On the Art of Writing Part 6

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic to plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and intervals. I believe that it lay--though whether consciously or not he scarcely tells us--at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selecting certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very first, Homer's _rapidity_. 'First,' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid; and,' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien.'

Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why verse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's choice of _rapidity_ to put in the forefront of Homer's merits may seem merely capricious.

'Homer (we say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself indicates Homer's simplicity, directness, n.o.bility. Surely either one of these should be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue with either?'

But when we see that the difficulty of verse-narrative lies just _here_; that the epic poet who is rapid has met, and has overcome, the capital difficulty of his form, then we begin to do justice not only to Arnold as a critic but (which is of far higher moment) to Homer as a craftsman.

The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact something daemonic. He seems to shirk nothing: and the effect of this upon critics is bewildering. The acutest of them are left wondering how on earth an ordinary tale--say of how some mariners beached ship, stowed sail, walked ash.o.r.e and cooked their dinner--can be made so poetical. They are inclined to divide the credit between the poet and his fortunate age--'a time' suggests Pater 'in which one could hardly have spoken at all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without making a picture "in the great style" against a sky charged with marvels.'

Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius. Just here it is rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, genius overcame it; yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical achievement is such a success. Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in this technical triumph over the capital disability of annihilating flat pa.s.sages. I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists; because they have only to give a stage direction 'Enter Ca.s.sius, looking lean,' and Ca.s.sius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer has in his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe him, walk him off. I grant the rapidity of Dante. It is amazing; and we may yield him all the credit for choosing (it was his genius that chose it) a subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity; since h.e.l.l, Purgatory and Paradise, though they differ in other respects, have this in common, that they are populous and the inhabitants of each so compendiously shepherded together that the visitor can turn from one person to another without loss of time. But Homer does not escort us around a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage to another. He proposes at least, both in the "Iliad" and in the "Odyssey,"

to unfold a story; and he _seems_ to unfold it so artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve us a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appet.i.te all the keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.

I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is this apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at the extreme of his difficulty--when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.

Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that no poet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the great Elizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated, in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake," in twelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the sea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy.

Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts, and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:--

For ever climbing up the climbing wave

--your ship taking one wave much as she takes another--is in its nature monotonous. Nay, you have only to read Falconer's "Shipwreck" to discover how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in a first-cla.s.s tempest. Courses, reckonings, tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of canvas--these occur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. But to the reader, if he be a landsman, their repet.i.tion in narrative may easily become intolerable; and when we get down to the 'trades,' even the seaman sets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep. In short you cannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as upon the plains of windy Troy: nor could any but a superhuman genius make sustained poetry (say) out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve, which none the less was one of the most heroic feats in history.

This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse, has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr Noyes' poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:--

Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake Put down the helm and drove against the seas-- Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman, Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again Put down the helm and so drove on--_et cetera_.

Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next to impossible. He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a ten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us in plain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made a superb epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, what amazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforward tale!--eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, and magnificently presented to Circe

Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main

--and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficulties connected therewith.

Note the s.p.a.ce given to Telemachus and his active search for the lost hero: note too how the ma.s.s of Odysseus' seafaring adventures is condensed into a reported speech--a traveller's tale at the court of Alcinous. Virgil borrowed this trick, you remember; and I dare to swear that had it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga of Nelson's pursuit after Villeneuve he would have achieved it triumphantly--by means of a tale told in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton. Note, again, how boldly (being free to deal with an itinerary of which his audience knew nothing but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal of the marvellous, s.p.a.ced at irregular distances) Homer works in a shipwreck or a miracle wherever the action threatens to flag. Lessing, as you know, devoted several pages of the "Laokoon" to the shield of Achilles; to Homer's craft in depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer: so that we are intrigued by the process of manufacture instead of being wearied by a description of the ready-made article; so also (if one may presume to add anything to Lessing) that we are cunningly flattered in a sense that the shield is being made for _us._ Well, that is one artifice out of many: but if you would gauge at all Homer's resource and subtlety in technique I recommend you to a.n.a.lyse the first twelve books of the "Odyssey" and count for yourselves the device by which the poet--[Greek: polutropos] as was never his hero--evades or hurries over each flat interval as he happens upon it.

These things, Ulysses, The wise bards also Behold and sing.

But O, what labour!

O Prince, what pain!

You may be thinking, Gentlemen, that I take up a disproportionate amount of your time on such technical matters at these. But literature being an art (forgive the reiteration!) and therefore to be practised, I want us to be seeking all the time _how it is done_; to hunt out the principles on which the great artists wrought; to face, to rationalise, the difficulties by which they were confronted, and learn how they overcame the particular obstacle. Surely even for mere criticism, apart from practice, we shall equip ourselves better by seeking, so far as we may, how the thing is done than by standing at gaze before this or that masterpiece and murmuring 'Isn't that beautiful! How in the world, now...!'

I am told that these lectures are criticised as tending to make you conceited: to encourage in you a belief that you can do things, when it were better that you merely admired. Well I would not dishearten you by telling to what a shred of conceit, even of hope, a man can be reduced after twenty-odd years of the discipline. But I can, and do, affirm that the farther you penetrate in these discoveries the more sacred the ultimate mystery will become for you: that the better you understand the great authors as exemplars of practice, the more certainly you will realise what is the condescension of the G.o.ds.

Next time, then, we will attempt an enquiry into the capital difficulty of Prose.

LECTURE V.

INTERLUDE: ON JARGON

Thursday, May 1

We parted, Gentlemen, upon a promise to discuss the capital difficulty of Prose, as we have discussed the capital difficulty of Verse. But, although we shall come to it, on second thoughts I ask leave to break the order of my argument and to interpose some words upon a kind of writing which, from a superficial likeness, commonly pa.s.ses for prose in these days, and by lazy folk is commonly written for prose, yet actually is not prose at all; my excuse being the simple practical one that, by first clearing this sham prose out of the way, we shall the better deal with honest prose when we come to it. The proper difficulties of prose will remain: but we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at any rate what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heard somewhere of a religious body in the United States of America which had reason to suspect one of its churches of accepting Spiritual consolation from a coloured preacher--an offence against the laws of the Synod--and despatched a Disciplinary Committee with power to act; and of the Committee's returning to report itself unable to take any action under its terms of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured had undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from it in the Committee's presence, the performance could be brought within no definition of preaching known or discoverable. So it is with that infirmity of speech--that flux, that determination of words to the mouth, or to the pen--which, though it be familiar to you in parliamentary debates, in newspapers, and as the staple language of Blue Books, Committees, Official Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prose which is not prose and under its real name of Jargon.

You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called Journalese. The two overlap, indeed, and have a knack of a.s.similating each other's vices. But Jargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries among good douce people who have never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never talk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad weather'; who have never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess,' 'recrudesce,' 'envisage,'

'adumbrate,' or with phrases such as 'the psychological moment,' 'the true inwardness,' 'it gives furiously to think.' It dallies with Latinity--'sub silentio,' 'de die in diem,' 'cui bono?' (always in the sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')--but not for the sake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier is his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poor language, to make it more floriferous, more poetical--like the Babu for example who, reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you, the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'

_There_ is metaphor: _there_ is ornament: _there_ is a sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks--no such zeal, artistic or professional, animates--the pract.i.tioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons. Caution is its father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: its mother, Indolence. It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in these times, _safe_: a thousand men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming the language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being.

Has a Minister to say 'No' in the House of Commons? Some men are const.i.tutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys it thus--'The answer to the question is in the negative.' That means 'no.'

Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that the speaker is a pompous person?--which was no part of the information demanded.

That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. But as a rule Jargon is by no means accurate, its method being to walk circ.u.mspectly around its target; and its faith, that having done so it has either hit the bull's-eye or at least achieved something equivalent, and safer.

Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that--

In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin provided was of the usual character.

Now this is not accurate. 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased,' for whom a coffin was supplied, it is wholly superfluous to tell us that he is deceased. But actually John Jenkins never had more than one case, and that was the coffin. The Clerk says he had two,--a coffin in a case: but I suspect the Clerk to be mistaken, and I am sure he errs in telling us that the coffin was of the usual character: for coffins have no character, usual or unusual.

For another example (I shall not tell you whence derived)--

In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first cla.s.s [So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as well as a first-cla.s.s. He might be a stuffed animal: perhaps he is] In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first cla.s.s the cla.s.s-list will show by some convenient mark (1) the Section or Sections for proficiency in which he is placed in the first cla.s.s and (2) the Section or Sections (if any) in which he has pa.s.sed with special distinction.

'The Section or Sections (if any)'--But, how, if they are not any, could they be indicated by a mark however convenient?

The Examiners will have regard to the style and method of the candidate's answers, and will give credit for excellence _in these respects_.

Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon? The first is that it uses circ.u.mlocution rather than short straight speech. It says 'In the case of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin' when it means 'John Jenkins's coffin': and its yea is not yea, neither is its nay nay: but its answer is in the affirmative or in the negative, as the foolish and superfluous 'case' may be. The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. I shall have something to say by-and-by about the concrete noun, and how you should ever be struggling for it whether in prose or in verse. For the moment I content myself with advising you, if you would write masculine English, never to forget the old tag of your Latin Grammar--

Masculine will only be Things that you can touch and see.

But since these lectures are meant to be a course in First Aid to writing, I will content myself with one or two extremely rough rules: yet I shall be disappointed if you do not find them serviceable.

The first is:--Whenever in your reading you come across one of these words, _case, instance, character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree_--whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another of them--pull yourself up and take thought. If it be 'case' (I choose it as Jargon's dearest child--'in Heaven yclept Metonomy') turn to the dictionary, if you will, and seek out what meaning can be derived from _casus_, its Latin ancestor: then try how, with a little trouble, you can extricate yourself from that case. The odds are, you will feel like a b.u.t.terfly who has discarded his chrysalis.

Here are some specimens to try your hand on--

(1) All those tears which inundated Lord Hugh Cecil's head were dry in the case of Mr Harold c.o.x.

Poor Mr c.o.x! left gasping in his aquarium!

(2) [From a cigar-merchant] In any case, let us send you a case on approval.

(3) It is contended that Consols have fallen in consequence: but such is by no means the case.

'Such,' by the way, is another spoilt child of Jargon, especially in Committee's Rules--'Co-opted members may be eligible as such; such members to continue to serve for such time as'--and so on.

(4) Even in the purely Celtic areas, only in two or three cases do the Bishops bear Celtic names.