Clarence B Kelland - "Youth Challenges"

Ernst Haeckel - "The Evolution of Man, V.2"

Mrs. Everard Cotes - "The Story of Sonny Sahib"

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - "The House of Life"

Style

W >> Walter Raleigh >> Style





Idiota, insulsus, tristis, turpis, abesto.


The poet seems to be soliloquising because he is addressing
himself, with the most entire confidence, to a small company of his
friends, who may even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be the
creatures of his imagination. Real or imaginary, they are taken by
him for his equals; he expects from them a quick intelligence and a
perfect sympathy, which may enable him to despise all concealment.
He never preaches to them, nor scolds, nor enforces the obvious.
Content that what he has spoken he has spoken, he places a
magnificent trust on a single expression. He neither explains, nor
falters, nor repents; he introduces his work with no preface, and
cumbers it with no notes. He will not lower nor raise his voice
for the sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble
across his entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the
tribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the
likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to a companion
pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers and judges, if they
will, of his achievement. Sometimes they come late.

This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour and self-respect, is
unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand by intimacy mutual
concession to a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal with
masks, that when they see a face they are shocked as by some
grotesque. Now a poet, like Montaigne's naked philosopher, is all
face; and the bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics is the
greater. Wherever he attracts general attention he cannot but be
misunderstood. The generality of modern men and women who pretend
to literature are not hypocrites, or they might go near to divine
him,--for hypocrisy, though rooted in cowardice, demands for its
flourishing a clear intellectual atmosphere, a definite aim, and a
certain detachment of the directing mind. But they are habituated
to trim themselves by the cloudy mirror of opinion, and will mince
and temporise, as if for an invisible audience, even in their
bedrooms. Their masks have, for the most part, grown to their
faces, so that, except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it
is hardly themselves that they express. The apparition of a poet
disquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, and
apologises to no idols. His candour frightens them: they avert
their eyes from it; or they treat it as a licensed whim; or, with a
sudden gleam of insight, and apprehension of what this means for
them and theirs, they scream aloud for fear. A modern instance may
be found in the angry protestations launched against Rossetti's
Sonnets, at the time of their first appearance, by a writer who has
since matched himself very exactly with an audience of his own
kind. A stranger freak of burgess criticism is everyday fare in
the odd world peopled by the biographers of Robert Burns. The
nature of Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it could
hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors out of three would call
him brother. But he lit up the whole of that nature by his
marvellous genius for expression, and grave personages have been
occupied ever since in discussing the dualism of his character, and
professing to find some dark mystery in the existence of this,
that, or the other trait--a love of pleasure, a hatred of shams, a
deep sense of religion. It is common human nature, after all, that
is the mystery, but they seem never to have met with it, and treat
it as if it were the poet's eccentricity. They are all agog to
worship him, and when they have made an image of him in their own
likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactly hits their
taste, they break into noisy lamentation over the discovery that
the original was human, and had feet of clay. They deem "Mary in
Heaven" so admirable that they could find it in their hearts to
regret that she was ever on earth. This sort of admirers
constantly refuses to bear a part in any human relationship; they
ask to be fawned on, or trodden on, by the poet while he is in
life; when he is dead they make of him a candidate for godship, and
heckle him. It is a misfortune not wholly without its
compensations that most great poets are dead before they are
popular.

If great and original literary artists--here grouped together under
the title of poets--will not enter into transactions with their
audience, there is no lack of authors who will. These are not
necessarily charlatans; they may have by nature a ready sympathy
with the grossness of the public taste, and thus take pleasure in
studying to gratify it. But man loses not a little of himself in
crowds, and some degradation there must be where the one adapts
himself to the many. The British public is not seen at its best
when it is enjoying a holiday in a foreign country, nor when it is
making excursions into the realm of imaginative literature: those
who cater for it in these matters must either study its tastes or
share them. Many readers bring the worst of themselves to a novel;
they want lazy relaxation, or support for their nonsense, or escape
from their creditors, or a free field for emotions that they dare
not indulge in life. The reward of an author who meets them half-
way in these respects, who neither puzzles nor distresses them, who
asks nothing from them, but compliments them on their great
possessions and sends them away rejoicing, is a full measure of
acceptance, and editions unto seventy times seven.

The evils caused by the influence of the audience on the writer are
many. First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the
characteristic vices of the charlatan--to wit, sheer timidity and
weakness. There is a kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man
when he takes pen in hand to address an unknown body of hearers, no
less than when he stands up to deliver himself to a sea of
expectant faces. This is the true panic fear, that walks at mid-
day, and unmans those whom it visits. Hence come reservations,
qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering courage,
which apes progress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with their
feet. The writing produced under these auspices is of no greater
moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient. All
self-expression is a challenge thrown down to the world, to be
taken up by whoso will; and the spirit of timidity, when it touches
a man, suborns him with the reminder that he holds his life and
goods by the sufferance of his fellows. Thereupon he begins to
doubt whether it is worth while to court a verdict of so grave
possibilities, or to risk offending a judge--whose customary
geniality is merely the outcome of a fixed habit of inattention.
In doubt whether to speak or keep silence, he takes a middle
course, and while purporting to speak for himself, is careful to
lay stress only on the points whereon all are agreed, to enlarge
eloquently on the doubtfulness of things, and to give to words the
very least meaning that they will carry. Such a procedure, which
glides over essentials, and handles truisms or trivialities with a
fervour of conviction, has its functions in practice. It will win
for a politician the coveted and deserved repute of a "safe" man--
safe, even though the cause perish. Pleaders and advocates are
sometimes driven into it, because to use vigorous, clean, crisp
English in addressing an ordinary jury or committee is like
flourishing a sword in a drawing-room: it will lose the case.
Where the weakest are to be convinced speech must stoop: a full
consideration of the velleities and uncertainties, a little bombast
to elevate the feelings without committing the judgment, some vague
effusion of sentiment, an inapposite blandness, a meaningless
rodomontade--these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style
that is a willing slave to its audience. The like is true of those
documents--petitions, resolutions, congratulatory addresses, and so
forth--that are written to be signed by a multitude of names.
Public occasions of this kind, where all and sundry are to be
satisfied, have given rise to a new parliamentary dialect, which
has nothing of the freshness of individual emotion, is powerless to
deal with realities, and lacks all resonance, vitality, and nerve.
There is no cure for this, where the feelings and opinions of a
crowd are to be expressed. But where indecision is the ruling
passion of the individual, he may cease to write. Popularity was
never yet the prize of those whose only care is to avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popular favour are
by the twin gates of laughter and tears. Pathos knits the soul and
braces the nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies the
sympathies; the counterfeits of these qualities work the opposite
effects. It is comparatively easy to appeal to passive emotions,
to play upon the melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to
encourage the narrow mind to dispense a patron's laughter from the
vantage-ground of its own small preconceptions. Our annual crop of
sentimentalists and mirth-makers supplies the reading public with
food. Tragedy, which brings the naked soul face to face with the
austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns the light inward and
dissipates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem, have long
since given way on the public stage to the flattery of Melodrama,
under many names. In the books he reads and in the plays he sees
the average man recognises himself in the hero, and vociferates his
approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century
was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied
delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of
feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantial grief. The real
Princess of Hans Andersen's story, who passed a miserable night
because there was a small bean concealed beneath the twenty eider-
down beds on which she slept, might stand for a type of the
aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these ridiculous
susceptibilities. The modern sentimentalist works in a coarser
material. That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among the
emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the
ally of the unpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler
and more useful device. By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled
to gratify the prurience of his public and to raise them in their
own muddy conceit at one and the same time. The plea serves well
with those artless readers who have been accustomed to consider the
moral of a story as something separable from imagination,
expression, and style--a quality, it may be, inherent in the plot,
or a kind of appendix, exercising a retrospective power of
jurisdiction and absolution over the extravagances of the piece to
which it is affixed. Let virtue be rewarded, and they are content
though it should never be vitally imagined or portrayed. If their
eyes were opened they might cry with Brutus--"O miserable Virtue!
Thou art but a phrase, and I have followed thee as though thou wert
a reality."

It is in quite another kind, however, that the modern purveyor of
sentiment exercises his most characteristic talent. There are
certain real and deeply-rooted feelings, common to humanity,
concerning which, in their normal operation, a grave reticence is
natural. They are universal in their appeal, men would be ashamed
not to feel them, and it is no small part of the business of life
to keep them under strict control. Here is the sentimental
hucksters most valued opportunity. He tears these primary
instincts from the wholesome privacy that shelters them in life,
and cries them up from his booth in the market-place. The
elemental forces of human life, which beget shyness in children,
and touch the spirits of the wise to solemn acquiescence, awaken
him to noisier declamation. He patronises the stern laws of love
and pity, hawking them like indulgences, cheapening and commanding
them like the medicines of a mountebank. The censure of his
critics he impudently meets by pointing to his wares: are not some
of the most sacred properties of humanity--sympathy with suffering,
family affection, filial devotion, and the rest--displayed upon his
stall? Not thus shall he evade the charges brought against him.
It is the sensual side of the tender emotions that he exploits for
the comfort of the million. All the intricacies which life offers
to the will and the intellect he lards and obliterates by the
timely effusion of tearful sentiment. His humanitarianism is a
more popular, as it is an easier, ideal than humanity--it asks no
expense of thought. There is a scanty public in England for
tragedy or for comedy: the characters and situations handled by
the sentimentalist might perchance furnish comedy with a theme; but
he stilts them for a tragic performance, and they tumble into
watery bathos, where a numerous public awaits them.

A similar degradation of the intellectual elements that are present
in all good literature is practised by those whose single aim is to
provoke laughter. In much of our so-called comic writing a
superabundance of boisterous animal spirits, restrained from more
practical expression by the ordinances of civil society, finds
outlet and relief. The grimaces and caperings of buffoonery, the
gymnastics of the punster and the parodist, the revels of pure
nonsense may be, at their best, a refreshment and delight, but they
are not comedy, and have proved in effect not a little hostile to
the existence of comedy. The prevalence of jokers, moreover,
spoils the game of humour; the sputter and sparkle of their made
jokes interferes with that luminous contemplation of the
incongruities of life and the universe which is humour's essence.
All that is ludicrous depends on some disproportion: Comedy judges
the actual world by contrasting it with an ideal of sound sense,
Humour reveals it in its true dimensions by turning on it the light
of imagination and poetry. The perception of these incongruities,
which are eternal, demands some expense of intellect; a cheaper
amusement may be enjoyed by him who is content to take his stand on
his own habits and prejudices and to laugh at all that does not
square with them. This was the method of the age which, in the
abysmal profound of waggery, engendered that portentous birth, the
comic paper. Foreigners, it is said, do not laugh at the wit of
these journals, and no wonder, for only a minute study of the
customs and preoccupations of certain sections of English society
could enable them to understand the point of view. From time to
time one or another of the writers who are called upon for their
weekly tale of jokes seems struggling upward to the free domain of
Comedy; but in vain, his public holds him down, and compels him to
laugh in chains. Some day, perchance, a literary historian, filled
with the spirit of Cervantes or of Moliere, will give account of
the Victorian era, and, not disdaining small things, will draw a
picture of the society which inspired and controlled so resolute a
jocularity. Then, at last, will the spirit of Comedy recognise
that these were indeed what they claimed to be--comic papers.

"The style is the man;" but the social and rhetorical influences
adulterate and debase it, until not one man in a thousand achieves
his birthright, or claims his second self. The fire of the soul
burns all too feebly, and warms itself by the reflected heat from
the society around it. We give back words of tepid greeting,
without improvement. We talk to our fellows in the phrases we
learn from them, which come to mean less and less as they grow worn
with use. Then we exaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon
epithet in the endeavour to get a little warmth out of the
smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of our everyday demeanour is
open and shameless, we callously anticipate objections founded on
the well-known vacuity of our seeming emotions, and assure our
friends that we are "truly" grieved or "sincerely" rejoiced at
their hap--as if joy or grief that really exists were some rare and
precious brand of joy or grief. In its trivial conversational uses
so simple and pure a thing as joy becomes a sandwich-man--humanity
degraded to an advertisement. The poor dejected word shuffles
along through the mud in the service of the sleek trader who
employs it, and not until it meets with a poet is it rehabilitated
and restored to dignity.

This is no indictment of society, which came into being before
literature, and, in all the distraction of its multifarious
concerns, can hardly keep a school for Style. It is rather a
demonstration of the necessity, amid the wealthy disorder of modern
civilisation, for poetic diction. One of the hardest of a poet's
tasks is the search for his vocabulary. Perhaps in some idyllic
pasture-land of Utopia there may have flourished a state where
division of labour was unknown, where community of ideas, as well
as of property, was absolute, and where the language of every day
ran clear into poetry without the need of a refining process. They
say that Caedmon was a cow-keeper: but the shepherds of Theocritus
and Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and Wordsworth himself,
in his boldest flights of theory, was forced to allow of selection.
Even by selection from among the chaos of implements that are in
daily use around him, a poet can barely equip himself with a choice
of words sufficient for his needs; he must have recourse to his
predecessors; and so it comes about that the poetry of the modern
world is a store-house of obsolete diction. The most surprising
characteristic of the right poetic diction, whether it draw its
vocabulary from near at hand, or avail itself of the far-fetched
inheritance preserved by the poets, is its matchless sincerity.
Something of extravagance there may be in those brilliant clusters
of romantic words that are everywhere found in the work of
Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Keats, but they are the natural leafage
and fruitage of a luxuriant imagination, which, lacking these,
could not attain to its full height. Only by the energy of the
arts can a voice be given to the subtleties and raptures of
emotional experience; ordinary social intercourse affords neither
opportunity nor means for this fervour of self-revelation. And if
the highest reach of poetry is often to be found in the use of
common colloquialisms, charged with the intensity of restrained
passion, this is not due to a greater sincerity of expression, but
to the strength derived from dramatic situation. Where speech
spends itself on its subject, drama stands idle; but where the
dramatic stress is at its greatest, three or four words may
enshrine all the passion of the moment. Romeo's apostrophe from
under the balcony -


O, speak again, bright Angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o'er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond'ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air -


though it breathe the soul of romance, must yield, for sheer
effect, to his later soliloquy, spoken when the news of Juliet's
death is brought to him,


Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.


And even the constellated glories of Paradise Lost are less moving
than the plain words wherein Samson forecasts his approaching end -


So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.


Here are simple words raised to a higher power and animated with a
purer intention than they carry in ordinary life. It is this
unfailing note of sincerity, eloquent or laconic, that has made
poetry the teacher of prose. Phrases which, to all seeming, might
have been hit on by the first comer, are often cut away from their
poetical context and robbed of their musical value that they may be
transferred to the service of prose. They bring with them, down to
the valley, a wafted sense of some region of higher thought and
purer feeling. They bear, perhaps, no marks of curious diction to
know them by. Whence comes the irresistible pathos of the lines -


I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me?


The thought, the diction, the syntax, might all occur in prose.
Yet when once the stamp of poetry has been put upon a cry that is
as old as humanity, prose desists from rivalry, and is content to
quote. Some of the greatest prose-writers have not disdained the
help of these borrowed graces for the crown of their fabric. In
this way De Quincey widens the imaginative range of his prose, and
sets back the limits assigned to prose diction. So too, Charles
Lamb, interweaving the stuff of experience with phrases quoted or
altered from the poets, illuminates both life and poetry, letting
his sympathetic humour play now on the warp of the texture, and now
on the woof. The style of Burke furnishes a still better example,
for the spontaneous evolution of his prose might be thought to
forbid the inclusion of borrowed fragments. Yet whenever he is
deeply stirred, memories of Virgil, Milton, or the English Bible
rise to his aid, almost as if strong emotion could express itself
in no other language. Even the poor invectives of political
controversy gain a measure of dignity from the skilful application
of some famous line; the touch of the poet's sincerity rests on
them for a moment, and seems to lend them an alien splendour. It
is like the blessing of a priest, invoked by the pious, or by the
worldly, for the good success of whatever business they have in
hand. Poetry has no temporal ends to serve, no livelihood to earn,
and is under no temptation to cog and lie: wherefore prose pays
respect to that loftier calling, and that more unblemished
sincerity.

Insincerity, on the other hand, is the commonest vice of style. It
is not to be avoided, except in the rarest cases, by those to whom
the written use of language is unfamiliar; so that a shepherd who
talks pithy, terse sense will be unable to express himself in a
letter without having recourse to the Ready Letter-writer--"This
comes hoping to find you well, as it also leaves me at present"--
and a soldier, without the excuse of ignorance, will describe a
successful advance as having been made against "a thick hail of
bullets." It permeates ordinary journalism, and all writing
produced under commercial pressure. It taints the work of the
young artist, caught by the romantic fever, who glories in the
wealth of vocabulary discovered to him by the poets, and seeks
often in vain for a thought stalwart enough to wear that glistering
armour. Hence it is that the masters of style have always had to
preach restraint, self-denial, austerity. His style is a man's
own; yet how hard it is to come by! It is a man's bride, to be won
by labours and agonies that bespeak a heroic lover. If he prove
unable to endure the trial, there are cheaper beauties, nearer
home, easy to be conquered, and faithless to their conqueror.
Taking up with them, he may attain a brief satisfaction, but he
will never redeem his quest.

As a body of practical rules, the negative precepts of asceticism
bring with them a certain chill. The page is dull; it is so easy
to lighten it with some flash of witty irrelevance: the argument
is long and tedious, why not relieve it by wandering into some of
those green enclosures that open alluring doors upon the wayside?
To roam at will, spring-heeled, high-hearted, and catching at all
good fortunes, is the ambition of the youth, ere yet he has subdued
himself to a destination. The principle of self-denial seems at
first sight a treason done to genius, which was always privileged
to be wilful. In this view literature is a fortuitous series of
happy thoughts and heaven-sent findings. But the end of that plan
is beggary. Sprightly talk about the first object that meets the
eye and the indulgence of vagabond habits soon degenerate to a
professional garrulity, a forced face of dismal cheer, and a
settled dislike of strenuous exercise. The economies and
abstinences of discipline promise a kinder fate than this. They
test and strengthen purpose, without which no great work comes into
being. They save the expenditure of energy on those pastimes and
diversions which lead no nearer to the goal. To reject the images
and arguments that proffer a casual assistance yet are not to be
brought under the perfect control of the main theme is difficult;
how should it be otherwise, for if they were not already dear to
the writer they would not have volunteered their aid.

It is the more difficult, in that to refuse the unfit is no warrant
of better help to come. But to accept them is to fall back for
good upon a makeshift, and to hazard the enterprise in a hubbub of
disorderly claims. No train of thought is strengthened by the
addition of those arguments that, like camp-followers, swell the
number and the noise, without bearing a part in the organisation.
The danger that comes in with the employment of figures of speech,
similes, and comparisons is greater still. The clearest of them
may be attended by some element of grotesque or paltry association,
so that while they illumine the subject they cannot truly be said
to illustrate it. The noblest, including those time-honoured
metaphors that draw their patent of nobility from war, love,
religion, or the chase, in proportion as they are strong and of a
vivid presence, are also domineering--apt to assume command of the
theme long after their proper work is done. So great is the
headstrong power of the finest metaphors, that an author may be
incommoded by one that does his business for him handsomely, as a
king may suffer the oppression of a powerful ally. When a lyric
begins with the splendid lines,

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