more efficacious
means of direct emotional contagion: his admiration, love, delight,
inevitably kindling ours. Besides this, there is the specific sthetic
quality of literature. What it is, I do not, and I suppose nobody
nowadays does, know: a charm due to the complex patterns into which
(quite apart from sound) the parts of speech, verbs and nouns and
adjectives, actives and passives, variously combined tenses, can be
woven even like lines and colours, producing patterns of action and
reaction in our mind, our nerve tracks--who knows? in our muscles and
heartbeats and breathing, more mysterious, even, than those which we can
dimly perceive, darkly guess, as effects of visible and audible form.
In so far as any of these effects are produced by the novel, the novel
participates in the nature of other sthetic productions; I do not say
of other works of art, for we are continually reverting to the old use
of _art_ as mere craft, and confusing with beauty what is mere logic,
dexterity, technical knowledge, or tact.

But the novel can get along perfectly without any such sthetic
qualities, as I hope to have shown by my enumerations of the many other
factors of pleasure, or, at least, of interest, which the novelist has
at disposal. And such non-sthetic interest is sufficient, not merely
for the Readers who are more scientific, or more dramatic, or more
practical, or more technically ingenious, than sthetic; but sufficient
even for sthetic Readers in their scientific, or dramatic, or practical,
or technical moments and capacities; for even the most sthetically
sensitive persons must have other sides to their characters, else they
would be dunces, criminals, paupers, bores, and general incapables. The
difference between the people who are sthetically sensitive and those
who are not (and here we have the key to the varying power of reading
novels like, let us say, Zola's _Pot-Bouille_), is not merely that the
sthetic people ask for beauty as the scientific do for knowledge and
the dramatic for human emotion, but that the sthetic people suffer very
acutely whenever the novel contains downright ugliness; suffer in a much
more positive manner than the scientific or dramatic Reader suffers from
glaring absurdity or hopeless tameness of situation; for in the one
case there is irritation or boredom, in the other something verging on
physical disgust. So that, regarding the novel, the question becomes
simply: which, in the individual case, happens to be the stronger, the
satisfaction of the many non-sthetic capacities for pleasure; or the
displeasure inflicted on the sthetic instinct by subject or treatment
which do not in the least offend any other craving of human nature? It
is a question, in fact, between the individual Writer and the individual
Reader; and I doubt whether it can ever be made a question of right and
wrong. Some persons _can_ read _A Vau l'Eau_ without any misery and with
much satisfaction, even getting up from their reading decidedly the richer
in knowledge and sympathy. Others are so harrowed that any possibilities
of pleasure or profit are absolutely paralysed, and there is no sort
of use in going on with the book. A third class can get through the
novel in a middle condition of balanced, neutralized satisfaction and
dissatisfaction, occasionally varied by a momentary predominance of
pleasure or loathing.

I have ventured to say that in such questions there is no absolute right
or wrong, and that a book like this (I have purposely chosen the most
excessive instance) may increase the spiritual health of some Readers
and momentarily jeopardize that of others, all equally estimable persons.
But what, I hear a class of Readers (and that class is represented,
as well as the others, in my own person), what is the use of being
utterly depressed and sickened by a hundred and fifty pages of trivial
hideousness? The sickening and the depression do no good, quite the
contrary; and, as I said, where there is nothing else, the book had best
be thrown into the fire. But the stimulation which the book can give to
sympathetic understanding is a good, a very good thing, since we can
never have enough of it in life. A novel like _A Vau l'Eau_ can give the
right kind of Reader an increased insight into the commonest, but also
the most powerful, needs and passions of mankind, and in so far it can
tend to make his attitude and action in life more useful, or at least
less mischievous. It can teach, moreover, pity for people who may,
perhaps, be helped; teach also resolute idealism in our own persons by
disclosing the very unideal sloughs above which our common human nature
has so insecurely and so partially raised itself. But in the question of
novels, as in all others, the most useful thing, perhaps, is to be at
the same time very sthetic and very capable of momentarily shelving
our stheticism, or rather of being able to see and understand
dispassionately, while keeping the most passionate aversions and
preferences.




IV

THE NATURE OF THE WRITER


I

Rushing through villages, along ridges, with the kingdoms of the earth
on either side, all yesterday in the motor-car; sitting in the heather,
hearing the wind in the pines, the distant hurtle of trains; all
this, and the millions of other things of sight, sound and feeling,
are transformed in the Writer's mind into words; words, if so be,
transmissive, evocative. And in the mind of Readers?

For the things which we write in our books, the Readers have to read
into them.

Of course all art depends as much upon memory as upon actuality; lives
as much, so to speak, in our past as in our present. Because, in however
unconscious and hidden a manner, all art deals with habits of perception
and association, which are but the tracks of the endlessly repeated
deeds of our life. Because it is in memory that our impressions are
stored; and (what is more important) that our preferences and repulsions
have become most strongly organized. Or, if you prefer, because it
is in our whole Past that we really think and feel, when we seem,
superficially, to be thinking and feeling only on this unclutchable
point, without parts or magnitude, the Present. All art is due to our
being creatures of experience, of recollection; but literature, the mere
written or spoken word, art or not, to a much more visible and greater
extent. For, if, as the new science of sthetics is beginning to teach,
the preference for a picture, a building or a song, indeed, the feeling
and realizing of its presence, depends upon stored up and organized
experience of our own activities, how far more exclusively does the
phantom-reality called literature exist only in the realm of our
recollections! It is not composed of objective, separately perceptible
lines, masses, colours, note-sequences and note-consonances; it has no
existence, no real equivalent, outside the mind; and the spoken sound,
the written characters, have no power unless translated into images and
feelings which are already within us. _What's Hecuba to me?_ We are not
much impressed by writings which deal with people and circumstances
outside our own experience; and not impressed at all by writings,
however eloquent, in a language which we do not understand.

Now _understanding a language_ means simply that certain symbolical
sounds or marks awaken in us echoes, images, feelings, which were
already latent within us. The Writer makes his book not merely out of
his own mind's contents, but out of ours; and in the similarity, the
greater or lesser equivalence, of these contents, lies all the possible
efficacy of literature. The newborn infant, could he see and spell,
spell the very longest words and, from an innate gift, comprehend at
once the hang of sentences, would yet be blind and deaf to literature.
Why? because he was newborn, had no life behind him, nothing for
literature to evoke, to rearrange, to subdue him with.


II

The Writer frames the patterns with which, like every other artist, he
encloses, subdues and satisfies the soul, out of material given entirely
and solely by the memory. This fact, to which I shall revert over and
over again, accounts for the chief characteristics of literature, and
for its particular relation to life. Let us, therefore, look at this
stuff given by memory to the Writer.

We are apt to speak of recollected things and actions as if they were
copies, a trifle faded and fragmentary, of the things and actions of
reality; and as if what applied to the one must therefore be true
of the other. This is not the case. The mere fact of being faded and
fragmentary means more than it seems, for it is due to a circumstance
we are apt to overlook, namely, that recollections do not exist (save
in dreams and visions) in space and time, reserved, so to speak, for
themselves; but that they exist in minds perpetually traversed in all
directions by a close and moving web of impressions from the present. We
should think of recollections as something similar to ghosts, whom we
can tell from living realities because they lack the corroboration of
surroundings, the bulk, vividness and warmth which come of various modes
of perception acting together. Like ghosts, recollections can enter by
closed doors, occupy seats already filled, flit about in inappropriate
places, baffle our attempts to clutch or scare them; but like ghosts
they can only be seen and not touched, only heard and not seen; moreover,
reality walks right through them. The presentment of the inner eye
or ear, however vivid (and otherwise we should be mad and lured to
destruction), cannot compete with the testimony of the senses; and if
recollections are faint and vacillating, it is because they are blurred
and interrupted by present reality.

I have been speaking of those recollections which are most like
realities, and which imitate, to a certain degree, the multifold
existence of all real things in space and time. But this is only the
least part of what memory furnishes; and even it, as we shall see,
is liable to singular processes of compression and expansion, of
intensifying and fading, under the varying pressure of life and thought.

I have alluded to the competition of recollections with present
impressions. There is, also, the competition between recollections and
recollections. In the ceaseless crowding of impressions, a hundred, a
thousand times exceeding our powers of storage, only those are accepted
in memory which are connected with our habits and interests, which
bear, so to speak, a kinship to other impressions already become
recollections. These they sometimes replace, the fresher detail hiding
the older one; and, in most cases, they coalesce with them, new and
old being crushed down together into composite images, abstractions
and diagrams, bulkless _ideas_, mere definitions "without space or
magnitude"; while, every now and then, some individual feature, some
forgotten peculiarity, will start into unexpected vividness.

Nor is this all. Even if the storage of memory were unlimited, the hurry
of life, its lack of spare time and energy, the necessity for rapid,
unhesitating and almost automatic action, would reduce the recollections
we habitually use to the barely necessary. Thus the name of a thing
or deed awakens, nine times out of ten, the notion of only one or two
qualities or uses, becomes a counter to reckon by, or a label of most
varying suggestion, serving to direct our momentary choice. If, as is
the case, we see only so much of reality as individually concerns us in
a given circumstance, how much less do we see of that more docile, more
easily compressed, cut down, pushed aside, momentarily abolished, world
of the past which is carried in ourselves! And here I revert and must
enlarge upon this possibility not merely of appearing and vanishing, but
of shrinking and dilating, of fading and intensifying, of shedding parts
and integrating them afresh, a possibility which is the most singular,
the most essential and the most pregnant characteristic of memory,
although it seems, oddly enough, the one least taken into account by
those who make such subjects their study. Recollections behave very much
like congregated soap bubbles, which the breath through the straw makes
bigger or smaller; now one, now another takes body or loses it, expands
and swallows up its neighbours, shrinks into one of a minute subsidiary
cluster; detaches itself to float in solitary iridescence, or to burst
unnoticed into nothingness.

This adaptability of all recollections, so utterly different from the
irreducible relations in space and time of present impressions, is what
makes literature, because it has previously made unwritten, unspoken
thought into a construction entirely unlike anything in real experience;
a construction answering not to the necessities of outward things, but
to the needs of the inner nature, the microcosm, the soul.

To sum up: memory deals with the potential and tends to the essential
rather than the actual; it is conditioned by our interests as much as by
the qualities of things; it has to do with the resultant mood as much as
with the object which produces it.

On these characteristics of memory depend, as I shall continue to
repeat, the imperfections of literature, but also its compensations, so
often surpassing all it lacks. For literature is vaguer, more superficial,
less massively efficient than the other arts, and infinitely less
sthetic.[3] But, for that very reason, it is more closely connected
with life, more universal and more permeating, and answers better to the
preferences and repugnances of each individual case. It is more docile
to our manifold wants because it deals with what our feelings have
already sifted and manipulated: with recollections, and nothing but
recollections.

 3: By _sthetic_ I do not mean _artistic_. I mean, as in my Cambridge
    Manual, _The Beautiful_, that which relates to the contemplation of
    such aspects as we call "beautiful" whether in art or in nature.

Consider this. Each Reader, while receiving from the Writer, is in
reality reabsorbing into his life, where it refreshes or poisons him,
a residue of his own living; but melted into absorbable subtleness,
combined and stirred into a new kind of efficacy by the choice of the
Writer. Again: round every suggestion given by a book there gathers a
halo of vague _something else_; and besides the succession of images
determined by the words of the Writer, there arises in the Reader
another succession, or more properly, a simultaneous _continuum_ in
which it all takes place. Thus the Reader's own experience, moving
beneath the pressure of the word, brings into consciousness how many
sights, how many feelings of which the author of that word can have
no notion:--_Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse._ It is on this
stirring of half-conscious and, at best, confused recollections, upon
this halo surrounding all clear literary suggestion, that depends very
largely the fittingness or the reverse of certain Writers to certain
Readers.

And the supremacy of literary genius is due, most probably, to its
onward stride, its unwavering course; the great Writer ploughing through
these vague crowding things of the Reader's memory, and with such
strength and directness that all irrelevancies fall aside, or become
compacted, lost, in his own masterful thoughts.

But one of the chief characteristics of literature is a comparative
vagueness; and even the greatest Writer probably lacks the definite
vision of his own work which is possessed by the painter or the
composer. Even in his own mind the magical structure, the Solomon's and
Abt Vogler's palace of thoughts, is but a fitful and varying mirage. And
he is doomed never to know what it will become in its real destination,
in that unexplored country, the soul of the Reader.

In the Reader's soul the thoughts evoked (if they _are_ evoked) at
the Writer's command are bound, as we have seen, to compete with the
thoughts suggested by reality; the Writer's intention, even if not
actually cast forth, is limited by the temper and experience of the
Reader; it is, at the best, transformed by unforeseen mixture till it
becomes, sometimes, as enigmatic as a sphinx, half goddess and half
beast, and often quite as monstrous. What have not commentators seen in
Dante or Shakespeare? What did not theology read into the epithalamium
of the Shulamite?

Letting alone such extreme cases, think of the quite normal addition
which we make, most unintentionally, to all we read! Say we are
low-spirited, have recently returned from a journey or parted with one
beloved, our irrelevant sadness will steep the Writer's thought in
melting mists; and the outlines of those recently seen hills and
buildings, the vibration of that recent presence, will overlay the
Writer's suggestion, or combine with it like the harmonies of some
disquieting instrument.

The Writer must break himself of any curiosity, and never hope to know
what he has really created. For his work, when complete, is just that
various, fluctuating, inscrutable form which owes its being to the
Reader as much as to himself, and which is hidden from him by the
impenetrable wall of flesh separating one soul from the other.


III

In the foregoing pages I have paraphrased a remark once made to me by
the one among all my friends who has always struck me as most sensitive
to literature, living (though no Writer) essentially in and by means of
the art of words. It is that the really great Writer seems to move along
irresistibly and unflaggingly among ideas, driving them on, transposing
them, bringing up more and still more from an unguessed rear, from
unfathomed hidden depths in himself and in his Reader. Ever since
hearing it I have found myself thinking in the terms of this remark,
which is one of those wellings up from deeply organized modes of feeling,
such as rise to the lips of genius or of passion. For it points to one
of the main facts of the psychology of all art as well as of literature:
the great Writer or artist is a creature who lives in a way more intense
and more unified than the rest of us, in those fields, at all events,
which specially concern him. And hence he can lay hold of our perception
and emotion, make it move at a pace surpassing our own, and compel our
labouring thoughts, our wandering attention, our intermittent feelings,
into patterns consistent, self-sufficing, vigorous, harmonious, unified;
in the presence of which all else dwindles and is forgotten.

These patterns, in which the artist's vitality spontaneously works
itself out, and in which our own vitality is made, however briefly
and imperfectly, to move also--these patterns are, in all arts save
literature, the visible and audible forms which the artist composes.
The soul of the artist lives, and our soul is made to live also, in the
shafts, architraves and vaultings of the building; in the outlines and
masses of the statue or picture; in the onward moving, backward falling
melodies, the embracing harmonies, the balancing, striving, checking and
interweaving counterpoint of the symphony.

But in the case of literature, the pattern is made, even more
completely, of _us_; not merely of our soul's motions, but of our
memory's contents. And of this dust of impressions, this stuff of our
shapeless and aimless daydreams, the man who thinks and feels in the
concentrated modes of the word elaborates a logical, coherent, organic
representation, more satisfying than any experience of our own; and, in
its vigour, balance and self-containedness, surviving in our mind among
the moving chaos of our own thoughts and feelings; nay, persisting long
after every word through which this miracle is wrought has been totally
forgotten.

What were the words in which Meredith told me of that sunrise on the
Adriatic, or Stevenson of the starry night in the Cvennes? Not one of
those words has remained in my mind. But there is the shape into which
they have moulded my thoughts and emotions, unchangeable, enduring.


IV

I have remarked on the fact that, having the Reader's memories for
material, literature lacks the definiteness, the massive certainty of
the other arts.

But while memory fails to preserve separate experiences in all their
vividness, it distils, in this very crushing together of the single
facts of life, an essence such as no other art (no, not even music) has
at disposal: an essence of which one drop, one whiff, can change, by its
subtle directness, the whole of our being of the moment. It is to this
_essential_ quality of memory that is due, more than to anything else,
the unrivalled wonder of literature. A whole apparatus of shown things,
of harmoniously combined forms, of convergent associations, is needed
before a picture can inspire a mood undoubted and irresistible like
that of Giorgione's Pastorals or Perugino's Adorations; in the case of
architecture, the very body of the spectator needs to be transported
inside a building, to be impinged upon not merely by its shape, but by
its lighting and its real magnitude. Even the musician is comparatively
slow; he needs a phrase or two with which to grip your vitals; and even
then, the impression is of a definite kind, excluding all others. But
the Writer--and here let me call him by his real name, the Poet, can,
with one little word--that word _palmy_, for instance, applied to Rome,
create a whole state of consciousness; and with a half-dozen words, make
shadows and iridescences of feeling shiver one through the other; give
the same vision in alternate flame of passion or in frost. And thus we
have not merely the page which goes to our head with its especial fumes
of feeling, all else forgotten; but what is far more wonderful, the
page, the half-dozen stanzas (like some of Browning's lyrics) epitomizing
all the human moods, making us feel that in the world's composition
there is sadness, triumph, irony, the taking of all things in earnest,
and the fine lightness of the individual recognizing his unimportance in
the face of it all. Thus, what architecture compasses with interchange
of uplifting and down-pressing forces, by vaulting-shafts seen between
colonnades and chancels rising in answer to crypts descending; what
music brings about with the combination of parts which take us in
front, rear, flank, wheeling us along in various phrases of similar
motions--this, the greatest of art's achievements, is accomplished by
literature in dealing with such poor things as mere blurred recollections.
But those recollections are steeped in feeling; and the counterpoint of
the poet is composed, directly, of the essence of emotion.


V

On this connection with memory it depends also that literature can--how
shall I put it?--risk giving us more pain than the other arts. This
singularity, and the appearance that, in the drama and novel especially,
we even extract some satisfaction from being hurt, has exercised the
ingenuity of philosophers. The explanation thereof is, perhaps, _that
literature does not hurt us so much as we think_. For we are apt to
think in names and definitions rather than in the terms of intricate
and obscure fact; and the fact, the "what is really happening" in
literature, is most uncommonly obscure and intricate. What we find first
of all is the label, the official subject of discourse, defined by
what we deem (from its greater clearness) the essential part of the
sentences, the big nouns and verbs, as, for instance: A man and woman
who have loved unlawfully and been murdered by an injured husband, are
now expiating in the whirlwinds of Hell the guilt, the fate, which one
of them explains to the Poet Dante. This is the subject of the episode
of Francesca da Rimini as it might be given in the doggerel argument
prefixed in old-fashioned editions of the _Divine Comedy_. There
seems little to rejoice at here; nor should we rejoice at all were we
transported into this situation; sinful love, murderous death, eternal
damnation and all. But we are not. Not even in the sternest reality,
under the stress of closest fellow-feeling, is the most sympathizing of
human beings transported into the true situation of a suffering other.
Not so much because imagination, and its short-cut sympathy, are weak,
for they are, on the contrary, amazingly strong: strong, since they can
countervail the fact that all of us, besides the realities which we
mirror in our soul, are dealing with realities far more direct and
cogent. It is our own life, trifling as it may seem, but imperious by
being _ours_, which must for ever check, deflect and alter whatever of
the life of others attempts to mingle with it. Our own life. Yes, even
when, compared with what we understand and imagine, we seem to have
none. Opposite to the life of Cordelia, Othello, Werther, in their
vivid, definite fragmentariness (and we may write the names of our
dearest friends in lieu of these heroes and heroines), there is our
own life, so commonplace that we scarcely notice it, but such a
solid, inextricable, living web of little habits, feelings, interests,
sensations, references, hopes and fears, which, taken singly, are
trumpery, invisible; but which just happen to be continuous, organized,
_to be ourselves_. To each of us there has come, at least once, the
sense of impotence and isolation because we could not enter into the
depths of joy or sorrow of our best beloved; we know the humiliation at
the petty irrelevancies which recall our faltering sympathy from out
of the twilight of anxiety, the gloom of utter woe into which we have
peered along the footsteps of that other soul: some worthless pleasure,
or undignified habit, food, sleep, the appeal of a mere sensation, a
hundred trifles we are ashamed to mention, make us turn our head, call
us back after a minute, a second, of--oh, such partial absorption in
that alien feeling! Like Persephone, but contrariwise, we have eaten
of the magic pomegranate; only the fruit was grown in reality, its
savour is our life, and even as she could not remain on earth, so we,
indifferent mortals, cannot, until our own hour comes, tarry in realms
of death.

It is thus when reality is pitted against reality, and when love and
shame help our effort. If we reflect that in the poem, play or novel,
the struggle in our consciousness is between our reality, familiar,
direct, continuous, manifold, in a word _ourself_, and _another_ merely
imagined, and that by someone else, expressed in a few large strokes, or
shown upon an actor's rouged and whitened surface; when we reflect on
these odds the wonder is not that we should endure such make-believe
painfulness, but rather that we should feel it at all. That we do feel
it, against the whole testimony of our personal life, proves that mixed
in this unreal pain there must be elements of pleasure to bribe our
attention: the satisfaction of watching and understanding, the tickle
of curiosity, and even the famous self-congratulation of the mariner
looking at the storm from safe shores. Highly intellectual natures
experience such things in real life, and derive some satisfaction, I
will not repeat cynically with La Rochefoucauld, from the misfortunes of
friends, but from their own pains and distresses; they suffer, but they
think; and thinking, to a thinker, is a form of fighting, of building,
of triumphantly using one's enemy, and so far pleasant. So it is in real
life. How far more in the case of mere written things! false, or, if
what we call true, remote in origin, artificial in shape and substance
like the mummies of a museum; and then transmitted, of all things,
through the medium of words! And here we return to words and their
peculiar nature and virtues. I have alluded to the episode of Francesca
da Rimini. The _argument_, the label thereof, we found to contain
nothing that was not painful; though even into it there comes a fact of
strange fascination: Love. That word we all love most, that bare verbal
fact, _Love_, is a good starting-point for our analysis. In these few
verses the mere word _Amore_ recurs nine times, the episode irradiated
with its charm from various points of that storm-coloured gloom; and, of
a sudden, it is repeated in three consecutive and symmetrical phrases:
"Amor ch'a cor gentil ratto s'apprende"; "Amor, ch'a null'amato amar
perdona"; "Amor condusse noi ad una morte"; forming a sort of triple
fountain of mystic light, in which float wondrous suggestions of beauty
and bliss: the "gentle heart"--"the lovely person"--"the pleasure of
loving"--and those tragic facts, all solemnly enounced, to wit: that
love forces the beloved to love; and that, loving in such wise, there
is no parting possible even in hell. There is something in this episode
besides murder, sin and eternal punishment; and of different quality!
The veritable subject is, therefore, found to be oddly altered from the
argument at the head of the canto. Moreover, this, which turns out to be
a kind of hymn to Love, is presented in a series of pictures which, to
say the least, have nothing very painful. I take them at random. The
allusion to the place of Francesca's birth, with the gravity of the
sea, the sweetness of the great river and its followers seeking peace
therein; the pathetic and solemn reference to the "King of the Universe,"
and to the prayers for Dante's peace (peace again!) with which the
lovers, "if He were their friend" (note this suggestion again) would
reward the poet's compassion. Then the vague crowds of antique knights
and queens, their very names symbols of valour and beauty, out of which
the two lovers of Rimini come forth; crowds glorious like those of
Tintoretto's Paradise: with, clear in front, Paris and Tristram,
Cleopatra, Helen, even the "great Achilles who fought at last for love."
What a triumphal galaxy! And then the world of romances corresponding
to this, into which, with the story of that first kiss, those lovers
disappear, the book of Launcelot and Guinevere. Then notice the attitude
of Dante imploring and listening to the tale; his _loving cry_, "O,
suffering souls, speak unto us," which, for very strength, carries
through that tempest; Dante in whom they recognize at once a creature
"gracious and benign"; who listens with reverent, bowed head, faints
from sheer sympathy; and, more significant than all, makes to Virgil
that most marvellous answer: "Alack, how many sweet thoughts, and how
much longing was needed to bring these to this grievous pass"; an answer
gathering up, with the poet's sweeping glance, all the love, joy and
sadness the world has known. Another point, but important: this Dante,
whose passionate fellow-feeling sighs at the thrill of Francesca's
narrative, is always, for our fancy, the _Poet_, and his companion
also; so that through this thunder-purple whirlwind of hell the two
are visible with the solemn serenity of their laurel crowns. One
might instance much more without exhausting this canto: thus, it is
significant that three times a flight of birds breaks through and
renders breathable that atmosphere of hell: the cranes, with their
association of happier climes; the starlings, suggestive of clear autumn
frosts, and finally those doves, "called by desire, flying to their
sweet nest on wide and steady wing"; with whom, by the most direct
symbol, we return, as usual, to the triumphant theme of Love.

All the foregoing is, however, an analysis of actual subject-matter
which, in the process of exposition, Dante has worked into the argument
in hand. To follow the literary transmutation of the subject, one must
take the statistics, so to speak, of the very words employed, showing
the constant recurrence of suggestions of gentleness, sweetness, dignity
and supreme value and longing. And only after some such analysis would
it be possible to see why this account, as the argument crassly puts
it, "of the sinners through lust perpetually driven by most cruel winds
symbolical of their unbridled passions"--has never been held, by lovers
and poets, as a very serious warning against Love. Also, what concerns
us philosophic creatures more closely, why all this painful business
results, baffling the critical eye, in giving an enormous dose of pleasure
which the pricks, the scars of trifling pain, only help to sink quicker
and deeper into the Reader's soul.


VI

But, you may object, all the painful things in literature are not
made by any means so--well, so _pleasant_ as this particular piece
of penetrating pathos. Philoctetes and Ophelia, and even the death of
Gretchen, _do_ give pain, and no mistake about it. Of course. Pain of so
real a kind that, for my part, I confess my frequent inability to face
it. I can remember in my childhood the positive dread, bodily almost,
with which I looked forward to the harrowing details of certain books my
mother read out loud, trying even to miss hearing them by some ingenious
stratagem; and the relief of the thought that the autobiographical form
guaranteed the survival of at least the principal personage, a minimum
of woe. And even now, if I must tell the truth, I am as likely as not
to skip the story of Le Fevre and such like; only the other day did I
not catch myself putting off a slight sensation of inconvenience which
accompanied in my throat, the selling of Stevenson's donkey, _Modestine_,
at the end of the Cvennes journey.

Now, if you ask me why we occasionally not only endure, but court, pain,
_real pain really felt as such_, there seems a reason for this apart
from all survival of early brutality or all weak-nerved hankering after
stimulants; apart even from a very singular and mysterious exception,
which I shall advert to, respectfully, later on. This reason is simple
enough and not without solemnity. Even in real life we sometimes court
the full savour of pain from an obscure instinct bidding us temper our
soul to the inevitable, cauterize evil by thorough realization, master
by our magnanimous forestalling the buffets of fortune. Nay, more,
because, feeling ourselves the living and thinking fragments of a whole,
we need to watch and listen to all that whole's mysterious ways; and
have the irresistible impulse to mingle in the forces which are making,
and which are destroying also, our little evanescent persons.


VII

This is the place for a parenthesis in our praise of literature, which
has taken for granted (as our praise of institutions, laws and habits
also does) that the thing is always of the very best; that there exists
no literature which is not noble, or at least no Readers who are not
pining to have it noble. Now the multiplying power of print gives
the direct lie to such a notion. In this one branch of human affairs
it is easy to be guided by that kindly Princess's advice, and eat
_brioche_--shilling classics--when enough bread is not baked from day to
day. And this being the case, the supply of other literature must answer
to a demand, a real need, for intellectual food which, even if harmless,
is not very spiritually nourishing.

The plain truth is that the bulk of mankind as at present existing,
educated mankind quite as much as uneducated, has no use for the finer
kind of literature. We have seen--if we have seen anything in the
foregoing pages--that literature, for its perfect existence, requires
the co-operation of the Reader with the Writer: the Reader must bring
all his experience to the business, all his imagination and sympathy; he
must enter deep into the Writer's work, help to make it live, and thus
receive a strengthened and purified life in exchange. Now, in our very
imperfect civilization, most people, even among the well-endowed and
energetic, are too fagged, and even among the idle are too busy, for
any such process. They invest their energies in necessary or unnecessary
work and virtue, and rarely have a penn'orth to spare. They are, in the
most literal sense, the Poor in Spirit; I use these words respectfully
and in view of certain items of blessedness and future glory attendant
on that state. For are they not the reserve material of mankind's
to-morrow? and even if they do not toil in mines and mills and offices,
have they not fostered those virtues and those inventions which every
now and then were thrust upon them by the riotously living spirits of
the past?

Such as they are--and they are everybody, including, turn about, our
precious superfine selves--the Poor in Spirit require intellectual food
in proportion almost to their inability to pay its proper price. It is
because of their fatal tendency to bore themselves, to stagnate, that
they require to be amused, tickled, shaken up; because they do not
naturally see or feel beyond their cramped and cabined personal or class
experience that they need violent enlarging of their life's horizon. But
all this, owing to their poverty of spirit, in the cheapest, shoddiest
and, alas! least efficacious manner. What they are like, even the
proudest of us superior creatures has some notion of when ill, worried,
tired, or merely in a fit of such demoralization as all creatures may
suffer from; then, by something which is almost like a providential
arrangement against a kind of sacrilege, we instinctively turn from
every poem, play, novel, essay which we normally care for as we turn
from our wholesome food and refuse our habitual exercise when we are
sick.

Of course, as the world progresses and less energy is spent in
exhausting labour, unintelligent learning, useless duty and dull
relaxation, the number of the Poor in Spirit, as of the poor in
health, money or virtue, may gradually diminish; and inferior or even
unwholesome literature, like bad eating and worse drinking, will tend to
disappear. But meanwhile, there the need is: the need to increase the
soul's activity and improve its temperature with as little outlay of
energy as possible, and therefore with the help of stimulants of various
degrees of badness. Thus it is patent that thousands of Latins will
patiently labour through a masterpiece of Zola or d'Annunzio, allured
by the obscenities mingled in its humane observation or its stately
far-fetched beauty. Whereas a hankering after brutal adventure and
creepy detail enabled the majority of Anglo-Saxons to accept even
Stevenson after his strange moral lapse in _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.
But without going to such unusual lengths, one can safely say that a
good proportion of books and papers are read because they appeal to
covetousness, to social vanity, to the delight in degrading others and
similar not very amiable human peculiarities. Such appeals exist, let us
remember, not merely in the writings which are forgotten to-morrow, but
in those handed down for their merits, and, alas! also for their vices,
from centuries back: it is not merely for their immortal beauty and wit
that people still read the _Iliad_, the _Inferno_, Rabelais or Swift.

All this is rather disconcerting; and, as a natural consequence, we
nobler minds are apt to blink it. Even apart from stimulation of man's
baser parts, we do not like to think that so much great literature finds
Readers, and so much poor literature finds many more, for the sake of
the plot interest, the details of kings and queens, the satisfaction
given to calf-love or tearful sentimentality even if nothing worse;
nay, to the most universal of all human needs, the need of company,
of someone else and someone else's business, no matter who and what.

Very disconcerting all this, no doubt, to our contemplations of the
double-peaked Parnassus, with Apollo and the Muses on the top, fiddling
and singing quite irrespective of an audience. But there is nothing to
be really distressed or in the least scornful about. No art, as I have
already repeated to satiety, ever came into being or remained there
for the sake of its mere artistic perfections; and beauty, harmony,
nobility, are qualities which we cherish and seek for, but only in
things and occupations answering to some more special need, bodily or
spiritual: there would be no beautiful patterns unless there had first
been stuffs and vessels, no architecture or sculpture unless people had
wanted idols to propitiate and temples to keep them in; no music unless
people had shouted and danced about for various reasons or no reason at
all. And there would have been no literature if talking and writing,
besides being practically useful, had not met the thousand different
wants, whims, nay vices, of the soul of man.

What goes on, to our admiration, in those high valleys of Parnassus,
where we imagine we live between Apollo and his sisters, with clear
rills of poetry and wisdom for ever bubbling under the hoof of a
well-broken, well-groomed Pegasus--what goes on up there (which is what
we are talking about in these pages) is an exception, though, like all
fortunate ones, an exception tending to increase. Everywhere below
there is and ever has been an unceasing, incalculable output of written
matter, serving or not its purpose in random fashion, and with the varying
amount of waste and litter and nuisance incident to the satisfaction of
all human wants; going, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of it,
to swell the dust heaps and kitchen middens where anthropology seeks
for the traces of extinct manners and customs. But as a result of all
this toiling and moiling and messing and muddling, there has emerged
occasionally a written thing so noble, so significant or lovely,
that, handy or useless, futile or instructive, we recognize in it an
inexplicable higher utility, a certain immortality, on account of which
we put it among our treasures, and bequeath it to our heirs.


VIII

We are mistaken, therefore, in looking on literature as an art exactly
like the others; and still more so in allowing the other arts to inflict
pain or leave dissatisfaction, because pain is an inevitable result of
human sympathy, and dissatisfaction a result of all pursuit of truth.
For only the art of words can thus enlarge our moral and intellectual
life, and only it, therefore, has a right to the price of such expansion
of experience and understanding.

Every art, until art falls into decay, is based upon some need quite
independent of the pursuit of pleasure; although pleasure, ninety-nine
times out of a hundred, stamps the need's satisfaction as useful to the
race and individual. It is my intention to review the various spiritual
needs, or, if you will, cravings, to which literature ministers blindly
and without inquiring after their goodness or badness. Before so doing I
would point out, in connection with the end of my last chapter, that we
often subject ourselves to pain at the Writer's hands on the deliberate
understanding that the pain is but insufficiently redeemed by any
pleasure, submitting to it for the health or the safety it may bring
us. I have already confessed that, speaking for myself, a good deal of
literature, whatever its other qualities, is so predominantly painful
that I would rather not read it again, that I am tempted to skip, turn
the page. But there is more than that. Reading, for instance, the second
part of _Werther_, I am almost terrified by its picture of the downfall
of a nature in which I find kinship to myself and some of my friends.
Despite the mitigations of beautiful writing and charming episode, the
mitigations of impersonality and distance belonging to all art; despite
the amusement of noting the admirable fidelity to life, the skill
employed, etc.; despite the pleasurableness of my own intellectual
activity and consciously enlarged experience, the total effect is
painful, and _ought to be painful_: I intend to be warned and chastened
through that very pain. We have all of us a racial instinct--or, at
least, a cultivated habit--of this kind of asceticism; we know that the
spirit, more than the flesh, is weak, and recognize the cruel bracings,
the harsh disciplines, required to strengthen it.

Symmetrically to this there has come to be in all decent creatures an
instinctive turning away from other kinds of literature because racial
experience tells us their pleasantness is bad. What we call _dirty_ or
_disgusting_ (often neither in the literal sense) literature is such
mainly from the experience that it soils or saps our souls, and from
the immediate foretaste of degradation which that experience causes.
A certain humourousness will, in some cases, allow endurance; the
lightness of mood and general topsy-turviness of laughter doubtless
preventing the thing in question from staining deep into our nature; the
comic being, essentially, superficial and transient. Such lightness--the
lightness of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire--means the possibility of
shaking certain degradations off our mind's surface; while the shame and
ill-will aroused by similar subjects treated without laughter, safeguard
those sanctuaries of memory and expectation on which depend so much of
life's bodily and mental health. Our spiritual organization is full
of such safety valves and compensations, due to incalculably repeated
survival of useful variations. And this explains once more the
differences between literature and the other arts. Painting, for
instance, possesses the direct suggestiveness of represented scenes and
objects; music makes for our nerves in even more violent or insidious
manner. Whereas the written word must always, as I have so often
insisted, fight its way against the thoughts and feelings already
occupying our consciousness; and cannot do it without employing forms
created by reasoning and therefore calling reason into play; literature
is, two-thirds, intellectual, and thereby loses half its dangers of
over-stimulating or blunting or perverting our sensibilities. Of course,
however, literature is chaste (and under chastity we should surely
include cleanness from cruelty quite as much as from lust) just in
proportion as the Reader is literary. The child, the savage or the
diseased person, goes straight for the gratification of his one desire;
his energies cannot be drafted off by reason, nor his feelings be
purified and disciplined by the hierarchic, nay, hieratic, influence
of form. The lewdest and most brutal literature is always the least
excellent; and the Reader for whom the higher qualities of literature
do not exist will naturally magnify all traces of the lower. Hence, we
should not lose patience even with prudishness; and, on the whole, sin
rather in making literature too much of a church than in letting it
become a free space for processes best performed in private and for
proceedings best not permitted at all.

The creature for whom literature really exists goes to it very much
as to science or to religion, from a desire, however unformulated, to
learn what is, and also what ought, or ought not, to be. And the powers
common to all art, the powers of soothing, vitalizing and harmonizing,
enable us to endure and court such enlightenment and edification.

But besides these definite and utilitarian aims of literature, or rather
below them, and in confused and less obvious regions of the soul, the
written word ministers to a number of instincts and cravings, mostly
unknown to other arts, and further differentiates literature from all
and any of them. It is of these underlying reasons for writing and
reading that I next wish to treat.


IX

That literature, so far from being a mere fine art, is in reality the
fare which caters for the least artistic of human wants, is illustrated
by one's own preferences in early life. I do not mean the books which
children care for, though the remark applies, of course, also to them. I
am alluding to the extraordinary things which passed for poetry before
the age when one begins to care for ... well, for what one calls _poetry_
in later years. Thus, I can remember wild pleasure at the aphoristic and
witty sayings scattered throughout the works of Pope and Young. "And
wretches hang that jurymen may dine," seemed positively sublime; and how
could my elders be insensible to the poetic quality of "for she's before
her Maker and Mankind"? A perversely prosaic child? Perhaps I was. But I
have heard grave and reverend signiors speak as if the "greatness" of
Shakespeare lay in his "philosophy," that is to say, certain statements
as obvious, as partial (and as flatly contradicted by similar statements)
as those of the Book of Proverbs, or rather of _a_ book of proverbs.

But apart from the knowledge of human nature extracted from poetry, my
childish mind was also sensitive to the mere charms of expression. "The
inverted silk," meaning a drawn-off stocking, has remained in my memory
as one of the chief beauties of Thomson's _Seasons_ and of the British
Classics. And from the fact that he wrote it, and was printed and read
for his pains, I presume that a good many persons of maturer years
but less recent date must have had exactly the same taste as mine was
as a child. The thing--I mean "the inverted silk" and my liking for
it--becomes less astounding when we note the part played in the greatest
classic poetry by the veiling of ordinary concerns under learned
allusion and inappropriate expression. Our ancestors must have taken
pleasure not merely in showing off, however irrelevantly, their various
kinds of learning, but, what is to the credit of their good heart, in
witnessing such display on the part of others. Such flowers of rhetoric
gave the satisfaction of riddles, whether answered or "given up"; and
of the various pedantic games on bits of paper ("Who said Divide and
Govern?" "What cost us our Colonies?") or the sad Bible games of
certain nurseries. Our ancestors revelled, no doubt, in all that talk
of Numbers, Essences, Planets, Gods, Hebrew Kings, that emptying out of
obsolete encyclopdias which constitutes half the obscurity of Dante,
maddening some of us to fury. They were children, those solemn medival
worthies. And we can all remember our own lively childish satisfaction
in saying to others, nay, in being said to: "Do _you_ know who Cyrus
was? How puppies are born? What's French for shoe string?" Nay, if my
own experience can be trusted, some children will play with dictionaries
and encyclopdias as a kind of finer riddle guessing.

All such "pleasure in power," as Nietzsche and Dr. Adler would say,
attached to the acquisition and display of irrelevant learning, is
probably a feature of the growing mind, in the race as in the individual;
perhaps, moreover, of the mind which has ceased to grow, or never grown
at all! To us there is something funny in people having extracted pleasure
from "the learned and ingenious devices" in which past ages hid and
sought platitude and bathos. Yet it is perhaps to the taste for such
ingenuity that we owe perspective, counterpoint, theology, metaphysics;
that we owe more recently the metrical and linguistic complications
of Parnassians and Symbolists. Anyhow, this is one instinct which
literature has appealed to.

We can now proceed to more general considerations. Exorbitantly on the
Writer's part, and in only less degree on the part of the Reader, the
need for literature is explained by one of the primary impulses of the
human being: the impulse to revive impressions when they are important,
to revisit, or failing that, to talk about all places, persons and
things which have a power over our feelings. Oddly enough the theorizers
on Art, and on the Play Instinct supposed to underlie art, have done
scant justice to this impulse; yet instances of it crowd at every step,
and the utility of it to the individual and to the race is manifest.
Thus it is evident that the pleasure in make-believe at the core of all
childish games is the pleasure in the thought of the horse, the lion,
the wild Indian, and with small girls, of the baby, the wardrobe and the
kitchen; these items can put the child into a pleasant frame of mind, an
agreeable excitement; and the child, by that process of make-believe,
sets about reviving that pleasure. The instinct continues throughout
life. We all quote the classic lover who cuts his beloved's name in the
bark of trees and sings it to the echoes; he intensifies in so doing
his recollection, and procures a feeling of real presence. Indeed,
the gloating over the fair one's portrait has much less of sthetic
contemplation than of such stimulation to feeling: a lock of hair, a
withered flower, will do as well and better (and the relics of all kinds
of piety have the same function); nay, the expectant mother is knitting
at the tiny sock less because the baby will want it soon than because
she wishes, already, to forestall the emotion of the little one's being
there. For when all is said and done, what the poor human being requires
is not things, but the effect of things upon himself; not food, but to
be satisfied and nourished. And such beneficent emotions not only still
the soul's hunger and thirst, but remake the soul's tissues. A shallow
utilitarian explanation of the world has overlooked these fundamental
facts, limiting usefulness to such objects and actions as directly
further man's material life, and leaving out of account those which
increase the life of the instincts and the emotions. And, in view of
this, it is a useful provision that a sight, a feeling, may last, or
serve twice over; as useful, at least, as the precautions to secure the
germinating of a seed or the supply of a commodity. Indeed, it is not
merely of sentimental conditions that we thus seek the reviviscence
through speech or symbol. And by this hangs the unflagging boringness of
specialists of all kinds: like Uncle Toby, they can give themselves all
the emotions of a campaign (and without risk of another musket wound)
over these few yards of entrenched lawn and their jackboot cannons; nay,
without any apparatus, and by the help only of a stick drawing in the
sand, and a lot of long words, as we all know to our cost and to their
satisfaction. Even I, though proud of my intellect, can "talk weather"
quite happily with any polite person at an afternoon call. "The peasants
foretell heavy snow this winter"--for I see the blue lowering clouds and
rolls of mist like wadding, and the mountains pale or glittering under
next day's sun; nay, the heavy berried ivy, and hedges full of hips and
haws.

Hence it comes that we are, all of us, more or less playactors, or, at
all events, playing children, imitating those we love and admire the
better to taste our secret emotions; or talking about the places and
persons we care about in order to renew our enjoyment: they are so
important, our neighbours and posterity really have a right to hear
all about them! And of this sort is the impulse of Dante, solemn in the
conviction that he must write of Beatrice "such things as have been said
of no other lady."

But the miracle of literature is this: that the love for that one woman,
Beatrice, ceases to be the private concern of that one man Dante; and
becomes, for each of the readers of the _Vita Nuova_, his own love;--the
love he feels, has felt, will feel; or which is destined, peradventure,
to lie dormant and stir once only in his life, at that touch of the
poet.


X

Literature is the universal confidant, the spiritual director of
mankind. It revives, relieves and purifies the Reader's feelings by
telling him of similar but nobler ones. It makes the Reader give, and
thereby possess, his own soul through the illusion of having for a
moment possessed that of the Writer.

I repeat: through the illusion. For we must guard against being misled
by the private life of Writers having become the _corpus vile_ of
gossiping analysis; a mere accident due to the preservation of famous
people's letters and to the autobiographical matter contained, like
every other sort of observed item, in their works. Being misled, I mean,
into thinking that the Writer is revealing, giving away, cheapening,
his innermost feelings. He may, indeed, feel poignantly that he is
thus exposing his own self, and take pleasure or pain or a bitter-sweet
mixture, in making himself a motley to the view. But, taking the act of
literary communication for what it really is, it becomes clear that the
Writer is exposing, evoking, only the Reader's own experience; though
widened, generalized by the universal experience stored up in the very
language he makes use of. The Reader, meanwhile, persuaded, no doubt,
that what he feels is the Writer's experience, is in reality feeling his
own: his own experience, but _sub specie humanitatis_, so to speak. This
is inevitable in the artistic phenomenon, since all artistic form is
three-quarters of it an heirloom, handled by mankind and fashioned by
its repeated handlings. There is no real unveiling of Dante in the _Vita
Nuova_, nor of Goethe in _Werther_; but an unveiling of the Reader to
himself under the pressure of a greater personality than his own, and
by the spell of processes which generations have elaborated. And under
the name of Beatrice or Charlotte he falls into contemplation of his
own mistress, or of the mistress of his dreams. If it were different
it would be a case of--What's Hecuba to me?


XI

The real revelation of the Writer (as of the artist) comes in a far
subtler way than by such autobiography; and comes despite all effort
to elude it; indeed, such effort and its methods are merely one of
the means of revelation. For what the Writer does communicate is
his temperament, his organic personality, with its preferences and
aversions, its pace and rhythm and impact and balance, its swiftness
or languor, aloofness or clinging or brooding attitude; and this he
does equally whether he be rehearsing veraciously his own concerns or
inventing someone else's. For the revelation is not so much in the
facts, as in the choice and arrangement thereof; and in the manner,
words, mode of seeing, explaining, condensing, eliding, expanding;
weighing down here and springing off there, in fact in the conception of
the subject, in the style. And by this projecting of himself in style
and conception the Writer subdues his Reader into living for the moment,
his own, the Reader's, experiences in modes of life which are the
Writer's. Modes of life not as a person, a man with an address and a
biography, but as a Writer; that is to say, an individual spontaneous
organism, itself subjected to those modalities of art which have been
fashioned by the needs of all foregoing mankind.

Once we have grasped these facts and their dependence on the great
process of give and take of all perception and interpretation, and so
far grasped likewise the part played in works of genius by the universal
and the eternal--once these things understood, there comes to be
something contemptible and excusable, futile and harmless, in all such
controversies as have raged round, let us say, _Elle et Lui_, or the
Carlyle Letters. We have been talking not merely about things we do not
know, but about things which scarcely exist, save in the knowing, in the
minds of the talkers. How much more so when, instead of attempting to
interpret _bona fide_ documents and records, we try to reconstruct fact
out of real works of art, like Shakespeare's _Sonnets_! We may guess at
incidents underlying them, we can gossip about what may have happened.
But the emotional drama is of our own making, and constructed out of
our own experience. More than in any other art there is illusion in all
literature, nay, rather _delusion_, the delusion of mistaking what the
Writer has evoked in us for that which the Writer has felt, seen, been,
himself. To the highest extent we receive from the Writer in proportion
to what we can give.


XII

But literature is beneficent not merely by the personality it stirs
within us. It helps us even more by being, sometimes, impersonal.

Every religion, of course, has ministered to this occasional need for
shuffling off our ego, and, like Dante's Piccarda, seeking peace in a
will transcending our own. And here I would remark that literature
seems destined to replace many of religion's functions; and has even
now already become, what religion was in its palmy days (when man's
activities were but little specialized), the universal caterer for all
such needs as are neither directly practical nor purely intellectual;
needs ambiguous and shamefaced, as well as clear-eyed and majestic. Nor
is the parallel made less precise when we remember, what sentimental
unbelievers tend nowadays to forget, that the religion of the past
had not merely its true saints, but its Archigalli, Corybantian
cymbal-clashers, Flagellants or merely practically minded pietists,
retiring, like the excellent Jung Stilling, to pray for funds towards
housekeeping and conviviality....

Be this as it may, the healing virtues of impersonal contemplation are,
fortunately, to be met on many sides. For some of us of the laity they
issue from whitewashed laboratories with their furnaces and odd-shaped
glassware, as Besnard has expressed it in his wonderful decorative
panels, where arise visions of worlds and times empty of mankind's
fretting and fuming; also in the tower whence storms are made to write
themselves down in purple and queer zigzags, and the flight is watched
of migratory birds, themselves carrying our purified thoughts into
distant climes of serenity. _The Cherub Contemplation_; Milton was right
to seek him in high places.

To other sorts of minds, or at other moments, the same impersonal
passion may be given by archology; and I have heard of a man, sorely
tried in all human matters, digging up peace, so to speak, with buried
cities; superposed layers of rubbish, say, of the seven times burnt
towers of Ilium. Nay, the extraordinary power which Rome has ever had
over wounded or tragically restless natures is but a case in point. An
hour's ramble among the great arches and the little belfries, plucking
the tufts of fennel, or scraping, with idle fingers, that odd, lilac
friable earth which looks like burnt-down cities and human ashes; an
hour of contemplation in that mild, yellow, Roman sunshine; and the
soul, so long galled by personal fears and sorrows, arises, feels itself
new and whole. And, its eyes washed clean, like Dante's with the dew
of Purgatory, it goes its way in peace; or ascends, in humility and
greatness, to the seats _ad dexteram domini_, there to participate in
the inevitable and universal.


XIII

In dealing with the question of inferior literature I have spoken of
the usefulness of certain of its lowest forms as a mere excitant, or
the least harmful among mere excitants, to minds fagged or numbed by
the monotony and narrowness of life.

Except as such, a less offensive substitute for drink, betting,
bull-fighting or nautch-dancing, Western as well as Eastern, I find it
difficult to understand that excessive or painful emotion should ever be
a desirable result of any kind of art. But experience has taught me to
be more diffident before the mysteries of the human soul, its various
sorts and varying needs. And although my temperament and my whole
philosophy (such as it is) bid me look with suspicion and aversion on
the kind of art which Nietzsche named, for all times, _Dionysiac_, I
recognize that its fumes and agonies may be required for a small number
who are the very opposite of that multitude I have dealt with as the
Poor in Spirit. As the world, in its deep imperfection, goes, there
seems room for certain exceptions, dangerous but salutary: creatures,
perhaps, less sound than we, but gifted with powers transcending ours,
with intensity of energy and passion out of keeping with life's even
tenor, but requisite to correct life's everyday poverty; the mysterious
brotherhood, known to us by our instinctive awe, of voluntary and
destined martyrs, however uncanonized, nay, however untried. For such
creatures as these, shadowed for us in the sublime first page of De
Quincey's _Levana_, creatures so made for suffering that they accept it
(for the world's good) as their element, thirst can be slaked only if
hyssop, not honey, tip the rod held to their lips. For these tense and
sombre souls, acquainted from childhood with bitterness and agony, the
intolerable masterpieces from which some of us shrink, Oedipus, Lear,
Wagner's death of Iseult, are not a _more_ which almost breaks the
spirit, but a _less_: the very stuff of their life, made solemn and
gentle by kinship with the happier, less tragic soul of others. I cannot
assert these things as certain, but only suspect them; and I pass
alongside of that Dionysiac art, in lack of understanding, but in awe
and humility.


XIV

In the foregoing pages I have often spoken as if literature were an art
just like the others; but this, as I have hinted, is the reverse of my
opinion. For while art encloses us completely in a world of its own,
literature is in great measure an intensification, but also a prolongation,
of real life. Our spirit has high needs besides the need for beauty
and dignity: desire for sympathy, for self-expression, craving for
intelligibility and permanence; and these other requirements, like our
meaner instincts, seek satisfaction in literature. But above all else
Experience--the completion of what life teaches us by snatches--is what
we seek for in the written word. Life puzzles, frightens us, yet we want
more of it. Life is for ever propounding problems, showing us samples
and diagrams which are snatched from our sight, effaced or inextricably
overlaid, just as we seem to seize them. Have we ever the map of a square
foot of existence, the sufficient formula of any character, even our
own, nay, least of our own? Do we ever understand the real _why_ of any
action, or rather its real _how_? Yet it seems urgent to know, and we
hunger and thirst after such knowledge. We are intellectual creatures
as well as practical and sthetic ones; and we want life's intellectual
essences, we ask its meaning. Hence the great Writer is always the man
of experience, the thinker, the philosopher. Having seen more, he should
be able to tell us.... But he must have really seen more; not perhaps
as actual objective fact, but as inner feeling and interpretation; and
if we suspect that what he tells us is second-hand or for the nonce,
adieu to his prestige! This is why we are so disturbed by everything
savouring of rhetoric or formula: the pedant, the bookworm, the superfine
attitudinizer, the most talented phrase-and-image monger is cheating us
when we ask for the knowledge, felt or thought, of life.

This is a large order; but by no means all. There is, besides, the fact
that human beings thirst for the human being; while in reality that
human being appears but fitfully in our neighbours and in ourselves. We
follow the glance of certain eyes, the smile or the bitter twist of a
mouth; we follow a gesture, an outline. But the human being, most often,
is not revealed to us pursuing; indeed, we may lose all sight of it,
masked, absorbed into conventionality. There are few things we want so
much (and this methinks is, perhaps, why there is a certain compensation
about all suffering) and get so little, as human contact; by which I
mean the realizing of other people's feelings. Even with our nearest and
dearest we rarely have it; indeed, least, perhaps, with them; so that
the passing stranger is sometimes, for his brief second, closer to us,
sinking deeper in. This passing stranger with the eyes promising the
secrets after which we strain, and with the hands whose clasp our nerves
have been longing for; this satisfying stranger can be given us by the
spell of the Writer. Literature can evoke for us creatures entirely
human, intelligible, whom we can love, clasp, perhaps also fight with,
our fill! Creatures existing merely as human forces, as brothers, lovers,
children, enemies, with none of reality's wrappings and trimmings; from
Helen, mere power of beauty, to Iago, mere power of baseness. The
innumerable hosts, more potent than the heavenly ones, created by poet
and novelist are, in great measure, the consolers of our inevitable
secret loneliness: they are those to whom, by the deed of fancy, we can
give ourselves utterly, as we give only to that which we have chosen
and, may be, to that we have created. Among these, less clear, but how
much more potent for his illusive reality, is the Writer himself! Every
Writer is, to our fancy, an essential man, because he shows us only his
essence, keeping the casual and deciduous for actual life. Hence, we
expect in the Writer a man of deeper life, higher power, than ourselves
or our neighbours. And in the very great Writer, the typical poet, we
really find him. Not as he sits at meat, or goes to his office, or
converses (even with his Boswell or Eckermann), but _as he writes_. Nay,
in the very greatest, we expect, we get, and _we make_, this typical man
(such as Emerson taught of) even in the ordinary concerns of life. Hence
the commanding quality of figures like Goethe, or Johnson, or Shelley;
the fascination of Stevenson.

The very great Writer _must_ be, potentially at least, a great
personality, else how can he know more than we, feel more than we,
see more than we? He cannot, like the artist, be a specialized genius
tacked on to a mediocrity. And for yet another reason. Perhaps the most
sthetic demand we make of literature (though at first sight it may not
seem so) is for a definite philosophy of life; since philosophy of life
means the essentials of sthetic contemplation: a standpoint, a unified
vision, a definite mood or temperament. And note that all the greatest
poets, those whom we put in the first line, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe,
Browning, are all philosophers of life.

It is the ignorance of this which makes the foolish failures of _art
for art's sake_, the jejuneness of all the Gautier, Leconte de Lisle,
Heredia kind of poetry; of men even like Baudelaire and Swinburne, the
wearisome hollowness of magnificent artists in words like d'Annunzio or
Barrs. However well they speak, there seems no call for their speaking.
Let them paint pictures in words, build temples and grottoes, score
symphonies of metaphors and allusions. But what can they tell of other
life or do with their own? They are of the stuff no reasonable creature
cares to know about; certainly not of the stuff that dreams are made of.
We are apt to judge them with undue harshness, because they disappoint a
need of ours: _poseurs_, hypocrites, _histriones_. For at the bottom of
much of our desire for great poetry is our desire for the greater life,
the deeper temperament, the more powerful mind, for the great man.


XV

A question arises at this point, frivolous and indiscreet, as it is
usually put; but taken seriously, important and most instructive in
many ways. Must the great Writer be a great Man?

The greatest Writer quite inevitably, and in the most everyday
acceptance of the term. The less great, in no such sense of human
greatness; but merely, I would add, because his fragmentary and special
superiority, his literary genius, has, to a greater or lesser extent,
benefited by the greatness of character which his betters, Readers as
well as Writers, have worked into the art of words.

For words, such as they come to hand, are steeped in association; syntax
is but the cast left by long repeated acts of thought; all eloquence
has originally welled up under high pressure of feeling. And the same
quality of intellectual and moral greatness which transports the Reader
into a world finer than his usual one, will make the literary artist,
the creature specially sensitive to such verbal suggestion, think and
feel, as long as he writes, in a way quite foreign to his individual
habits; because, to whatsoever extent, he is doing so in words imposed
on him by others. Of course, however, the smaller Writers (and among
them many whom we call classics) are liable to lapses from this high
state of being. I believe, if we watched (and even without watching!),
we should always find them out. They hesitate and swerve, or exceed,
exaggerate; however elaborate their skill, they are unequal, and,
although most often piquing themselves on taste, on judgment, they
offend against it.[4] For nothing can replace the unflagging directness,
the unhesitating intention of greatness; that energy which, hastening
steadily along, gives all things their just weight, fills out or
neglects obedient to a central necessity, concentrates everything from
sheer unity of purpose, and sweeps all irrelevant matter away in the
irresistibleness of habitual and organized power.

 4: See my further chapter on De Quincey and Landor.

And by a well-known psychological law, such superior vitality is
necessarily self-forgetful, in a way altruistic; the great Writer
never dreams of making a point, doing a fine thing, showing off to
advantage; his outgoing energy flows into the matter in hand, however
trifling; he is impressed, moved (little guessing by his own genius)
as it seems by the necessities of the case. In humble terms, he has
the faculty of unceasing, complete interest, which means gift of
oneself, superabundance of life; and there is in his proceedings the
concentration on the desired object which gives an air of being rapt,
and is indeed a kind of higher automatism.

Judicious and faithful artists of _art for art's sake_, disdainers
of _subjectivity_ and of _self-exhibition_, classics and Parnassians
of all times and countries, has the suspicion never crossed your
ingenious brains that you are able to give your graceful or ostentatious
performances, to play about seriously and to no purpose, simply because
other men have thought, have felt, have lived, with inevitable,
self-unconscious entireness?

Here I must gather up a dropped thread of this intricate subject; and
explain exactly what I mean, speaking of literary genius, by the words
_self-unconscious_ and _entire_; and, if I can, also by that expression
_living_, when applied to a Writer. For quite a number of great Writers,
_e.g._ Henry James, as compared with other persons, seem scarcely to
live at all, the storms in their existence, when no longer magnified by
our admiration, being often of teacup proportion. Let alone that writing
means a special activity, and very often a steady drudgery, that is to
say, a derivative, in the French medical sense, from living as most men
mean life. I am not, therefore, prying into the private concerns of
Writers, which do not differ, except by being often less interesting,
from those of other folk. The actual biography of human beings is
determined by their character, but also, quite two-thirds of it,
by circumstances: the manifestation of certain tendencies may never
attain a visible importance; only looks and gestures, tones of voices,
judgments and preferences revealing to the shrewd observer (or the
recording angel) what the creature really was. In this the Writer is but
as his fellow-men, and his potentialities are no more adequately used up
than theirs. But between them and him there is a fundamental difference:
that he has a possibility of manifesting his real personality where others
have not. For the man who deals with words deals really with ideas, and
his whole existence, as likely as not, is a perpetual reacting on what
he sees, hears, reads of, nay, imagines. In his unnoticed way, perhaps
in his solitary and detached existence, the Writer is, like that personage
of Browning's, more in the turmoil of life than his more seemingly
active contemporaries. For of these, the practical man is oddly shut
between the blinkers of his practice (note it in soldiers, politicians,
men of business) and the creature of passion, be he sinner or saint,
goes headlong towards the only satisfactions which exist for his nature,
stumbling across, upsetting or trampling upon, everything alien to
that dominant impulse. But the Writer is, by the nature of things, the
contemplative man; and if the facts of life do not of necessity play
havoc with his fortune, break his heart, or wear out his nerves, they
abut upon his feeling, his thought, with no exceptions or impediments.
This John-a-Dreams, often taxed with indifference or incapacity for
action, is in reality for ever being subjected to impressions of pain or
joy; his preferences and repulsions are called on, by what he witnesses,
quite without ceasing; he is loving or hating persons and acts he may
have only faintly guessed at; he is judging ten thousand things which
practically do not concern him, weighing, turning over, going through
all forms of suspense, doubt and resisted conviction; acting out stories
back into the past, forwards into the future; he is in the whirlpool
of life, and it is in him. This John-a-Dreams, whose name is Dante,
Shakespeare, Goethe or Browning, may, indeed, not be living very
noticeably in the modes of his particular station, situation or business.
But he is living in those of fifty creatures in whom some day the world
(reading of Francesca, Hamlet, Faust and those _Men and Women_) will
recognize a life deeper, more concentrated, more essential than its own.

Such is my meaning when I repeat that the very great Writer must of
necessity be a great man; a full-blooded type of some great class of
men; and as such endowed with sensitiveness, passion, activities, _and
experience_ far surpassing that of other men.

_And experience._ I italicize these words and repeat them, because,
superficially considered, this is what may oftenest seem lacking in
one absorbed in contemplation, study and intellectual production. But
experience is, remember, an inner phenomenon; and the mere accidental
finding yourself in given circumstances does not necessarily give it.
A man may have been in a battle or a shipwreck, and possess no real
experience on the subject; even commoner things, being in love, losing
nearest and dearest, health or fortune, seem, judging by results,
by no means always to constitute experience thereof. And one of the
disappointments of life is perceiving how extraordinarily little
experience has been accumulated, very often, by those who have lived
longest and most; Vauvenargues' saying, "_on tire peu des vieillards_,"
being true of nothing so much as of experience. Whereas the Writer,
if we chance to know him intimately, often surprises by the singular
slightness of the facts which have given him abundant knowledge on
certain points: a remark dropped, a word in a letter, a look sometimes,
will be all he can point to as human document, and yet how wide, how
deep he has reached into _our_ hidden experience! A grotesque proof
of this is that Writers are sometimes taxed with indiscretion, almost
libel, for having described real events which, at the time of writing,
had not yet happened; imagination in this case going straighter and
quicker than facts. It may also be that a Writer, in some purely
invented story, forestalled feelings which real circumstances awaken
only later in him: his real self was there, truly; and the imagined
risk, loss or alternative, the imagined contact with a given other
personality, will, by the logic of organic creation, have brought to
his pen's tip the words he is one day destined to hear or speak. And it
would be instructive (if such inquiries were not conducted mostly on the
mere surface, all vanity and preconceived ideas, of authors) to inquire
whether every great author has not, once at least in his existence,
been astonished at meeting some real creature he had portrayed before
knowing; has not thrilled at the glance of eyes, the contact of nerves,
which, in that seeming absence of real experience, he had felt and
described long ago.

And here I would remark upon a misconception of literary talent. People,
intelligent people, friends of mine, who should know better, have a way
of talking as if the greater suggestiveness of a book or poem were due
to superior literary endowment. "So and so, _with his literary talent_,
of course, made the most of the subject." Not at all. So-and-so, my dear
people, made most of the subject because he was more deeply, variously,
richly _interested_ than others; because, at the moment of writing, and
probably at some half-unconscious, wholly forgotten, previous moments,
that particular subject made a greater stir in a mind already filled
with more items from more frequent past stirrings. To be more interested
in the world, unselfishly, platonically, passionately; to understand
more and more quickly; to feel things into their furthest ramifications,
this is, indeed, the characteristic of the great Writer, but 'tis his
human superiority, not, believe me, his literary talent. _That_, owing
to the concordances of function which exist throughout life, will, very
likely, be superadded: having an immense deal more to say, the special
gift of speech will, nine times out of ten, have been evolved alongside
of the gift of thought or feeling. But in the tenth case it may not:
some of the greatest Writers, Browning, for instance, make one suspect
an originally poor vocabulary, a defective sense of phrase, overcome by
sheer necessity of saying, but of which traces remain here and there
(like the seams in ill-compacted voices) in far-fetched, cumbersome or
inappropriate expressions. But the man was full of things to say, of
modes of feeling, leaps and rushes and quiet returnings on himself,
movements backwards, forwards, upwards, downwards, weaving inextricably
but intelligibly between those items; and, as they filled out every
dimension of his own soul, enabling him to take the soul also of his
Reader, and enclose it, worked upon, working, in the four-square
edifice, in the eight-part counterpoint, of, say, _Abt Vogler_ or
_Galuppi_.

Literary talent: A thing most difficult of definition, because the order
of the universe, finding it vain in itself, has on the whole not given
it a chance when separated from the human worth of the Writer. Yet
we occasionally get a glimpse of it; either when the mere poverty of
thought and feeling, the vacuity of the _man_, as in Gautier, d'Annunzio
and, I grieve to say, Swinburne and Landor, show it through rents and
threadbareness; or, again, when other Writers, quite decently constituted
human beings, like the brothers de Goncourt, fall to practising literary
vocalizations, swells and shakes in public, desisting from singing
a real tune out of sheer childlike solemnity of professional pride.
_Literary talent_; a very wonderful, complex and scientifically
interesting gift (like the vocal parts of a great tenor); and quite
inestimable when used to some purpose, is, I want to repeat, so utterly
useless in itself that Providence, the Cosmos, or Man's impatience has
rarely given us the sight of it in its poor nakedness.

Closing this parenthesis, I may restate my conviction that it is a
mistake to scold, say, at Sterne or Voltaire because his works are
not reliable certificates of his private behaviour; and that the great
Writer's great humanity is real, because it really acts upon us through
his works.

Moreover, the greatness of personality which underlies great writing
must not be thought of as necessarily continuous. With Writers not
of the first order the great inspiration is an exception, due to an
exceptional strand in their nature, or an exceptional moment. It is an
old remark that passion makes all men eloquent. I have verified its
truth in the answers to letters of condolence; they are apt to have an
eloquence contrasting sharply with the embarrassed conventionalities
which call them forth. And a friend of mine has had the scheme of
collecting such perfect pieces of literary expression from among the
letters, published in the newspapers, of soldiers at the front. The
psychological explanation of this sporadic eloquence is simple. A
great emotion, when not so violent as to scatter everything, makes
the human being live, for the moment, at higher pressure; morally and
intellectually, and often physically, his temperature is higher, his
circulation sweeps along swifter and fuller; and he breathes life
into tissues shrunk and anmic during the imperfect life of every
day. Moreover, great emotion, and even more, that latent or continuous
emotion we call _passion_, unifies the personality, deafens and blinds
it to the appeal of irrelevant matters, forces all energies from vain
competition into powerful co-operation, and establishes throughout the
soul order and hierarchy. _Distraction_, in the truest sense of the
word, becomes impossible, and frivolity vanishes; all words, gestures,
movements not to that one purpose are sheer forgotten. And, for the
moment, the creature, knowing of only one thing to say, says it to
perfection; nay, feeling only one thing, thinks it with a fulness, a
sudden illumination of remotest points and knitting together of most
abstract connections, before which we outsiders feel as if suddenly in a
prophet's presence.

Now such a state of intensified and co-ordinated feeling and thinking
is the condition of all great artistic work. The ancients were not
far wrong in comparing the inspiration of the poet with the demoniac
possession of the priestess or the lover. We must not be misled by
what we see, nay, what he himself remembers, of the great Writer's
handicraft; much of which is but a critic's, an editor's, an imitator's
or even a copyist's task: the labour, assiduous, weary, sometimes
heart-breaking, of filling up the gaps and rents of flagging inspiration;
of working up to the sample, as it were, of his lapsed genius. We are
told that Mozart wrote most of _Don Giovanni_ when so fagged at the
day's end that his wife had to keep him awake by telling him stories.
Taking this metaphorically, the anecdote is true; Mozart, we also know,
invented his music when out of doors or playing at billiards, that is
to say, in moments of excitement and concentration; and the scribe's
or editor's work of those sleepy evenings had nothing to do with his
genius. Similarly with the great Writer. The immortal thoughts come
under the pressure of life vividly seen and felt; they grow, moreover
(and this is a neglected side of the question), in the soul's silent
leisure, but not in its laziness; gaining substance and taking shape in
the moments, perhaps the seconds, of unrecorded, intensest life; for the
incubation of genius should not be thought of as the sitting of a hen.
A man has felt, nay probably thought, a thing a hundred times before it
starts into his literary consciousness; even the meanest may be eloquent
like d'Annunzio about his preferences and repulsions; and these imply
habitual repetition of strong states of feeling. The preferences may be
of humble, sometimes of base enough, kind, but they imply heightened
vitality. Even the most rhetorical of Writers, those in whom we vainly
seek a higher human quality, must have had an overmastering emotion,
even if only for a half second, about a fountain in a garden, or an
almond tree. All noble emotion is not exclusively for the benefit of
wife and child, church or state, as we have a way of taking for granted.
Moreover, in the specially gifted individual there is undoubtedly a
special emotion: that of mere creation, the plunge into one's own
element, the breasting of the sea of words and rhythms, the joy of
effort mingling with divine facility. And it is this emotion, this
emotion of trying, doing, succeeding, which probably accounts for the
occasional splendours of Writers of the school of _art for art's sake_.
Art happened to be their one passionate side, _their_ piece of life and
humanity.


XVI

The studies embodied in the foregoing notes have gradually convinced me
that while literature answers to many and various needs of the spirit,
it becomes an art through one great incidental characteristic: the
momentary living in the _modes of eternity_, with its resultant bracing
and clarifying of the soul. This is the central miracle, blessedness and
blessing of all art.

That literature should ever compass it depends, in my opinion, not on
the indefinable something called _literary talent_, but on the fact of
this verbal gift belonging to a personage greater than the average of
his audience; greater at all events in connection with what he writes,
and in that connection, feeling and thinking more; or, at the least,
manifesting his moments of thought and feeling in more complete and
more continuous fashion.

Before closing these chapters, let me recapitulate the elements with
which the Writer works, and the psychological conditions under which
he does so.

I have tried to show that the action of literature is different from
that of real life, because the written word acts on the plane not of
direct experience but of memory. Now the ways of memory are special
to itself, and so, in a manner, is memory's logic. For memory means
experience submitted to the disintegration, the elimination and
addition, the chemistry, so to speak, of our whole human organism, and
of the accumulated items of experience which it has previously altered
and integrated in the mind. Memory is not a storage, but a selection;
and the fact of recollection implies already a certain suitability to
our character and habits. Memory is not a helter-skelter gathering
together, since everything new becomes at once connected by similarity
or significance with something old. In memory, therefore, the items
of experience, thus diminished, enlarged, and fused, come to exist in
different dimensions, to move with different weight and pace, obeying no
longer the rhythm of the outside world, but that of the inner one, and
taking their meaning and power not from an alien universe, but from the
individual human soul.

So much for the items of experience and the words, I am tempted to say
the _nouns_ and _adjectives_, which the Writer groups into patterns of
almost magical power within the mind of the Reader. That magic is not
merely inherent in those nouns and adjectives, due to the community of
experience of Reader and of Writer. Even more, in my opinion, its very
mysterious essence requires to be sought in what I have alluded to as
movement, as _pace and weight, impact and rhythm_. It is in these modes
of activity that the individual Writer, like the individual artist,
reveals and exercises his stronger, swifter, steadier, subtler and
more harmonious life. This subject has received little or no attention,
masked very considerably by the more obvious, but less essential
functions of other kinds of movement applicable to words: prosody,
alliteration, assonance, rhyme, in fact those audible peculiarities
which make literature a poorer sort of music. What I am speaking of,
and wish to see scientifically studied, is movement of a subtler and
wholly interior sort, perceptible to one deaf or unacquainted with the
pronunciation of a given language, and communicable, to a large degree,
in every good translation. For it is simply the movement in the thinking
and feeling of the Reader, obedient to the thinking and feeling of the
Writer. It is the complicated pattern of stresses put not upon syllables,
but upon suggestions; the pattern of insistence, of slurring, of
hurrying, of binding together, of imperceptible approach or sudden
attack, of dwelling on and drawing out, of letting go and breaking
off, of reiteration and syncope; all woven together by a pace solemn or
swift, lingering or light, but whatsoever it be, informed by some great
unifying rhythm.

This it is, this quality of all great verse and all great prose, which
answers to the higher moments of specially gifted individuals and
generations and generations of individuals. And being such, through this
mysterious soul-compelling quality of form, it is that literature can
achieve the same result as do arts less seemingly hampered by practical,
or less distracted by intellectual, needs: can make for the soul a
habitation which is a mode of life.

Since such is the result of art, consciously and honestly striving to
meet one of man's temporary wants, bodily or spiritual, the artist,
drawing upon the stores of his own soul and his countless predecessors'
souls, meanwhile frames such a combination of visible or audible, or
intellectually apprehended, forms as imprisons in its nobility and
beauty the feelings of the man who sees, or hears, or apprehends, the
Reader who understands and makes the thing afresh.

And in this construction, whose material bulk or material duration may
be that of a cup or a cathedral, a song or a whole opera, five lines of
Pascal's or three volumes of Carlyle's--in this sthetic construction
the soul can dwell awhile and renew itself in active peacefulness, safe
from the irrelevances of an imperfect world; and living, during those
few seconds which have the value of eternity, the life intense, unified,
ordered and universal; the life imposed not from the chaos without, but
from the cosmos within.


XVII

How much greater is what man makes than what man is!

It was brought home to me, some time ago, at a reading, given at a
theatre in Rome, of his Ode to Garibaldi by d'Annunzio.

The Writer was not morally suited to the subject, and the poem is by
no means of his best. Yet watching the people in the theatre, and the
author himself upon the stage, I felt the utter difference and immense
superiority of the atmosphere of art as against that of reality. As the
verses rolled out, sonorous and weighty, and the images surged up and
receded in constant metamorphoses; as the whole poem advanced with the
decision of course and the weigh-on of a great ship, it seemed as if
none of these real people could have had a hand in the making of it,
could belong to the same category of existence.

Yet the insignificant man holding the manuscript was the author; and
these students in the pit, listless, vague, negligible, were, very
likely, just like the youths whose heroic death on the Janiculum the
poem commemorated. Had Garibaldi in his reality been present, he too,
I almost think, would have seemed but another poor real ghost--or one
taking on life only by poetic hyperbole--on that background of living
artistic impression. For, when the hero of our enthusiasm appears, do
we not robe his insufficiency in the pomp which is false to real life,
but true to the demands of the spirit?

In this way, being the response to man's organized and unceasing
cravings for strength, clearness, order, dignity and sweetness, for a
life intenser and more harmonious, what man writes comes to be greater
than what man is.




V

STUDIES IN LITERARY PSYCHOLOGY


(A) THE SYNTAX OF DE QUINCEY

It was in examining some of the writings of De Quincey, with no other
view originally than the improvement of my own English, that I first
came across certain facts which led me to the notion that there may be
some necessary connection between the structure of a man's sentences and
his more human characteristics; and that style, in so far as it is
individual, is but a kind of gesture or gait, revealing, with the
faithfulness of an unconscious habit, the essential peculiarities of the
Writer's temperament and modes of being.

This notion came home to me only gradually; so that these notes, which
end as a page of literary psychology, begin, in all simplicity of heart,
as an exercise in syntax and rhetoric. I shall leave them as they came,
jotted down in the course of reading; for whatever truth there is in
them will in this manner appear in its own plain way, not yet arranged
to suit any theory.

The first thing which struck me during this analysis of De Quincey, was
that there was something very individual, something decidedly queer, in
his management of _verbs_. I began accordingly to count the verbs in his
writings, adding to them adverbs and active participles, as against the
nouns and adjectives; and, when I found a great preponderance of the
latter kind, I did the like by two writers as dissimilar as possible
from De Quincey--namely, Defoe and Stevenson, with an exactly opposite
result. It now seemed to me that I had got hold of two categories of
style: the one in which the chief part was given to action, as in Defoe
and Stevenson; and the other in which, so to speak, _mere being_, mere
quality, was to the fore. And looking round, it seemed to me that style
might be roughly divided into these two categories, with a third added,
containing Writers, like Landor, in whom the elements of verb and of
noun are very equally represented. But having established this, I
continued to work at De Quincey, and found that there were other and
more subtle and more important, peculiarities connected, apparently,
with this one, and of these further peculiarities the following notes
contain an analysis.

Here, to begin with, is one of the finest passages in the _Opium-Eater_,
and, I should venture to add, in the whole of English Prose:

    "Let it suffice, at least on this occasion, to say, that a few
    fragments of bread from the breakfast-table of one individual (who
    supposed me to be ill, but did not know of my being in utter want),
    and these at uncertain intervals, constituted my whole support.
    During the former part of my sufferings in ... I was homeless, and
    very seldom slept under a roof. To this constant exposure to the
    open air I ascribe it mainly that I did not sink under my torments.
    Latterly, however, when colder and more inclement weather came on,
    and when, from the length of my sufferings, I had begun to sink into
    a more languishing condition, it was, no doubt, fortunate for me,
    that the same person to whose breakfast-table I had access, allowed
    me to sleep in a large unoccupied house, of which he was tenant.
    Unoccupied, I call it, for there was no household or establishment
    in it; nor any furniture, except a table and a few chairs. But I
    found, on taking possession of my new quarters, that the house
    already contained one single inmate, a poor friendless child,
    apparently ten years old; but she seemed hunger-bitten, and
    sufferings of that sort often make children look older than they
    are. From this lorn child I learned that she had slept and lived
    there alone for some time before I came; and great was the joy the
    poor creature expressed when she found that I was, in future, to be
    her companion through the hours of darkness. The house was large;
    and, from the want of furniture, the noise of the rats made a
    prodigious echoing on the spacious staircase and hall; and amidst
    the real fleshly ills of cold, and, I fear, hunger, the forsaken
    child had found leisure to suffer still more (it appeared) from the
    self-created one of ghosts. I promised her protection against all
    ghosts whatsoever; but, alas! I could offer her no other assistance
    We lay upon the floor, with a bundle of cursed law papers for a
    pillow, but with no other covering than a sort of large horseman's
    cloak; afterwards, however, we discovered, in a garret, an old
    sofa-cover, a small piece of rug, and some fragments of other
    articles, which added a little to our warmth. The poor child crept
    close to me for warmth, and for security against her ghostly
    enemies. When I was not more than usually ill, I took her into my
    arms, so that, in general, she was tolerably warm, and often slept
    when I could not; for during the last two months of my sufferings, I
    slept much in daytime," etc.

In this page I have counted, of verbs, adverbs and active participles,
about fifty, as against a hundred and fifty nouns, pronouns, adjectives
and adjectival participles. But the difference in quality is far greater
than that in mere quantity. The verbs are for the most part verbs of
existence or of mere explanation, and many are in reality only fragments
of adjectival sentences, which, in other languages, might perhaps have
been replaced by actual adjectives. Whatever they are--"was," "ascribe,"
"begun," "call it" (in the sense of naming), "found," "learned," etc.
etc.--they serve only to bind the nouns and adjectives into logical
sentences, but do not bring any sense of action into the passage. Most
of them, moreover, might be replaced by equally indeterminate words
without altering the total effect. Look, on the contrary, at this list
of nouns and adjectives: "Ill," "utter want," "uncertain interval,"
"whole support," "sufferings," "two months," "houseless," "London,"
"roof," "constant exposure," "colder and more inclement weather,"
"length of sufferings," "languishing condition," "fortunate person,"
"breakfast table," "large unoccupied house," "tenant," "household or
establishment," "furniture," "table," "few chairs," "house," "single
inmate," "poor friendless child," "ten years old," "hunger bitten,"
"sufferings," "children," "older," "child," "great joy," "poor
creature," "house of darkness," "house," "large," "want of furniture,"
"rats," "noise," "staircase," "hall," "prodigious echoing," "spacious,"
"cold," "hunger," "forsaken child," "leisure," "ghosts," "protection,"
"floor," "bundle," "cursed law papers," "pillow," "covering,"
"horseman's cloak," "sofa-cover," "rug," "fragments," "articles,"
"warmth," "security," "ghostly enemies," "usually ill," "warmth."

Was ever such a catalogue of suggestions of gloom, terror and misery?
The very reiteration, towards the end, of the word "warmth," after the
string of words like "unoccupied house," "ghosts," "floor," "bundle,"
"horseman's cloak," "fragments," is of the strongest negative effect,
even without the sequel or accompaniment of "security," "ghostly
enemies," "ill," "hunger," and "sufferings." What a _study in black and
wretchedness_, as Whistler would have put it!

But verbs are not merely unimportant in De Quincey; they are also
mismanaged, for his indifference to action becomes positive incapacity.
Look at this passage from the _Opium-Eater_:

     "Whatever is to become of poor Piranesi, you suppose, at least,
     that his labours must in some way terminate here. But raise your
     eyes, and behold a second flight of steps still higher, on which
     again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very
     brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial
     flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on
     his aspiring labours: and so on until the unfinished stairs and
     Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall."

All through this passage there is confusion between the active verb
and the passive, the two forms alternating quite without reason or
connection. Now, as it happens, this accidentally coincides with the
matter in hand, and heightens the impression of the whole thing being an
opium-dream, almost a nightmare. But take a passage containing merely
ordinary statements, and note the effect of this peculiarity, I should
almost have said, this characteristic infirmity--of De Quincey's:

     "I replied that, _as to the allegation of his enemies, as it_
     seemed _to be established upon such reputable testimony_, seeing
     that the three parties _concerned_ all _agree in_ it, it did not
     _become_ me to question it; but the defence _set up_ I must _demur_
     to. He _proceeded to discuss_ the matter, and to _lay down_ his
     reasons; but it seemed to me so impolitic to _pursue_ an argument
     which _must_ have presumed a man _mistaken_ in a point belonging to
     his own profession, that I did not press him even when his course
     of argument _seemed_ open to objection; not to _mention_ that a man
     who _talks_ nonsense, even though 'with no view to profit,' _is_
     not altogether the most agreeable partner in a dispute, whether as
     opponent or respondent. I _confess_, however," etc.

Here are twenty-eight verbs. Ask yourself what corresponding impression
of movement, activity, they leave in you? But of these some are
auxiliaries, employed as portions, often merely qualifiers, of ideas.
Ten, characteristically enough of Latin origin, are distinctly abstract,
savouring of jurisprudence and philosophical discussion--"reply,"
"establish," "concern," "agree," "question," "demur," "proceed,"
"discuss," "presume," "press," "mention." With this spuriousness of the
words superficially denoting movement, go certain other peculiarities
of the passage. Let us examine its structure. To begin with, one-half
of the matter is presented, for the very first time, in the form of
a parenthesis, or at least in a very parenthetical form--"as to the
allegation of his enemies," etc., the second half making its appearance
also in a somewhat similar, indirect, referential, shambling sort of
way, "as it seemed to be established," etc. After this we have a real
parenthesis, and no doubt of it. "Seeing that, etc. ... agree in it."
This parenthesis contains, moreover, two involutions, or what seem
involutions, "agree in," and (by elision) "concerned." Closing the
parenthesis we get the other half of the subject, "it did not become
me to question it," presented negatively and itself a negation (to
_question_). Tacked on, like an afterthought, comes the third main item,
again presented negatively, "but the defence set up [De Quincey sets up
the opponent's defence before having made his own attack] I must demur
to." Remark that the chief verb comes so late that we are kept in
suspense as to which it may be; it might have been "agree with." And so
on.

On re-reading this sentence, the suspicion arises that it may be a joke,
and intended as a caricature of polite discussion. But if this be the
case (which nothing else leads one to suppose), it is merely the
caricature, by De Quincey, of De Quincey's own style.

Let us take instead the last paragraph of _Levana_:

     "Lo! here is he, whom in childhood I dedicated to my altars. This
     is he that once I made my darling. Him I led astray, him I
     beguiled, and from heaven I stole away his young heart to mine.
     Through me did he become idolatrous; and through me it was, by
     languishing desires, that he worshipped the worm, and prayed to the
     wormy grave. Holy was the grave to him; lovely was its darkness;
     saintly its corruption. Him, this young idolater, I have seasoned
     for thee, dear gentle sister of Sighs! Do thou take him now
     to _thy_ heart, and season him for our dreadful sister. And
     thou--turning to the _Mater Tenebrarum_, she said--'Wicked sister,
     that temptest and hatest, do thou take him from _her_. See that thy
     sceptre lie heavy on his head. Suffer not woman and her tenderness
     to sit near him in his darkness. Banish the frailties of hope,
     wither the relenting of love, scorch the fountain of tears, curse
     him as only thou canst curse. So shall he be accomplished in the
     furnace, so shall he see the things that ought not to be seen,
     sights that are abominable and secrets that are unutterable. So
     shall he read elder truths, sad truths, grand truths, fearful
     truths. So shall he rise again _before_ he dies, and so shall our
     commission be accomplished which from God we had--to plague his
     heart until we had unfolded the capacities of his spirit.'"

In this sentence a certain heavy jerkiness, very characteristic of De
Quincey, seems to depend upon the needless reiteration of pronouns; and
at the same time, the alternation, equally avoidable, of their cases,
thus: "Him," "him," "his," "he," "whom," "he," "him," "him," "his,"
"he," "he," "him," "him," "him," and "I," "my," "I," "my," "I," "I,"
"I," "mine," "me," "me," "I," "thee," "thou," "my," etc. In ten lines we
are given twenty-six pronouns, without counting two _ours_. And the fine
movement of this passage begins only when this crowd of pronouns, with
their wearisome fluctuations, at last comes to an end: "Banish the
frailties of hope," etc.

The lack of movement, the nervelessness, of De Quincey's style is here
manifest, not merely in that abuse of pronouns, in the redundancy of
auxiliaries, and in the incapacity for dealing with the litter of small
words, "to," "until," etc.; but very especially in this particular lazy
and restless shifting which turns the same noun now into a nominative,
now into an accusative, instead of keeping a steady course all through.
One seems to feel the infirmity of the opium-eater's will. In a
still finer passage, the same indecision (bringing with it extreme
parentheticalness and marring all rhythm and cadence) is shown in a
perpetual changing about from the active to the passive form, and _vice
versa_:

     "She it was that stood in Bethlehem on the night when Herod's sword
     swept its nurseries of innocents, and the little feet were
     stiffened for ever, which, heard at times as they tottered along
     floors overhead, woke pulses of love in household hearts that were
     not unmarked in heaven."

Note in this sentence the mismanagement of adverbs and prepositions and
articles--"in," "on," "when," "which," "that." Each of these produces
a change in our sense of place, time or person, a new adjustment like
that of pulling out a register on an organ; and where there is no real
movement in the subject-matter, we feel jerked about to no purpose. By
this senseless shifting of case, turning from passive to active with
reference to the same noun, the sword of Herod seems of a sudden to become
the dominant subject of the sentence, while _She_ in reality remains such.
Then the little feet, first presented as accusative, become the nominative
of the tottering and the waking of pulses; then, having been the nominative
in the active form, they become the accusative in the passive form of the
"marking in heaven."

But, in the same way as this incapacity for action turns De Quincey's
experiences of that empty house into what they should be, terrifying
dreams, with dreamlike vagueness of _how, when and why_, and dreamlike
vividness of _what_; so also the same peculiarity and with it De Quincey's
redundance and emphasis, unite in making the following into something of
matchless grandeur. What a dream of sounds!

     "A music of preparation and of awaking suspense; a music like the
     opening of the Coronation anthem, and which, like that, gave the
     feeling of a vast march, of infinite cavalcades, filing off, and
     the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty
     day, a day of crisis and of final hope for human nature, then
     suffering some mysterious eclipse and labouring in some dread
     extremity somewhere, I knew not where, somehow, I know not how, by
     some things, I know not whom--a battle, a strife, an agony--was
     conducting, was evolving like a great drama or piece of music...."

This passage belongs to his eulogy of Sir Thomas Browne, and it suggests
to me that we shall usually find not merely a key to an author's
peculiarities in his criticisms, favourable or the reverse, of others;
but that we may probably find that his own work is excellent or poor
according as he is just or absurd in his judgments: efficiency of
perception coinciding with efficiency of expression, and _vice versa_.
Listen to De Quincey in the presence of his far greater predecessor:

     "Where--he asks--shall one hope to find music so Miltonic, an
     intonation of such solemn chords as are struck in the following
     opening bar of a passage in the _Urn Burial_? 'Now, since these
     bones have rested quietly in the grave, under the drums and
     tramplings of three conquests,' etc. What a melodious ascent as of
     a prelude to some impassioned Requiem breaking from the pomps of
     earth and from the sanctities of the grave!... Time expanded, not
     by generations or centuries, but by vast periods of conquests
     and dynasties; by cycles of Pharaohs and Ptolemies, Antiochi
     and Arsacides! And these vast successions of time distinguished and
     figured by the uproars which revolve at their inauguration, by the
     drums and tramplings rolling overhead upon the chambers of forgotten
     dead, the trepidation of time and mortality vexing, at secular
     intervals, the everlasting Sabbaths of the grave."

Note how De Quincey has developed the "drums and tramplings" into a
military requiem service, with its processions and its fugues; how he
has used Browne's text as a theme for a great symphony of his own.

After this let us turn to De Quincey's eulogy of another of his idols,
Burke, and see the alteration in his style, his judgment and his
manners! These pages of his _Rhetoric_ may be the more instructive that
we shall have occasion to examine not only more of De Quincey's own
writing, but a passage from Burke which he holds up for our admiration
(_Rhetoric_, p. 57).

     "_Fancy_ in your throats, ye miserable twaddlers! as if Edmund
     Burke were the man to play with his fancy, for the purpose of
     separable ornament. He was a man of fancy in no other sense
     than as Lord Bacon was so and Jeremy Taylor, and as all large and
     discursive thinkers are and must be: that is to say, the fancy
     which he had in common with all mankind, and very probably in no
     eminent degree, _in him_ was urged into unusual activity under the
     necessities of his capacious understanding. His great and peculiar
     distinction was that he viewed all objects of the understanding
     under more relations than other men, and under more complex
     relations. _According to the multiplicity of those relations,
     a man is said to have a large understanding, according to their
     subtility, a fine one_, and in an angelic understanding all things
     would appear related to all. Now, to _apprehend_ and _detect_
     more relations, or to perceive them more steadily, is a process
     absolutely impossible without the intervention of physical analogy.
     To say, therefore, that a man is a great thinker, or a fine thinker,
    is another expression for saying that he has a _schematizing_ (or,
    to put a plainer but less accurate expression, a _figurative_)
    understanding. In that sense, and for that purpose, Burke is
    figurative; but understood, as he has been understood by the
    long-eared race of his critics, not as thinking in and by his
    figures, but as deliberately laying them on by way of _enamel_ or
    _after ornament_, not as incarnating, but simply as dressing his
    thoughts in imagery; so understood, he is not the Burke of reality,
    but a poor fictitious Burke, modelled after the poverty of
    conception which belongs to his critics."

There is in this passage a delicate piece of thinking, namely, the
account of what one might call the relation-perceiving mind; and
there is a daring, though perhaps not absolutely justified, connection
established between it and the mind which thinks metaphorically. But
in what truisms and repetitions is it not wrapped up! Or, rather, how
this thought staggers about in irrelevant directions, and among useless
provisos and distinctions, impelled (if I may speak like De Quincey) by
the fitful wind of the critic's abusiveness! Here was something which
wanted saying in the clearest, most abstract manner; yet how far less
clear is it not than the far-fetched and romantically obscure train of
thought of the criticism on Sir Thomas Browne. And now, having read
De Quincey's encomium upon Burke, let us read the quotation which is
intended to bring home to us the organic and inevitable quality of
Burke's metaphorical thinking. This is it:

     "Such are _their_ ideas; such _their_ religion; and such _their_
     law. But as to our country, our race, as long as the well-compacted
     structure of our Church and State, the sanctuary, the holy of
     holies, of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by
     power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on
     the brow of the British lion; as long as the British Monarchy, not
     more limited than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like
     the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and
     girt with the double bar of its kindred and coeval towers, as long
     as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land,
     so long the mounds and dykes of the low Bedford level will have
     nothing to fear from the pickaxes of all the levellers of France.
     As long as our Sovereign Lord the King, and his faithful subjects
     the Lords and Commons of this realm, the triple cord which no man
     can break; the solemn guarantees of each other's being and each
     other's rights, the joint and several securities, each in its place
     and order for every kind and every quality of property--as long as
     these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all
     safe together; the high from the blights of envy and the spoliation
     of rapacity, the low from the iron hand of oppression and the
     indolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it, and so it will be.

       "Dum domus neae capitoli immobile saxum
        Accolit; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit."

That is the quotation; and this is what De Quincey has to say about it:

    "This was the sounding passage which Burke alleged as the
    _chef-d'oeuvre_ of his rhetoric; and the argument upon which he
    justified his choice is specious if not convincing. He laid it down
    as a maxim of composition, that every passage in a rhetorical
    performance which was brought forward prominently, and relied upon
    as a _key_ (to use the language of war) in sustaining the main
    position of the Writer, ought to involve a thought, an image and a
    sentiment; and such a synthesis he found in the passage which we
    have quoted."

Now it happens, whatever Burke himself (with parental ill-judgment) may
have thought to the contrary, that this passage is a model of the
inefficacious, all, save the sudden, "Amen! and so be it, and so it will
be," and the Latin. Far from having an impression of stability, one has
a feeling that all the various things in which digging and building come
in, "well-compacted structure," "sanctuary," "fortress," "temple," "Keep
of Windsor," "towers," "mounds and dykes," are not sitting still, as
such heavy things should, but rambling vaguely all over the place. And
this is due to the fact that the mind of the Reader, instead of being
kept as quiet as the British Constitution, is hunted up and down a
series of parentheses, and made, so to speak, to look round the corner
of ever so many qualifying sentences. The result being (by the well-known
psychological law) that the Reader attributes his own mental movement
to the buildings. And this is made worse by the unnecessary use of
the participle of so lively a verb as "defend." Had he said "guarded,"
things would have stayed just a trifle quieter. Then there is the
equally unnecessary definiteness of "to stand" (where "to be" would have
sufficed); and the negation "inviolate," bringing with it the suggestion
its contrary "violation"; also the active verbs "limit" and "fence,"
"oversee" and "guard." The Windsor simile is thought _of_, not thought
_in_. Had Burke actually felt, so to say, _in_ the terms of Windsor and
its connected images, he would not have spread out before it (as if he
might Eton playground) the Bedford level, as though Windsor Castle and
the British Constitution were at hand together to point guns at its
invaders. Least of all, had he really seen the towers of Windsor arise
as the symbol of British monarchy, would he have been able to think of
Bedfordshire from the merely topographical and agricultural point of
view, as "low" and "fat"? What on earth could it matter to the monarchy
whether the Duke of Bedford's estate was _low_ and _fat_ or high and
thin? Further, increasing thereby the sense of action which is already
making the various solid structures to wobble uneasily in our mind, this
same land is partially personified by the form, "have nothing to fear."
But perhaps the crowning proof of this being a merely elaborately
thought-out (and as happens in over-elaboration, bungled) piece of
rhetoric, its irrefutable mark of rhetorical inefficacy is this meeting
together of the pickaxes with the dykes and the mounds. Note the
connection! Levellers of ideas--levelness of soil. Dykes and mounds
naturally destructible--what by? Why, by those very levellers and
pickaxes! But what the levellers would have made for would have been not
the dykes, but Windsor Castle; the levellers of ideas do not destroy
ploughed fields, fat or thin, they demolish Constitutions, monarchies.

It is quite probable that De Quincey was not only abnormally sensitive
to the grandeur, the picturesqueness of the nouns in this passage
(allowing them to evoke images in irrelevant fashion: "towers," "keeps,"
"dykes," "pickaxes," "levels," etc.), but that he did not feel the
senseless quality of the action suggested by the accompanying verbs,
simply because verbs had very little significance for him. I have
already remarked that this incapacity for duly appreciating actions
seems allied, in De Quincey at least, with certain other marks of a
will-less and undiscriminating mode of being. These other characteristics
are diffuseness, redundancy, a tendency to mix, quite irrationally,
familiarity with grandiloquence, and finally a total lack of respect
for others and of restraint upon his own vituperative faculties.

Here is a passage of which the items are placed so as not to coalesce:

     "Again, at a coronation, what can be more displeasing to a
     philosophic taste than a pretended chastity of ornament, _at war_
     with the very purpose of a solemnity essentially magnificent? An
     imbecile friend of ours in 1825, brought us a sovereign of a new
     coinage 'which'--said he--'I admire, because it is so exquisitely
     simple.' This, he flattered himself, was thinking like a man of
     taste. But mark how we sent him to the right-about. And that
     weak-minded friend," etc.

Here we have the long interrogatory passage about the Coronation
followed instantly, when the mind is in a state of expectant attention
and ready crammed with Coronation splendours, by the sudden and at first
irrelevant introduction of "an imbecile friend," and his little feeble
speech. Then follows De Quincey's criticism of the friend's speech,
addressed not to the friend, but to the Reader, who is buttonholed
by that sudden, "But mark!" We have been shunted three times: from
"Coronation" to "imbecile friend's point of view," and from that to De
Quincey's critical _aparte_ to us. Moreover, the "which I admire" of the
friend is so placed as to suggest rather the previous sentence than the
coin he is actually holding. The natural wording would have been "an
imbecile friend," etc., "brought us a sovereign," etc., "saying he
admired it because----" But this very simple and direct form contains a
concordance of verbs of which De Quincey is frequently incapable. Let us
look at this passage more in detail, for it is instructive to do so.

Its main fault is that of all De Quincey's bad passages, a senseless,
flurried changing of point of view. Thus: "Pretended chastity of
ornament," acts as nominative to "philosophic task," dative; then as
nominative to (dative) "purpose of a solemnity," which is (by elision)
nominative to "magnificent." The next nominative, to our astonishment,
is the sudden "imbecile friend," who continues to be nominative of the
verb "admire," although the really important noun is now the "sovereign
of new coinage." Then "_he_" becomes the second accusative [the Reader
having been made the first accusative by the sudden grabbing of him with
that, "But mark!"]--and then "we"--_i.e._ De Quincey, becomes nominative
to the "sending to the right-about." As a matter of common logic there
are two chief nominatives--"elegant simplicity" and "sovereign of a new
coinage," but they have got so jostled that we are scarcely aware of
them. It is this jostling, this lack of order which gives De Quincey's
style, for all its real magnificence, a certain vulgarity. We feel,
however vaguely, that we are dealing with a man, occasionally subtle
and frequently majestic, but unbalanced, ungoverned, without purpose or
discrimination, self-important and self-indulgent, with the restlessness
of egotism, and of whose breeding we are never sure.

The vulgarity is manifest in a tendency to talk big, and, at the same
time, to mix slang with grandiloquence in situations where no humorous
effect can be obtained by this proceeding. He might be describing
himself in the phrases, "the very top of the tree among the fine
writers" and "Birmingham rhetorician"; and here is a description in
which, unwittingly, he has written himself down, matter and form:

     "Undoubtedly he has a turgid style and mouthy grandiloquence
     (though often the merest bombast); but for polished rhetoric he is
     singularly unfitted, by inflated habits of thinking, by loitering
     diffuseness and a dreadful trick of calling names."

How sadly this applies to De Quincey himself is shown by his beginning
his _Essay on Style_ with--what would you expect?--an attack on "conceited
coxcombs":

     "Semi-delirious lords and ladies, sometimes theatrically costumed
     in caftans and turbans--Lord Byrons, for instance, and Lady Hester
     Stanhopes--proclaiming to the world that all nations and languages
     are free to enter their gates, with one sole exception directed
     against their British compatriots; that is to say, abjuring by
     sound of trumpet the very land through which they themselves, etc.
     etc. We all know who they are that have done this thing; we _may_
     know, if we inquire, how many conceited coxcombs," etc. etc.

And now we may take leave of this strange, ill-balanced mortal, with his
incapacity for holding his tongue on irrelevant matters, which is a sign
of intellectual weakness; his incapacity for keeping his irrelevant
emotions (especially vituperative) to himself, which is a mark of moral
vulgarity; and yet with such subtlety of thought, such tragic depth of
feeling, and, occasionally, such marvellous power of seeing and saying!
For in that self-same _Essay on Style_, where Mr. Snagsby and the modern
paragraph Writer are both forestalled, we come upon this passage:

     "The preparation pregnant with the future, the remote correspondence,
    the questions, as it were, which to a deep musical sense are asked
    in one passage and answered in another; the iteration and ingemination
    of a given effect, moving through subtle variations that sometimes
    disguise the theme, sometimes fitfully reveal it, sometimes throw it
    out tumultuously to the blaze of daylight; these and ten thousand
    forms of self-conflicting musical passion...."

Self-conflicting musical passion! Is it not characteristic of De Quincey
that to him music should signify self-contradiction, rather than order
and harmony?


(B) THE RHETORIC OF LANDOR

I am the better pleased to have chosen Landor as the object of my random
analysis, that he has been studied, as the type of the classical prose
Writer, by so considerable a critic as Mr. Sidney Colvin. This coincidence
will allow us, only the better, to examine in what manner even the most
purely "artistic" writing is determined by the underlying temper of the
man who writes; indeed, to what extent this same so-called _artistic_
quality is in reality the result of very human qualities or defects.

Here is what Mr. Colvin tells us about the fundamental difference
between what he calls _classic_ and _romantic_ methods in literature:

     "The romantic manner, the manner of Shakespeare, and Coleridge and
     Keats, with its thrilling uncertainties and its rich suggestions,
     may be more attractive than the classic manner, with its composed
     and measured preciseness of statement. Nay, we may go further, and
     say that it is in the romantic manner that the highest pitch of
     poetry has assuredly been reached; in the perfect and felicitous
     specimens of that manner English poetry has given us something more
     poetical even than Greece or Rome ever gave us. But, on the other
     hand, the romantic manner lends itself, as the true classical does
     not, to inferior work. Second-rate conceptions, excitedly and
     approximately put into words, derive from it an illusive attraction
     which may make them for a time, and with all but the coolest judges,
    pass as first-rate. Whereas about true classical writing there can
    be no illusion. _It presents to us conceptions calmly realized in
    words that exactly define them, conceptions depending for their
    attraction not on their halo, but on themselves._"

I have underlined the last sentence of this passage, because it defines
the nature of what Mr. Colvin, quite justifiably but arbitrarily (since
such names have never acquired more than a fancy value), calls by the
name of _classic_ or _romantic_. Now, my examination of Landor, and of
my own feelings towards Landor, and of such items of literary psychology
as I have been able to scrape together, seems rather to prove that
these so-called classical ways of proceeding are more pretentious than
efficient, that they are compatible with what is little better than
verbiage, and that--one asserts it with awe--in Landor's own work they
are indicative not of the great talent he really possessed, but of his
melancholy limitations of soul and, therefore, lapses of sense.

The preference expressed for the classical manner appears to depend in
great measure upon Mr. Colvin's notion that poetry (or prose in its
artistic freedom) deals with _conceptions_, and that the words which
best define such conceptions (and the more calmly defined apparently the
better) allow us to realize most effectually whatever attraction these
conceptions may have. There seems to be some underlying belief that the
aim of literature is to tackle, so far as possible, the famous Kantian
"thing in itself," stripping it of such purely phenomenal wrappers and
disguises as its effects. The "halo" is evidently the value, the meaning
which things occasionally take on owing to their relations with poor human
souls. We have been referred to Shelley and Wordsworth for examples of
such "halo"; and the first lines of the "Ode to the Nightingale" might
have been quoted in order to show us what _this halo_ is like. There is
something austerely attractive (if I may say so) in the renunciation of
such halos, and it is very dignified, no doubt, thus to make all things
equally uninteresting. But the power of literature upon the soul depends,
oddly enough, on the soul's recognition of the massive or subtle
connections between itself and the things the Writer is talking of. And,
what is more curious still, there is in human nature such perverse
hankering after relations between things and itself, that when the
Writer, disdainful of halos, has stripped all things into isolation,
he seems to be obliged to weave a new set of relationships, and these
relationships are occasionally ... well, you shall judge. I have
italicized them; in this passage from one of Landor's finest dialogues,
_Eugenius and Lippi_:

     "The clematis _overtopped_ the lemon and orange trees; and the
     perennial pea _sent forth_ here a pink blossom, here a purple,
     here a white one; and, after _holding_ (as it were) _a short
     conversation_ with the _humbler_ plants, _sprang_ up about an old
     cypress, _played_ among its branches, and _mitigated its gloom_.
     White pigeons ... examined me in _every position_ their _inquisitive
     eyes_ could take," etc.

First of all, there appears to be no essential difference between the
perennial pea and the pigeon; yet the one, speaking commonly, stays in
its place and the other walks about, walks about, moreover, according to
Landor, with a power of shifting the place of its eye, such as ordinary
pigeons rarely display. And, excepting this ocular restlessness, Landor's
pigeon gets through very much less business than his perennial pea. The
classical Writer's refusal to tell us how the perennial pea affected
Lippi, the stylist's horror of saying that the perennial pea, merely
_was_, has forced Landor, despite his singular sharpness of observation,
into a number of amazing mis-statements, which I have underlined in my
quotation, and can sum up as the transformation of so quiet, and one
might fairly say, so passive, a thing as a garden corner into a dramatic
entertainment, enlivened by circus performances. Perhaps Landor was
bored by gardens; one might think so, and merely regret he should have
chosen to speak of them; and pass to something else. But Mr. Colvin
expressly tells us that "in images of terror no (what) other Writer has
shown greater daring, or a firmer stroke." So I am acting fairly in
taking another passage, from Mr. Colvin's own hand, as an example of the
striking results of the desire for clearness, for logical elaboration,
for what people call "objectivity," which distinguishes the _classic_
manner.

Here is the passage:

     "He extended his _withered_ arms, he thrust forward the _gaunt
     links of his throat_, and upon _gnarled_ knees, that smote each
     other audibly, tottered into the _civic_ fire. It, like some
     _hungry and strangest beast_ in the _innermost wild of Africa_,
     pierced, broken, prostrate, motionless [I interrupt to remind the
     Reader that all this refers to a fire], _gazed at by its hunter in
     the impatience of glory, in the delight of awe_, panted once more
     and seized him."

Now, would you call all this story of lions and hunters on the one side,
this anatomic plate of bony decrepitude on the other, a _vivid image_, a
_daring and firmly rendered terrifying image_ of an old hero throwing
himself into a burning town?

[The malignance of my heart causes me secretly to rejoice at Landor's
having called it the _civic fire_.]

Look, again, at this other sample given by Mr. Colvin, this time in
verse:--

  I never pluck the rose; the violet's _head_
  Hath shaken with my breath _upon its bank_,
  And _not reproached me_; the ever-sacred cup
  Of the pure lily hath between my hands
  _Felt safe_, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.

This passage might be called the carnival or dumb crambo of classicism,
at all events of the method which refuses all mere subjective _halos_,
and makes for the "conceptions in themselves." The lily was not allowed,
of course, to stir Landor's fancy like those flowers, unseen at the feet
of Keats, in the "Ode to the Nightingale." It had to be considered for
what it was! So, in order to be in legitimate relations to a verb, it
was made to _feel safe_; similarly, the violet was induced to refrain
from reproach; nay, not the whole of the violet, which might have seemed
exaggerated, but only the violet's _head_; the rest of the violet being
presumably busy clinging to the _bank_, upon which, rather than upon the
violet or than on to the owner of a sacred cup, Landor appears to have
breathed. The lily, moreover, was turned into a _sacred cup_, filled,
not, as is commonly the case, with _dust_, but with _grains of gold_. No
one can complain that these flowers are presented through the halo of
Landor's feelings, or that he had any feelings to present them through.
But is Landor's method more really _direct_ than, say, that of Keats,
and does it give us more of the flower, or more of the Writer and his
inkpot?

I want to run this matter to ground, because it will lead us, I think,
to some important facts in the psychology and, I should almost call it,
the _ethics_ of writing. Here is a narrative (_Fate of a Young Poet_) of
a simpler sort, and in which Landor is presumably aiming at interesting
the Reader in his hero:

    "It is said that he bore a fondness for a young maiden in that
    place, formerly a village, now containing but two farmhouses. In my
    memory there were still extant several dormitories. Some love-sick
    girl had recollected an ancient name, and had engraven on a stone
    with a garden nail, which lay in rust near it, Poore Rosamund. I
    entered these precincts and beheld a youth of manly form and
    countenance, washing and wiping _a_ stone with a handful of wet
    grass; and on my going up to him, and asking what he had found, he
    showed it to me," etc.

What a struggle is here between reality and abstraction, and how in this
confusion we utterly fail to know what to think, how to feel, fail
utterly to receive the great Writer's word of command!

Now this _word of command_, or, if you prefer, this magician's spell,
making our soul follow with docility, making it see, hear, feel solely
what and in what manner the Writer chooses, can be given, I believe, on
one condition only: that the Writer feel very distinctly the moods he
wishes to impart, and see in a given light and in a given sequence the
things he wishes us to look at. This very simple condition Landor by
no means always fulfils. And when it is not fulfilled, nothing, not
the clearest intelligence, the richest invention, the most faultless
judgment, is a bit of good. All the powers of style are wasted if you do
not care for what you are talking about.

And yet what powers of style are his! It is worth while examining and
meditating on the merest technicalities of Landor's writings. His
structure of sentences, for instance, is both musically and grammatically
often a wonder. See how he breaks up long and repetitive movements with
short abrupt ones; how he alternates nouns, verbs, adjectives, and even
adjectives and particles at the end of members of sentences! Note also
the skilful insertion of parenthetical passages. The lucidity of his
successful phrases is perfect; you see, without ever having to look,
along the whole passage, however intricate, and your mind is stimulated
to such gentle yet vigorous exercise by the beautiful and constantly
varied cadence, never putting you to sleep by one sort of repetition,
nor giving you a headache by another. Compare, in order to appreciate
Landor, that perpetual stress on the end of the sentence, or sentence's
member, which makes De Quincey's fine passages often as harrowing to
the nerves as the successive discharging of cartloads of stones. These
are high triumphs of literary craft, but then everything, or nearly
everything, in Landor is sacrificed to their attainment. One might
imagine that he sometimes thinks his sentences first as grammar and
syntax (as a poet may think a lyric as sound), and then fits in the
items irrespective of their value as meaning.

He is full of mere mechanical dodges. Thus, the lucidity is often
obtained by what I should call empty, transparent words: for instance:

    "When he is present I have room for none (no reflections) _besides
    what I receive from him_."

The words italicized are idle, but they serve to _space_ the sense.
Elsewhere the clearness is got by an antithetical arrangement in places
where, very often, there is no real antithesis; thus:

    "(Dashkoff) And when the one (the wife) has failed to pacify the
    sharp cries of babyhood, pettish and impatient as sovranty itself,
    the success of the other (_i.e._ the husband) in calming it," etc.

Here the impression of union which was required by the subject is
absolutely marred by this futile structural opposition, but the syntax
becomes wonderfully clear. And this antithetical arrangement, this
introduction of the opposite for the easier apprehension of what is
really being talked about, results in the peculiar kind of insipidity,
of half-heartedness, which makes Landor such poor reading despite his
very great qualities; an impression is neutralized by its own negation
before it has had time to solidify. Landor does not allow us to feel, so
anxious is he that we should define and determine. For instance:

    "Could she (Sappho) be ignorant that shame and fear seize it (love)
    unrelentingly by the throat, while hard-hearted impudence stands at
    ease, _prompt_ at opportunity, and _profuse_ in declaration?"

In this passage lucidity is obtained by the distinction between _prompt_
and _profuse_. But in the meantime poor Timid Love, who, after all,
should have been the hero of the play, is forgotten!

All this is due, I think, to the fact that Landor did not really care
for what he was writing about, but only for the fact of writing. This
is proved by his metaphors being not expressive, but explanatory; he
has not felt the subject in those, or indeed in any, particular terms,
but cast about him for parallels for better apprehension. Thus, these
metaphors are apt to be trite or slackly expressed, and they are (as we
saw in the case of the old gentleman who flung himself into the burning
town) very often carried on far beyond the needs of the subject. Whereas,
on the contrary, if he had felt the metaphor, he might have expressed it
more vigorously than the rest, but he would have let it go as soon as it
ceased to concord with his chief vision and feeling. Let us look at one
of his finest passages; and one of those in which the thought of death
seems to have brought some genuine emotion--I mean Bossuet's speech to
Mlle de Fontanges:

    "This in which we live is ours only while we live in it; the next
    moment may strike it off from us; the next sentence I would utter
    may be broken and fall between us. The beauty that has made a
    thousand hearts to beat one instant, at the succeeding has been
    without pulse and colour, without admirer, friend, companion,
    follower. She by whose eyes the march of victory shall have been
    directed, whose name shall have animated armies at the extremities
    of the earth, drops into one of its crevices and mingles with its
    dust."

How clear and stately, yet how wearisome! Why? simply and crassly
because there is no feeling in it at all. Eloquence there is, and in
other parts of the dialogue, wit and humour in abundance. But it is all
elaborately reasoned, planned out; and no man's reasoning and planning,
however elaborate, can replace feeling. No Writer is able to shift his
critical ruler and foot-measure quickly and subtly enough to adjust a
whole effect, as does the mere sensitive eye, eye of body or of soul.
See how even in this passage he leaves the essential behind in order
to work out a mere detail--"animated armies at the extremities of the
_earth_, drops into one of _its_ crevices and mingles with its dust."
Why, the earth has become the heroine of this passage, and the poor
dying beauty is a mere adjunct to its extension, its battlefields and
holes and dust. "So she is," Landor might answer. But not to her own
feelings, nor to ours, nor to Landor's, if he had any!

Let us look at Landor's masterpiece, the dialogue of _Leofric and
Godiva_:

    "The beverage of this feast, O Leofric, is sweeter than bee or
    flower or vine can give us: it flows from heaven; and in heaven will
    it abundantly be poured out again to him who pours it out here
    abundantly."

How complete is here the rhetorician's indifference! He is so little
wrapped up in the dramatic situation that he wanders off after any
pretty detail which is trailed across the path; he _must_ be after the
bee or the flower or the vine! But now he pulls himself together, having
got to the tragic part of the business; we have come to the Famine, and,
by all the gods of Pen and Ink, Landor will show us what a Famine is
like!

Godiva speaks:

    "There is dearth in the land, my sweet Leofric. Remember how many
    weeks of drought we have had, even in the deep pastures of
    Leicestershire; and how many Sundays we have heard the same prayers
    for rain, and supplications that it would please the Lord in His
    mercy to turn aside His anger from the poor, pining cattle. You, my
    dear husband, have imprisoned more than one malefactor for leaving
    his dead ox in the public way; and other hinds have fled before you
    out of the traces, in which they, and their sons and their
    daughters, and haply their old fathers and mothers, were dragging
    the abandoned wain homeward. Although we were accompanied by many
    brave spearmen and skilful archers, it was perilous to pass the
    creatures which the farmyard dogs, driven from the hearth by the
    poverty of their masters, were tearing and devouring, while others,
    bitten and lamed, filled the air either with long and deep howls or
    sharp and quick barkings as they struggled with hunger and
    feebleness, or were exasperated by heat and pain. Nor could the
    thyme from the heath, nor the bruised branches of the fir tree,
    extinguish or abate the foul odour," etc. etc.

The first and most superficial thing which strikes me in this sentence
is the constant see-saw of alternatives: if you are not going to be
impressed by the _dead malefactor_, then try the _harnessed peasants_;
if the _sons and daughters in harness_ aren't enough, take the _fathers
and mothers also_. Again, if the dogs _disturbed over the carcases_ are
not to your satisfaction, please note the _unfed_ ones. Moreover, you
may fix your mind, or your choice, either on the _sharp and quick
barkings_, or upon the _long and deep howls_; in the same manner you are
left free to attribute the dog's struggles either to (a) _hunger and
feebleness_, or (b) _heat and pain_. After such a choice of evils it is
not astonishing that you should require disinfection by two different
disinfectants--namely, _thyme_ and _fir branches_; nor need we wonder,
after so many alternating possibilities, that the stench is neither
_extinguished_ nor _abated_.

During this examination a light seems to have dawned in me, a certainty
far surpassing all considerations of Leofric and Godiva. I have watched
Landor at work! Landor, even the mighty, severe demi-god of classic
prose, has appeared to me in the semblance of a boy provided, by
heartless teachers, with a theme, and obliged to produce a given number
of lines thereon. Conscientiously, and with touching intellectual
willingness, he has meditated, chin in hand, or hand in hair, upon the
concatenated possibilities: the beginning of it all was a drought, that
is to say, a scarcity of water (this suggests prayers for rain). The
water supply being insufficient, there was no fodder; the cattle got
none. Hence some died: hence carcases by the roadside; hence the
employment of human labour in lieu of cattle; the sons and daughters
harnessed--nay, in certain cases, the elder members of the family; nay,
happy thought! the oxen have died of exhaustion on the way, and the
family drags the wain homeward, for, of course, though carcases are left
by the roadside, carts may always come in handy, and are worth taking
home. Then the poor people couldn't feed their dogs any longer, hence
the dogs eat the carcases, or else (for some dogs, though few, are
confirmed vegetarians) died of hunger; and, as it was hot (for it is
always hot when it is dry in England), occasionally also died of heat;
and the dogs, very likely, fell to fighting over the carcases, and bit
one another, or got lamed (perhaps by people throwing stones at them?
Landor has forgotten this!). Such a state of things must have become
positively dangerous, and there being danger, Leofric and Godiva required
an escort, and being very great personages, had an escort of two kinds:
namely, bowmen and spearmen, and the bowmen were skilful, for it is no
easy matter to shoot with a bow, whereas the spearmen were only required
to be brave, for it only requires presence of mind to run a spear into a
dog. Meanwhile, of course, the unburied carcases stank, including those
of the dogs who had died for so many reasons; in consequence, thyme and
fir branches were provided; and here, I am sorry to note an omission,
for Landor has indeed told us that the thyme was got from the heath, but
has left us without due information concerning the place whence the fir
branches were procured. This oversight is probably due to the excitement
of perceiving what a fine opportunity this was of showing the unkind
fussiness of Leofric. He not only clapped into gaol every person guilty
of having left a dead ox on the thoroughfare, but frightened (though we
are not told how) the poor peasants (even to the extent of making them
run away) whenever he met them dragging their cart themselves, no doubt
because his pedantic sense of propriety was offended by this innocent
proceeding.... Here, then, in the course of learning every possible
detail about a drought, we have had our mind prepared for a heartless
and martinet Leofric.

At the end of the dialogue is an autobiographical note by Landor:

    "The story of Godiva, at one of whose festivals or fairs I was
    present in boyhood, has always interested me; and I wrote a poem on
    it, I remember, by the _square foot_ at Rugby.... May the peppermint
    be still growing on the bank in that place!"

How oddly simple, and how oddly like real poetry this is! Why? Because
Landor was remembering his own past, and, once in a way, feeling genuine
emotion.

I know nothing about Landor's private life, save that he lived a quarter
of a mile from the house whence I am writing, and once threw his cook
out of the window on to the violet bed, and made a _bon mot_ at the
time, or more likely, afterwards. And I have nothing to do with what
Landor may have been capable, or not, of feeling under the stress of
reality. But that he was an unfeeling wretch as soon as he dealt with
pen and ink, his own or others', I will prove to you through his own
words.

After telling us that Dante's lines about Ugolino are "unequalled by any
other continuous thirty in the whole dominion of poetry," he hands them
over "to whoever can endure the sight of an old soldier gnawing at the
scalp of an old archbishop." Merely the bad taste of a man born, after
all, in the eighteenth century? Perhaps. But he does not dismiss the
other episode of Francesca, though it were better if he had, for he has
furnished us with the following commentary:

    "Then when she hath said, 'La bocca mi baci tutto tremante,' she
    stops: she would avert the eyes of Dante from her: he looks for the
    sequel: she thinks he looks severely: she says 'Galeotto is the name
    of the book,' fancying by this timorous little flight she has drawn
    him far enough from the nest of her young loves. No, the eagle beak
    of Dante and his peering eyes are yet over her, 'Galeotto is the
    name of the book.' What matters that? 'And of the writer?' Or that
    either? At last she disarms him: but how?--'_That_ day we read no
    more.'"

_Nest of her young loves!_ There is something almost obscene, like the
proceedings of a madman, in the intrusion of such Dresden china imagery
into that place dumb of all light, and moaning as the sea in tempest
moans, into the presence of a passion erring, but undying, of a tale
which Dante ends thus: Whereas one of these spirits spoke in this
fashion, the other wept so that for pity I swooned, like unto dying; and
I fell, even as a dead body falls.

I said that I did not require to know anything about Landor's private
life. There is enough, and too much, revelation of Landor in this
notion of a Dante severely catechizing, of a Francesca all fright and
blushes, and trying, vainly, to divert that sour prying pedant by
talking of books and authors! And what unintended, perhaps unapprehended,
self-revelations do authors sometimes consign to paper and print:
"Galeotto," Francesca tells Dante, "was the name of the book, and the
name also of the author!" What could be more interesting to a man of
letters!


(C) CARLYLE AND THE PRESENT TENSE

Persuaded as I had become--and as I hope my Reader will also be after
my analysis of De Quincey--that the greatest differences in literary
effect are due mainly to different treatment of the verb, I set about
an examination of the present tense, as it has been employed in our
language.

It seems an idiotically obvious remark, yet one is apt to feel a little
shock of surprise when its truth is brought home to one: _the present
tense makes things present;_ it abolishes the narrative and the narrator.
This can be verified, as the relation of relief and colour is best
verified in pictures, by a process of reversing, like standing a picture
on its head. The ballad gives us this. For in the ballad the bulk of the
telling is sometimes in the present tense, and the effects are obtained
by a lapse into the past. For instance:

  He has gotten a coat of the even cloth,
    And a pair o' shoon of the velvet green;
  And till seven years were come and gone
    True Thomas on earth was never seen.

Here the ballad monger, like the uneducated folk of our own day,
experiences a difficulty in following an action without actually
witnessing it, hence he speaks in the present; but when he wants to sum
up the result, he unconsciously employs the past tense, which makes an
end of the business. And of course the alternation with the past tense
produces by contrast an extremely lively sense of the present. In more
artistic ballads the past tense is prevalent, and there is a jump into
the present at the moment of passion and action, with a very solemn drop
back into the past to give the result. Thus, in the _Braes of Yarrow_:

  Two has he hurt, and three has slain
    On the bloody braes o' Yarrow;
  But the stubborn knight crept in behind,
    And pierced his body thorough.

Again:

  She's ta'en him in her arms twa,
    And given him kisses thorough;
  She sought to bind his mony wounds,
    But he lay dead on Yarrow.

It is surely no mere coincidence that the past tense should here recur
as soon as the action is finished.

I have said that the present tense abolishes the fact of narration. This
has a most important result, that of doing away with the sense of cause
and effect. For we cannot feel any casual connection without projecting
ourselves into the past or the future. The present tense, constantly
pushing us along, leaves no leisure for thinking about _why_; it hustles
us into a new _how_. The present, in this case, never becomes a past, the
thing which we can keep and look into; it simply drops off into limbo,
vanishes entirely, as it probably does in the case of many children and
of thoughtless, uneducated persons.

Moreover--and this is obvious--the present tense can bring the event
before us, or us before the event, forcing us into a kind of sham
belief. I say of _sham_ belief, because this special kind of condition,
that of dramatic illusion, is often totally different from the genuine
kind of belief, what William James would probably call the "warm,
familiar acquiescence" which belongs to the sense of reality. We may sit
in a theatre and be hurried, bullied into interest and sympathy with
something which we do not seriously believe possible. And here I should
like to distinguish very clearly between this kind of realization, due
to presentation on the stage, to presentation by the present tense and
similar devices, and realization by such fullness and harmony, such
organic synthesis of co-ordinated detail, as is produced by only the
very greatest novels or poems. After watching a Sarah Bernhardt play, or
reading a chapter of Dickens even with breathless interest, I am by no
means haunted by a certainty that something is going on, that certain
people are continuing to live, struggle and suffer, such as I have after
reading Thackeray, or Stendhal, or Tolstoi; on the contrary, there is
often, as one lays down the book or rises from one's seat, a feeling of
abrupt breaking off, of turning off the lights. For once lapsed into
silence, Lady Dedlock, Snagsby, Jo, Tulkinghorn, the wicked Chuzzlewits,
cease to exist, cease therefore to develop, even like the personages
of a Sardou drama after the curtain has fallen. But the Newcomes, the
family of Del Dongo, and Katia, Levine, Anna, Wronsky, Natacha, Princess
Mary or Peter Besukow are just as living and active when I am not reading
about them as when I am; and the poisoning of Othello's mind takes place,
as a matter of fact, _between_ as much as _during_ the acts. Why?
Because all these great creations have an organic, inevitable existence
of their own, and once in contact in our thoughts, they must alter
and act on one another even like real things; whereas the others are
mere cleverly-painted puppets, whose movements catch and arouse our
attention; but which, once the band hushed and the lights out, collapse
into heaps of wood and wire.

By this hangs the fact, often puzzling in the extreme, that "thrilling"
stories are so often very poor and so often forgotten as soon as read;
also that pathetic effects can be produced by third-rate talent. The
difficult, the unique thing to produce is such fascination as continues
when the Reader is surrounded by different impressions, and submitted to
contrary influences; the fascination given by the life organic, which is
also the life everlasting!

I have spoken of Dickens' use of the present tense. It is accompanied by
several dodges converging towards the same effect. First, the dodge (the
essential factor of theatrical illusion) of making the characters say
their whole say, instead of telling us what they said; with the result
that the most unlikely thing is accepted because, in a way, you are made
to hear it, and speeches are listened to with acquiescence which would
revolt our sense of probability if their substance were merely retailed.
Again, and more efficacious still, the dodge of undoing the wrappers one
by one, taking the boxes one out of the other, and thereby producing,
like the conjuror, a spurious belief in the reality underlying these
deliberate proceedings. I will not lay un-pious hands on Dickens, whose
greatness exists despite such glaring drawbacks; so I will invent a
passage after his manner, burn him only in effigy. Listen! "In that
street there is a house; in that house there is a room; in that room
there sits a woman." Each affirmation (impossible to negative because
there is no real connection with anything else) builds up a certainty in
the Reader's mind. So that when we come to "and that woman is sewing a
shroud," the certainty is positively crushing. How sceptical we should
remain if the passage ran as follows: "In a certain house of a certain
street, a woman sat sewing a shroud."

This undoing the wrappers is, as I hinted, a frequent accompaniment
of the use of the present tense; it exists in most ballads, and in the
popular recital (as one may still hear it in certain countries) of fairy
tales. And all such processes--or all processes so employed: the present
tense, the dialogued narrative, the reiterative development of unrelated
facts (or, if you prefer, elaborate peeling away of one fact and showing
the next), are substituted for the power of persuading the Reader by
intellectual or emotional evidence that things really have happened in
the way described. These processes have the advantage of saving, not
merely the skill or intuition which the Writer has not got, but the
intelligence and imagination, the sympathy, nay, the mere attention
which the Reader may not be able or inclined to give. We are all of us
at times too poor in spirit or nerves to meet the artist half-way, and
help him to build his magic cities or plant his enchanted woods in our
soul. It is on such occasions that a good thumping on the drum, or a
good flaring of Bengal lights is highly welcome. And for this reason
such aids to interest and to tears are indispensable to a large number
of persons, those who happen to be intellectually inert, or never were
anything else.

Now let us turn to a different aspect of the present tense and pass from
depreciation to reverence. For amazing contrast to what, let us say,
Dickens contrives by means of the present tense, is what Carlyle employs
it to achieve. The contrast is between melodrama and the highest lyric,
the lyric of prophecy. Here, say in _The French Revolution_, we become
witnesses no longer of juggler's tricks, but of miracles. Let us watch
and wonder.

The intellectual process is wholly different from the one we have been
examining in Dickens. Carlyle's present tense does not oblige us to
witness the taking of the Bastille or the death of Louis XVI. in the
manner in which Dickens' present tense has obliged us to witness the
death of the Man from Shropshire, or the interview of Lady Dedlock and
Guppy. Louis XVI., Mirabeau, Danton, and the rest are seen but vaguely,
as from a distance, recognizable on the whole by some constantly
recurring attitude easily identified from afar: nay, by some quite
superficial peculiarity like Dusky D'Esprmenil, Gyrating Maurepas,
or Sea-Green Robespierre, Carlyle's _Revolution_ affording in this a
curious contrast with Michelet's, where we learn so well the actual
features, the marks of underlying temperament, the very visceral life,
in many cases, of all the _dramatis person_. No; in Carlyle the
illusion is not in the least of the dramatic kind; it is of the lyric.
What the present tense does here is to transport us perpetually, to
hustle us unceasingly into the presence of Carlyle himself. It forces
us, without allowing a pause to think or glance over our own shoulder,
to look down on the revolution from the skyey post of observation where
_he_ sits, like some belfry gurgoyle overlooking a flattened city
and a mapped out country, among storms and sunsets; a kind of cosmic,
archangelic dmon, seeing the molehill-upsettings, the ants' processions
and tumults of this world, and this world as but a tiny item of the
swirling universe around him; seeing it all with comprehension of
the how and why, with pity and disdain. It sounds ridiculous to say
(something like the anticlimax of a nostrum advertisement) that it is
the present tense which allows Carlyle to do and be all this; but that
seems to be the case. For the present tense dispenses with all question
and answer, all explanation; and it gives continuity not to the things
he speaks about, but to what he says about them, with the result that
what we are witnessing is not the drama down below in streets and
fields, nor even the drama in human hearts (there is wonderfully little
fellow-feeling with any of his personages); but is the drama up here in
the soul of this strange, marvellous prophet, Stylites-like among the
forces of Nature, calling out what he sees in the little earth, in the
vast infinity, like Jeremiah muttering and shouting of the past and
future, "Therefore I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary with
holding in...."

There is no difference, save in length, in subject and in philosophic
attitude, between the _Revolution_ and a poem like "Abt Vogler," or
the "Grammarian's Funeral." The doings of Jacobins and Girondins, the
September Massacres or the War in Argonne, hold the same place as
Browning's Illumination of the Cupola or Uphill Procession; they are
episodes, illustrations, metaphors almost, bringing home the eternal
laws of Being and Becoming, of Death and Renewal; and they are for
Carlyle, as for Browning, what they were for the "Chorus Mysticus":
_alles Vergngliche ist nur ein Gleichniss_.

Take a chapter of the _French Revolution_ and transpose it into the
past tense; you will get the same effect as by similarly transposing
"Abt Vogler" or the "Grammarian": all cohesion, all co-ordination will
disappear; the transition from one subject to another will become
senseless; the action, which is that of the Prophet holding forth,
will come to a stop. But the consecutiveness of cause and effect,
the intelligibility of history will not have been attained. For what
will those sudden vocatives, invectives, prophecies become in a mere
past-tense narrative of sublunary events? And what connection will there
be among those historical affairs, stranded in bits, if we no longer
feel their connection in the travailing or transfigured spirit of the
Seer?

But I will take an example. I open the _French Revolution_ literally at
random, at the beginning of the fourth chapter of the last book. And,
substituting the past tense for the present, I produce the following
half-page:

    "The Convention, borne on the tide of Fortune towards foreign
    victory, and driven by the strong wind of Public Opinion towards
    Clemency and Luxury, rushed fast; all skill of pilotage was (or
    _being_) needed, and more than all, in such a velocity. Curious to
    see how it veered and whirled, yet had ever to whirl round again,
    and scud before the wind. If, on the one hand, it re-admitted the
    protesting Seventy-Three, it had, on the other, to consummate the
    apotheosis of Marat; it had to lift his body from the Cordeliers'
    Church and transport it to the Pantheon of Great Men; flinging out
    Mirabeau to make room for him. To no purpose: so strong did public
    opinion blow. A Gilt Youth-hood, in plaited hair tresses, tore down
    his busts from the Theatre Feydeau; trampled them under foot;
    scattered them, with vociferation, into the cesspool of Montmartre.
    His chapel was swept away from the Place du Carrousel; the cesspool
    of Montmartre was to receive his very dust."

I should add that in making this slight alteration in a few verbs, I
have found it inevitable to alter the pronouns also: it is impossible,
for instance, to speak of the Convention as _we_: once it is a thing of
the past it becomes _it_ and thereby the interrogative passages become
more or less childish.

This one travesty should suffice to show that in this book the present
tense is not in the least a device (as people sometimes imagine) for
making the narrative rattle on. As a fact the narrative never does
rattle on; anything but that! The use of the present tense answers, on
the contrary, to Carlyle's very personal attitude in what is really the
world of contemplation; and it is, I believe we should find, only one of
the inevitable literary expressions thereof; for no man's style was ever
so organically personal as his, so intimately interwoven with individual
habits of thought and feeling; at all events, I think, among English
prose Writers. But if my Reader is not convinced we will try again, but
this time purposely selecting one of the pieces of purest narrative,
one, therefore, which ought, on the face of it, rather to gain than lose
by transposition into the past tense. Here it is, made a hash of by that
simple alteration of tenses:

    "On the morrow morning, she delivered her note to Duperret. It
    related to certain family papers which were in the Minister of the
    Interior's hand ... which Duperret was to assist her in getting;
    this, then, had been Charlotte's errand to Paris? She had finished
    this in the course of Friday, yet said nothing of returning. She had
    seen and silently investigated several things. The Convention in
    bodily reality, she _had_ seen; what the Mountain was like. The
    living physiognomy of Marat she could not see: he was sick at
    present and confined to home. About eight on the Saturday morning
    she purchased a large sheath knife in the Palais Royal; then
    straightways, in the Place des Victoires, took a hackney coach: 'To
    the Rue de l'Ecolede Medicine, No. 44.' It was the residence of the
    Citoyen Marat! The Citoyen Marat was ill, and could not be seen;
    which seemed to disappoint her much. Her business was with Marat,
    then? Hapless beautiful Charlotte! hapless squalid Marat! From Caen
    in the utmost West, from Neuchtel in the utmost East, they two were
    drawing nigh each other; they two had, very strangely, business
    together.... No answer. Charlotte wrote another note, still more
    pressing; set out with it by coach, about seven in the evening,
    herself. _Tired day labourers had again finished their work;_ huge
    Paris was circling and simmering, manifold, according to its wont;
    this one fair figure had decision in it, drove straight, towards a
    purpose.... And so Marat, People's Friend, was ended; the lone
    Stylites had got hurled down suddenly from his pillar; _whither_? He
    that made him does know."

I have underlined the sentence about the workmen, because the result
of the altered tense is particularly bad here; this sentence deals
obviously with the general, the universal, the always happening, and
that cannot be adequately given by the historic tense. For the same
reason no large generalization can be formulated in the past tense.
Compare the difference between "all men have died," and "all men are
mortal!"

The present tense, therefore, which is a rough and ready dramatic trick
in the ballad, and a vulgar dodge for realization in a Writer (for all
his genius) of the superficial psychology of Dickens, the present tense
is also the natural form of the lyric or the prophecy. For men like
Shelley, Browning or Carlyle, it is the tense of the eternal verities,
which, from their very nature, have not _been_, but, like all divine
things, always _are_.




VI

THE HANDLING OF WORDS


The following studies are of the same general nature as my previous
analysis of De Quincey, Landor and Carlyle; only they have been carried
out on a more humble method, although I am apt to think, with more
ambitious results. For a good deal has already been written, by everyone
else and myself, about literary construction in the larger sense, and an
incalculable lot about questions of rhetoric, whereas I seem to have
been pursuing for the first time and in solitude the minutest elements
to which literary style can be reduced, namely, single words and their
simplest combinations.

Some years ago a letter to the _Times_ from Mr. Emil Reich proposed that
"statistical tests" should be applied to literature with the purpose of
ascertaining in what Writers differ from one another. I do not know
whether this suggestion was acted upon by anyone else; at all events I
know of no results thereof except my own. Since, fired by that notion, I
at once set about a census of the words contained in a page, respectively,
of Defoe, Fielding, Stevenson, Pater and sundry other celebrated
authors; extracting, classifying and counting up the parts of speech
which they contained. By dint of this I came at length to find myself
seated, metaphorically, in a circle of neat little heaps of nouns and
pronouns, adjectives and participles, verbs and adverbs, and all the
ambiguously named "prepositions," "conjunctions," even "adverbs,"
according to different grammarians and lexicographers, little words
which receive least attention though they do so much of the work of a
sentence. This last mentioned circumstance, as you shall see, had not so
far dawned upon me. So there I sat, wondering why the numbers of nouns,
verbs and adjectives were apt to be either so much the same in different
Writers or so very different in the same one; and this quite irrespective
of the likeness or unlikeness which I could not help feeling in their
respective styles. Then I came to understand what I ought to have
foreseen (but am glad I did not), namely, that the relative proportion
of the more important parts of speech, the respective number of nouns,
adjectives and verbs must depend in the first instance upon what the
Writer has got to talk about, as distinguished from his individual
propensities about how to say it. To get equal conditions for my
statistical experiment, it would have been necessary to pick out specimen
pages embodying exactly equivalent subject-matter, and who was to judge
of that equivalence? Or else, to analyse pages enough--say all the pages
he ever wrote--of each, turn about, of the authors under comparison in
hopes of exhausting all the subjects he had ever written about, and thus
arriving at an average classification of all the words which every one
of the Writers under comparison ever employed. _The Statistical Test
applied to Literature._... Let me recommend the prosecution of this
study to young gentlemen and ladies anxious to fit themselves out as
general Reviewers.

Returning to myself, I found that though I was none the wiser for having
counted the different kinds of words in a page of, say, Henry James
compared with a page of Hardy, yet the course of these fruitless
statistical labours had brought to light remarkable and suggestive
differences in the use to which those words (and the small fry of
auxiliaries, conjunctions, prepositions, etc., perhaps most of all),
were put by the two Writers under comparison.

And with the gradual recognition of the pattern in which an individual
author sets his words, connecting and co-ordinating them in a way
peculiar to himself, there also became evident that every such pattern
of words exerts its own special power over the Reader, because it has
elicited in that Reader's mind conditions, or rather activities, similar
to those which have produced that pattern in the mind of the Writer.

_Writers and Readers._ Here I was back at my old belief that literature
takes effect solely by the co-operation, the interaction of him who reads
with him who writes; a belief which had in the meanwhile been confirmed
by my studies in the psychology of other arts.[5] As regards that of
Literature, I had, as the foregoing essays show, long recognized that
the Writer has always to draw upon the Reader's stored-up experience,
and can tell him something he does not yet know only by evoking and
rearranging what he already knew. The preceding parts of this volume
embody one single inquiry; namely, which of the Reader's stored-up
images and feelings are thus being drawn upon to produce a particular
effect? Among which of those memories is the Writer compelling him to
dwell and to move?

 5: Cf. _Beauty and Ugliness_ (in collaboration with C. Anstruther
    Thomson); also my Cambridge Manual, _The Beautiful_.

That had been, so far, my problem. The one I had now, almost accidentally,
struck upon, was more elementary, more essential, more intimate, and
certainly more recondite, and ran thus: What are the mental attitudes
which the Writer forces upon the Reader? what are the mental movements
he compels him to execute in that process of evoking and rearranging
those past images and feelings? In short, not merely _what_, in the act
of understanding, is the _Reader made to think about_ by that particular
Writer, but HOW is he made to think of it?

How, meaning: is the thinking to be done _easily_ or with _effort_;
quickly or slowly, smoothly or jerkily? How, meaning: in a _unified_
way or a scattered way, _straightforward_ or _intricate_? How also,
in the sense of a horse's paces (is it an amble or a gallop?), or a
man's gesture and action, leaning or supporting, leaping or stumbling,
clutching, holding on or dropping. How, finally, in the sense of all
those alternations of expectation, suspense, fulfilment or frustration,
which make up not only the large and obvious drama of human life, but
also this minute invisible drama of human thought.

Since, even in the few following analyses, we shall see the Reader
following the steps of the Writer and mimicking his bearing while he
is made to travel along level roads or steep or twisting paths; led
straight to the subject's centre, or approaching it slowly and by
stealth; made to rise and poise on steady wings with that eagle of the
introduction to the _Ring and the Book_; or to go round and round the
domestic lawn in the dark like Goldsmith's Tony Lumpkin. Neither is the
Reader allowed to travel empty handed in the guiding (or misguiding)
Writer's footsteps. Like him he must carry in his mind whatever he has
been made to gather up on the way, holding its items asunder, or folding
them over, or mixing them indissolubly with one another.... But the
motions of our limbs, the acts we perform with our bodies, are few and
simple and clumsy, compared with those of the mind, moving backwards and
forwards in time as well as in space; and it is better to drop this
inadequate metaphor of what, by his manner of disposing the parts of
speech, the Writer, for better for worse, obliges the Reader to do....

Since the name of that docile and active response, conscious in its
results not its processes, is _Reading_. And having made all allowance
for subject-matter and its detail treatment, the name of what determines
the ultimate essentials of that response, so far as these lie with the
Writer, is STYLE. _Style_ when thus responded to by synthetic intuition.
But when subjected to analysis, it turns out to be, as I hope I may
prove, nothing but the Handling of Words.


(A) MEREDITH

_Harry Richmond_, chapter xxxvi., p. 55, of Heinemann's second volume.
Five hundred words taken at random. Nouns and pronouns, 159 (of
which half, roughly speaking, personal pronouns); verbs and verbal
participles, 66; adjectives and adjectival participles, 25.

    "... Janet, liking both, contented herself with impartial comments.
    'I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools,'
    she said. Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the world and
    all things in it. We rode over to Julia's cottage, on the outskirts
    of the estate now devolved upon her husband. Irish eyes are certainly
    bewitching lights. I thought, for my part, I could not do as the
    captain was doing, serving his country in foreign parts, while such
    as these were shining without a captain at home. Janet approved his
    conduct, and was right. 'What can a wife think the man worth who sits
    down to guard his house door?' she answered with slight innuendo. She
    compared the man to a kennel-dog. 'This,' said I, 'comes of made-up
    matches,' whereat she was silent.

    "Julia took her own view of her position. She asked me whether it
    was not dismal for one who was called a grass-widow, and was in
    reality a salt-water one, to keep fresh, with a lap-dog, a cook and
    a maid-servant, and a postman that passed the gate twenty times
    for twice that he opened it, and nothing to look for but this
    disappointing creature day after day! At first she was shy, stole
    out a coy line of fingers to be shaken, and lisped; and out of that
    mood came right-about-face, with an exclamation of regret that she
    supposed she must not kiss me now. I protested, she drew back.
    'Shall Janet go?' said I. 'Then if nobody's present I'll be talked
    of----' said she, moaning queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep
    loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect deliriously
    wild. I complimented her on her keeping so fresh, in spite of her
    salt-water widowhood. She turned the tables on me for looking so
    powerful, though I was dying for a foreign princess. 'Oh, but
    that'll blow over,' she said, 'anything blows over as long as
    you don't go up to the altar'; and she eyed her ringed finger,
    woebegone, and flashed the pleasantest of smiles with the name of
    her William. Heriot, whom she always called Walter Heriot, was, she
    informed me, staying at Durstan Hall, the new great house, built
    on a plot of ground that the Lancashire millionaire had caught up,
    while the Squire and the other landowners were sleeping. 'And if you
    get Walter Heriot to come to you, Harry Richmond, it'll be better
    for him, I'm sure,' she added, and navely: 'I'd like to meet him up
    at the Grange.' Temple, she said, had left the Navy, and was reading
    in London for the Bar--good news to me.

    "'You have not told us anything about your princess, Harry,' Janet
    observed on the ride home.

    "'Do you take her for a real person, Janet? One thinks of her as a
    snow-mountain you've been admiring.'"

The first thing striking me in this quotation from _Harry Richmond_ is
that these five hundred words have, among them all, only two semicolons,
one of which does not even count, because it closes a quotation.
Altogether the five hundred words constitute thirty sentences, counting
everything closed by a full-stop as being a sentence. Of these thirty
sentences, five have no comma in them; only one, and that a quotation,
begins with _and_; not one begins with _but_, _for_, _therefore_,
_consequently_, or any similar expression of logical separation or
connection.

In the body of sentences, _but_ occurs only once: "Oh, _but_ that'll
blow over--": _and_ occurs twelve times: five times as a mere link in
an enumeration--"with a lap-dog, a cook _and_ a maid-servant, _and_ a
postman," etc.--three times with a sense of consecutiveness, as in
"At first she was shy ... _and_ lisped"--once only with the sense of
connected thought: "Janet approved his conduct _and_ was right."
_For_ is absent; and so is _but_, the two causal particles, both
differentiating, while they connect, and in so far betokening
discrimination and logic. The absence of this class of words gives
the quotation an irresponsible, unreasoning and impulsive air, and
the lightness coming thereof. With this tallies the lack of weighing
and analysing: the adjectives and adjectival participles and adverbs,
"right--fresh--shy--wild," etc., being direct qualifiers designating the
property of a noun, but never analysing it; adjectives showing not so
much what a substantive, a thing or person, _is_, as what the substantive
_does_, how it affects others. As might be expected, in these same five
hundred words I can detect only three parentheses: "I thought, _for my
part_, I could not do as the captain was doing, _serving his country in
foreign parts_, while such as these," etc., and "a grass-widow, _and was
in reality a salt-water one_," etc., and neither of these parentheses
reinforce the logical coherence.

It strikes me that in analysing style one should pay great attention to
words like "of which"--"that," etc., because, referring back, as they
do, implies a demand on the Reader's memory and constructive attention.
There is no such demand made in this page of Meredith. If anything is
claimed, is taxed, it is the Reader's power of following short, rapid
movements, and of "spotting," "twigging," their relation to one another.
This is an interesting point. For, despite Meredith's habit of shooting
out sentences without connection, and the impulsive impression given
by his lack of causal words, the Reader finds himself called upon to
synthesize, to judge and decide; more so, very often, than the less
intellectual Reader at all cares to do. The fact is that he is told a
number of things at whose meaning he must make a rapid guess, much as
the sportsman decides on the nature of a bird or beast by a rapid series
of suppositions, an argument, a synthesis.

Take this sentence: "Then if nobody's present," etc., said she,
"_moaning queerly. The tendency of her hair to creep loose of its bands
gave her handsome face an aspect deliriously wild_"--such a sentence is
surely an unusual demand on a Reader's intuition and experience: it is
the flight of a bird, and he must decide what shape and habits that
flight implies. It is this odd selection of what he tells and does not
tell, this omission of links, which makes Meredith a sealed book to
careless or unintelligent Readers. While his style runs on without
causal marks or logical forms, the choice of items is perpetually
forcing us to spot and to conjecture. We are made to be intellectual
in default of himself: to supply what his impatience and impulsiveness
denies. Probably much of his wonderful vividness arises from this; we
are never allowed to sit still and wait to be told; we must watch and
decide while the words fly past, very much as we do in the case of
certain real people, who, laconic and detached, work themselves into our
soul by dint of the effort of understanding which their reserve, their
lack of formula, imposes upon us. There is about Meredith some of the
swiftness, unclutchableness, and mystery of reality, just because there
is so little of the connection, analysis, synthesis of contemplation.

Connected with this is the singular similarity and straightness of
direction of his sentences and half-sentences, as, most typically, in
the following saying: "I always think in these cases that the women must
be the fools." There is no reason given for thinking thus; it is direct
and inevitable; in fact, it is thought because the _I_ happens to think
so. In Meredith everything seems to be whatever it is _because he thinks
so_, no other Possibility existing in the presence of this vivacious,
headlong, delightfully egotistic mind. Remark that instead of the
sentence just quoted most people would have written: "In these cases I
think that the women must be the fools," or rather, "I think the women
must be the fools in these cases." The first arrangement would have
qualified the women being fools by _my_ way of thinking, whence a chance
of error; in the second case the foolishness would have been limited to
the cases in point. But, as Meredith has put it, the "in these cases"
has been tucked away so close, so small, that what stands out is "I
think--women fools." As a fact the literal meaning of Meredith's syntax,
"I always think in these cases that the women must be the fools," is not
what he conveys to us, which is: "I always think that in these cases."
Yet, despite his placing of the _that_, the sentence prances on to its
unqualified and unjustifiable conclusion. Probably the habitual way of
expressing such a thought would be "It always seems to me that"; but
Meredith, judging by this page, eschews two forms: the oblique and the
passive or deponent (false passive). The sentence after this seems
an attempt, and an awkward one, to break this monotony of too many
transitive verbs. "Her affectation was to assume a knowledge of the
world." No one surely ever thought in such a form except for literary
purposes. Meredith's meaning is "she affected to assume"; while the
_literal_ meaning of this form implies something more, namely, that
every one has affectations, and that this particular one was Janet's; or
that we had been given to expect an affectation from Janet, and this,
sure enough, was it.

This remark leads me to think that there is great importance in the
proportion, first, of passive forms to active; secondly, of what I may
call _deponent_ or false passive forms, "seems," etc., to transitive
forms; thirdly, of oblique (dative or locative) forms to direct ones
with accusative or possessive. In this quotation I can find only one
oblique statement (since the sentence about Janet's affectation is
misleading, but, as syntax, quite direct): "The tendency of her hair to
creep loose of its bands gave her handsome face an aspect deliriously
wild." Here the obliqueness of the thought is further marked by the
introduction of "the tendency." There is something _cryptic_, if I
may be allowed such jargon, in this very plain statement, as if more
were meant than meets the ear. It is as if this oddly straight-flying
creature suddenly dived and disappeared. I fancy that it is such
sentences which give Meredith an affected air, but also one of knowing
more than he cares to tell. They must make the Philistine pause, or kick
them aside as lumber. It would be interesting to examine such _cryptic_
or enigmatic utterances, and the impression they leave of our dealing
with unusually intuitive persons, bringing up marvellous fragmentary
knowledge out of their suddenly dived-into depths; an impression due
to such sudden rupture of ordinary modes of speaking. The peculiarity
exists as a positive nuisance in that very gifted _poseur_, M. Barrs.
In Meredith, as in Stendhal, it is doubtless genuine and temperamental.

This analysis will, I hope, serve to suggest to my Reader and fellow
student what such studies are beginning to make clear to my mind,
namely, that the degree of life in a Writer's style depends upon the
amount of activity which he imposes upon his Reader. If this activity is
disconnected, discursive, of the rapidly _spotting, twigging_ kind, the
style will be living and active, but disjointed and a little enigmatic
as in Meredith; if this activity is logical, we shall have the sense
of orderly and harmonious energy we shall see presently in Stevenson;
certain other modes of activity, as revealed and as communicated by
syntax, we shall have occasion to analyse in Henry James and in Hewlett.


(B) KIPLING

_Kim._ Five hundred words taken at random, only choosing a page without
dialogue, p. 118. Nouns, 157; verbs, 59; adjectives and adverbs, 53.

    "... Who would have bid him learn. But had it not been proven at
    Umballa that his sign in the high heavens portended war and armed
    men? Was he not the friend of the stars as of all the world, crammed
    to the teeth with dreadful secrets? Lastly--and firstly as the
    undercurrent of all his quick thoughts--this adventure, though he
    did not know the English word, was a stupendous lark, a delightful
    continuation of his old flights across the housetops, as well as the
    fulfilment of sublime prophecy. He lay belly flat and wriggled
    towards the mess-tent door, a hand on the amulet round his neck. It
    was as he suspected. The sahibs prayed to their god; for in the
    centre of the mess-table--its sole ornament when they were on the
    line of march--stood a golden bull fashioned from old-time loot of
    the summer palace at Pekin--a red gold bull, with lowered head,
    ramping upon a field of rich Irish green. To him the sahibs held out
    their glasses and cried confusedly.

    "Now the Reverend Arthur Bennett always left mess after that toast,
    and, being rather tired by his march, his movements were more abrupt
    than usual. Kim, with slightly raised head, was still staring at
    his totem on the table when the chaplain stepped on his right
    shoulder-blade. Kim flinched under the leather and, rolling sideways,
    brought down the chaplain, who, ever a man of action, caught him by
    the throat and nearly choked the life out of him. Kim then kicked
    him desperately in the stomach. Mr. Bennett gasped and doubled up,
    but, without relaxing his grip, rolled over again and silently
    hauled Kim to his own tent. The Mavericks were incurable practical
    jokers; and it occurred to the Englishman that silence was best till
    he had made complete inquiry.

    "'Why, it's a boy,' he said, as he drew his prize under the light of
    the tent-pole lantern; then, shaking him severely, cried: 'What were
    you doing? You are a thief.'

    "His Hindustanee was very limited, and the ruffled and disgusted
    Kim intended to keep to the character laid down for him. As he
    recovered his breath he was inventing a beautifully plausible tale
    of his relations to some mess-scullion, and at the same time keeping
    a keen eye on and a little under the chaplain's left armpit. The
    chance came; he ducked for the door-way, but a long arm shot out
    and clutched at his neck, snapping the amulet-string and closing on
    the amulet. 'Give it to me, oh give it me! Is it lost? Give me the
    papers?' The words were in English, the tinny, saw-cut English of
    the native bred, and the chaplain jumped.

    "'A scapular!' he said, opening his hand--'no, some sort of heathen
    charm. Why--why do you speak English? Little boys who steal are
    beaten. You know that?'"

The first paragraph contains several _changes of grammatical direction_:
a passive form "had it not been proven" turning into an active "that his
sign portended." Moreover, we have a nominative which is a whole phrase;
the _it_ which was _proven_ becoming the _that_ of the "that his sign,"
etc. After this a simple past--"was he not a friend of the stars,"
etc.--and a perfectly direct interrogation with _he_ as nominative
and "friend of the stars also." Both these two first sentences are
interrogative, and that is their only formal connection.

Next we get a sentence with a double parenthesis, which, however, makes
it only the clearer, and seems to put on weight. "Lastly--and firstly as
the undercurrent of his quick thoughts--this adventure," etc. Weight
is also put on by the sort of drum tap call on the attention of the
_firstly_ and _lastly_. The impact of this sentence is due to the
damming up of the meaning by those two parentheses. The Reader is made
to expect something by that _lastly_; his attention is restrained
violently by the "firstly as the undercurrent," etc.--which, although
parenthetical, is in no way an _obiter dictum_ slipped in, but, on the
contrary, a reduplication of that call on his expectation, a sort of
multiplier of the movement. Only after these two strong pullings-back of
the meaning do we get the beginning of it with _this adventure_. But the
impact is heightened again by a new stoppage: "though he did not know
the English word." Then only is the meaning let go, with a snap--"was a
stupendous lark." There can be no doubt after this of the truth of the
assertion that the chief importance of the thing from Kim's point of
view, was _its being a lark_. Compare, in order to realize the mechanism
of tension and restraint by which Kipling has obtained this effect, the
very clear and proper, but absolutely nerveless sentence in which I
have just paraphrased it! After the sort of radiating crash of that
word _lark_ (something corresponding to the high note of an intricate
Mozart _Cadenza_), comes a sort of developing _Coda_, as, in some of
Beethoven's Sonatas, symmetrically uniting the two ideas: "a delightful
continuation of his old flight across the housetops as well as the
fulfilment of sublime prophecy." After this elaborate and very dynamic
passage describing Kim's consciousness, we pass abruptly to his bodily
condition, considered objectively: "he lay belly flat and wriggled
towards the mess-tent door, a hand on the amulet round his neck." Here
also, after an analysis of motion, _i.e._ of abstractly considered moods,
we get a very vivid image of bodily position and movement, almost an
instantaneous snapshot. We have a feeling as of the boat having been
finally shoved off from shore. This whole arrangement is extremely
efficacious. It may, no doubt, degenerate into a trick. If such
arrangements are frequent in Kipling, this would explain much of his
popularity; on the other hand a sensitive Reader might resent their
repetition and thereby wreck their efficacy: the fatal suspicion
arising of _the thing being cheap, i.e._ perfunctory, shoddy.

This suspicion of _cheapness_ happens here to be borne out by the
sequel, which is evidently neither inspired by continuous interest nor
revised by habitual care; this sequel is a deviation of meaning. Let us
look at it. Here is the passage:

"It was as he suspected." Here the Reader's attention is twitched,
and ordered suddenly back to Kim's consciousness. Now comes a logical
elision, a showing to us of the thing which Kim had had in his mind,
while showing us, at the same moment, its counterpart in reality
(instead of saying "_he had expected that the sahibs_," etc., "_and it
appeared that they really were doing it_.")

Such sudden rolling into one of the expected thing and the actual thing
has the vivacity of a conjurer's trick, of any kind of summation of two
modes of calling on the attention. It is the "you are going to see,"
said at the instant of pulling the thing out of the hat; we get the
total of two (what I must call) _movement values_, and the additional
value of their comparison. So far, so good. But now we come to the
slack part. The slackness of attention, I may remark, by the way,
betrays itself by the use of a wrong tense: "It _was_ as he suspected.
The sahibs _prayed_ to their god"--the logical development requires the
concordance _were praying_, because the two items cannot be on the same
_plane of thought_, the first sentence telling us about Kim, the second
about what Kim was telling (or had told) himself. Such a difference of
what I call _plane of thought_ is more important even than a difference
in the _plane of time_, and, in most cases, it implies the latter. The
praying of the sahibs did indeed go on contemporaneously with Kim's
suspecting. But it was a continuation; and the part of their _praying_
which was going on was not the same part as the one he _suspected_,
since it was a part about which a tense is used showing that the
suspicion was verified by the praying, consequently must have existed
apart and before. This slackness of realization of the relations in time
and in logic between the two verbs, accounts for an actual and quite
unintentional deflection from the meaning in Kipling's mind really. For
the substitution of "prayed" for "were praying" in that juncture gives
the past tense, the _prayed_, the meaning of habitual doing of the thing
instead of doing it at that moment. "It was as he suspected. The sahibs
prayed to their god"--means, according to English grammar and usage,
that Kim was borne out in his suspicion that the sahibs _were in the
habit of praying_; whereas the true meaning is that what the sahibs
were doing at that moment answered to Kim's suspicions. I fancy that the
transition from Kim's consciousness to the external reality has been too
much, at this moment, for Kipling's attention or lack of attention.

Let us look further at this which I might call the slackening of
Kipling's grasp. "For in the centre of the mess-table--its sole ornament
when they were on the line of march--stood a golden bull from old-time
loot of the summer palace at Pekin--a red gold bull, with lowered head,
ramping upon a field of Irish green."

Now the sentence, "the sahibs prayed to their god" represents what Kim
thought, not in the least what was really happening. And the _for_ of
the succeeding sentence most distinctly connects its contents with this
notion of Kim's; we expect to be told something to justify Kim's view
about the praying to a god. We expect to be told it, moreover, _in terms
of Kim's thought_, since no indication has been given that we have done
with Kim's suppositions. From this point of view it is a pity to speak
of a _mess-table_; for to Kim, most probably, it was only a _table_.
Then Kipling tells us that the object he is about to describe was the
mess-table's sole ornament when they (_they_ can only refer to the
sahibs, thus connecting back to Kim's imaginary people praying to an
idol) "were on the line of march"--a piece of information which could
scarcely have been understood by Kim, even if it had been suggested
to him. For what could Kim, thinking of _idols_, understand about the
regulation-ornamenting of mess-tables at one moment rather than another?
Kipling, notwithstanding, continues to abound in information respecting
this mess-table ornament: it had been fashioned "out of old-time loot of
the summer palace at Pekin"--and it had, he tells us, "a field of Irish
green," while of all this information the only piece Kim could have
grasped (even had he, instead of us, been told) is that the thing in the
middle of the table was a "red gold bull, with lowered head."

We have left Kim and his head full of suspicions a good way behind! Yet
the next moment we jerk back to it, and look at the table no longer in
the light of Kipling's information, but in that of Kim's imagination,
for the ensuing sentence states, not that the officers were drinking
toasts round that golden bull, but that "_to him_ the _sahibs_ held out
their glasses and cried aloud confusedly."

But, you may say, was Kipling not to tell us the reality which had
erroneously confirmed Kim's suspicions? This is just the _hic_. My
contention is that had Kipling's consciousness been full of the subject,
he would inevitably have seen the two orders of facts, the objective in
the mess-tent, the subjective in Kim's mind, in their real relation
of importance to the Reader, that is to say, the objective strictly
subordinated to the subjective. He would have told us, because he would
have thought of, the details of the mess-tent, etc., _only in so far
as they explained Kim's ideas_ and his consequent action. The mischief
in all this, the origin of the faulty construction, even of the misuse
of tenses, lies, I fear, in the slackness and poverty of the thought.
Where ignorance of the habits of a language cannot come into account, I
believe that bad syntax, bad grammar, bad rhetoric can be traced to a
lapse in the power of feeling and thinking a subject. Literature, more
than any other art, is a matter of intellectual and emotional strength
and staying power. Let us see whether, in our five hundred words,
Kipling recovers himself after this lapse.

He has been talking of Kim, so far. He now requires to talk about the
chaplain. Instead of turning clean to his new point of view, he lurches
over to it across that self-same sentence in which irrelevant information
about the mess-table was given alongside of Kim's impressions. He has
so little the feeling of having made a mistake that he builds upon it.
"_Now_ the Rev. A. B. always left mess after that toast." Here we are
again going to meet, if not an absolutely incorrect concordance of
tenses, at least a very slack employment of them. Listen! "... _always
left_ ... and, _being_ rather tired by his march, his movements _were_,"
etc. To put the tenses right it would be necessary to slip in "and
to-day"--or "on this occasion"--so as to connect the general statement
with the particular one. Moreover, the pronouns are so placed that the
verb "being tired"--is either without a nominative or governed by "his
movements." Such a lapse, doubtless common enough among eighteenth-century
Writers, has come to represent a real confusion of thought, at least a
stumble in thinking, nowadays that grammatical habits have acquired more
precision and stability.

The next sentence begins with _Kim_, as the preceding one did with the
Reverend Arthur; and our attention being drawn to him and his "slightly
raised head ... staring at the totem," we are as surprised as he when
"the chaplain stepped on his right shoulder-blade." After that we have
first Kim as governing the action, then the chaplain; two _leads_ made
more conspicuous by Kim beginning with an intransitive verb and another
making him passive to the Reverend Arthur's boot ("Kim flinched under
the leather and ... brought down the chaplain----"), and the chaplain
deflecting from the passive into the active with the parenthetical
information "ever a man of action." What would this exchange of
nominatives have looked like without that parenthesis? Let us try. "Kim
flinched under the leather, and, rolling sideways, brought down the
chaplain, who caught him by the throat and nearly choked the life out
of him." The sentence, reduced to this, is weak, without solid middle
on which to articulate it; and the two nominatives strike out confusedly
like puppets whose strings have got mixed up. The "ever a man of action"
serves as supporting body to these disjointed members. It steadies
the rest, and makes the continued exchange of nominatives in a way
rhythmical; for the interchange continues. But there comes a sudden
break, showing that this seesaw of nominatives has been accidental and
the result of disorder. For after "silently hauled Kim to his tent"--we
get this other thing, "The Mavericks were incurable practical jokers."
After this comes the second half explaining this sudden introduction of
the regiment--"and it occurred to the Englishman that silence was best
till," etc.

It is an odd proof of deficient logical feeling, and (in so far, perhaps
also, of real sense of consecutive action), that Kipling should not have
written: "_for_ the Mavericks were," etc. As it is, this whole sentence
is chaotic; and although the verbs employed are consecutive in their
meaning, "Kim kicked"--"Mr. Bennett gasped and doubled up ... rolled
over ... silently hauled Kim," etc.--the lack of logical connection
makes them into a series of ill-understood jerks, _as they no doubt
would have seemed to bystanders_.

The lack of causal clearness continues; perhaps I might add, Kipling's
satisfaction with an imperfectly stated causal relation. "His (the
Reverend Arthur's) Hindustanee was very limited, and the ruffled and
disgusted Kim intended to keep to the character laid down for him."
This follows upon two Hindustanee words, which this unstrung sentence
explains in retrospective fashion. It is possible that such logical
slackness may lighten the trouble of some Readers, those who don't care
to follow the _hang of an action_, and are satisfied with staring at
mere movement. If so, I am not sure whether this way of writing may not
be a kind of _impressionism_, a deliberate trick on Kipling's part. For
note the sequel: "The chance came; he ducked for the doorway; but a long
arm shot out and clutched at his neck," etc.

If impressionism, however, it is unsuccessful; because all impressionism,
literary as much as pictorial, depends upon _a fixed point of view_
whence unity and intelligibility are obtained. Now this elision of the
man to whom the arm belonged does not go with a point of view. Not
Kim's; for to Kim the central occurrence would not be the nominative
_arm_ actively shooting out from the inexplicable, but a nominative
_Kim_ suddenly collared [hence become passive] by a very well guessed-at
chaplain. And if not Kim's point of view, then whose? The absence
of words denoting the _causal attitude_ (and all words save nouns,
adjectives, verbs, and their satellites are words deciding the Reader's
attitude) is conspicuous in the next sentence also: "The words were in
English--the tinny, saw-cut English of the native bred, _and_ the
chaplain jumped."

_And?_ the chaplain may be said to jump also over this connecting link.
This gives vivacity, but also a sense of emptiness and superficiality.
The effect is increased by the spasmodic speech of the chaplain--"A
scapular," he said, opening his hand. "Why--why--do you speak English?
Little boys who steal are beaten. You know that?" I have no doubt the
chaplain actually did speak like that. But it affects me as Reader
exactly like a snapshot leaving the _how_ of a movement unintelligible.
A certain scamping of the passage is shown by not altering the _why_,
which may also mean "_for what reason_," and which by no means announces
itself at once as an interjection.

I am sorry that accident should have furnished me with so poor a page
from what is, in many ways, a great and charming book. But having
trusted to mere chance in my selections from Meredith, Henry James,
Hardy, Stevenson, and Hewlett, I had no right to pick and choose when it
came to Kipling. Of course there must be, in even the most inspired or
the most careful Writers, a certain amount of work in which inspiration
or care has been insufficient, work done in moments of their being,
intellectually, _below par_; or else work done at the beginning of a day
before the mind has warmed to the task. On the other hand, it is in such
less fortunate work that we can judge of what I should call the Writer's
_constitutional tradition_, of the habits and standards which operate
in re-reading and revision; and I think it is probable that Kipling is
among the most unequal and hasty, and in so far the least disciplined,
of contemporary English Writers.


(C) STEVENSON

_Travels with a Donkey in the Cvennes_, p. 151. Five hundred words.
Nouns and pronouns, 138; verbs, 70; adjectives and adjectival
participles, 41.

    "All was Sunday bustle in the streets and in the public house, as
    all had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been
    near a score of us at dinner by eleven before noon; and after I had
    eaten and drunken, and sat writing up my journal, I suppose as many
    more came dropping in one after another, or by twos and threes. In
    crossing the Lozre I had not only come among new natural features,
    but moved into the territory of a different race. These people, as
    they hurriedly despatched their viands in an intricate sword-play
    of knives, questioned and answered me with a degree of intelligence
    which excelled all that I had met, except among the railway folk at
    Chasserads. They had open telling faces, and were lively both in
    speech and manner. They not only entered thoroughly into the spirit
    of my little trip, but more than one declared, if he were rich
    enough, he would like to set forth on such another.

    "Even physically there was a pleasant change. I had not seen a
    pretty woman since I left _Monastier_, and there but one. Now of
    the three who sat down with me to dinner, one was certainly not
    beautiful--a poor timid thing of forty, quite troubled at this
    roaring table d'hte, whom I squired and helped to wine, and pledged
    and tried generally to encourage, with quite a contrary effect; but
    the other two, both married, were both more handsome than the
    average of women. And _Clarisse_? What shall I say of _Clarisse_?
    She waited at table with a heavy, placable nonchalance, like a
    performing cow; her great grey eyes were steeped in amorous languor;
    her features, although fleshy, were of an original and acute design;
    her mouth had a curl; her nostril spoke of dainty pride; her cheek
    fell into strange and interesting lines. It was a face capable of
    strong emotion, and, with training, it offered the promise of
    delicate sentiment. It seemed pitiful to see so good a model left
    to country admirers and a country way of thought. Beauty should
    at least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a
    weight that lay upon it, it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on
    an elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and, in a
    moment, _patet dea_. Before I left I assured _Clarisse_ of my hearty
    admiration. She took it like milk, without embarrassment or wonder,
    merely looking at me steadily with her great eyes; and I own the
    result upon myself was some confusion. If _Clarisse_ could read
    English, I should not dare to add that her figure was unworthy of
    her face. Hers was a case for stays; but that may perhaps grow
    better as she gets up in years.

    "_Pont de Montvert_, or _Greenhill Bridge_, as we might say at home,
    is a place memorable in the story of the Camisards. It was here that
    the war broke out; here that those southern Covenanters slew their
    _Archbishop Sharpe_...."

The whole first page gives the sense of ponderation. We get, in close
sequence, two sentences of appreciation of circumstances, nay of
supposition. The two first sentences had been direct affirmations: _All
had been Sabbath peace among the mountains. There must have been near a
score of us at dinner_, etc.; the reference is to something which is not
the Writer. In the second half of the second sentence we suddenly double
back to Stevenson--"and after I had eaten and drunken," etc.--not for
his own sake, however, but merely using him as a sort of fixed point of
view whence to see the real object under discourse. Then we get "as many
more came dropping in." His slipping in here of "I suppose" (when the
objective meaning could have been got equally by "_about_ as many more")
prepares one for a perpetual give and take between the told thing and
the teller, which is very characteristic of Stevenson's mode of
exposition.

In the very next sentence--"In crossing the Lozre I had not only come
among new natural features," etc.--the _I_ returns, the mere statement
turns into personal narrative. The last sentence of this paragraph--"They
had open telling faces, and not only entered thoroughly into the spirit
of my little trip"--sums up this interplay of the traveller and the
journey with the reference to the proper "entering into the spirit of
my little trip." The whole of this paragraph is active; even in a
place where a passive might be expected, Stevenson makes himself the
nominative of _supposing_, while the _people_ remain nominative of
"_dropping in_." The seesaw in the subject-matter is given by a seesaw
between nominatives of different parts of the sentence.

[Note meanwhile the direction given to the sentences and half-sentences
as indicated by their initial words: "_All; there; and after; I suppose;
in crossing; these people; they had; they not only._"]

Let us go on with the verbs; I fancy we shall find the same variety, but
variety coherent and co-ordinated. First, "_all was_"; then, "all _had
been_"; this pattern of simple and reduplicated past is continued: "There
_must have been_"--"I _had_ eaten and drunken"--and this is further
complicated by the combination of the simple past and present participles:
"_had_ eaten, _sat_ writing." Again we have the same structure--"In
_crossing_ the Lozre I _had_ not only _come_," etc.--only reversed, the
participle coming first, and this time with a compound past "had come."

These changes in tense are, so to speak, _dimensional movements in
time_, and their variety and intricacy enlarges it, as variety of
movement in space enables us to feel an object as cubic. The next
sentence, "these people, as they hurriedly despatched ... questioned and
answered me," etc.--somehow leaves an impression of the _presentness_
then, of that past.

In the next paragraph, I find no passive form, nor even one of those
apparently passive forms, which, from Latin analogy, we may call
_deponent_. "I had not seen a pretty woman since I left Monastier, and
there but one. Now of the three who sat down with me to dinner, one was
certainly not beautiful," etc. At the outset there is a _chassez-croisez_
between two nominatives; the accusative _woman_ of the first sentence
becoming the nominative of the next. Let me note a lapse of grammar--alack,
ye pedants!--for we had _woman_ in the singular, and now, behold, have "of
the three." But, as I think we should find also in Sterne, this lapse,
so far from seeming awkward, has a cavalier grace, as of a hat a little
askew. To return to our actives and passives: there is, as we shall see
by continuing the quotation, only _one_ deponent, and of this the real
quality is that of an adjective: "And Clarisse? What shall I say of
Clarisse? She waited at table with a heavy, placable nonchalance,
like a performing cow; her great grey eyes _were steeped_ in amorous
languor";--and this apparent deponent breaks agreeably through the
series of active verbs governing more obvious adjectives: "Her features
... _were_, her mouth _had_ a curl; her nostril _spoke_ of, etc.; her
cheek _fell_ into," etc. All this is not merely variety, it is movement.

Stevenson, by introducing verbs of movement about things which are
motionless, supplies that sense of activity which we get from the fact
of the person spoken of being in movement (the woman, remember, was
waiting at table), and which he could not keep on reiterating. I feel
certain that writing is largely an art of such substitutions of effect,
one set of items being made to furnish an impression required for
another. Hence the utter mistakenness of criticizing single expressions,
as in the case of Carducci's famous _Silenzio verde_, of which pedants
repeated, that silence, being unappreciable by the eye, could not be
_green_; overlooking that the greenness and the silence produced
equivalent impressions, and converged in our consciousness.

Again, let us return to Stevenson: we are now no longer hurrying across
provinces, but in a dining-room, looking about us leisurely. And the
sentences, hitherto short, have now expanded into much complexity of
clause. I would point out that the sudden breaking in with a question
which is in reality an interjection (--"And Clarisse? What shall I say
of Clarisse?") gives the page not merely a lyrical (or mock lyrical)
vivacity, but, by association with certain eighteenth-century forms,
a certain gallant affectation, an archaism transfiguring what would
otherwise be mere eyeing of a waitress in a restaurant: 'tis the opening
of a bag of graceful, old-world associations. This little interlude
prepares us (being in fact the expression of the already existing attitude
in Stevenson) for the order of thought in the next sentence:--"Beauty
should at least have touched society; then, in a moment, it throws off a
weight that lay upon it; it becomes conscious of itself, it puts on an
elegance, learns a gait and a carriage of the head, and in a moment,
_patet dea_"--ending with that Virgilian phrase (which also takes us
back to the eighteenth century of "And Clarisse?"--so purely literary):
_Patet Dea._

By this time we are just prepared for "If Clarisse could read English, I
should not dare to add that her figure was unworthy of her face. Hers
was a case for stays, but that may perhaps grow better as she gets up
in years." The sentence--"Hers was a case for stays"--acts, I think,
to bring us back to homeliness, and especially to the individual,
_narrative_ reality.

Remark how in examining this whole passage I have passed, continually,
from the _form_ to the actual _contents_; in literature they are closely
intermeshed in the effect on the Reader. It is _form_ to think in this,
and not a different, succession of _items_; and it is _realization_ of
the items to produce such forms. Note that we get a consistency and
co-ordination in Stevenson's mood (_i.e._ the subjective matter under
discourse) exactly answering to the co-ordination in the mere words, as
explained before. Let us examine into one or two other points:

The passage thus accidentally selected begins with a deliberate
symmetrical repetition: "_All_ was Sunday bustle in the streets ...
as _all_ had been Sabbath peace upon the mountains." It is a figure
of symmetrical comparison: _Sunday--Sabbath_; _bustle--peace_;
_streets--mountains_. But we do not again get any such symmetrical
form, at least in the five hundred words under examination; and there is
a looser logical tie at the end of the paragraph: "_not only_ entered
into the spirit of my little trip, _but_ more than one declared," etc.
Persistent use of such symmetrical exposition, as we get it in Johnson,
Gibbon, and Macaulay, awakens, in a Reader at all sensitive, the
suspicion of perfunctoriness on the part of the Writer, of a curtailing
and twisting of facts for easier exhibition; since facts do not exist in
this neat form, nor feelings either. Whence the inference that Writers,
who see or show things in this convenient but mendacious manner must be
either pedants or charlatans.

Nothing could be further from Stevenson's practice. Besides, this
passage is extraordinarily full of logical forms; loose but not the less
effective. In the sentences under examination I find a great number and
variety of expressions denoting intellectual processes and stimulating
them: "I suppose"--"or"--"not only"--"but"--"not only"--"but" (second
time)--"Even"--"Now of the"--"other two"--"although"--"It seemed"--"I
own." This means that the Writer (and the Reader of course also)
discriminates, separates, calculates, compares and draws conclusions.
Moreover, the short initial phrase of the second paragraph, "Even
physically there was a pleasant change"--forestalls the summing up
the Reader is going to be made to make, even as the previous paragraph
contains a longer forestalling of the same kind. "In crossing the
Lozre," etc. And, although the whole passage is perfectly clear, it
is remarkably complicated: full of turns and superpositions, however
frankly and carefully pointed out. So that I can easily imagine
that although this degree of logical activity is a pleasure to the
intelligent Reader, an actual enhancement of the adventurous and
fanciful subject-matter, it may represent to the stupid or tired Reader
an exertion which will make him prefer something "more straight to the
point," meaning thereby something vaguely intelligible despite
inattention.

Looking at these five hundred words in the spirit of a graphologist,
one may generalize as follows: first, great balance, what in the
contemporary French pseudo-physiological jargon would be noted as
belonging to a _magnifique quilibre_; second, richness of modalities;
third, steady and lively activity without ups and downs, promising in
moderation and always achieving; fourth, equally keen perception of
outer things and of human qualities; fifth, active imagination always
returning to the starting point (_vide_ Clarisse); the same _coming back
on itself_, the very same completion, as regards feeling and logical
processes; sixth, wonderful, I will not say _self-restraint_, but
natural discipline, co-ordination of functions. No exaggeration, no
watering down; no false starts, no loose ends. A humane, many-sided,
well-compacted, singularly active, willing and unegoistic personality:
a creature in whose company our soul loves to dwell, because we receive
much, and are made to give more and better than usual.


(D) HARDY

_Tess of the d'Urbervilles_, p. 42 (cheap edition). Five hundred words.
Nouns, pronouns, and nominal words, 108; verbs, 62; adjectives and
adverbs, 62.

    "However Tess found at last approximate expression for her feelings
    in the old Benedicite that she had lisped from infancy, and it was
    enough. Such high contentment with such a slight initial performance
    as that of her having started towards a means of independent living
    was a part of the Durbeyfield temperament.

    "Tess, it is true, wished to walk uprightly, while her father did
    nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content with
    immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for
    laborious effort towards such petty social advancement as could
    alone be effected by a family so heavily handicapped as the once
    powerful d'Urbervilles were now. There was, it should be said, the
    energy of her mother's unexpended family, as well as the natural
    energy of Tess's years, rekindled after the experience which had so
    overwhelmed her for the time.

    "Let the truth be told: women do as a rule live through such
    humiliations, and regain their spirits and again look about them
    with an interested eye. While there's life there's hope is a
    conviction not so entirely unknown to the betrayed as some amiable
    theorists would have us believe.

    "Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life,
    descended the Egdon Slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her
    pilgrimage. The marked difference, in the final particular, between
    the rival vales now showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor was best
    discovered from the heights above; to read aright the valley before
    her it was necessary to descend into its midst. When Tess had
    accomplished this feat, she found herself to be standing on a
    green-carpeted level, which stretched to the east and west as far as
    the eye could reach. The river had stolen from the higher tracts and
    brought in particles to the vale all this horizontal land; and now
    exhausted, aged, and attenuated, lay serpentining along through the
    midst of its former spoils. Not sure of her direction, Tess stood
    still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a
    billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to
    her surroundings than that fly.

    "The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had
    been to excite the mind of a solitary heron which, after descending
    to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck erect, looking
    at her. Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowlands a
    prolonged and repeated call. From the furthest east to the furthest
    west, the cries spread as if by contagion, accompanied in some cases
    by the barking of a dog. It was not the expression of the valley's
    consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived, but the ordinary
    announcement of milking-time, half-past four o'clock, when the
    dairymen set about getting in the cows.

    "The red and white herd nearest at hand which had been phlegmatically
    waiting," etc.

This passage forces me to examine into the nature of the words I have
counted in my several analyses. For whereas the other Writers analysed
give from 132 to 159 nouns, Hardy gives 108; while verbs rise to 62,
higher, that is, than Kipling and Hewlett, and adjectives to 62; that is
to say 9 more than Kipling, 8 more than Hewlett, who was highest on my
list. First let me see how I account for those additional adjectives.

At first sight, on re-reading the passage from end to end, I am not
struck by many adjectives and adverbs to omit. It does perhaps seem
unnecessary that the river should be both "exhausted, aged, and
attenuated." But on reconsidering the sentence it is difficult to decide
which of these adjectives is the superfluous one. _Exhausted_ is not
implied in attenuated, nor is either _exhausted_ or _attenuated_ implied
in _aged_, nor _aged_ in the two others. The expression tallies with the
thought; and it is the thought itself which is redundant and vague. We
are being _told all about_ the locality, not what is necessary for the
intelligence of the situation. For instance, in these five hundred words
we are twice given points of the compass--that is to say, information
which has nothing to do with the subject in hand, and which the Reader
neither needs, nor, as a fact, is able to apply. Since points of the
compass can add to the meaning of a passage only if: (1) We already
possess the geography of the region, and require to feel in which
direction on the map the traveller is going; thus it is of consequence
to know that Stevenson drove his donkey, say, south-east or south-west;
it is of consequence if I say, "forests lying north of Paris" or "the
seaboard west of Rome," etc. (2) Points of the compass can be mentioned
to some purpose if they imply a peculiarity of light or warmth or the
time of day; we learn something when we are told that "the sun was now
in the west," or that a room "faces north."

But what do we learn when Hardy tells us that a particular valley, whose
name is imaginary, _stretched to the east and west as far as the eye
could reach_. The only movement in one's mind is a faint question, "Was
the valley so very narrow as not to stretch at all north and south; and,
if it was so narrow, is the word _stretched_ very applicable to its east
and west direction?"

We get a reference to this detail of orientation further on--"from the
furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread"--and, since we
perceive no reason for this dragging in of points of the compass, we
imagine one, and get a vague idea that the sounds rose in the east in
some sort of connection with the sun. At least this is my experience;
and I feel annoyed at finding that that east and west really implies
nothing about the sounds.

I therefore suspect that all this talk of orientation is a mere mark of
irrelevant writing, of saying everything there is to be said about the
subject, as we have seen about the river. It is a soliloquy of Hardy's
about two valleys and their contents, without reference to the story
or the Reader. Listen to him! "The marked difference, in the final
particular, between the rival vales, now showed itself"--"The secret of
Blackmoor was best discovered from the heights around; to read aright
the valley before her it was necessary to descend into its midst."

Now, we can quite imagine a passage in Stevenson comparing two valleys
much in this manner; but then the valleys and his journey, the genius of
the place, so to speak, would be the chief personages; and the points
of comparison would be such as the Reader, who had never been in that
neighbourhood, could visualize in fancy. But here we are not merely
listening to Hardy's recollections poured out without reference to us,
but we are, while doing so, interrupted in our attempt to follow the
adventures and the inner vicissitudes of Tess. All this detail about the
geological formation, "the river had stolen from the higher tracts and
brought in particles to the vale all this horizontal land--" all this
orientation and comparison of lie of land is subject to the sentence:
"Tess Durbeyfield then ... full of zest for life, descended the Egdon
Slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her pilgrimage." And the
sentence of comparison between the two valleys is suddenly succeeded by
"when Tess had accomplished this feat she found herself to be standing
on a green-carpeted level," etc. After which we again leave Tess in
order to remark on the geological history, as noted above.

After disposing of the river in the prehistoric past, we revert to Tess,
who "was not quite sure of her direction." And this lack of certainty is
in Hardy as well as in his heroine.

Notice how he tells us the very simple fact of how Tess stops to
look round: "Tess ... stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant
flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length."
"_Hemmed_ expanse," that implies that the expanse had limits; it is,
however, compared to a billiard-table "of indefinite length." Hardy's
attention has slackened, and really he is talking a little at random. If
he visualized that valley, particularly from above, he would not think
of it, which is bounded by something on his own higher level (_hemmed_,
by which he means _hemmed in_), in connection with a billiard-table
which is bounded by the tiny wall of its cushion. I venture to add
that if, at the instant of writing, he were feeling the variety, the
freshness of a valley, he would not be comparing it to a piece of cloth,
with which it has only two things in common, being flat and being green;
the utterly dissimilar flatness and greenness of a landscape and that of
a billiard-table.

We are surely in presence of slackened interest, when the Writer
casts about for and accepts any illustration, without realizing it
sufficiently to reject it. Such slackening of attention is confirmed
by the poor structure of the sentence, "a fly on a billiard-table of
indefinite length _and_ of no more consequence to the surroundings than
that fly." The _and_ refers the "of no more consequence" in the first
instance to the billiard-table. Moreover, I venture to think that the
whole remark was not worth making: why divert our attention from Tess
and her big, flat valley, surely easy enough to realize, by a vision of
a billiard-table with a fly on it? Can the two images ever grow into one
another? is the first made clearer, richer, by the second? How useless
all this business has been is shown by the next sentence: "The sole
effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite
the mind of a solitary heron, which, after descending to the ground not
far from her path, stood, with neck erect, looking at her." Leave out
all about the billiard-table, and the sentences coalesce perfectly and
give us all we care to know. Such as Hardy has left them they give us a
good deal more; not indeed of items, but of words. "The _sole effect_
of her _presence_," etc. Here are two nouns, both abstract, and an
adjective not of quality but degree. Then "so far"--with the tense "had
been"--giving the notion of far longer time than Tess probably stayed
looking about. Moreover, her presence excited not the solitary heron,
but the _mind_ of the solitary heron. And the heron, we are told,
"descended to the ground _not far_ (why not _near_?) from her path,"
etc. How all the action of the heron's downward flight and sudden
inquisitive stopping is lost in all these circuitous phrases! We
scarcely see the heron at all.

After all these meanderings the next sentence fairly startles us, and
since it tells us of something startling it is right it should startle
us. But it does so merely by contrast with the vagueness of the preceding
sentences; for in itself it is weak and vague. "Suddenly there arose ...
a call" is the only active element in it; "_from all parts_ of the
lowland" is again feeble, for the meaning is simply "from all around,"
and the reference to _parts_, the reiteration of _lowlands_ (as if by
this time we hadn't been told often enough that we were in a valley!) is
mere padding.

The next sentence is largely a repetition of this, with the added and
useless orientation, "from the furthest east to the furthest west--the
cries spread." But Hardy must needs add "as if by contagion." This adds
something, undoubtedly, to the meaning; but the idyllic impression of
the pastoral cries waking each other as they spread does not gain by
suggesting the spread of a malady! Nor is Hardy even now satisfied:
"accompanied _in some cases_ by the barking of a dog." He has given
us an orientation, he has explained that the cries arose in echoing
succession; why bring in "some cases," why say "accompanied by," when
the meaning is simply "and here and there the bark of a dog."

But Hardy has started on further and even less necessary information,
for he tells us: "It was not the expression of the valley's consciousness
that beautiful Tess had arrived"--who in his senses would have thought
that it was? Meanwhile we have got two abstractions and a personification,
in a cumbersome attempt to weld together the disjointed items about
the valley's origin (old exhausted stream), its orientation, flatness,
greenness, billiard-table, etc., with Tess's journey. I can only surmise
that Hardy has become suddenly aware of having left Tess in the lurch
and wants to make up for it. Then he is afraid lest we should take this
poetico-mythological "expressions" of the valley's consciousness too
seriously. It wasn't that in the very least, he hastens to tell us,
it was "but the ordinary announcement of milking-time," and he adds
"half-past four o'clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the
cows."

This page is so constructed, or rather not constructed, that if you skip
one sentence, you are pretty sure to receive the same information in the
next; and if you skip both, you have a chance of hearing all you need
later on. This makes it lazy reading; and it is lazy writing.

Lazy reading is not without attractions, for we are often lazy; and I
can conceive that some of Hardy's popularity, despite certain great
qualities of fantastic imagination, tragic feeling, and a certain almost
pantheistic or mythological spirit--all of them rather caviare to the
general--may be due to this indulgence of the Reader's indolence. But
it is bought at the price of the Reader's indifference.

There are moods when we prefer to read a novel, skipping whole phrases
and passages and moving in slow and somnolent fashion; but in more
wakeful moments our energy, seeking for employment, resents these heaps
of useless words to be thrown aside; and it demands of an author that he
direct it along definite ways, at definite speeds. Our attention, when
we really give it, wants to be made to move briskly, rhythmically, to
march, nay, as Nietzsche puts it, _to dance_.

Now marching and dancing are done in literature, as in all art, by
the awakening of the activities of measuring, comparing and unifying.
Furthermore, all these analyses of mine have persuaded me that the
_active quality_ in literature is not due so much to a richness of
words--of verbs--expressing action, as to the presence of words, and
arrangements of sentences, _forcing the Reader to think_. _To think_;
for literature, let us remember, deals exclusively with thought and
its modes, and constructs its patterns, not of sounds or lines, but of
impressions and inferences. To _think_, not in the sense of thinking
whether a thing is true or false, the subject of a sentence put back,
as it were, from the sphere of words into that of real experience; but
to _think_ in the sense of following, realizing the relations in which,
by the placing of words, this subject is put. The intellectual activity
of the Reader is called forth in realizing the comparative importance of
the different items mentioned, their dependence upon one another. He is
forced to pass from side to side, seeking equivalents and differences,
backwards and forwards, identifying causes and effects, all round, in
front and behind, getting at things at their proper angle of vision:
he is made to construct the meaning, as the sentence is constructed,
in a more or less elaborate logical architecture, or, if you prefer,
counterpoint; and made to do so at a pace, with an accentuation, imposed
by the Writer.

Now this activity of the Reader, when he makes a sufficiently
complete response, is stimulated and kept alive by the swiftness and
certainty demanded of it, and by the constant need for perceiving and
co-ordinating a variety of items. A page of literature, whatever its
subject-matter, gives us the impression of movement in proportion as it
makes _us_ move: not forwards merely, but in every direction; and in
such manner as to return back on the parts and fold them into unity.

All this is mainly a work of logical thinking. To begin with, there is
the general distribution of the subject-matter, the amount of cause and
effect, of similarity and dissimilarity, which the Reader is made to
perceive. In this page of _Tess_, such distribution can scarcely be
said to exist. The five hundred words I have analysed begin with
psychological remarks on the state of mind of Tess, on the hereditary
characteristics of her family, with an _excursus_ on the peculiarities
of the feminine mind. All this, loosely but sufficiently put together,
should constitute the end of a chapter; we ought to be allowed more than
a mere new paragraph before passing from this inner landscape to the
outer one; or else the two ought to be interwoven, as we find it, even
trickily, in Zola and other French Writers, by attempting to show how
the new scenery affected Tess's mood. Hardy has neither broken off and
paused, nor worked the two subjects into one another. He has connected
them by one little word only, the word _then_. "Tess Durbeyfield _then_,
in good heart, and full of zest for life, descended the Egdon Slopes."
This might be sufficient, the _then_ standing vaguely for all the
foregoing, and loosely connecting the past with the present, if only
we continued to talk of Tess; if, for instance, the passage continued,
"Crossing the hill, Tess saw the new valley before her and noted its
difference from the one she had left behind her." But Tess is simply
dropped: not even set about some action which should feel as continued
behind our backs, and which we should find at a further stage, when we
revert to her. Tess is forgotten; and, instead, our attention is called,
without anything denoting deliberate intention, to all those details of
lie of the land, and geological structure. Then suddenly Hardy would
seem to have remembered Tess, and felt that she ought not to have
been neglected. But so perfunctory is his co-ordination, so slack his
realization, that he reverts to her with an expression which is utterly
unsuitable. Having introduced the two words "_before her_" quite
irrelevantly into the sentence, "the secret of Blackmoor was best
discovered ... to read aright the valley _before her_ it was necessary
to descend into its midst," he finds no more appropriate allusion to
Tess's walk down than to call it a _feat_, and describe it as
"accomplished."

I mention this singular inaptness of expression, because I regard it as
a sign of the general slackening of attention, the vagueness showing
itself in the casual distribution of the subject-matter; showing itself,
as we shall see in lack of masterful treatment of the Reader's attention,
in utter deficiency of logical arrangement. These are the co-related
deficiencies due to the same inactivity and confusion of thought.

I will not go over the subsequent passages again; my Reader can verify
at a glance this lack of coherence, of sense of direction, particularly
if he will bear in mind, for comparison, Stevenson's marvellously
constructed account of his descent from one Cvennes valley into
another, and of their respective physical and moral characteristics.
The two passages--Hardy's and Stevenson's--represent, within the limit
of endurable writing, the two extremes of intellectual slackness and
intellectual activity. Having pointed out so much, I will proceed to the
words and sentences which, in this page of Tess, are of the class which
directs, or rather ought to direct, the Reader's attention.

The intellectual movement I have alluded to is not imparted to sentences
by the mere preponderance of verbs as such; but it depends mainly upon
the complexity of verbal concordance; upon the arrangement of different
tenses with reference to one another, by which the Reader, passing
from present to future, from more remote to less remote past, from the
historic past to subjunctives and gerunds, is forced at once to realize
very definitely the exact import of each grammatical form and to connect
them swiftly with one another, thus establishing a kind of _intellectual
space_ in which the logical concatenation is held, and a series of
_planes of action_, more central (_i.e._ present) or more back (_i.e._
past), or more forward (_i.e._ future), and in various positions of
mutual dependence, along which the Reader's attention shifts the nouns
and adjectives obedient to the Writer's behest and thus grasps the exact
meaning. Here again I would refer to the page of Stevenson's for an
example of richness and clearness of verbal concordance, and also to the
coming page of Hewlett.

Bearing this contrast in mind, let us examine the quoted five hundred
words from _Tess_. There is a distinct preponderance of the direct
narrative tense. In the first sentence it is complemented with its
co-relative and with the auxiliary, "Tess _found_ in the old Benedicite
... that she _had_ lisped." Here are, so to speak, two _planes_ of past.
After this come over a hundred words with nothing save the narrative
tense, "was--wished--did--resembled--effected--were"--with only two, and
only slightly accentuated correspondence of other tenses (I leave out
the present of "it is true," which does not belong to the story), namely
"resembled him in being and having," these participles introducing a
sense of presentness into that narrative past; and "having no mind for
... effort towards such ... _as could ... be effected_ by a family so
heavily handicapped as ... now _were_."

This sentence, without much accentuation, is constructed in a clear
and logical interchange of reference to present and to future, while
remaining in the past. And it is undoubtedly the most braced and active
sentence of the whole quotation.

Let us examine the terms in the succeeding one. Here there is variety:
"_was_ (narrative past); _it should be said_ (present with future
involved); _rekindled_--had _overwhelmed_ (remote past); _let_ the
_truth be told_ (imperative); women _do ... live_; regain; _look about_;
_while there's life there's hope_; _is a_ condition; _would have us
believe_." There is even considerable variety; but quite insufficient
co-ordination.

The present tense particularly and the imperative "_let the truth be
told, women do live_," etc., is a mere chatty interruption. So far
from feeling that we must attend, we have the sense that the author is
pleasantly divagating into generalities, whither we may, but need not,
follow him.

Instantly after this we get the historic tense again, with its
concording tense--"Tess _descended_"--"The difference now _showed_
itself"--"The secret was best _discovered_"--"to _read_ ... it
was necessary _to descend_"--"had _accomplished_"--"found herself
_standing_"--"_stretched_"--"could _reach_." But this concordance,
so far from being rigorously logical and impelling our thoughts in a
definite direction, leaves the impression of utter perfunctoriness.
For one does not expect to hear these unchangeable topographical
peculiarities treated in narrative style; and there is an aimless
emphasis in "the secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from the
heights around; to read aright the valley _before her_ it was necessary
to descend into its midst"; and that member, "_before her_," slipped in
for conscience' sake (Tess having been left in the lurch), gives a wrong
personal meaning to the perfectly general statement about _descending
into its midst_; and contrasts with the extreme generality of the
previous statements.

As already remarked, all this dropping and taking up of Tess like
a puppet, sometimes plopping her into the landscape and sometimes
withdrawing her, entirely confuses the _planes_ on which we think out
this information. The remote past "_the river had stolen_"--coming as it
does immediately after "Tess _found herself standing_"--appears to be
concordant with it, and suggests that the river had done its _stealing_,
not as Hardy means, in prehistoric ages, but _while Tess was standing
there_, or only just before. Substitute for the river "shepherd," and
we see the whole thing happening alongside, a little behind, so to say,
Tess's standing.

From word 350 to 500, approximately, the historic tense continues: "Tess
stood"--with very simply concorded, remoter pasts--"_had_ been to excite
... a heron ... after descending stood--then arose ... the cries spread
... accompanied.... It was not"--few verbs, and so connected that scarcely
any variety of what I must call "planes in time" are established.

It is, so to speak, all on the flat; and the attention is not called
upon to understand when or why.

There is thus very little of the first item which determines a sense
of activity in literature. There is still less of the other, namely,
correlation in time and space of the words and arrangements implying
logical processes and forcing the Reader to measure, compare (therefore
to recollect), and see cause and effect. In the very first sentence of
all, which we have had occasion to find the best in other ways also,
there is a comparative wealth of the words implying different modes
of intellectual movement: "_However--at least--it is true--while her
father--but it should be said--let the truth be told._" These words
diminish significantly as we pass to the second half of our quotation,
where the slackness of writing becomes conspicuous; a change so
great that I venture to think that with the words "Tess Durbeyfield
then"--there begins another day's work, betraying the listlessness of
the resumption of a daily task, and that difficulty of warming to the
subject which often obliges more careful Writers to write afresh the
sentences with which they have, so to speak, merely got their pen under
weigh.

But to the lack of complexity of tense and logical form (meaning as
these do activity of realization, memory, foresight, comparison, and
causality on the Reader's part) we must add, if we are to explain the
weakness and vagueness of this page, also the number of unnecessary
qualifications.

A word which qualifies will undoubtedly arrest the attention and set up
a movement of intellectual weighing on the part of the Reader. But not
if he recognize that it is due to mere non-committal and habit of adding
a _rather_ or an _at least_ when not needed. _Then_ it comes to express
mere hesitation, lack of energy of the Writer; and the Reader passes it
over as he would any other form of mental stammering.

Now in these five hundred words a large proportion of the statements are
qualified where no qualifying is needed. We have "at least approximate
expression"--"such a _slight initial performance_"--"_immediate_ and
_small_ achievements"--"_laborious_ effort towards _such_ petty social
advancement _as could alone_ be effected"--"women do _as a rule_"--"not
_so entirely_ unknown _as_"--"the _marked_ difference in the _final_
particular"--"_exhausted, aged_, and _attenuated_, lay _serpentining_"
--"not _quite_ sure"--"the _sole_ effect."

Such superfluous qualifications account for the preponderance of
adjectives and adverbs; and to them is due much of that impression of
slovenliness and lack of interest to which I have already so often
adverted.

But these faults may also lend themselves to that dominant impression of
lazy, dreamy, sensual life among lush vegetation and puzzled rustics as
slow as their kine (when not stirred by sudden gusts or wellings-up of
animal love, rage, or devotion), which Hardy's genius has put before us.
Trees, grass, and haystacks do not move about; sheep, cows, and bulls do
not think; the pale moon nights, the long, sultry noons, are made for
dreams. And Stevenson, Meredith, or Henry James would scarcely be what
is wanted for such subject-matter.

The woolly outlines, even the uncertain drawing, merely add to the
impression of primeval passiveness and blind, unreasoning emotion; of
inscrutable doom and blind, unfeeling Fate which belong to his whole
outlook on life. And the very faults of Hardy are probably an expression
of his solitary and matchless grandeur of attitude. He belongs to a
universe transcending such trifles as Writers and Readers and their
little logical ways.


(E) HENRY JAMES

_The Ambassadors_, p. 127. 500 words. Nouns and pronouns, 137; verbs,
71; adjectives and adverbs, 48.

    "Our friend had by this time so got into the vision that he almost
    gasped 'After all she has done for him.' Miss Gostrey gave him a
    look which broke the next moment into a wonderful smile: 'He is
    not so good as you think.' They remained with him, these words,
    promising him, in their character of warning, considerable help; but
    the support he tried to draw from them found itself, on each renewal
    of contact with Chad, defeated by something else. What could it
    be, this disconcerting force, he asked himself, but the sense,
    continually renewed, that Chad was--quite in fact insisted on
    being--as good as he thought? It seemed somehow as if he couldn't
    _but_ be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad. There was a
    succession of days, at all events, when contact with him--and in its
    immediate effect as if it could produce no other--elbowed out of
    Strether's consciousness everything but itself. Little Bilham once
    more pervaded the scene, but little Bilham became, even in a higher
    degree than he had originally been, one of the numerous forms of
    the inclusive relation, a consequence promoted, to our friend's
    sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make
    acquaintance. Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the
    eddy; it absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down;
    and there were days when Strether seemed to bump against him as
    a sinking swimmer might brush against a submarine object. The
    fathomless medium held them--Chad's manner was the fathomless
    medium; and our friend felt as if they passed each other, in their
    deep immersion, with the round, impersonal eye of silent fish. It
    was practically produced between them that Waymarsh was giving him
    then his chance; and the shade of discomfort that Strether drew from
    the allowance, resembled not a little the embarrassment he had
    known, at school, as a boy, when members of his family had been
    present at exhibitions. He could perform before strangers, but
    relations were fatal; and it was now as if comparatively Waymarsh
    was a relative. He seemed to hear him say 'strike up then,' and to
    enjoy a foretaste of conscientious domestic criticism. He had struck
    up, so far as he actually could; Chad knew by this time in profusion
    what he wanted; and what vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim
    expect of him, when he had really emptied his mind? It went somehow
    to and fro that what poor Waymarsh meant was 'I told you so--that
    you'd lose your immortal soul!' But it was also fairly explicit that
    Strether had his own challenge, and that, since they must go to the
    bottom of things, he wasted no more virtue in watching Chad than
    Chad wasted in watching him. His dip for duty's sake, where was it
    worse than Waymarsh's own? For he needn't have stopped resisting and
    refusing; he needn't have parleyed, at that rate, with the foe."

I begin with the first sentence virtually not dialogue: "They remained
with him, these words, promising him, in their character of warning,
considerable help; but the support he tried to draw from them found
itself, on each renewal of contact with Chad, defeated by something
else." Here I find _they_--_these_--_their_--_them_--_him_--_him_--_he_
--besides an _itself_. Surely an unusual dose of pronouns, that is to
say, of words decidedly _personal_. And here I ask myself why I have
written this word _personal_? Am I under the suggestion of the fact
of Henry James being a "novelist of personality"? Perhaps. But also it
seems to me, that pronouns, used like this, have something more personal
than nouns: they here become a sort of personification. There is, at all
events, an extraordinary circling round these pronouns. I feel that, had
they been _nouns_, they would have undergone some transformation, not
remained this selfsame something we circle about.

Circle about and among; for we penetrate between them (one almost
forgets what _they_ really are, feeling _them_ merely as something
with which one is playing some game--pawns? draughts? or rather
adversaries?), finding them now as a nominative, now a possessive, now
a dative. It is noteworthy that this shifting of the _case_ of these
pronouns gives the sentence an air of movement, more than would be given
by the presence of verbs. In the two next sentences I have again the
impression of an unusual abundance of pronouns, perhaps because of the
two _its_: "What could _it_ be, he asked himself," etc., and "_It_
seemed somehow," etc. Evidently the use of pronouns implies a demand on
the Reader's attention: he must remember what the pronoun stands for,
or rather (for no one will consent to such repeated effort where only
amusement is at stake) the Reader will have to be, spontaneously, at
full cock of attention, a person accustomed to bear things in mind, to
carry on a meaning from sentence to sentence, to think in abbreviations;
in other words he will have to be an intellectual, as distinguished
from an impulsive or _imageful_, person. In this sentence we get the
equivalent as subject-matter of this singular intellectuality and
judicialism of form: "What could it be,... but the _sense_ that Chad
was ... as good _as he thought_." What I mean is that the thing we are
watching with Strether, almost hunting, indeed, is not a human being nor
an animal, neither is it a locality we are trying to discover; not even
a concrete peculiarity we want to run to ground; it is the most elusive
of psychological abstractions: a _force_, a _belief_, in other words an
intellectual residuum of experience, which, being defined, involves a
comparison. The question is not: Did Chad do this or that? but: Did Chad
come up to a conception which Strether had formed? Remark also the
logical form (_by elimination_) of "what could it be, but," etc.

In the next sentence we again have a comparison of degrees; and an
affirmation of logical necessity--"it seemed _somehow_ as if he couldn't
but be as good from the moment he wasn't as bad." I have underlined the
_somehow_. For it denotes a scientific habit, accepting a fact with
the reservation that at some future time an obscure part of it will be
understood; it is a sign of careful classing of known and unknown.

In the next sentence we have an acknowledged parenthesis, a forestating
of a logical objection or question: "There was a succession of days, at
all events, when contact with him--and in its immediate effect, as if
it could produce no other--elbowed out of Strether's consciousness
everything but itself." Indeed the parenthesis is a double one, for
inside the fact of being told that it was the immediate effect of
the contact we are also assured (lest we should stray off to other
possibilities) that "it could produce no other." Nay, in the beginning
of the sentence there is another clause: "at all events."

Let me stop to say that I quite understand that such qualifying
sentences may, at the first glance, seem padding, like the "he said"--"says
I"--of uneducated people; mere attempts to gain time to deal with
disorderly thought. But I believe that here, on the contrary, they
betoken, and provoke, a subdivision of meaning, an act of intellectual
care and prudence. Similarly, take note of the expression "_succession
of days_": a less analysing and classifying Writer would have been
satisfied with "there were days." In the next sentence we have: "Little
Bilham pervaded the scene"; Little Bilham being thereby volatilized into
a thin essence; the elision meaning "the fact or existence or idea of
Little Bilham pervaded," etc. With, however, a proviso, "_but_ Little
Bilham became," etc. Is this proviso going to restore to Little Bilham
any of his forfeited concreteness? You little know Henry James if you
think that! For the proviso proceeds to make Little Bilham into "one of
the numerous forms of the inclusive relation"; nay, he grows into a
complex abstraction "in a higher degree than he had originally been."
What nouns we have here! _Form, relation, degree!_ And for adjectives
and adverbs, _numerous, higher_ (meaning more intense) and _originally_.
And if we go on to the full stop we add, "a consequence promoted, to our
friends' sense, by two or three incidents with which we have yet to make
acquaintance." In all this sentence only two words, "Little Bilham,"
have a concrete meaning, give a visual image; and even Strether becomes
"our friend," that is to say, gets considered not as anything tangible
or visible, but as a relationship. Meanwhile we have added to the nouns
of the first half-sentence, "_consequence, friend, sense, incidents_,
and _acquaintance_," but to the adjectives, nothing! And to the verbs
_promoted_ and _make_, which merely represent alterations of intensity
and valuation in these abstract nouns. I almost believe that my analysis
is less abstract than this sentence out of a _bona fide_ novel! But now
comes a change. The next sentence is not only concrete but picturesque:
"Waymarsh himself, for the occasion, was drawn into the eddy, it
absolutely, though but temporarily, swallowed him down; and there were
days when Strether seemed to bump against him as a sinking swimmer might
brush against a submarine object." Here we have an _eddy_; the eddy
_swallows_ Waymarsh; and he and Strether are _sinking swimmers_,
bumping against _submarine objects_. But even this is qualified with
abstractions; it is "for the occasion" and "absolutely, though but
temporarily," and it is governed, if not grammatically, at least in
intention, by the verb _seem_. For in the next sentence, "The fathomless
medium held them," etc., we learn that "Chad's manner was the fathomless
medium"--sufficiently abstract in all conscience!

There is once more a curious concreteness in the continued metaphor:
"they passed each other, in their deep immersion, with the round,
impersonal eye of silent fish." Of course it only _felt_ like this to
Strether. But it feels like this to the Reader; and this thoroughly
carried-out picture is probably what enables the Reader to live on
through more abstraction. If I may talk in an Irish manner, we seem to
take a provision of breath in that concrete metaphorical world (even
though a submarine one) sufficient for a continued walk in the rarefied
atmosphere of the real story. This deep-sea metaphor is a master-stroke.
It has awakened a sense of the concrete; and he caps it with a comparison,
that of the exhibition at school, "and the shade of discomfort ...
resembled not a little the embarrassment he had known, at school, when
members of his family had been present at exhibitions. He could perform
before strangers, but relations were fatal," etc., a concrete image
actually rising to the dramatic point where Waymarsh, transformed into
the schoolboy's relative, seems to cry "Strike up!" The tendency to
concrete thought continues: "He has struck up, so far as he actually
could; Chad knew by this time in profusion what he wanted; and what
vulgar violence did his fellow pilgrim expect of him when he had really
emptied his mind?" Not only a repetition of the _striking up_ which
is now metaphorically done by Strether; but we get "profusion," an
expression singularly referable to concrete things; then "vulgar
violence," then "fellow pilgrims," then "emptied his mind."

In the next sentences we get "bottom of things," "wasting virtue"--"dip"
(in the sense of dipping in water), and finally so definite an image
as "parleying with the foe." But all this concrete metaphor does not
prevent our having, in these hundred words or so, had "so far as he
actually could"--"wanted"--"expect"--"really"--"somehow"--"fairly
explicit"--"at that rate." And it is quite proper that the most conspicuous
sentence of these five hundred words should be, "I told you that you'd
lose your immortal soul!" For the whole business is one of souls and
nothing but souls.

What the people _do_ has no importance save as indicating what
motives and what spiritual manners they have, and how these affect the
consciousness of their neighbours. And, in this quotation, a considerable
amount of extremely vivid feeling of concrete things becomes merely so
much metaphor, illustrating purely subjective relations.

"Alles _Tangible_," one might say, paraphrasing _Faust_, "ist nur ein
Gleichniss."

Let us now ask ourselves how it is that all this is not vague, _swimmy_,
and merely wearisome? How is it that we have not to clutch on to the
meaning as on to that of a metaphysical treatise?

I think because of the splendid variety, co-ordination, and activity of
the verbal tenses.

In the first sentence, "They remained with him, these words, promising
him, in their character of warning, considerable help"; there is the
passage from one real nominative (_these words_) to another (_their
character_), through the "promising him," followed immediately by
a change of active into passive, "but the support he tried to draw
from them found itself ... defeated by," etc. Then the sudden
interrogation--"What could it be," etc.--and the concatenation of
parenthetically placed verbs, pressing on each other, "but the sense,
constantly renewed, that Chad _was_--quite in fact insisted on
being----" etc. Here the parenthetical holding back merely hurls
the meaning along with accumulated force. The immediately following
sentences, "It seemed somehow as if he couldn't but be," etc., "There
was a succession of days," etc., "Little Bilham, once more," etc., seem
to me perfect models of clearness and cogency. The sense is abstract,
far-fetched; but how the fine ordering of the verbs forces us to go
right through, with no gaping or wondering, no shirking of any part
of the meaning! It is useless to review the whole five hundred words,
because the remark I have to make would always be the same. With what
definiteness this man sees his way through the vagueness of personal
motives and opinions, and with what directness and vigour he forces our
thought along with him! This is activity, movement of the finest sort,
although confined to purely psychological items. And it is in virtue of
this strong, varied, co-ordinated activity forced on to our mind, that
we fail to feel the otherwise degrading effect of what is, after all,
mere gossip about an illicit _liaison_.

These are storms in teacups; but under the microscope of this wonderful
Writer, what gales, currents, eddies, whirlpools, Scylla's seadogs
ready to tear, and Charybdis yawning! We may wind up by repeating that
we, like Strether, "waste no virtue in watching Chad."


(F) MAURICE HEWLETT

_Richard Yea and Nay_, p. 8. Five hundred words. Nouns and pronouns,
132; verbs, exclusive of auxiliaries, 56; adjectives and adverbs, 54.

    "In Paris Richard repaired to the tower of his kinsman, the Count
    of Angoulesme, but his brother to the Abbey of St. Germain. The
    Poictevin herald bore word to King Philip Augustus on Richard's
    part; Prince John as I suppose bore his own word whither he had most
    need for it to go. It is believed that he contrived to see Madame
    Alois in private; and if that great purple cape that held him in
    talk for nearly an hour by a windy corner of the Pr-aux-Clercs did
    not cover the back of Montferrat, then gossip is a liar. Richard,
    for his part, took no account of John and his shifts; a wave of
    disgust for the creeping youth had filled the stronger man, and,
    having got him into Paris, there seemed nothing better to do with
    him than to let him alone. But that sensitive gorge of Richard's was
    one of his worst enemies; if he did not mean to hold the snake in
    the stick he had better not have cleft the stick. As for John and
    his writhing, I am only half concerned with them; but let me tell
    you this. Whatever he did, or did not, sprang, not from hatred of
    this or that man, but from fear or from love of his own belly.
    Every Prince of the house of Anjou loved inordinately some member of
    himself, some a noble member nobly, and others basely a base member.
    If John loved his belly, Richard loved his royal head: but enough.
    To be done with all this, Richard was summoned to the French King
    hot-foot, within a day or two of his coming; went immediately with
    his Chaplain Anselm and other one or two, and was immediately
    received. He had, in fact, obeyed in such haste that he found two
    in     the audience chamber instead of one. With Philip of France was
    Conrad of Montferrat, a large, full, ruminating Italian, full of
    bluster and thick blood. The French King was a youth just the age of
    Jehane, of the thin, sharp, black-and-white mould into which had run
    the dregs of Capet. He was smooth faced like a girl, and had no need
    to shave; his lips were very thin, set crooked in his face. So far
    as he was boy he loved and admired Richard; so far as he was Capet
    he distrusted him with all the rest of the world. Richard knelt to
    his suzerain and was by him caught up and kissed; Philip made him
    sit at his side on the throne. This put Montferrat sadly out of
    countenance, for he considered himself, as perhaps he was, the
    superior of any man uncrowned. It seems that some news had drifted
    in on the west wind. 'Richard, oh Richard,' the King began, half
    whimsical, half vexed, 'what have you been doing in Touraine?' 'Fair
    Sir,' answered Richard," etc....

One has, at the outset of this quotation, the impression of being
presented with a very straight narrative and little else. Taken
superficially one might skip certain words, and read it thus: "In Paris
Richard repaired to the tower of his kinsman, the Count of Angoulesme
... his brother to the Abbey of St. Germain. The Poictevin herald bore
word to King Philip Augustus on Richard's part; Prince John ... bore his
own word whither he most needed it to go." The words I have omitted are
only five, and not important ones; and it is only on continuing the page
as it really stands that one feels these words _have been there_, and
that they have acted, what we call "unconsciously," in such a way as
to convey a gesture, an intonation, wholly different from that of my
altered version. The _but_ turns the mere consecutive account of where
the King and his brother respectively lodged into the beginning of a
comparison of their respective proceedings.

After the straight statement about the herald's carrying Richard's news
comes a statement, at first sight not much more complex, to the effect
that "John bore his own word whither he had most need for it." This
might mean simply that the author is not concerned with John, if the
Reader had not been invited by that continuous symmetry (Richard does
this, John that, Richard's message on the right, John's on the left) to
a constant comparison, accentuated by that _but_; we understand that
if Hewlett does not specify to whom John sent word of his coming,
the "whither he had most need for it," is not a passing over John's
proceedings as unimportant, but a pointing at them as suspicious. It
does not mean "I know that Richard sent the herald and to whom; it
doesn't matter what John did." It means "Richard acted openly and
officially, with the perfunctoriness, perhaps, of official proceedings;
John in secret, and in secret because he was up to something." This
suspicion is thrown on to John with redoubled strength by slipping in
the "I suppose." It is Don Basilio's "Ah del paggio quel ch'ho detto era
solo un mio sospetto." It is stronger than a direct statement, by the
impact of all the author's untold reasons; we feel in the presence of a
man with facts up his sleeve and who has thought it all out; hence we
are unable to disregard even innocent-looking statements of his. By this
time we are quite prepared for the "it is believed that he contrived to
see Madame Alois in private"--the belief, treated apparently as a mere
_on dit_, converging apparently with the suspicions of the author. It
is not only Hewlett who suspected John, but the public at large. After
this comes a statement which does not surprise us, that John had a
more or less marked meeting with Montferrat; a statement put in form of
supposition--"and if that great purple cape that held him in talk ...
did not cover the back of Montferrat"--which by passing it, so to speak,
through our own and the Writer's judgment, makes it infinitely more
cogent: it is turned into a logical necessity, not a mere observed fact
capable of misinterpretation. And it is closed by the author openly
taking sides, calling additional witnesses, "then gossip is a liar." In
short, this, which has looked like a plain narrative, is in reality a
lawyer's summing-up, a lawyer's putting things in his own light, an
accusation. John is condemned in our opinion, and we are quite prepared
to find that Richard had long judged and condemned him; moreover, that
our future dealings with him will be as with such a condemned person.
In the sentence following: "Richard, for his part, took no account of
John and his shifts; a wave of disgust," etc.,--we leave the apparently
objective narrative, the "for his part" making us look at things from
Richard's point of view. And now let me leave for a moment the minute
analysis of this page to make an observation which adds to its interest.
Reading Hewlett's more recent novel, the _Queen's Quair_, I felt more
and more, as I expressed it to myself, that Hewlett had somehow applied
to the Past, and to a story of violent tragedy, the methods invented by
Henry James in his later books for the treatment of the teacup storms
taking place in well-bred and peaceful modern souls.

This impression, which I had not then leisure to analyse, was due, so
far as I could guess, to the manner in which the items were thrown down
before the Reader in apparent confusion, until, with his help, they
slowly sorted themselves into certainties far more compact and cogent,
far more difficult to shirk, than those conveyed by any clear and
straightforward narrative. The Reader, to paraphrase the other James
(William, the psychologist), was bombarded with impressions out of
which he had to make something intelligible. Make it, but how? Can mere
pelting with random facts force upon the Reader an overwhelming sense
of coherence? Surely not. I have not the _Queen's Quair_ by me; but the
explanation of the point is furnished, I think, by _Richard Yea and
Nay_. I had remembered this book as a strange mixture of the heroic and
the extremely intimate; the nature of the subject making it very unlike
my recollection of the _Queen's Quair_. But now, on looking at this page,
I see that instead of a narrative we are really having a discussion of
motives, neither more nor less than in Henry James; and a discussion of
motives (also as in Henry James) from the point of view of one person at
a time. Now applying this fact to the question, "Why should bombarding
with random impressions as in the _Queen's Quair_ and the _Ambassadors_
result in leaving the Reader, after a period of utter confusion, with
convictions which are irresistibly cogent, especially the conviction
_that things had to be like that_," I have come to the conclusion that
this element of cogency must be due to the perpetual enlisting of the
Reader's logical sense. It is all those sentences of comparison: "A, _on
the one hand_, B, _on the other_, Richard, etc. etc., _but_ John," etc.
etc., which set the Reader comparing, measuring, weighing. And it is
the "I suppose"--"it is believed," all those references to gossip, which
set the Reader supposing, believing, and sifting gossip. Otherwise
stated, the depth of the Reader's conviction comes from the logical
activity forced upon him. For logic has the imperative in belief, the
_must_; whence it comes that we see _what must be_ (_i.e._ what we have
ourselves calculated and foreseen) far more intimately and insistently
than _what merely is_. Hewlett and Henry James both catch us in the
meshes of the Writer's and the various personages' views, which become
our own by our effort to follow them; whereas Writers like Meredith and
Kipling pass their magic-lantern figures across the blank screen of our
fancy. For, paradoxical though it may sound, _to think a thing out is
to live it out_; we stretch our real attention parallel to those dead
facts, we clasp them with our living thoughts, and thereby make them
ours, since our _thought_ of a situation is a part of ourself; while
the mere outer situation itself is--well, no situation at all, a mere
bodiless phantom.

Hence (odd as it appears) there is a fundamental resemblance between Henry
James and Hewlett; the resemblance revealed (as by some graphological
detail) by those words "but"--"then"--"if"--"on his part"--those forms
"I suppose"--"it is believed"--which signify that the situation is an
inner, not an outer, one. The interest in both cases is in the attitude
of the various persons towards one another, not in the "actions" which
reveal or suggest that attitude; both novelists are subjective and
logical and judicial. Henry James is the judge studying the case quite
impartially; Hewlett, the advocate preparing a very partial special
pleading. Both say to the Reader not "Look what happened"--but "Think
what _must have_ happened"--and the _what has happened_ (or rather,
what we infer must have happened) has value, not in itself, as a source
of further outer happenings, but rather as producing certain inner
conditions of the _dramatis person_. The incident at the river-side inn
(in the _Ambassadors_) is not made interesting in itself, but in the
altered conception of Chad and Madame de Vionnet, which it brings about
in Strether's mind, just as the murder of Rizzio (in the _Queen's
Quair_) is not made interesting in itself, but in the added fear and
hatred in the soul of Queen Mary. The drama for both novelists is an
_inner_ one. _Inner_, undeniably; but _inside_ what? The answer is easy,
so far as Henry James is concerned: _in_ refers to the _mind_, the
_soul_ of the _dramatis person_, in which (and evidently not in the
streets, the fields or even in a drawing-room or garden) the real
action takes place. An intellectual and moral revolution is happening
in Strether's nature: what we watch are his impressions, suspicions,
surmises, certainties, the fluctuation and alternation of his standards,
and the emotional ups and downs and upsets accompanying them.... What
is he going to think of the relations between Chad and the French lady?
Will he condemn, condone, perhaps even come to secretly rejoice at them?
That is the drama of the _Ambassadors_, and its scene is Strether's
_mind_. I repeat this over-obvious statement, the better to bring out
the difference between Henry James and Hewlett by previous insistence on
their points of likeness. For, as we have already noticed, with Hewlett
also the drama is mainly an _inner_ drama. Only the _inner_ refers to
something quite different. My impressions on this subject are so vague,
although so pervading (gathered from other of his works also, besides
_Richard_ and the _Queen's Quair_), that it is fairer not to set them
down at once in black and white, but convey them by examples to my Reader.
Well then! In these five hundred words, selected quite at random, we
have five references to bodily peculiarities. John is a "creeping
youth"--Richard "the stronger man"--John is "writhing"--Montferrat is
"large, pale, ruminating, full of bluster and thick blood." The King of
France "thin, sharp, of the black-and-white mould into which the dregs
of Capet had run." Remark that the adjectives, so sparse with Hewlett,
follow on each other thick when it is a question of what I must call
_physiological_ peculiarities. The first of these passages is to tell
us of a "wave of disgust for the _creeping_ youth"--and of Richard's
"sensitive gorge." And the core of the matter is in the remark: "Every
prince of the house of Anjou loved inordinately some member of himself,
some a noble member nobly, and others basely a base member. If John
loved his belly, Richard loved his royal head." This summing-up is the
more striking, that however natural it may be to think of the _creeping,
writhing_ John as "loving his belly," the _contents_ of the head, a
man's thoughts, standards, and volitions, are so bodiless that we rarely
think of them as being his _head_; so that this forcing of spiritual
things into bodily terms becomes suggestive of a very strong bias on the
author's part to feel and think with reference to bodily temperament.
Now this is what differentiates Hewlett's subjectivism from that of
Henry James. Hewlett's personages exist towards one another, not as
human beings whose temperamental difference culminates, transmuted by
intellectual activity, in an intelligible idea, but rather as creatures
in whom the element of thought and purpose is but the fitful result of
their physiological constitution, and who exist towards each other with
the obscure attractions which animals may feel, and the constant, deep,
mysterious, blind, dumb hostilities of their animal nature. I know, of
course, that underlying all our feelings and thought and action is the
deep-seated mystery of temperament, are the sympathies of flesh and
blood, the incompatibilities of nerves and viscera, the purely bodily
selection of prey, of mate, of enemy. But with the ordinary human being
all this appears in consciousness as something different, transfigured
for the benefit of reason into reasonable motives and judgments; and
we are not conscious of the bodily temperament making us love and hate,
even as the man in health is unconscious of the inner functions through
which he lives, and of the muscles, thanks to which he moves; the
clarified, precise data of intellectual consciousness driving the bulky,
vague knowledge of our fleshly constitution into the background.

This is not the case with Hewlett's personages. Of them we must repeat
that "they loved inordinately some member of themselves----"; or rather,
let me alter the formula, loved, not "some member"--but "_with_ some
member of themselves; loved _with_ a noble member nobly, or _with_
a base member basely." Certain it is that we are always made to feel
the bodily phenomenon at the bottom of all their emotions. Thus, in
the passage which I have paraphrased, we are told of Richard's "worst
enemy," his _wave of disgust_, his _sensitive gorge_; likewise that John
was a thing not merely _loving his belly_, but using it to move with
"creeping, writhing"--a belly mainly. Moreover, that Montferrat was not
merely blustering, but "full of thick blood," and "ruminating"; that the
King of France was a half degenerate, almost sexless creature, a child
when he should already have been a man, and with a child's calf-love
for this _strong_ Richard of the ready disgusts. Nay, even in the
mode of address of Philip to Coeur de Lion there is an odd bodily
tremulousness given by the queer placing of the interjection "Richard,
oh Richard"--which is the beginning of a sob, as distinguished from "O
Richard, Richard" which, in English, is the usual form for conveying
reproach. Temperaments made conscious to themselves and to one another;
that is the formula of Hewlett's personages: stirring of blood and
viscera, shrinkings of cuticle and muscle directly conveyed to the
creature's mind and to the Reader's; the garment, nay, rather the outer
skin, of thought, motive, habit, stripped away; and the creatures
moving, through an odd penumbra, in the quivering, half-flayed nakedness
of their physiological nature. When it is that of Richard, of the
magnificent, solemn and magnanimous feline, we feel the uncannily quiet
animal movements as so much dignity and charm. And this, with the
heroic surroundings, the constant open air and open sea of _Richard
Yea and Nay_, and its tragic tale of adventure and devotion, leaves an
impression of exotic grandeur, a relief after our reasoning and talking
modern world. But the work presented by the Writer represents the
equation of his tendencies of treatment and of the subject he chooses to
treat. And while in _Richard_, Hewlett gets the subject which corrects,
checks, and purifies his tendencies, he gets the subject which intensifies
them in the _Queen's Quair_. With Coeur de Lion we are safe on the
adventurous mountain paths and stormy seas in the rare atmosphere of the
epic; we watch the great lonely beings who, in their simplicity and
struggle, seem so much finer than our poor selves: the lion, the hunted
antelope, the eagle, made noble by centuries of heraldic symbol. But
with Queen Mary and her rout of wenches and pages and cutthroats, we
come to obscure creatures whose inner workings move to disgust more
even than to tragic horror; and Hewlett's handling, magnificently
efficacious, turns those tortuous and stuffy palaces of Valois times
into the burrowing places of mere human vermin. It is just because we
are made to realize so well the longings and the fears and rages of
his murderers and his wantons, that we cannot do with them; and that,
instead of pathos or terror, we feel only the faintness of nausea. Feel
it, at all events, _in remembering_ the book.

For here we strike upon a curious point in the psychology of Readers,
if I may judge other Readers by myself: it sometimes happens that my
remembrance of a book is accompanied by feelings different from those
which I recollect having had at the moment of reading that same book.
This does not always happen. In the case of the _Ambassadors_ (as in
that of Stevenson's _Cvennes_) the feelings accompanying the remembrance
tally exactly, become fused, with the feelings I remember having had
while reading. But in the case of other Writers, notably Hewlett, there
is a discrepancy. The reason must be that while there are books whose
subject-matter and style are homogeneous, so that whatever you remember
of them must always affect you in the same manner, there are other
books which are heterogeneous, a dualism of HOW the Writer makes his
Reader think and of WHAT he makes him think about. I take it that
when the actual wording of this latter kind of book is forgotten, the
subject-matter may be remembered, and instead of being neutralized,
clarified, purified by the style, that subject-matter left to itself,
may remain in our mind as insipid or villainous dregs.

And now, having given some examples of the physiological information
which constitutes the subject of so much of Hewlett's discourse, let me
return to my quotation and show even more clearly the peculiarity of his
style I find so oddly at variance with that subject-matter of his. This
will further bring out his unexpected points of resemblance with Henry
James, the novelist who lets us least into the secrets of that _mortal
coil_ which even his heroes and heroines had not entirely shuffled.
For, like the style of Henry James, Hewlett is elaborately, intricably,
inexorably intellectual, nay logical. The Reader is drilled to infer
rather than to accept. He is ordered to put two and two together and
draw conclusions. He is coerced by _whiles_ and _thens_ into going only
a certain distance along one line, in order to turn back and judge the
distance compared to the previous one. He is compelled to pause and look
round by _buts_ and to start afresh by _ands_; to turn aside by _as
fors_; to crane into the beyond by _ifs_ and _whatevers_. He is forced
to pull items together for himself simply by their being left unconnected.
Put briefly, this Reader of Hewlett's is made to exert himself, to
live actively and attentively. He is made to be highly intellectual
and highly judicious while reading about deep-seated and inarticulate
mysteries of temperament and unbridled, unreasoning impulses. He is made
to live with his brain, indeed perhaps more literally than psychology as
yet ventures to suggest, with his _motor centres_, while dealing with
the _creeping belly_ of John and the _thick blood_ of Montferrat. Now
such intellectual activity is comparatively rare; it is braced, balanced,
and noble; and the Writer who calls it forth, _because he possesses it
himself_, is in so far, and whatever his subject, whatever the substances
which stain and befoul his thoughts, _noble also_.

I think I have already alluded to a belief which seems to prevail among
literary critics, meaning thereby, such of us as generalize and codify
our own quite uncriticized personal likings and dislikings--the belief
that _nobility_, indeed, _virility_ of style is a question of abundance
of verbs and paucity of adjectives. I suppose I am a literary critic
myself; and at the beginning of these psychological exercises I
certainly started with that belief. This examination of one single
passage of Hewlett will, I trust, have shown that things are less
simple; and that such qualities as nobility and virility are really
due to the variety and co-ordination of the verbal tenses, and to the
cogency of the logical parts of speech; which means to the degree of
activity elicited from the Reader, and the economy and efficacy thereof.
Take, for instance, the beginning of the sentences which I have been
analysing; you will find that the initial word betokens an almost
constant change in the direction of the thought, but a change of
direction which is congruous, in other words, an unusual amount of
varied but co-ordinated intellectual movement. Let us look into it: "But
that sensitive gorge of Richard's was one of his worst enemies," etc.
_But_ firmly deflects the attention, forces us to attend to something
quite different, forces us to face round to another standpoint. _That_
employed instead of _the_ before "sensitive gorge" makes us look back on
the foregoing, and carry along one of its items with the _sense of the
item having come out of the direction we have left_--"was one of his
worst enemies"--a general statement, reminding us by a movement towards
something already known that Richard was surrounded by enemies. And now
we come to a very particular statement: "_If he did not mean to_ hold
the snake in the stick, _he had better not have_ cleft the stick." We
get, moreover, a future combined with a _more than perfect past_, a
looking forwards and a looking backwards, but not merely straight
backwards as in the case of _the perfect pass_, a looking across one
past into a remoter, deeper down past. We have, in this concordance of
tenses, two _planes_ in time as well as two directions in subject. "As
for John and his writhings, I am only half concerned," etc. Here is a
sudden, but perfectly intelligible and connected leap from the merely
objective position "Richard and John were or had been"--to the subjective
position of the Writer; a change therefore from a narrative of past and
gone things to a pleading in the present. "But let me tell you this,"
etc.--and now even _we_ are dragged in; we feel that the narrative is
becoming a play within the play, or a picture inside a picture (like the
Bible Histories of the Sixtine Ceiling, framed in the architecture of
Sybils, Prophets, and Genii). "Whatever he did or did not"--a general
statement in symmetrical shape and with the extra cogency of the negative
form (which often acts like a spring)--"sprang _not_ from hatred _but_"
etc. What perpetual shifting and adjusting of our attention, backwards,
forwards, laterally, etc., in this sentence!

Now look at the words which do the marshalling of our thought: "_But_,
_if_, _not_; _not_, _this_, _that_, _but_, _from_, _or_, _from_,
_own_"--they are all words telling us nothing at all except how _we are
to think and feel in this matter_.

Again we get a general statement: "Every prince of the house of Anjou
loved inordinately some member of himself," with a symmetrical division
of attention, "some a noble member nobly, others basely a base
member----"; the noble--nobly, basely--base, forming a couple to the
right and a couple to the left, and accentuating the symmetrical
arrangement. Then the sudden pulling up short: "But enough." After which
a rapid turning round to the general statement: "to be done with all
this"--a present which is a future; and a plunge back into what promised
to be the smooth, straight current of the past: "Richard was summoned to
the French King," etc.

The next sentence, however, "he had, in fact, obeyed in such haste that
he found two," etc., is a return to the explanatory mode: we are to
attend to a _why_, not merely to a _how_. "With Philip was Conrad"--this
plain statement of fact is tacked on to the preceding argument, just
by reason of its isolation: in the frame of mind induced by the "in
fact"--of the previous sentence, the Reader, so to speak, stoops and
picks up the isolated statement about Conrad, recognizing in it, thus
detached and dropped, the thing he has been made to expect by that
rather mysterious "he found two in the audience-chamber instead of one."
The fact is not insisted on; it gains the more significance by the swift
and secure transition to plainer statement of things: "The French King
was a youth ... of the thin, sharp, black-and-white mould into which had
run the dregs of Capet." Hewlett, it may be remarked, puts unusual trust
in the nimbleness of his Reader's wits. The first sentence gives us the
genealogy and the moment, tells us what to expect. In the light of the
"dregs of Capet" information, we see, without need of explanation, that
the beardlessness, the crookedness of Philip's face, are signs of racial
degeneracy. The next sentence divides Philip in two "so far as he was boy,
etc.--so far as he was Capet," and by this symmetrical placing of his
two tendencies, we are prepared for his ambiguous treatment of Richard;
ambiguous, but now intelligible to us. After all this preparation for
the future we again quietly return to the Past.

"Richard knelt," etc. Note the feeling given by the sudden change from
active to passive. We might thus, keeping the contents, rewrite the
sentence but altering the movement--"Richard knelt to his suzerain, and
Philip caught and kissed him"--instead of "Richard knelt to his suzerain
and _was by him caught up_ and kissed," as Hewlett has it. Hewlett's
version keeps Richard as the important person, the nominative of the
passive as well as of the active. We have to look sharp to understand
what has happened; but we find Richard in the centre of the stage as
before. Then, suddenly, Philip is the nominative, making Richard sit
on the throne. This is necessary to change the movement and take our
attention in the direction of Montferrat, who was left standing. This
sentence is splendidly inclusive of much past and future. "For he
considered himself (as perhaps he was) the superior of any man uncrowned."
So much tacked on to one small FOR, thanks to the steadying power of
that parenthesis ("as perhaps he was"), which gives it a firm basis of
pause. And then our interest is stirred by the sudden introduction of
the narrator's opinion: "it seems that some news had drifted in on
the west wind." Rewrite that sentence, "It happened that some news,"
etc.--and note the way in which the point gets lost by this alteration.


POSTSCRIPT

And now, having got to the end of my allotted five hundred words of
_Richard Yea and Nay_, and also of the batch of contemporary Writers
whom I analysed when in pursuit of "Statistical Tests," let me sum up
the results of these examinations. Or rather let me enlarge upon the
fact that there may or may not exist a concordance or a discrepancy
between what a Writer is thinking about and the manner in which he
compels his Reader to follow his thoughts. This seems a mere platitude
when we are in the presence of verse, where you cannot help being aware
that the rhythm and rhymes and other audible elements are mysteriously
compelling you to keep step with them; a step which, you are also keenly
aware, is suitable or not to the argument in hand, as, for instance,
a hop, skip and jump is unsuitable to a funeral. Everyone knows that,
besides the subject, there is, in all verse, something which is called
the _form_. What seems less universally recognized is there being a form
also in prose (and in as much of any poetry as can be rendered into
prose). Since this latter kind of form, such as constitutes the _style_
of prose, does not appeal through the ear to the moving and _miming_
arms and legs, but in more modest and subtle, yet quite as imperative a
manner, through our hidden organs of silent speech to ... well! the rest
of that invisible totality which, in a merely psychological sense, we
may as well call our _Soul_. FORM is not merely something we perceive;
it is something which determines our mode of perception and reaction.
And, naturally, nowhere so imperatively and categorically as in what is
meant by Art, implying as that word does a pause in real life's pursuing
and being pursued; a moment of safe contemplation (no "hungry generations
treading us down," or we them), a leisurely space of time wherein we
surrender our liberated activities to the biddings of the artist. This
explains why literary _form_ or _style_ means a lot in a novel or essay,
and little or nothing in a manual we are cramming for an exam.

As to the nature of this thing, _prose style_, and wherein its various
potentialities and imperatives reside, that is precisely what we have
been trying to run to ground. Incidentally to so doing we have come
upon the fact that the individual qualities of a Writer's style may
constitute either a unity or a dualism with the other qualities which
that Writer has accepted as inherent to his subject, or, owing to
individual affinities, has found especially attractive in that subject.
In the case of the _Ambassadors_ (and probably much of Henry James's
later work) the unity between subject and style was, we found, complete:
we got a soul's drama exhibited in the most intellectual and imaginative
(_e.g._ the metaphorical) terms. In _Richard Yea and Nay_ no such unity
could be discovered. And in that other great novel of Hewlett's, which
we glanced at without any analysis, I will take it on myself to state
that the dualism between subject and wording was absolute, the two
elements of the _Queen's Quair_ falling completely asunder in _this_
Reader's recollection of the book.

Now what I should like to point out before closing this particular set
of studies--for the point is much to the credit of this great art of
prose writing--is that, although such a dualism, or if you prefer,
contradiction, may diminish our literary happiness in one way, it may
safeguard it in another; or save our own self-respect and our esteem
for an author. Such a discrepancy may, indeed, mar our profit from that
Writer's virtues; but when the virtues are rare and commanding, like
those of Hewlett's style, they will (if we have the right literary
sensitiveness) oblige us to forgive, and what is more, even forget,
that drawback. Not, mind you, merely tolerate it slackly, blinking
feebly and, as that Elizabethan put it, "shutting our apprehension up,"
ourselves remaining by so much the less keen and clean in consequence.
Not tolerate--and every Reader is thus indulgent to some favourite
Writer (if not Hewlett why, maybe, Dickens!)--but really forgive and
forget. Since here comes in the sovereign miracle of all great art,
that, in the radiance of what we love it blots out what we do not like;
the overwhelming nobility of high sthetic enjoyment making us, by what
Karl Groos has called the mind's "monarchical constitution," incapable
of taking offence at less noble details; just as the full-fledged
musical listener does not realize or even believe in the morbid or
intoxicating effects of Wagner's music on hearers incapable of following
its marvellous musical complexities.

Having thus touched upon the unity or dualism constituted by a Writer's
style, his _handling of words_ with his subject-matter, let us call to
mind once more that there is another kind of concordance possible in
these matters, and another kind of discrepancy, namely, between him
who writes and him who reads; without which concordance, or happy
coincidence, between the native constitution and the traditions of
Writer and Reader, no amount of genius can save the situation. This is
the undeniable truth at the bottom of that so apparently disheartening
remark, _De Gustibus_. You cannot (or had better not!) _dispute_ of
tastes; but you can amply _account_ for them. And accounting for them,
you need not be disheartened, since the same diversity of temperament
and training obtains among Writers as among Readers. And since writing,
like all other art, varies in character according to the time, the
place and the individual, there will always be a good Writer for every
good Reader. Whether there will always be found a good Reader for every
good Writer is another matter, leading us into questions of printing,
publishing, reviewing, and, generally, of Gray's "Churchyard" and the
"Mute inglorious Milton" buried therein.

That there will always be forthcoming a bad Writer to suit a bad Reader,
is an article of my belief in the Harmonies of Creation. There are also
less _a priori_ grounds for asserting it to be the case.




VII

"IMAGINATION PENETRATIVE"

APROPOS OF MR. LUBBOCK'S _CRAFT OF FICTION_


I

As happens when one lives alone in the country, I have been spending my
winter evenings, for all company, with a novel. Sometimes a very good
novel; oftener indifferent poor, though always accepted with gratitude;
names shall be neither here nor there. Latterly there has been the
accompaniment also of random meditations on Mr. Percy Lubbock's charming
little _Craft of Fiction_. Now, as may happen when thoughts are coming
and going round about a subject, a sentence, indeed only a couple of
words, have been knocking about in my head: _Imagination Penetrative_.
They are Ruskin's, remembered across years and years, but with no
recollection of the precise sense himself connected with this very noble
phrase. So that around it my own meaning has freely shaped itself in
various groups of impressions and analyses.

It happens that the person who, of any I ever came across, had most
intuition (shall we say "Imagination Penetrative"?) on the subject of
pictures, used to point out that second best painters, while giving
their figures any amount of detail and of _projection forwards_ (knees,
elbows, bosoms, paunches, indiscreet rotundities, hitting you in the
eye), are quite unable (just because they _are_ mediocre people) to
make the beholder realize that their figures, if real, would have a
back view, that there would be space, space full of other things if
you explored into it, _behind them_. Now it seems to me that, quite
similarly, the second-rate novelist, indeed the mediocre anybody you
choose, has little or no sense of, no interest in, the unseen; that he
is aware, or, at any rate, able to make _us_ aware, only of the
contingent; that he is without instinct for the _beyond_, for what
I call in my mind _otherness_, and is therefore also without the
understanding of change which comes of there being _otherness_ and
_beyond_. Such a novelist, or such an anybody, lacks "Imagination
Penetrative"; which comes to saying that he has no surplus thought,
vision or feeling. And what I should like to see investigated--though I
can scarcely hope Mr. Lubbock will undertake the investigation, and I
shall presently say why I don't think he will--Lubbock or no Lubbock,
what I should like some ardent young critic to inquire into is a notion
I have long entertained _a priori_, and shall set forth as a duly modest
query--namely, whether the Novelists with what I have called _no back,
no beyond_, to their _dramatis person_, are not also the Novelists
dealing preferably in _situations_, while the Novelists I should call
the _three-dimensional ones_, those whose personages possess sides,
qualities, besides the ones we are told about, are the Novelists dealing
preferably in _character_. "Three-dimensional" I have called them,
because like every human activity related to time and space, Imagination
(whether Penetrative or merely superficial) can be expressed in terms of
dimensions, of movement of thought or feeling beyond the present aspect
or present interest.

Perhaps I should explain what I mean by _novels of situation_ or _novels
of character_? But, no! I should be merely paraphrasing those words whose
meaning is just that and no other.

I don't know what questions young writers may be discussing nowadays;
but when I was young, such discussions raged, usually without much
practical result or theoretic conclusion, around the respective method
and status of _novels of situation_ as against _novels of character_;
turning over which sort one would aspire or condescend to write,
although one usually grew old without writing any novel at all. I
imagine these discussions must have been imported from Paris, revolving
as they did round Stendhal, Flaubert and Maupassant. And indeed I find
them renewed (or shall I say _renovated_?) by Mr. Lubbock under the
supreme auspices of _Mme Bovary_. I can appreciate, because I can
remember, the superior attractiveness of the "Novel of Situation."
You felt cleverer, or felt you would feel cleverer if you also were a
novelist, in plotting out "if A happens to B, then C will happen to D."
Such processes shared the intellectual prestige of arithmetic or chess,
neither of which I ever mastered; they had the elegance of the first
five problems of Euclid, at which my geometry stopped short. _Situation_
was eminently neat, at all events when conceived by a novelist.
_Character_, on the contrary, had a tendency to loose ends and hopeless
knots; it was _not_ neat, and unless one condescended to horrid
Dickensian caricature, one couldn't feel masterly about it, surely.
Because _Character_ seemed to have a way of its own. Hence in stories
where _Character_ was the chief interest, there seemed no obvious
imperative why anything should happen as it did, or indeed happen at
all; the action, as well as the actors, was not quite definite and
coherent. Whereas, in the novel of _Situation_ there was definiteness,
coherence and a quite irresistible causal imperative; things _couldn't_
have happened any differently from how they did.

Thus I felt and argued in the distant ardent Eighties. Nor did it strike
me till the Eighties and such discussions had long been left behind,
that the reason why, in novels of _Situation_, everything thus behaved
according to definition and programme was that, as a matter of fact,
none of it had ever happened at all; the exquisite fitness of such
representations of human existence being referable to the same cause
which makes clothes sit so accurately, with never a crease or a bagging,
on the dressmaker's doll.

And now let me return, after this biographical illustration, to
"Imagination Penetrative," and to those qualities of fiction for which
I have developed an exclusive and doubtless unfair preference, those
which I find in the other kind of novel, that of _Character_. The main
difference between the two schools is that one of them intuitively,
_i.e._ from a feeling left by repeated but unsifted experience, makes
allowance for the potential and changing, for what the novelist is not
certain or clear about, the unknown of which he knows only that it
exists. While the other School of novelist is interested only in such
qualities and probabilities as are needed for his little--or perhaps his
magnificent!--scheme. This _Constructive_ novelist, perhaps like all
other _Constructive_ persons, thinks of the universe only as brick and
mortar, or lath and plaster, for his august temple or pleasing gazebo.
And just as the practical man throws away everything he has no use
for, and marks his passage through time and space with rubbish-heaps
alongside monuments, so also, methinks, this constructive novelist
is occasionally overtaken by the Nemesis of the thus discarded and
disdained elements of human reality. Speaking without metaphor, I am
beginning to suspect that the novelist of _Situations_ frequently
invents a situation which is impossible and even absurd, like that
of the _Altar of the Dead_, whose introductory page is perhaps Henry
James's very loveliest. Even worse may happen, and, alas! did happen to
that same noble and exquisite Master. I am alluding to his _Turn of the
Screw_. Only the inveterate habit of working out situations as if they
were chess-puzzles can account for the anomaly of a man so tenderly and
reverently decorous having come by the abomination of such a story. The
very title of it seems to hint at a sense of having put himself into the
grip of a logical mechanism every turn of whose relentless winch forced
him deeper and deeper into hideous innuendo. For once that situation hit
upon, it could be made plausible only by suggestions he would never have
entertained had he shrunk from the first contact of those obscene ghosts
of servants and of that (one hopes) neurotic governess. That he did not
shrink came of the lack of _Imagination Penetrative_, such as reveals
the further potentialities of whatever the artist looks at, and thereby
stirring his irresistible human preferences and aversions, preserves him
from the temptations which beset mere constructive ingenuity in the
novelist.

Some of its lesser dangers also beset the critic, as witness Mr. Percy
Lubbock. Does he not arraign Tolstoi's _War and Peace_ as shapeless; and
fall foul of all details and episodes _which do not conduce to a plan_,
just those which express the Writer's, and awaken the Reader's, intuition
of what I can only call _otherness_, of that third dimension in which
alone change can take place and life expand.


II

With this, perhaps only personal, preference in the way of novels, there
hangs together my conception of how works of fiction can act for good
or evil in the abstract; and even the notion I form of how a particular
work of fiction may be acting on a particular Reader. This latter notion
is at times curiously vivid, and itself constitutes a little romance
occupying my own mind for, maybe, a few minutes. Let me give an instance
of this, no doubt, quite fallacious fantastication, since it did in this
case lead to reflections which are not fanciful, but reasonable, and, I
think, not unimportant. Thus: it happens that a young man has told me
he is promised a place as tutor in a foreign family; and then, the
conversation passing to quite different subjects, and turning on famous
novels, he comes to mention Stendhal's _Rouge et Noir_, of which, of
course, the hero happens to be a tutor. Instantly the thought, unspoken,
arises in my mind: if he gets that place, will the story of Julien Sorel
not suggest, nay, does it not suggest already, that the mother of his
pupils may become for him a Mme de Rnal? I seem to see the thought
forming in his mind, while it is really forming, perhaps solely, in
_mine_. I continue thinking; and pass put of the realm of fantasticating.
May there not have been in the mind of Julien Sorel, or rather of
Stendhal when he created him, some lurking reminiscence of a Rousseau's
_Julie_, or some less famous eighteenth century fair frail one,
succumbing to a tutor...?

I have, of course, never entered a family in such a capacity, nor,
for the same reason, come into the presence of a Mme de Rnal except
by hearsay. Indeed, perhaps because we writers turn our potential
day-dreams (as Dr. Varendonck suggests in his recent book) at once into
so much copy--I have little or no experience of such romantic imaginings
as I just now attributed to my would-be young tutor. But I know that as
a child I spent weeks in the hope of lighting upon a Pictish Camp like
the good little boy in ... could it have been _Sandford and Merton_,
or some of Miss Martineau's stories? And even more certain is it that
several early years of mine were spent in the company less of my
flesh-and-blood playmates than in that of the _Swiss Family Robinson_
(a fifth son thereof myself!) and of Jules Verne's scientific argonauts.
Is it not in this manner, I mean thanks to such (perhaps gratuitously
supposed) romance between that real young tutor and Stendhal's fictitious
lady, or as my own _bona fide_ childish dreams of Pictish Camps and
Desert Islands--is it not thus that the novelist helps us through lives
and along walks (my own at the heels of my elders) which might otherwise
be but a weary, dreary drag?...

Of course it is also in this manner that fiction may warp us, as indeed
it warped Flaubert's _Mme Bovary_; as Stendhal's Julien was warped,
poisoned by a fiction in historical guise but acting as fiction does,
the _Mmorial de Ste Hlne_, which you remember he hid inside his
seminary mattress. But moralists have never ceased falling foul of the
dangers of every kind of reading, philosophers arraigning novelists, and
novelists accusing philosophers. Thus did not our eminent contemporary
M. Bourget delight _bien-pensant_ France with his pious invention of the
agnosticism of Herbert Spencer and Taine leading an innocent DISCIPLE
(_vide_ the novel so called) into seduction of young girls and eventual
murder? When, in the meanwhile, each and all of his own novels must have
incited callow French Readers to expensive adultery in elaborately
inventoried _entresols_. All of which dangers, and some more obvious
ones, constitute nevertheless, to my thinking at least, a very trifling
drawback to set against the immense benefit of bringing new currents
into thoughts and feelings silted up behind the many breakwaters of
civilized existence. Nay, the horrors and vulgarities of up-to-date
cinemas, no less than the monsters of old-fashioned fair-booths,
probably constitute what is nowadays called a _biological advantage_ to
hidebound toilers and moilers; anyhow, whether or not biologically
valuable to the race, a mitigation of the lot of poor individual souls.
And, after all, what is a _race_ except an aggregate, a series, of
individual souls, mostly rather to be pitied? So I should hesitate about
discountenancing even the most sensational and subversive suggestions in
novels and plays. They are probably the less of two evils (modern
psychiatry tells us some of the greater!) even when they are not real
blessings in questionable disguise. I am also unable to make up my mind
_a priori_, indeed only further progress of abnormal psychology will
enable us to do so, whether such leniency should be extended or not to
"immoral" and even to "brutalizing" readings. One would surely have to
know more, and with scientific certainty, about the previous mentality
of those who enjoy them before deciding whether such (to our noble
selves!) unsavoury enjoyment should be condemned as an incitement to
evil courses or be condoned as some kind of Aristotelian _Catharsis_,
bringing to a crisis the latent infections of the soul and purging them
away by application of that classic remedy called terror and pity.

But while thus unable to judge in similar cases and inclined to
suspect that "horrors" may be a necessary condiment for savages and
no-better-than-savages, I am in no manner of doubt concerning the
mischief they do to those who are not, and need not be, savages at
all. Because unless we are blinded by our own respectability, we can
sometimes watch in our own persons the nightmares, or at least the moral
dyspepsia and infectious eruptions due to the spreading, to what is
technically called the _proliferation_, of certain ideas in our mind.
Such ideas may be decorously summed up under the French rubric, "Du
Sang, de la Volupt et de la Mort," which is the rather self-slandering
title of a volume of Barrs's stories, and might more justifiably be the
sub-title of so much of d'Annunzio's even finest work. We are informed
by psychiatry of the unclean and sterile merging of the various items
of that title; Volupt, which ought to stand for "the procreant bed and
cradle," being made to preside over the torture chamber and the charnel,
to the mind's monstrous pollution. Nor is this danger limited to _bona
fide_ fiction. The avidity, scarcely explicable by mere patriotic and
humanitarian righteousness, which met the Bryce and _Matin_ Reports
of enemy atrocities, and the output of lewd and sanguinary myths which
marked the War Years in every belligerent country, should warn us
civilized persons that "terror and pity" are not always purifying
passions. We high-minded readers of newspapers and of history read as a
newspaper, need not grudge our meaner brethren the life-enhancing and
possibly even life-sustaining thrills of such literature as _we_ avert
our eyes from.

Indeed the need for thrills, for stimulation of our torpid attention and
thick-skinned sympathy, and for narcotic production of blissful dreams,
is at the bottom of all such art as Nietzsche aptly called _Dionysiac_.
And it is only little by little, as Man emerges from brutish darkness
to some far-between moments and places of safe and lucid life, that
art sheds its Dionysiac emblems and instruments, becoming, instead,
_Apolline_. Now to bring about that change, while itself that change's
effect and symbol, is largely the work of what I have called, adopting
Ruskin's beautiful expression, "Imagination Penetrative," since such
imagination is indeed as the light of the Sun-god, of the divine musician
and healer. Penetrating through our surroundings it lets us see more
and more of the universe whereof we are a trifling little portion. And
dispelling, for a moment, the dark fumes of our animal instincts and our
visceral life, it allows us to witness even the drama of our own life as
if it were the drama of others.




VIII

CAN WRITING BE TAUGHT?


A quarter of a century and more ago, as I had ended a lecture, one of
the first in this volume, upon Literary Construction, there came up
from among my audience a young and intelligent lady, who, after the
compliments suitable to the occasion, asked me to tell her _where she
could learn the value of words_.

Some poet, I forget which, would have answered, as he did on a similar
occasion, that such knowledge must be looked for in her heart. My own
answer was quite in that style, with the addition (only not spoken out
loud) of calling her, as the poet had called his interviewer, a fool.
And then I went on through the years--and the fool was myself--imagining
that had settled the question.

The fact is that the increasing, and by this time inveterate, habit
of looking at such matters from the psychological rather than the
biographical point of view, led to my forgetting how I myself learned to
write, nay to my almost taking for granted that the individual writer
teaches himself in the course of his practice; or at the utmost finds
whatever can be taught embodied in the practice of other writers. I
recognize having thought so much about the relation between Writers and
Readers as to overlook the relations between teachers and pupils, and
tacitly almost to deny their importance. Now that is absurd. So, having
collected these studies of the literary art, I am trying to apply my
mind to this side of the subject.

_A priori_, there is no reason why, instead of being left to find it all
out for himself, a writer should not be taught (though, alas! there are
often concrete reasons why he should never learn) that sundry literary
proceedings, whereunto the natural creature is evidently propense, are
far better avoided.

All education, all progress, we are told, is carried on by such
forestalling of individual experience and consequent setting free of
human effort for something new. Neither is it sufficient to be set
imitating good models, since no model is good all through, just as no
saint is entirely saintly, and it is just as well to be told, "Do this
but don't do that." Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it is the case
for "Don't do that." Not because our hearts and our taste are originally
bad, but because (at least so I incline to think), whether in dealing
with _bona fide_ children or with the metaphorical undying Child called
_Man_, inculcation of virtue and wisdom is unimportant by the side of
dissuasion from evil courses; nay, I suspect that our indulgence in such
conduct as jeopardizes self, neighbours and whole nations, is often
proportionate to the admonitions we receive to become heroes, sages and
saints. As regards Literature, at all events, what beginners require are
not treatises on the Sublime and Beautiful, but rules of thumb against
such practices as they would naturally fall into with self-complacency.
Let me illustrate this by an example taken, as our fathers would have
said, from a Sister-Art, since it is sometimes easier to be brief and
incisive when talking about what one knows less about. Of all the Rules
of Thorough Bass I vainly attempted to master in my salad (or rather
mustard-and-cress) days, one only has remained indelible in my memory,
namely: Never, under any circumstances whatsoever, to commit Consecutive
Fifths in the Bass. What these are I prefer not to be asked nowadays;
suffice it that they are forbidden. Well! I would put my hand in the
fire, or, [like the famous contrapunctist, Fenaroli, when correcting a
pupil's _figured basses_] put my thumb into the ink-stand, to testify
that a vast amount of the genius of Bach, Handel, Haydn and Mozart (I
am more cautious about Beethoven quartets after Opus 122) was saved by
their having been taught as little boys (like the octogenarian _maestro_
from whom I had that inky anecdote), taught maybe by that terrific
dripping black thumb drawn across the consecutive fifths of their
exercises--anyway _taught_ during infancy, to avoid that and all similar
sequences, instead of learning from individual experiences of the wry
faces of excruciated hearers.

Such is my intimate conviction with regard to music, about which I know
but little; and it applies _mutatis mutandis_ to Literature, about which
I know quite a lot. However, having a suspicion that Consecutive Fifths
may become, or already are, the sole _basis_ as well as _bass_ of modern
harmonies, I do not hold by the eternal validity of any particular set
of rules about them or about anything whatever, but only the validity
of rules of one sort or another as requisite for art's essential play
of habit, acquiescence, expectancy and surprise. Which opinion, when
applied to the art of letters, admonishes me to take example by the
immortal M. Bergeret, and murmur, "Serait-ce un nouveau style?" while
admitting that I am too far advanced in years to have any use for such
new-fangled delights and sublimities. Is not all life a to-and-fro
between stability and change, a metabolism (as biologists would put it)
between law-respecting and law-discarding?

All of which comes to saying that I withdraw any remarks which might
imply that you cannot be taught by other persons how to write, and
especially how _not to write_. Only adding the proviso: that you must
be a writer-born before you can learn these things to any purpose.

So, taking for granted (as all who write must do) that I too was a "born
writer," let me stretch out across the dark solid years since anybody
taught me anything, and lay hold of a few reminiscences of how and by
whom I was made a writer after having been duly born one.

First, however, there are sundry other memories to be dealt with, but
under the heading "how one teaches oneself." For in such matters, indeed
perhaps in all matters, what one is taught--taught in the sense of
deliberate tuition--can take effect only if applied to an incessantly
shifting continuity of one's own trying and repeating; indeed, as I have
already remarked, such teaching by others is mainly a "don't do that,"
and consequent selection and adaptation of one's own process of doing,
trying and repeating. I suppose one may fairly generalize from one's
own experience that every "born writer" is possessed by the demon of
scribbling, sometimes at an age when that demon has to commandeer the
hand and spelling of some elder, bored but proud. Since it is evident
that a "gift for writing" means a tendency to think in words rather than
in visual or any other imagery, as indeed what one deems one's best
writing comes spontaneously in verbal form, without there seeming to
have been a meaning pre-existent to those words; without, in short,
an act of translating one's thoughts. Moreover, all the effort and
grinding and gnashing of teeth comes in working up to that spontaneously
generated sample, in translating (and this time it _is_ translation and
no doubt about it) whatever has presented itself in non-verbal form,
say as sequences of inner pictures or wordless impulses and moods, into
arrangements of words such as may pass muster alongside the--shall we
say?--_verbally thought_ passages; neither more nor less than when a
translator from a foreign tongue works at making his translation read as
if it were an original. But to return to the self-teaching processes:
Persons possessed of, or rather by, this queer facility for thinking
straight off in words (and _words_ imply a complicated perspective of
their own), and possessing also the capacity for translating their
_other_ thought so that it reads as if it originally were verbal,
persons, in short, with the "gift of writing," presumably have it to the
extent of an unruly instinct forcing them to scribble. And also, though
here I am generalizing from my own case--pushing them to exercise this
gift with the pertinacity and deliberation which others put into learning
tennis, golf, chess or any other game. Since, to the "born writer,"
there is no game comes up to writing, none so full of the enthralling
ups and downs of hope, triumph and desperation, nor with such ineffable
joys of moments of facility, _Mozartian_, triumphant, heart-melting,
heavenly.... The gift of writing thus comes to be developed by
spontaneous, but also by deliberate exercise. I suppose that with
many this takes the shape of abortive verses and stories, or, less
agonizingly, letters and diaries. With others, as happened with myself,
a habit may arise of forcing into words all that passes through one's
head and under one's eye, or what is taken for all such, since I daresay
the literary selective faculty already hoodwinks us into disregarding
what does not fall into verbal forms or verbal perspective. Which latter
remark leads to a very important but neglected truth, namely, that the
literary gift implies a rapid, unhesitating, often quite unconscious
choice of what items to present, indeed of what attitude to take up,
towards the matter in hand; in what succession to exhibit its various
aspects, let alone which of those potential aspects to shut out
altogether, creating and obeying a scale of "values" purely literary and
often oddly at variance with the values of real life. For what else is
the art called _rhetoric_?

These natural processes are, of course, fostered by certain educational
habits, especially making young people compose on given themes; a
habit, by the way, which accounts for the superior verbal and logical
nimbleness of one's French friends, but also for their intolerable
ratiocination (_ergoter_ they call it!) and amplification, let alone
their speech being petrified into _clichs_; or rather their very
judgments and sensibilities cramped by reach-me-down formulas made,
like their soldiers' clothes, in three sizes only....

Having let myself go to this unjust tirade--due to the retrospective
terror of having in my teens hesitated between becoming a French or
an English writer--let me atone for this unmannerly outburst (and
incidentally let me push on in our discussion) by expressing the deep
conviction that reach-me-down phrases, or preferably the readiest-made,
threadbarest, second-hand ones, are the natural legitimate, irreplaceable,
spiritual raiment in which a writer can learn to explore the universe
and his own soul; one might almost add, in which any human creature
learns to think and feel humanly at all. Modern man, moreover, is a
reading as well as a speaking creature. And no one is more primarily a
reading animal ("animal benigno," as Dante's Francesca so justly calls
him who pays attention to her story) than is the creature who writes.
And the chief result of reading, the first and foremost use of the
Writer, is that we are helped to recognize whatever exists, whether in
the macrocosm or the microcosm, by being shown it drawn, painted and
perspectived with words, made easy and pleasant for our comprehension,
just as we are taught by the Painter to notice shapes and effects in
nature by having them isolated and focused and emphasized on his canvas.
Perhaps it is only by having learned other folks' valuation that we can
get a scale of what is valuable ourselves; at least once we have got
beyond the snatchings, lungings and cowerings of mere appetites and
fears; once we proceed erect, with our eyes on the skyline as befits
Homo Sapiens, and especially the _Reader and Writer_ variety thereof.

And now, thanks to having 'indulged unjust prejudice against the over
rhetorical and pseudo-logical training of our Latin cousins, I have come
to a very important stage in this disquisition, namely, the statement
that all art lives and develops by our first tackling whatever we want
to say or show by the use of the formul of our predecessors. Which,
when it comes to literature, means that ninety-nine hundredths of all
teaching resides in the works of other writers; and that it is while
reading that we learn most and best how to write.

The very revolts of new schools prove this to be the case. There would
be none of the topsy-turveying of all the old habits of seeing, feeling
and saying, unless these innovators, romanticists or futurists of
whatever epoch, had not been bored to death or impotently exasperated by
doing what their elders had done, or trying to do it or being admonished
to do it. So true it is that, as Hegelians teach, nothing is closer akin
to an assertion than its negation, nothing more conducive to the use of
furs or fans than feeling cold or hot; or, as Freud puts it, that our
virtues are but inverted vices and (this is surely a case for adding?)
_vice versa_....

There are doubtless temperaments which are naturally docile; also epochs
ruled rather (as Tarde pointed out) by tradition than fashion. So it is
possible that my Mid-Victorian self may have been of slower growth and
more stolid acquiescence than my juniors and betters. Nevertheless
critical investigation of the works of authors taken at random would,
I think, confirm my own experience: that it is the rarest thing in the
world for a writer to be, so to speak, himself from the very outset.
Among my own contemporaries, especially in the one I know best, I can
recognize long preliminary stages of being _not oneself_; of being;
_being_ not merely _trying_ to be, an adulterated Ruskin, Pater, Michelet,
Henry James, or a highly watered-down mixture of these and others, with
only a late, rather sudden, curdling and emergence of something one
recognizes (even if there is no one else to recognize!) _as oneself_.
Whether that _oneself_ is better or worse is neither here nor there.
What I am driving at is only the fact that writers learn most from what
they read, because the mind is not a Pallas Athena bursting full grown
and in full dress from even the most Olympian brain, but takes its
substance and shape mainly from what it feeds on. Or, if you prefer a
biological simile such as fashion requires, that our mind observes a law
of heredity unlike that of our bodies, whether those be obedient to
Lamarck or Weissmann or Dr. Semon or Mr. Bateson.

I spoke of _ninety-nine hundredths_. The hundredth part of what has
taught us to write in the way _we do_ write and not otherwise, is
precisely what is merely meant by _teaching_, similar, for instance, to
the prohibition of _Consecutive fifths in the Bass_. Such teaching as
this doubtless makes a difference, since even the hundredth ingredient
of a mixture conduces to its total character. It is influential, as
every negation must be, by producing a different kind of assertion, as
is shown by the well-known harmonic effects (whatever they may have been
which I do not know) of avoiding those consecutive fifths instead of
building up one's bass out of nothing else. At all events I can vouch
for an endeavour to avoid certain literary courses which I was told
were wrong; even though perhaps, because no temptation thereto had
arisen in my so distant infancy, I may not have avoided split infinitives
and "slangy expressions" as rigorously as latter-day reviewers have
admonished me. What is surer still, and a great deal more important in
my own eyes, is that an inborn desire to make quite sure what others and
even myself happened to be talking about was fostered to the utmost by
the lessons I received. And whether that hundredth fraction, meaning what
_was taught_, be of much importance or not as against the ninety-nine
parts of imitative self-teaching, this hundredth is very dear to remember.
For it means the Past and those who are past, including one's dead and
gone self, and so many dead and gone places, backgrounds it would be
impossible to recognize.

I was taught most of that negative part of writing which, after all, is
merely the application to literature of common sense and good manners,
by my Mother. She was, almost in proportion as many of her views and
ways would have been called "advanced," decidedly old-fashioned, as
belonging to a West Indian family and brought up in a remote district
of Wales. Thus she clung, even in the seventies, to certain eighteenth
century words and pronunciations, and to heresies which I later
identified as Voltairian, or derived from Rousseau and Tom Paine; and
her politics were those of Charles James Fox. She had never heard of
Browning, who was her exact contemporary, nor of George Eliot; nor
apparently of Darwin, though when his views were brought to her notice
she spoke as if all reasonable persons must have held them. I remember
her speaking of Shelley, whose "subversive" notions were quite according
to her heart, as "rather morbid, my dear"; and would have added, had she
not deprecated applying such a word to poetry, decidedly new-fangled.
Like our latter-day lovers of French literature, she had read little of
Racine, but liked him only the better. She was very strong on grammar;
acquired an exhaustive (and to my childish mind exhausting) knowledge
of the fourteen cases (including _avec le peu_) of the French past
participle. Also she had great faith in Euclid, of whom she had mastered
up to and inclusive of the fifth proposition of the first book, besides
the _definitions_ and _postulates_, all of which she endeavoured to
convey to me during our walks, always by word of mouth, and without
allowing me to glance at a diagram or even to draw one furtively in the
road's dust, deeming as she did that relations of the sides and angles
A, B, C, and D were most properly dealt with by the logical faculty or
"Causality," located by phrenologists half-way between the brows and
ears (alongside of _Ideality_ and _Veneration_), and deprecating the
intrusion into such subjects of the bodily eye which she kept almost
entirely for reading, although she had a poetic taste for scenery,
specially of lakes and mountains. This mathematical education of herself
and of me pursued, like her study of pianoforte and guitar fingering,
with indomitable application and on self-devised methods, was interrupted
after a couple of years by the urgent need for guiding and curbing my
literary dispositions, which were characterized by more natural bad
taste than the visible configuration of my brain had led her to expect.
Besides, of course, a more philosophical training in the works of George
Coombe and of that remarkable young philosopher called Buckle, she
taught me how to write out of two excellent books, Blair's _Rhetoric_
and Cobbett's _Grammar_, supplementing them with elaborate and admirably
written commentaries of her own, and with horribly painful object-lessons
in _corpore vili_ of my adolescent works. These she criticized entirely
from the point of view of good sense and good manners, although "ideality"
and "poetic feeling" were what she praised most in literature. She was,
in truth, at once intensely poetical and excessively prosaic; permeated
with cynicism yet beyond description sentimental and idealizing;
philosophically abstract and passionately personal in all her judgments;
more logical than all the _Encyclopdistes_ rolled into one, and
childishly unreasonable and credulous whenever herself and her belongings
were concerned. She regarded all religions as the invention of ambitious
priests; but she was convinced she had had a magical vision of her future
husband (only he bore more resemblance to her future brother-in-law)
on All-Hallows' Eve in consequence of dipping her shift with due
incantations in the pond at the end of the policies. Similarly, while
denouncing all Biblical genealogies as ridiculous imposture, she never
had a doubt about herself being descended from "Robert the Bruce, the
Counts of Vermandois, many kings of France, and the kings of England up
to Edward III." She was, briefly, a mass of contradictions; but these
were all grown into each other, made organic and inevitable by her
passionate and unmistakable individuality which recognized no law but
its own, and, while unceasingly influenced by others, was never once
checked or interfered with. She was tyrannical and self-immolating
more than any of us are or can imagine in these days; overflowing with
sympathy and ruthlessly unforgiving; dreadfully easily wounded and quite
callous of wounding others; she was deliciously tender, exquisitely
humorous, extraordinarily grim and at moments terrifying; always difficult
to live with and absolutely adorable. She had a high notion of the
dignity of literature, and of the divine quality of genius, which she
took for granted in all her belongings. While my father thought poorly
of writing, describing it (I now think not quite unjustly) as a "gift
of the gab," my mother had made up her mind that I had to become, at
the very least, another De Stal. I disagreed with all her criticisms,
trembled before them; smarted and secretly rebelled under her teaching;
and in my heart adored it, like her. And when I now look into my
literary preferences I find that I care for a good deal of what I have
read, and even for some of what I myself have written, because in some
indirect manner it is associated with her indescribable, incomparable
person. And the above is all that I feel sure of on the question
_whether Writing can be taught_.




IX

WHAT WRITERS MIGHT LEARN ...


As already remarked, the intention of this postscript is to make good
some of the omissions of which I have become aware while correcting
and putting together the older portions of this volume. With one such
omission I have just dealt, discussing _whether_, and _how_, writing
can be taught. There remains another, a far graver one, at least to my
present thinking. It concerns the relation, not of words to one another
nor of Writers and Readers to words, but, owing to the nature of that,
the relation, both as it is and as it should be, of writing to life.
Whence arises the further question: To what use should those who read
put those who write? _Use_ suggests _misuse_. But I am not alluding to
what is often spoken of by moralists as the _misuse of literary gifts_.
This is always put to the account of the Writer, and turns upon his
applying his special talent either to the diffusion of such doctrines
as we happen to be afraid of, or to the unguarded treatment of subjects
such as we English call "unpleasant," meaning more pleasing than is good
for us. The drawbacks of literature, those at least which I am most struck
with, are of an opposite kind. They depend far less on the misapplication
of literary gifts by the Writer as on abuse, like that of narcotics and
stimulants, by the Reader, that is to say, by the world at large, not
educated as yet to discriminate such beneficent yet dangerous cordials
and sedatives from the food of facts and reasons.

For the preceding studies have convinced me (and I trust suggested to a
few others) that the handling of words is nothing but the handling of
the associations and habits, especially the emotional ones, existing
potentially in the mind of the Reader. Such "handling of words" is a
rearrangement of values for the sake of an alteration of mood, just like
the _modus operandi_ of other kinds of art. But whereas neither painting
nor sculpture, still less architecture and music, can practise such
unperceived and unintended deception, the artistic processes of literature
pretend to transfer facts and opinions from one man to the other, while
most of the time they are merely transmitting orders how to act or at
least how to feel. Have we not seen how, without letting slip a single
tell-tale "good" or "bad," the combination of seemingly neutral adjectives,
the bare concordances of tenses and placing of prepositions and adverbs,
may carry the implication of the highest praise or most violent blame?
Does not the bringing in of certain abstractions like _Duty_, _Justice_,
_Honour_, the employment of _my_ and _our_ instead of _yours_ and
_theirs_, often prejudge, decide a question, say, of peace and war? May
not the word _Truth_, of all others the most difficult of definition,
set up incipient willingness to go to the stake or send others to it;
when the word _opinion_, of which we know the precise meaning, would
merely make us shrug our shoulders or stifle a yawn?

Thus, when not an evident superfluity like other art, literature is
mainly persuasion and exhortation in the guise of statement. And we are
all so accustomed to such use (which I call _misuse_) of literary power,
as to overlook that persuasion means _making others feel as you wish
them to feel_ upon a given matter, instead of letting that matter,
whatever it is, make them feel by its own relation to them and to their
circumstances. _Persuasion_ signifies a vote in your favour, a decision
to your liking. While as to _Exhortation, that_ is oftenest compassed by
invoking the Past, and the hoarier or more infantile the better, to come
and queer judgments concerning only the Present and Future.

And here I must interrupt myself to say that we are all of us so
hagridden by ... [there! _Hagridden_ is an act of just such literary
prejudging; strike it out and read instead: we are all _so given
over to_] a habit of praise and blame instead of mere _remarking and
stating_, that what I have just said will almost inevitably be read
as an attack upon, a condemnation of, all literature except that of
scientific primers. Have patience! and I may show you that it is only a
statement of how things seem to me, with an implicit suggestion of how,
were this duly recognized, they might become different; an implicit
explanation also of why they could not have been otherwise than they
are. I mean in this matter of literature as an instrument of Persuasion
and Exhortation. Can we conceive literature having become anything else,
indeed coming to exist at all, when we bear in mind that classical
Antiquity made a man's civic importance and sometimes his legal status
depend on his capacity for public speaking, that is, on _persuasion_;
while, on the other hand, theocratic civilization has always required
impressive formul regulating Man's attitude to the Divinity and attuning
his mind to piety with an appeal unanswerable as that of church organs
and more primitive bull roarers? Nor is it credible that the mere wish
to record facts and impart one's _whys_ and _wherefores_, would have
sufficed to evolve a literary art until the medival recognition that
quite a trifling theological fallacy may damn you everlastingly (as
_vide_ Dante), and the even more recent application of "natural" science
to everyday convenience, which between them gradually turned the
stream of literature from persuasion and exhortation to the (at least)
ostensible statement of how things are and the discussion of the causes
thereof. Meanwhile, perhaps in proportion as mankind has got engrossed
in material improvement, its intellectual training has been left to the
doctors of _divinity_ and graduates in _humanities, Humaniores Liter_
as opposed, no doubt, to _Diviniores_; but _Liter_ in any case: written
or preached _words_, books, sermons, newspaper articles and political
holdings-forth. All these forms of literature have maintained their
classico-theological status of legitimate instruments for making people
feel and act differently from how those people might be prompted by
their own circumstances and inclinations, but in accordance with the
convictions and aims of somebody else.

That is a state of affairs as old as literature itself; but just by
reason of its being so very ancient and unaltered, by no means one to be
invariably desired. How undesirable nowadays was brought home to me by
noticing the universal, unflagging persuasion and exhortation wherewith
the writers of all the belligerent nations made the war welcome and kept
it going: indeed, as much execution was done by the horrible power of
words as by the more new-fangled engines which did the mere brute
destruction of bodies and material goods. That was indeed an object
lesson (in _corpore vili_ and, alas! also _anima nobili_) of the power
of Literature, far surpassing that fabled of music (vide _Alexander's
Feast_), to sway the soul of man.

I am not proposing, in Mr. Gradgrind fashion, that man should let
himself be swayed only by Facts. Nor solely by what is rather different
from Facts, namely, Realities. As much as by these, and in proportion,
the Soul of Man needs swaying by the unrealities, deliberate and
unmistakable, of Art. _Swayed_ in the sense of being made to live, for
however brief an interlude, according to the heart's desire, in the more
vivid, steadier, essential and harmonious modes of its own invention,
which means, of Art. That kind of swaying and the instinct for it have,
indeed, no value for such survival as the human race shares with other
vertebrates and invertebrates, shares with such lowly somethings,
neither plant nor animal, which just survive and nothing besides. But
are we sure that odd, unaccountable superfluity called a soul would
have survived without some such superfluous responses to some such
superfluous activity? At all events such activity and such responses,
such _swaying_, are felt as a human need, and should therefore, like the
needs for bodily survival, be accounted honourable. Only, there might be
advantage in pointing out and bearing in mind that "_being swayed_," as
we are swayed by music, architecture, the other visual arts, by lyric
and dramatic poetry, and even the fine spectacles of Nature, is not the
same kind of swaying as that by eminent statesmen, preachers, journalists,
and even by plain men of letters, as exhibited, for instance, during the
war years and all the other years since Man's Creation. There is the
difference that, as men of action and moralists are for ever complaining
(_vide_ Tolstoi), art and poetry lead to nothing, whereas other human
activities do frequently lead to something often far better not led to.
Art--or call it "poetry" if you choose--does not _Sway_, manipulate our
mind and will with the object of getting us to _do this_ or _refrain
from that_; it has no "constructive plans"--such as every latter-day man
of letters among us is hawking about, or whimpering for, only to pull
down and "reconstruct" to-morrow. But in some yet unascertainable manner
such handling by art, and by the art of words, is, I believe, building
and rebuilding the shape and substance of ourselves. And even if it does
not, it makes us happy without putting us up to mischief, and that is
surely to be thanked and prayed for!

Neither are incitement to mutual slaughter--war and civil war--and
justification thereof, the only drawbacks of our over literary habits
of mind. The excessive importance thus given to the manner of stating
(usually faking the values!) as compared with the things stated, has
done more than to place in irresponsible literary hands the incalculable
destructive apparatus which we degrade our science into inventing. That
science should be set to purveying, not habits of thought and rules of
judgment, but telephones, electric light, aeroplanes, poison gas and
antiseptic treatment, seems quite as it should be to us who are trained
by and to literature, and are so far incapable of recognizing in Science
the sovereign teacher not only of the ways of things--_Rerum natura_--but
more essential even, of the ways wherein to conduct the mind.

Consonantly with my sorrow at the neglect of the philosophical training
which science could give us, what I would deprecate even more than the
sensational damage with which literary persuasion and exhortation helps,
every now and then, to overwhelm the community, what strikes me as
grievous is the daily unheeded wasting and spoiling of the man of letters
himself and his influence.

For, just as words are employed both to tell how things are and, on
the other hand, used like all art to make people feel differently from
how they would otherwise be feeling; so, of course, we Writers stand
half-way between thinkers and artists, akin now more to the philosopher
and again to the musician. This much is evident, that with our verbal
gift there goes more general lucidity of thought (since lucid thought
_is_ verbal) than is indispensable in other walks of life; and there
goes also a greater sensibility and less inhibition of impulse than
other walks of life would always tolerate. To possess, as the French
vulgarly put it, _la langue bien pendue_, conduces to that glib tongue
becoming an unruly member, set wagging for the pleasure of impressing
others, or pleasure of feeling and hearing ourselves. Especially as the
faculty for putting forth metaphorical wings leads to giddy flights
and poising not without _bombinating_, like Rabelais's chimras, _in
Vacuo_; whence instability, self-indulged and at times irresponsible.
_Volubility_, remember, which in English is synonymous with _talking
fast and easily_, in the original Latin and some Latin languages,
signifies _undue facility for changing feelings and views_. Now,
obviously the oftener you change your feelings and views the more you
will have to say, and with grateful variety; which, to us Writers, is
surely of consequence. No doubt there is some peevish exaggeration in
the old saw that speech is of silver and silence of gold. But golden or
not, we Writers cannot afford to pay in that kind of cash; and worse
luck to us!

Now, recognition of these our natural drawbacks, and occasional acts of
confession and contrition like my present one, might grow into a habit
of keeping alive to the transgressions our literary nature is prone to.
More easy to compass and even more efficacious could be such recognition
on the part of our Readers, teaching them to take us with rather more
grains of doubt and enjoy our performance like a play or concert, without
necessary influence on the rest of their conduct, which might be safely
left to the less fascinating admonitions of Reality. This would seem
natural enough; but here we come up against another bad business about
all Literature, namely, its origin in political and forensic persuasion,
and in the exhortations and sacramental exorcisms of religion. Are not
we Writers the (however usurping!) successors of priests and wizards
and medicine men, of prophets and sibyls? Like theirs (_teste David
cum Sibylla_, as remarked in the _Dies Ir_), our words are often taken
seriously, and we nearly always, at the moment at least, take them
seriously ourselves. We pontificate, consecrate, anathematize, we
elaborately purify (as witness the late war!), and prophesy without
a blush. We have been brought up to this solemn insistence on our
particular ritual and liturgy, never venturing to wink, like the honest
haruspex, nor put our tongue, for relief, in our cheek; indeed, never
guessing we may be absurd and even odious. Meanwhile, being Writers,
we are to that extent artists (and quick-change artists!); and art
legitimately requires self-expression and self-exhibition. So the world,
in the intervals of other business, takes us for its Sunday mornings and
Saturday evenings; bowing before our gestures of consecration to God or
the Infernal deities, while the next moment it claps and cries _encore_
to our vocalizations and chest notes.

All this is, of course, natural and could not have been avoided in the
past. But if acknowledged it may perhaps become less excessive and less
of a subject of self-congratulation. There might arise some division of
spiritual labour; or rather, a differentiation between the various wants
of man's soul and the trades which cater for them. Thus priests and
prophets are needed by a (smaller and smaller?) set of people who cannot
feel comfortable except when ordered about and swallowing the nostrum
labelled "certainty." Experimenters and analysts must, on the other
hand, increase in numbers as Mankind grows more and more complicated
and recognizes more complexity in its surroundings. While, just in
proportion to such dealings with Reality, artists and poets, musicians,
actors, singers, all such as express themselves and exhibit counterfeit
presentments, will be necessary to make up for reality's shortcomings.
Thus, paying more tribute to truth and doing more honour to fiction, the
world might be none the worse for a few thinkers taken among those who
are gifted for literature, and an increasing number of philosophers who
were admittedly poets, and _vice versa_; though one hopes their philosophy
would be learnt rather in the practice of science than in the sibylline
books of purely literary ages.

Be all this as it may, my second postscript, rectifying previous
omissions on the subject of Literature, comes to this: that besides the
nature and use of words by the Writer, some study should be devoted to
the nature and the use, also the misuse, of the Writer.

Moreover, as regards a Writer's position in his own eyes: that surely
would grow more satisfactory if we retired awhile from persuading and
exhorting other people, and grew more careful of our own consistency and
genuineness; recognizing and admitting that what we express and exhibit
is not Eternal Law nor Transcendental Truth, but just our preferences
and opinions, a part, and if possible the least faulty, of our
individual selves.

There is, however, another trade which, when a Writer happens thus
to express himself, is frequently attributed to him: namely, that of
standing on his head to amuse the Reader or to attract attention. To
those who enjoy such alleged antics, and feel that topsy-turviness is
the best means to their notice, it is difficult to know what to answer.
But among the literary weaknesses we Writers are often conscious of,
there is also the kind of self-expression and self-exhibition which the
French call _Boutade_, expression and exhibition not of that self which
has matured through recurrent acts of agreement and disagreement, but
rather of momentary impatience and unmannerliness. Confessing my own
failings of this sort, I want to say that I am not guilty of them in the
immediately foregoing pages. Crude as may be the mode of statement, all
I have just written is the matured (even if nowise rare or precious)
fruit of a lifetime of being not a Writer only, but likewise a Reader. A
Reader weary, indeed, of a good deal of ... I scarcely know what to call
it!--to be found in literature: But a Reader, no less, quite unspeakably
grateful for what other Writers have given me of their substance and
revealed to me of my own.




X

CONCLUSION


"What we find words for is that for which we have no longer any use in
our heart." Thus wrote one among the half-dozen greatest verbal artists
of modern times. And added: "There is always a grain of contempt in
every deed of speech."

Nietzsche was telling us, according to his wont, rather what he
experienced with mingled complacency and disgust in his own self,
than what he valued in others. To him the word--and he was apt to
feel it rather as the spoken than the written word--was essentially the
response, almost the reflex, the impatient, violent, contemptuous and
often self-contemptuous venting and easing of his inner distress, of
his instability, soreness and frenzy. To such, as he called himself, a
Dionysiac man, and to all mankind in its Dionysiac moods, the word is a
cry, sometimes a curse, at best an invocation of the unattainable. And
being such, the Dionysiac word, like all Dionysiac art, may, for a
moment, relieve by bringing to a head the misery of life, or stir life's
lethal sluggishness to change and hope.

But there is another use for the word, that to which it--and by the word
I mean, of course, literature--has been put by men, say, like Goethe or
Browning, enabling both them and us to take up position to what is not
ourself and to whatever in ourself had better not be. It is thus the
vehicle through which some of the small clarified portions and moments
of the Writer's soul can be transmitted to that of the Reader, helping
him to see and feel if not the same thing, at least his own share of
things in the same serene and lucid manner, remodelling himself and
the world, however little, according to his choice. The word is then
no longer what Nietzsche called Dionysiac and described with mixed
self-satisfaction and disgust. It does not deal with self at all except
as part of the great otherness of contemplation and understanding. We
may call it _Apolline_: an instrument of lucid truthful vision, of
healing joy, and perchance even of such prophecy as makes itself come
true.

ADEL NEAR LEEDS,
_August_ 1922.




WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

 HORTUS VIT; or, THE HANGING GARDENS.
 Moralizing Essays

 THE ENCHANTED WOODS

 THE SPIRIT OF ROME

 HAUNTINGS. Fantastic Stories

 THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVELLER

 POPE JACYNTH, AND OTHER FANTASTIC TALES

 GENIUS LOCI. Notes on Places

 LIMBO, AND OTHER ESSAYS. To which is now
 added "Ariadne in Mantua"

 LAURUS NOBILIS. Chapters on Art and Life

 RENAISSANCE: FANCIES AND STUDIES

 THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. With 3 Illustrations

 ALTHEA. Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties

 VANITAS. Polite Stories, including the hitherto
 Unpublished Story entitled "A Frivolous Conversation"

 BEAUTY AND UGLINESS. With 9 Illustrations

 VITAL LIES. Two Vols.

 THE TOWER OF THE MIRRORS

 LOUIS NORBERT. A Twofold Romance

 SATAN THE WASTER. A Philosophic War Trilogy.
 With Notes and Introduction

THE BODLEY HEAD




TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE

The publisher's advertising, which faces the title page in the original
book, has been moved to the end. A small number of spelling mistakes
have been corrected and missing punctuation added. The following
additional changes have been made:

Vanvenargues has been changed to Vauvenargues.

The context makes it clear that "ball" should be replaced by "bull"
in the passage "drinking toasts round that golden BULL".

Ah del paggio quel ch'o detto era solo un mio sospetto.
has been changed to
Ah del paggio quel _ch'ho_ detto era solo un mio sospetto.

Varendouck has been changed to Varendonck.




[End of _The Handling of Words_ by Vernon Lee]
