Talks on Writing English. First Series

PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED

Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions. Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work, yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has been lost.

We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance—the antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so on—might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour,—the prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways decent or indecent,—have not in themselves anything that can be called Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention, but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.

“The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he goes on to exemplify this thus:—

Compare these three simple statements: “I found him very agreeable one afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house.” Now all that the word “wet” says is that the afternoon was watery; but it clearly implies that it was an afternoon when you would not care to be out of doors. All that the words “in a country house” state is a simple fact of locality; but they imply that you were in a place where not to be out of doors was probably a serious trial to the temper. So the last statement as a whole, “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house,” suggests, though it does not state, that the person spoken of was one whose charms could overcome a pretty bad temper. At the same time it is a phrase which I fancy anybody would admit to hold the attention more strongly than either of its predecessors; and its superiority in force lies not so much in the bare facts which it adds to the first statement as in the thoughts and emotions it suggests. Still again, take this sentence from one of M. de Maupassant’s stories: “It was the 15th of August—the feast of the Holy Virgin, and of the Emperor Napoleon.” He states only two facts about the 15th of August, and these in the simplest of words. Neither by itself would hold one’s attention enough to remain long in memory. But put them together; think what the Holy Virgin means to Catholic Europe, and what the Emperor Napoleon means to those who are not subdued by the magic genius of Bonaparte,—and you have a sentence that when mid-August comes about will hover in your head. Yet the force of this—so greatly superior to the force of either statement by itself—lies not in what is actually said, but wholly in what is implied, suggested, connoted, in this sudden, unexpected antithesis.

The thing which the writer has caused the reader to think—or even to suppose himself to think—is sure to interest him. The dullest of bores is absorbed in his own words, and in effect that which the reader receives by suggestion is his own thought. What is denoted is the word of the writer; what is connoted is for the time being the thought of the reader.

It is not difficult to see that Clearness is an aid to Force; or, to put it more exactly, that a lack of Clearness will interfere with Force. Yet the one is by no means essential to the other. The diction of “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” that book so strong that it wrings the heart almost like a fierce personal sorrow, is in passages so obscure as to have given rise to the rather cheap mot that the novel would be successful if it were translated into English. Almost any page of Carlyle might also be cited in illustration; while that Clearness may fail to secure Force is proved by the pellucidly stupid lucubrations of an innumerable company of authors whom nobody could fail to understand if it were possible to keep awake to read them.

Connotation may be the result of various causes. It may be produced by a swiftness and briskness of motion which so awakens and quickens the mind that the reader is aroused to thought, and seizes each idea presented as if he had himself originated it. It is this sort of force that we mean when we speak of the vivacity or the brilliancy of a work. The secret lies chiefly in passing quickly from one significant point to another. This involves, it is apparent, the power of selecting the significant, and of bringing this out while avoiding the unessential.

The effectiveness of the sensational story depends largely upon a quality closely allied to this, although here it is a matter not so much of style as of material. The tale which moves rapidly from situation to situation, so that the reader seems to share the adventures of the characters, often owes as much to the swiftness of its progress as to the nature of the story told. It owes more, as a general thing, to the vividness with which the exciting situations are imagined and presented. The more real a thing seems to the reader, the more suggestive it must be to him, and the more likely is he to share the sensations set down, so that for the moment it seems as if he were actually experiencing them. In other words, the more real the narrative, the more suggestive it becomes.

One great means of producing this sense of reality either in narrative or in any other kind of composition, whether in the setting forth of thoughts, or in the telling of events, is in making what is written specific. The specific term is apt to be more suggestive than the general from the fact that it presents to the mind an idea which can be grasped readily. When one reads that the Indians are on the war-path and are ravaging the country, one has a vague feeling of horror; but if one is told that the Red Men have crossed the bounds of Big Lick Reservation, have murdered and scalped a settler named John Thing, have burned his cabin, and carried off his wife and children, there is no vagueness about it. The impression becomes at once vivid and forceful in what it denotes, and stirring in what it connotes.

It is from a misapplication of this fact that modern fiction has fallen into that vice which has been known as Realism—perhaps because it is less real than any other sort of fiction ever devised. It is apparently by a perception of the effectiveness of the specific, that Realists have been led into the error of believing in the effectiveness of the minute.

Before leaving the quality under discussion it is well to say a word about what is called “reserved force.” Our respect for a writer is always increased by feeling that he might do more than he is doing. We are led on by a desire to see what greater things he will accomplish. The feeling in reading an author who is evidently doing his utmost is not unlike that felt in crossing a bridge which shakes with the footfall. It may carry us over the stream, but on the other hand it may break under us. I once heard a lady explain her dislike for a certain youth by saying: “I never could endure a man who is always doing his darnedest!” The expression is unhappily vulgar, but it does seem to me to be humanly expressive. We do not like to feel that we have come to the end of the resources of a friend or of an author.

How then does a writer produce an impression of reserved force? The phrase meets one in book reviews, and to inexperienced writers is apt to convey little but bewilderment. One way in which the finished literary craftsman secures the impression of reserved power is by deliberately making the minor parts of his work weaker than those more important. In other words, he gains the effect of reserved strength by reserving strength. Often it is well in the revision of a composition to lessen the stress of expression in unimportant passages; to soften down, as it were, all portions except the high lights. The natural tendency of every earnest writer is to express himself as vigorously as possible, and in the first draft this is well,—provided always that he has the self-control and the skill so to modify in revision the less important parts that the emphasis shall be properly proportioned. Shading in literature is a matter which it is not easy to explain without examples much longer than it is possible to use here. It must be learned by the study of masterpieces. It is well to keep in mind, however, that it is oftener the result of a clever softening of minor passages than of a heavier emphasis upon important portions; and above all that the secret of shading and of reserved force as well is proportion. It is rather comparative than absolute stress which is effective. Vehemence is not vigor. Make up your mind clearly what points you wish to bring out most sharply; that is half of the process: then see to it that the remaining parts of the composition are kept subordinate to these; that is the rest of it.

Largely, too, is a sense of reserved force imparted by smoothness and ease of style. A style which is rough generally seems hard and labored. To carry the reader forward easily seems to be to carry him surely, and gives the impression that the writer could go faster and farther if he but chose.

One of the secrets of smoothness is the art of easy transition from one paragraph to another, from one sentence to another, from one thought to another. In Macaulay’s essay on “Machiavelli,” for instance, after speaking of the correspondence of the Italian, the author continues:

It is interesting and curious to recognize, in circumstances which elude the notice of historians, … the fierce and haughty energy which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable hatred of CÆsar Borgia.

We have mentioned CÆsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for a moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of Italy was so strongly personified, etc.

And so the essayist goes on to draw a comparison between CÆsar Borgia and Machiavelli, which he had of course intended from the first, but which he has had the art to introduce as if it were a sudden thought. The effect is as if the name of Borgia had suggested the parallel; and not only does this give an air of spontaneity, but it also impresses the reader with a feeling of security in the resources of the writer. If the mere mention of a famous name can bring so much from his mind, it is evident that that mind must be most abundantly stored.

More subtle, and therein so much the more admirable, is the art which links together the parts of a composition simply by closeness of meaning. To illustrate it would take too much room, but all the great essayists afford examples, and it is in them that this detail of literary skill may most conveniently be studied.

Another matter closely connected with Force is that of beginning and ending well. If the opening sentence of a composition interest the reader he is ready to go on, while an effective close leaves him with a pleasant impression of what he has been reading. In a composition divided into parts or chapters, it is especially important to see to it that the separate portions end effectively. The general verdict upon a book is largely made up of the sum of impressions received from the endings of sections. Here again the reader will find examples in all the masters, but a few may be given. In a vein almost familiar, but in entirely good taste, Lowell begins his superb essay on Chaucer:—

Will it do to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say anything, not new but even fresh, on a topic so well worn?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pilate took water, and washed his hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clyx.com