On the Art of Writing Part 8

Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her feelings, but gets to his hero and to business without ado:--

Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face-- (You have the sun visualised at once), Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase; Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn.

When Shakespeare has to describe a horse, mark how definite he is:--

Round-hoof'd, short-jointed, fetlocks s.h.a.g and long, Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, High crest, short ears, straight legs and pa.s.sing strong; Thin mane, thick tail, broad b.u.t.tock, tender hide.

Or again, in a casual simile, how definite:--

Upon this promise did he raise his chin, Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave, Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in.

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of Hero's first meeting Leander:--

It lies not in our power to love or hate, For will in us is over-ruled by fate...,

and set against it Shakespeare's description of Venus' last meeting with Adonis, as she came on him lying in his blood:--

Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit Shrinks backward in his sh.e.l.ly cave with pain, And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again; So, at his b.l.o.o.d.y view--

I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the whole pa.s.sage) to be lovely. You may even judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. But you cannot help noting that whereas Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, which later on he learned to pack into verse, such as:--

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care.

Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died young? Then let us take Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something very like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, and what I may call _solidified sensation_. Let us take this admired pa.s.sage from his "d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy":--

_Ferdinand._ How doth our sister d.u.c.h.ess bear herself In her imprisonment?

_Basola._ n.o.bly: I'll describe her.

She's sad as one long used to 't, and she seems Rather to welcome the end of misery Than shun it: a behaviour so n.o.ble As gives a majesty to adversity (Note the abstract terms.) You may discern the shape of loveliness More perfect in her tears than in her smiles; She will muse for hours together; and her silence (Here we first come on the concrete: and beautiful it is.) Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.

Now set against this the well-known pa.s.sage from "Twelfth Night" where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to him and invented by her--a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more definite is the language:--

_Viola._ My father had a daughter lov'd a man; As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, _I_ should your lordship.

_Duke._ And what's her history?

_Viola._ A blank, my lord. She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare _has_ to use the abstract noun 'concealment,' on an instant it turns into a visible worm 'feeding' on the visible rose; how, having to use a second abstract word 'patience,' at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.

Turning to prose, you may easily a.s.sure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim--to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague--as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The late Mr E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), ill.u.s.trated the maxim by setting a pa.s.sage from Burke's speech "On Conciliation with America"

alongside a pa.s.sage of like purport from Lord Brougham's "Inquiry into the Policy of the European Powers." Here is the deadly parallel:--

BURKE.

In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern aegypt and Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.

BROUGHAM.

In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government.

You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke's thought to his own page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on the mind?

'This particularising style,' comments Mr Payne, 'is the essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it produces. Brougham's pa.s.sage is excellent in its way: but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke's sentences. The best instances of this energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the cla.s.sical writers of the seventeenth century. 'When South says, "An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise," he communicates more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.'

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this pa.s.sage is expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr Payne and me that he uttered it vividly.

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a pa.s.sage from Dr John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay within South's compa.s.s:--

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to p.r.o.nounce, This is the Patrician, this is the n.o.ble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say _This is Iesabel_; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, _This is Iesabel._

Carlyle noted of Goethe, 'his emblematic intellect, his never-failing tendency to transform into _shape_, into _life_, the feeling that may dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet's imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.'

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I wasted an hour of a May morning in a denunciation of Jargon, and in exhorting you upon a technical matter at first sight so trivial as the choice between abstract and definite words.

A lesson about writing your language may go deeper than language; for language (as in a former lecture I tried to preach to you) is your reason, your [Greek: logos]. So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men's summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the first-hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at second-hand. If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circ.u.mvent. For the Style is the Man, and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.

LECTURE VI.

ON THE CAPITAL DIFFICULTY OF PROSE

Thursday, May 15

To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of Jargon behind us, we have to essay a difficult country; of which, though fairly confident of his compa.s.s-bearings, your guide confesses, that wide tracts lie outside his knowledge--outside of anything that can properly be called his knowledge.

I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt when he divided his host on the slopes of Mount Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In asking the remnant to follow as attentively as they can, I promise only that, if Heaven carry us safely across, we shall have 'broken the back'

of the desert.

In my last lecture but one, then,--and before our small interlude with Jargon--the argument had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this point: that the capital difficulty of verse consisted in saying ordinary unemotional things, of bridging the flat intervals between high moments.

This point, I believe, we made effectively enough.

Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to oppose a corresponding point, that the capital difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary things, in running it up from its proper level to these high emotional, musical, moments. And mightily convenient that would be, Gentlemen, if I were here to help you to answer scientific questions about prose and verse instead of helping you, in what small degree I can, to write. But in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once again, is an art) you cannot cla.s.sify as in a science.

Pray attend while I impress on you this most necessary warning. In studying literature, and still more in studying to write it, distrust all cla.s.sification! All cla.s.sifying of literature intrudes 'science' upon an art, and is artificially 'scientific'; a trick of pedants, that they may make it the easier to examine you on things with which no man should have any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one.

Beetles, minerals, gases, may be cla.s.sified; and to have them cla.s.sified is not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had to _make_ a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would cla.s.sification help? To cla.s.sify in a science is necessary for the purpose of that science: to cla.s.sify when you come to art is at the best an expedient, useful to some critics and to a mult.i.tude of examiners. It serves the art-critic to talk about Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of painting. The expressions are handy, and we know more or less what they intend. Just so handily it may serve us to talk about 'Renaissance poets,' 'the Elizabethans,' 'the Augustan age.' But such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, determinate, as for examples the terms 'inorganic,' 'mammal,' 'univalve,' 'Old Red Sandstone' are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as a.s.suredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan.

We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead.

Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth died; yet (if 'Elizabethan' have any meaning but a chronological one) Shirley belongs to the Elizabethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on the horizon: whereas Donne--a post-Elizabethan if ever there was one--had by 1603 reached his thirtieth year and written almost every line of those wonderful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the dominant note to Jacobean and Caroline poetry.

In treating of an art we cla.s.sify for handiness, not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man (_improbus h.o.m.o_) with his wicked inventions is for ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled--and, if you are wise, thank Heaven--that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins.

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish us when we defined prose as 'a record of human thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm laxly.' When you give genius leave to use something laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get the better of you.

Observe, now, following the story of English prose, what has happened.

Its difficulty--the inherent, the native disability of prose--is to handle the high emotional moments which more properly belong to verse.