The Principles Of Success In Literature Part 6

The beauty of this pa.s.sage seems to me marred by the awkward yet necessary interruption, "under these circ.u.mstances it is," which would have been avoided by opening the sentence with "such evanescent hauntings of our forgotten selves are most apt to startle us in solitudes," &c. Compare the effect of directness in the following:--

"This was one of the most common shapes of extinguished power from which Coleridge fled to the great city. But sometimes the same decay came back upon his heart in the more poignant shape of intimations and vanishing glimpses recovered for one moment from the Paradise of youth, and from fields of joy and power, over which for him too certainly he felt that the cloud of night was settling for ever."

Obedience to the law of Sequence gives strength by giving clearness and beauty of rhythm; it economises force and creates music. A very trifling disregard of it will mar an effect. See an example both of obedience and trifling disobedience in the following pa.s.sage from Ruskin:--

"People speak in this working age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands and food and raiment were alone useful, and as if Sight, Thought, and Admiration were all profitless, so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life and the raiment than the body, who look on earth as a stable and to its fruit as fodder; vinedressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden."

It is instinctive to contrast the dislocated sentence, "who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race," with the sentence which succeeds it, "men who think, as far as such men can be said to think, that the meat," &c. In the latter the parenthetic interruption is a source of power: it dams the current to increase its force; in the former the inversion is a loss of power: it is a dissonance to the ear and a diversion of the thought.

As ill.u.s.trations of Sequence in composition, two pa.s.sages may be quoted from Macaulay which display the power of pictorial suggestions when, instead of diverting attention from the main purpose, they are arranged with progressive and culminating effect.

"Such, or nearly such, was the change which pa.s.sed on the Mogul empire during the forty years which followed the death of Aurungzebe. A series of nominal sovereigns, sunk in indolence and debauchery, sauntered away life in secluded palaces, chewing bang, fondling dancing girls, and listening to buffoons. A series of ferocious invaders had descended through the western pa.s.ses to prey on the defenceless wealth of Hindostan. A Persian conqueror crossed the Indus, marched through the gates of Delhi, and bore away in triumph those treasures of which the magnificence had astounded Roe and Bernier;--the peac.o.c.k throne, on which the richest jewels of Golconda had been disposed by the most skilful hands of Europe, and the inestimable Mountain of Light, which, after many strange vicissitudes, lately shone in the bracelet of Runjeet Sing, and is now destined to adorn the hideous idol of Prista.

The Afghan soon followed to complete the work of devastation which the Persian had begun. The warlike tribe of Rajpoots threw off the Mussulman yoke. A band of'mercenary soldiers occupied the Rohilcund.

The Seiks ruled on the Indus. The Jauts spread terror along the Jumnah.

The high lands which border on the western sea-coast of India poured forth a yet more formidable race--a race which was long the terror of every native power, and which yielded only after many desperate and doubtful struggles to the fortune and genius of England. It was under the reign of Aurungzebe that this wild clan of plunderers first descended from the mountains; and soon after his death every corner of his wide empire learned to tremble at the mighty name of the Mahrattas.

Many fertile viceroyalties were entirely subdued by them. Their dominions stretched across the peninsula from sea to sea. Their captains reigned at Poonah, at Gualior, in Guzerat, in Berar, and in Tanjore."

Such prose as this affects us like poetry. The pictures and suggestions might possibly have been gathered together by any other historian; but the artful succession, the perfect sequence, could only have been found by a fine writer. I pa.s.s over a few paragraphs, and pause at this second example of a sentence simple in structure, though complex in its elements, fed but not overfed with material, and almost perfect in its cadence and logical connection. "Scarcely any man, however sagacious, would have thought it possible that a trading company, separated from India by fifteen thousand miles of sea, and possessing in India only a few acres for purposes of commerce, would in less than a hundred years spread its empire from Cape Comorin to the eternal snows of the Himalayas--would compel Mahratta and Mahomedan to forget their mutual feuds in common subjection--would tame down even those wild races which had resisted the most powerful of the Moguls; and having established a government far stronger than any ever known in those countries, would carry its victorious arms far to the east of the Burrampooter, and far to the west of the Hydaspes--dictate terms of peace at the gates of Ava, and seat its va.s.sals on the throne of Candahar."

Let us see the same principle exhibited in a pa.s.sage at once pictorial and argumentative. "We know more certainly every day," says Ruskin, "that whatever appears to us harmful in the universe has some beneficent or necessary operation; that the storm which destroys a harvest brightens the sunbeams for harvests yet unsown, and that a volcano which buries a city preserves a thousand from destruction. But the evil is not for the time less fearful because we have learned it to be necessary; and we can easily understand the timidity or the tenderness of the spirit which could withdraw itself from the presence of destruction, and create in its imagination a world of which the peace should be unbroken, in which the sky should not darken nor the sea rage, in which the leaf should not change nor the blossom wither.

That man is greater, however, who contemplates with an equal mind the alternations of terror and of beauty; who, not rejoicing less beneath the sunny sky, can also bear to watch the bars of twilight narrowing on the horizon; and, not less sensible to the blessing of the peace of nature, can rejoice in the magnificence of the ordinances by which that peace is protected and secured. But separated from both by an immeasurable distance would be the man who delighted in convulsion and disease for their own sake; who found his daily food in the disorder of nature mingled with the suffering of humanity; and watched joyfully at the right hand of the Angel whose appointed work is to destroy as well as to accuse, while the corners of the house of feasting were struck by the wind from the wilderness."

I will now cite a pa.s.sage from Burke, which will seem tame after the pictorial animation of the pa.s.sages from Macaulay and Ruskin; but which, because it is simply an exposition of opinions addressed to the understanding, will excellently ill.u.s.trate the principle I am enforcing. He is treating of the dethronement of kings. "As it was not made for common abuses, so it is not to be agitated by common minds.

The speculative line of demarcation, where obedience ought to end and resistance must begin, is faint, obscure, and not easily definable. It is not a single act or a single event which determines it. Governments must be abused and deranged, indeed, before it can be thought of; and the prospect of the future must be as bad as the experience of the past. When things are in that lamentable condition, the nature of the disease is to indicate the remedy to those whom nature has qualified to administer in extremities this critical, ambiguous, bitter potion to a distempered state. Times and occasions and provocations will teach their own lessons. The wise will determine from the gravity of the case; the irritable from sensibility to oppression; the high-minded from disdain and indignation at abusive power in unworthy hands; the brave and bold from love of honourable danger in a generous cause. But with or without right, a revolution will be the very last resource of the thinking and the good."

As a final example I will cite a pa.s.sage from M. Taine:--"De la encore cette insolence contre les inferieurs, et ce mepris verse d'etage en etage depuis le premier jusqu'au dernier. Lorsque dans une societe la loi consacre les conditions inegales, personne n'est exempt d'insulte; le grand seigneur, outrage par le roi, outrage le n.o.ble qui outrage le peuple; la nature humaine est humilie a tous les etages, et la societe n'est plus qu'un commerce d'affronts."

The law of Sequence by no means prescribes that we should invariably state the proposition before its qualifications--the thought before its ill.u.s.trations; it merely prescribes that we should arrange our phrases in the order of logical dependence and rhythmical cadence, the order best suited for clearness and for harmony. The nature of the thought will determine the one, our sense of euphony the other.

IV. THE LAW OF CLIMAX.

We need not pause long over this; it is generally understood. The condition of our sensibilities is such that to produce their effect stimulants must be progressive in intensity and varied in kind. On this condition rest the laws of Climax and Variety. The phrase or image which in one position will have a mild power of occupying the thoughts, or stimulating the emotions, loses this power if made to succeed one of like kind but more agitating influence, and will gain an accession of power if it be artfully placed on the wave of a climax. We laugh at

"Then came Dalhousie, that great G.o.d of War, Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar,"

because of the relaxation which follows the sudden tension of the mind; but if we remove the idea of the colonelcy from this position of anti-climax, the same couplet becomes energetic rather than ludicrous--

"Lieutenant-Colonel to the Earl of Mar, Then came Dalhousie, that great G.o.d of War."

I have selected this strongly marked case, instead of several feeble pa.s.sages which might be chosen from the first book at hand, wherein carelessness allows the sentences to close with the least important, phrases, and the style droops under frequent anti-climax. Let me now cite a pa.s.sage from Macaulay which vividly ill.u.s.trates the effect of Climax:--

"Never, perhaps, was the change which the progress of civilisation has produced in the art of war more strikingly ill.u.s.trated than on that day. Ajax beating down the Trojan leader with a rock which two ordinary men could scarcely lift; Horatius defending the bridge against an army; Richard, the lion-hearted, spurring along the whole Saracen line without finding an enemy to withstand his a.s.sault; Robert Bruce crushing with one blow the helmet and head of Sir Harry Bohun in sight of the whole array of England and Scotland,--such are the heroes of a dark age. [Here is an example of suspended meaning, where the suspense intensifies the effect, because each particular is vividly apprehended in itself, and all culminate in the conclusion; they do not complicate the thought, or puzzle us, they only heighten expectation]. In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior.

At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies. In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants. In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister. But their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind. It is probable that among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers that were marshalled round Neerwinden, under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf, who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England."

The effect of Climax is very marked in the drama. Every speech, every scene, every act, should have its progressive sequence. Nothing can be more injudicious than a trivial phrase following an energetic phrase, a feeble thought succeeding a burst of pa.s.sion, or even a pa.s.sionate thought succeeding one more pa.s.sionate. Yet this error is frequently committed.

In the drama all laws of Style are more imperious than in fiction or prose of any kind, because the art is more intense. But Climax is demanded in every species of composition, for it springs from a psychological necessity. It is pressed upon, however, by the law of Variety in a way to make it far from safe to be too rigidly followed.

It easily degenerates into monotony.

V. THE LAW OF VARIETY.

Some one, after detailing an elaborate recipe for a salad, wound up the enumeration of ingredients and quant.i.ties with the advice to "open the window and throw it all away." This advice might be applied to the foregoing enumeration of the laws of Style, unless these were supplemented by the important law of Variety. A style which rigidly interpreted the precepts of economy, simplicity, sequence, and climax, which rejected all superfluous words and redundant ornaments, adopted the easiest and most logical arrangement, and closed every sentence and every paragraph with a climax, might be a very perfect bit of mosaic, but would want the glow and movement of a living mind. Monotony would settle on it like a paralysing frost. A series of sentences in which every phrase was a distinct thought, would no more serve as pabulum for the mind, than portable soup freed from all the fibrous tissues of meat and vegetable would serve as food for the body. Animals perish from hunger in the presence of pure alb.u.men; and minds would lapse into idiocy in the presence of unadulterated thought. But without invoking extreme cases, let us simply remember the psychological fact that it is as easy for sentences to be too compact as for food to be too concentrated; and that many a happy negligence, which to microscopic criticism may appear defective, will be the means of giving clearness and grace to a style. Of course the indolent indulgence in this laxity robs style of all grace and power. But monotony in the structure of sentences, monotony of cadence, monotony of climax, monotony anywhere, necessarily defeats the very aim and end of style; it calls attention to the manner; it blunts the sensibilities; it renders excellences odious.

"Beauty deprived of its proper foils and adjuncts ceases to be enjoyed as beauty, just as light deprived of all shadow ceases to be enjoyed as light. A white canvas cannot produce an effect of sunshine; the painter must darken it in some places before he can make it look luminous in others; nor can the uninterrupted succession of beauty produce the true effect of beauty; it must be foiled by inferiority before its own power can be developed. Nature has for the most part mingled her inferior and n.o.ble elements as she mingles sunshine with shade, giving due influence to both. The truly high and beautiful art of Angelico is continually refreshed and strengthened by his frank portraiture of the most ordinary features of his brother monks, of the recorded peculiarities of ungainly sanct.i.ty; but the modern German and Raphaelesque schools lose all honour and n.o.bleness in barber-like admiration of handsome faces, and have in fact no real faith except in straight noses and curled hair. Paul Veronese opposes the dwarf to the soldier, and the negress to the queen; Shakspeare places Caliban beside Miranda, and Autolycus beside Perdita; but the vulgar idealist withdraws his beauty to the safety of the saloon, and his innocence to the seclusion of the cloister; he pretends that he does this in delicacy of choice and purity of sentiment, while in truth he has neither courage to front the monster nor wit enough to furnish the knave.'' [Ruskin].

And how is Variety to be secured? The plan is simple, but like many other simple plans, is not without difficulty. It is for the writer to obey the great cardinal principle of Sincerity, and be brave enough to express himself in his own way, following the mood of his own mind, rather than endeavouring to catch the accents of another, or to adapt himself to some standard of taste. No man really thinks and feels monotonously. If he is monotonous in his manner of setting forth his thoughts and feelings, that is either because he has not learned the art of writing, or because he is more or less consciously imitating the manner of others. The subtle play of thought will give movement and life to his style if he do not clog it with critical superst.i.tions. I do not say that it will give him grace and power; I do not say that relying on perfect sincerity will make him a fine writer, because sincerity will not give talent; but I say that sincerity will give him all the power that is possible to him, and will secure him the inestimable excellence of Variety.

EDITOR.