The craftsmanship of writing

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THE CRAFTSMANSHIP OF WRITING

THE

CRAFTSMANSHIP

OF WRITING

BY
FREDERIC TABER COOPER

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1920

/^JUjM.AU>r^

^f^^ 77

Copyright, 1910, igii
By DODD, mead & COMPANY

Ci7

TO

ARTHUR BARTLETT MAURICE

in recognition of long-standing and loyal friend

ship as well as of his special kindliness

towards this particular volume,

it is herewith cordially

inscribed

PREFACE

The present volume is the outgrowth of
a course in essay writing, offered two years
ago in connection with the University Ex-
tension work of Columbia University. It
embodies in part what the author then un-
dertook to teach his students, supplemented
by what the students quite unconsciously
taught the author. There was a class which,
taken collectively, offered much diversity of
scholarship, a wide range of preparation
for writing. Yet one and all of them pre-
sented practically the same sort of problem;
one and all said in effect : "I have had such
and such training ; I have worked hard and
willingly; yet my manuscripts do not sell.
What is the matter with my preparation?
What books should I read? What course
should I take?" And in a wider way, these
are the questions that are to-day being asked
throughout the length and breadth of this
continent. Now the purpose of this vol-
ume is to answer these questions, by point-
ing out that the fault is primarily with the

PREFACE

would-be authors themselves, and not with
their preparation. The best teaching they
can anywhere receive is at most a make-
shift, a mere starting point ; they must learn
to rely upon themselves, and the earlier the
better. The most that this book or any
other can do is to guide them away from
certain wrong paths and toward certain
right ones ; they must cultivate self-criticism,
industry, the art of taking infinite pains, the
habit of looking upon to-day's failures as
the stepping stones toward to-morrow's
success. The laurels of authorship are
worth the winning largely because there is
no primrose path leading to them.
New York: April 13, 191 1.

CONTENTS

CHAPTEB PAGB

I The Inborn Talent ... 3

II The Power of Self-Criticism 47

III The Author*s Purpose . . 79

IV The Technique of Form . . 115
V The Gospel of Infinite Pains 153

VI The Question of Clearness . 179

VII The Question of Style . . 209

VIII The Technique of Translat-
ing . ....... 243

I

THE INBORN TALENT

CHAPTER I

THE INBORN TALENT

It is always helpful, in writings possessing
even the mildest of text-book flavour, for
author and reader to start with a clear
mutual understanding of scope and pur-
pose. The best way in which to forestall
that aggrieved sense which a student often
feels of having derived no profit from a
certain book or article or lecture course, is
to say frankly, at the outset: ** Here, in
brief, is what we intend to do. If your
individual case falls outside these limits,
you will waste your time, since it belongs
upon the list of what we have no intention
of doing."

In the present volume of papers on The
Craftsmanship of Writing, the best and

C 3 ]

• • • • *

. : : ;; :'\ ;T^E INJBpRK TALENT

quickest way to reach this helpful under-
standing is to explain what first suggested
them, and what results it is hoped that they
will achieve. There has probably never
been a time when so large a number of men
and women, of all sorts and conditions,
have yielded to the lure of authorship —
and the elemental, naive and random ques-
tions that they often ask shows that there
has never been a time when so many were
in need of a word of friendly guidance.
And this is precisely what the present vol-
ume claims to give. It does not pretend to
point a royal road to literature — to fur-
nish a new philosopher's stone for trans-
muting ordinary citizens into famous poets
and novelists. It has no ambition to
create new authors — since authors worthy
of the name are born, not made — nor to
compete with the efforts of our college Eng-
lish Departments, our summer lecture
courses, our correspondence schools and

[ 4]

THE INBORN TALENT

literary agencies — for we have a surfeit
of these already. The aim of The Crafts-
manship of Writing is nothing more pre-
tentious than to help would-be writers to
reach a somewhat saner, more logical un-
derstanding of the real nature of the pro-
fession they are entering upon, both on its
technical and its artistic side; to discount
its delays and disappointments; and above
all, to learn to help themselves by intelli-
gent self-criticism. For it is a somewhat
curious fact that there is no other line of
intellectual work in which a man or a
woman may remain, through months and
years, so fundamentally ignorant of his or
her real worth.

Now the reason why a struggling au-
thor may waste years of misdirected ef-
fort, without knowing just how good or
bad his productions really are, is not dif-
ficult to explain. The sources of any
workman's knowledge of his worth are

[5 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

practically only three in number : the mar-
ket value of his ware; his own self-criti-
cism, and the opinions of others. Now
it is a common experience among young
authors to find through weary months that
their wares apparently have no market
value at all — this does away with the
first source of knowledge. Secondly, the
ability to criticise one's self in a detached,
impartial way is one of the rarest of hu-
man faculties — and not a bit less rare in
authors than in other people. Yet, un-
fortunately, it is upon his own judgment
that every young writer must very largely
depend. For there is probably no other
craft or employment in which it is so dif-
ficult to obtain a really authoritative opin-
ion ^ — for the excellent reason that in no
other craft or employment is there such
a lack of any general requirement, any
standard of apprenticeship. Indeed, It Is
often as hard to guess the potential powers
C 6]

THE INBORN TALENT

of a beginner in letters as to predict how a
raw recruit is likely to conduct himself
under fire. Let us, therefore, take up
separately these two questions: First, the
various kinds of critical opinion a young
author is able to obtain upon his writings ;
secondly, the nature and degree of system-
atic training it is possible for him to ac-
quire.

But first let us ask one more prelimi-
nary detail: where does the raw recruit
In the army of authorship mainly come
from? In other trades and professions
there is some sort of selective barrier: a
college degree, a regent's certificate, a
Civil Service examination, a Union Mem-
bership, some sort of initial guarantee of
fitness. Then, too, in many cases, there
is the prohibitive question of expense. It
costs both time and money to become a
lawyer or physician — even to go upon
the stage means nowadays a year or two
[ 7 ]

- THE INBORN TALENT

in a dramatic school, if one does not want
to start with a handicap. In contrast
writing seems so simple; pen and ink, a
pad of paper, a table in a quiet corner —
these to the uninitiated seem to be the net
amount of required capital. Frank Nor-
ris, in a burst of rather curious optimism,
once wrote, " The would-be novel writer
may determine between breakfast and
dinner to essay the plunge, buy ( for a few
cents) ink and paper between dinner and
supper, and have the novel under way
before bedtime. How much of an outlay
does his first marketable novel represent?
Practically nothing.'* Mr. Norris seems
for the moment to have forgotten that his
own first " marketable novel," McTeague
(although published subsequently to Mo-
ran of the Lady Letty) ^ represented care-
ful labour scattered over a period of four
years, and that a portion of it at least ne-
cessitated quite literally a further delay
[ 8 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

than that of ink and paper, being submitted
in part fulfillment of the requirements of
a course at Harvard University. La
Bruyere came considerably nearer the
truth when he cynically wrote, from a dif-
ferent angle:

A man starts upon a sudden, takes Pen, Ink
and Paper, and without ever having had a
thought of it before, resolves within himself to
write a Book; he has no Talent at writing, but
he wants fifty Guineas.

Now, as In every other attempt to ob-
tain a high rate of interest upon a small
investment, the results are extremely
precarious. The difference in this par-
ticular case of the beginner in literature
is that the fault lies less with the invest-
ment than with the Investor. Out of a
hundred beginners, taken at random, no
two have had the same sort or degree of
training, the same advantages of worldly
[ 9 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

knowledge, the same allotment of that
special fitness which It Is convenient to
speak of as the Inborn Talent. And It
would be most extraordinary If all of
them, or any considerable portion of
them should have. The field is open to
all comers, without prejudice of colour,
sex or age. And so we find competing
side by side, the university man, with
half a dozen letters after his name; the
young woman from some Western farm,
who thinks herself a second Mrs. Brown-
ing; the underpaid teacher, the starveling
minister, the physician with a dwindling
practice, who seek to eke out a meagre
income with an occasional magazine ar-
ticle; the society woman and the man of
leisure whose whim it is to see them-
selves in print; the suffragette, the sweet
girl graduate, the whole motley host
that, rightly or wrongly, believe them-
selves to have the Inborn Talent. Now,

[10]

THE INBORN TALENT

if these new writers seek advice — and
sooner or later they practically all of them
do — from whom can they seek it?
What avenues are open to them?

Some writers, of course, are more for-
tunately placed than others, in this re-
spect; but in practice it will be found that
the usual sources of criticism, whether fa-
vourable or hostile, narrow down to four:
I. The biassed opinions of interested
friends; II. The bought opinions of pro-
fessional advisers; III. The rejections or
acceptances of editors,, either with or with-
out comment; IV. The published criti-
cisms in the review departments of news-
papers and magazines. Now, as already
said, there is a certain degree of luck in all
four of these sources of criticism. Thus,
to take them up in order, the opinions of
the first class may not always be biassed.
A young author may have the good luck
to number among his friends or relatives

[II]

THE INBORN TALENT

one or more authors of big accomplish-
ment and fine discernment who may
serve the place of literary godfather, and
who in rare and wonderful Instances, such
as that of Flaubert and Maupassant, ac-
tuallse that Ideal form of apprenticeship
which all the arts enjoy save only that of
letters. Again, it sometimes happens
that a beginner Is fortunate enough to
choose for his adviser a professional
reader whose horizon happens to be wider
than that of the mere market value of lit-
erary ware, and whose suggestions stimu-
late the growth of his mentality as well
as of his bank account. And then again,
there are editors, who, in spite of the bur-
den they carry, are not always too busy
to send, with a rejected manuscript, a line
or two of welcome advice to a young au-
thor whom they see to be stumbling need-
lessly — or a few words of equally valued
praise to the be^nner whose first work

[12]

THE INBORN TALENT

shows, through all its crudeness, the un-
mistakable gleam of the Inborn Talent.
And as to the fourth class, that of the pro-
fessional critic, there are a good many
successful authors who freely admit the
debt they owe to him for many a frank
word of praise or censure in earlier years.
Indeed, this last source of outside help
ought to be the most disinterested and the
most useful of them all. That it is not,
is due to two simple and rather obvious
facts: first, that it cannot possibly reach
the novice in letters until he begins to get
his writings into print; secondly, that the
rank and file of reviewers think it their
duty to speak to the readers of books
rather than to the writers of them — to
tell the general public why they ought to
like or dislike a certain volume, instead of
telling the author in what particulars his
work was good and in what others it might
have been better.

[13]

THE INBORN TALENT

" I believe," says Sir Walter Besant, in
his Autobiography, " that one can count
on ten fingers the few critics whose judg-
ments are lessons of instruction to writ-
ers as well as readers/'

It is this dearth of real enlightenment
that makes so many first attempts —
whether poetry or prose, essays, stories
or special articles — sheer guess-work,
groplngs in the dark. Hundreds of first
manuscripts, and second and third manu-
scripts, too, are written with tremulous
hopes and fears, absurdly overvalued one
moment and blackly despaired of the next.
They start out on their travels, meekly sub-
mitted " at your usual rates," and soon
come homing back, with only the empty
civility of a printed slip to save them from
the waste-paper basket. That is a fair
statement of the average beginner's expe-
rience, is it not? And it is looked upon as
quite in the natural course of things, a

[H]

THE INBORN TALENT

special application of the economic law of
supply and demand. It places the young
author in the same category with every
other class of workman who goes around
peddling the produce of his handiwork.
And if that produce does not happen to
be wanted, there is no logical reason why
anyone should be required to buy it,
whether it be a sonnet or a sugared waffle.
In an essay entitled, V Argent dans la
Litterature, Zola writes, with customary
bluntness: "The State owes nothing to
young writers; the mere fact of having
written a few pages does not entitle them
to pose as martyrs, because no one will
print their work. A shoemaker who has
made his first pair of shoes does not
force the government to sell them for him.
It is the workman's place to dispose of his
work to the public. And if he can't do it,
if he is a nobody, he remains unknown
through his own fault, and quite justly so."

[15]

THE INBORN TALENT

Now it does no good to argue that there
is something radically wrong about the
present system. It is quite sufficient if we
frankly recognise that literature occupies
an anomalous position, and to seek for the
reason. The great advantage that the arts
and professions enjoy in theory over trade
and business is that they aim to produce
objects of such beauty or service of such
importance that the ordinary laws of mar-
ket value do not apply to them. Aside
from literature, there is no profession, ex-
cepting the closely allied one of the maga-
zine illustrator, which is subjected to a like
degree of precarious uncertainty. Archi-
tects, it is true, do occasionally enter plans
in a competition for some big public build-
ing— but this is an exception to the cus-
tom of their craft, a gamble which they
enter into voluntarily, fully prepared to be
cheerful losers. Young artists may re-
peatedly have their pictures refused admis-
[i6]

THE INBORN TALENT

sion to the annual Salons ; but at least they
have the comfort of knowing that there was
just one ground for such refusals, namely,
that the pictures were not sufficiently
good art. A doctor has some trouble
in getting his first case, a lawyer in getting
his first brief; but when oncie they have se-
cured respectively a client and a patient,
they count upon being regularly employed;
it is inconceivable that they should be dis-
missed with a printed notice that their
dismissal " does not imply a criticism of
their intrinsic merits." Even your corner
grocer, if you leave him without specified
reason and go to a competitor halfway
down the block, considers it a criticism,
and one that he has a right to resent.

As already implied, there is a very simple
reason why the man of letters stands in a
class apart. The artist and sculptor, the
lawyer and doctor, even the grocer and the
plumber, have all in their several ways

[17]

THE INBORN TALENT

served a long and relatively costly appren-
ticeship. They have, to put It colloqui-
ally, learned their job before they have
been allowed to practise for themselves.
Whether they will become distinguished In
their several callings or even demonstrate
an average skill remains to be proved.
But they start with a certain guaranteed
fund of foundation knowledge, a certain
preliminary craftsmanship. It Is conceiv-
able, of course, that a medical student
might in his first year, successfully treat
some simple case of croup or whooping-
cough. But that one achievement would
not give him sufficient self-assurance to
hang out his sign, even if the laws of his
State permitted such recklessness. Yet
when the merest tyro in writing happens
by some lucky hit to write a story good
enough to win acceptance, or even, let us
say, a story that has somehow won ac-
ceptance although not good enough, his
[18]

THE INBORN TALENT

pendulum of self-criticism swings to the
outmost verge of elation. He refuses
to entertain the possibility of further re-
jections. He begins to multiply the num-
ber of stories he can write a month by the
number of months In the year, and the
product again by the number of dollars on
his first cheque.

Of course, In a majority of cases, such
dreams are doomed to the same fate as in
the fable of the "Pot of Milk" — and
It is fortunate for the world at large, and
doubly fortunate for the young author that
this Is so. The truth is that In literature,
as in every other art, there Is no such
thing as a royal road to fame. Just be-
cause a writer Is free to hang out his
shingle, so to speak, at the very beginning,
it does not by any means follow that he is
permanently exempted from serving an
apprenticeship. And this fact Is the sole
excuse for dwelling at length upon so com-

[ 19 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

monplace a grievance as rejected manu-
scripts. Every young writer knows, of
course, that he faces repeated rejection;
but very few recognise that each manu-
script that comes back is part of their edu-
cation, a definite amount of the time and
effort which every apprentice Is expected to
pay.

The present writer well remembers his
own first attempts to write short stories,
while still a college undergraduate, and
his surprise and resentment when one by
one the magazines failed to appreciate
them. He grudged the labour spent upon
them ; he felt, in a vague sort of way, that
he had been defrauded. College themes,
curiously enough, rested on a different
basis. The time spent on them involved
no Irritation, although they were doomed
in advance to be still-born. The reason
for this difference was that the writer
recognised his college themes as part of

[20]

THE INBORN TALENT

the cost of preparation, and that he had
not yet learned that his rejected manu-
scripts were also part of that same prep-
aration — and by far the more important
part.

" The worst of all evils, for a begin-
ner," says Zola, in the above-mentioned
essay, "is to arrive and to succeed too
soon. He ought to know that behind
every solid reputation there He at least
twenty years of effort and of labour."

What each man or woman learns
from a rejection depends, of course,
upon the circumstances of the indi-
vidual case. It may teach nothing more
than the unwisdom of submitting a certain
type of story or article to one particular
magazine; or again, it may bring a salu-
tary awakening to the fact that what the
author fondly believed to be a master-
piece is, after all, a rather tawdry and
banal performance. But in any case, a

[ 21 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

setback is wholesome discipline if it makes
a writer ask himself seriously what is the
matter with his work — for it is better to
tear up half a dozen good manuscripts
than to let a single bad one find its way
into print. " As remediless as bad work
once put forward," Is a wise little simile
of Mr. Kipling's — you will find it in
The Light that Failed^ not far from the
point at which the two versions of that
story part company. It must, however, be
borne in mind that no sort of apprentice-
ship ever created genius — Its utmost
value is to develop technical skill. In
every art there are two indispensable quali-
ties — an Inborn Talent and a slowly and
painfully acquired technique — the only
difference, in the case of literature, bemg
that the technique must in the main be
self-taught. The Inborn Talent is, by its
very definition, a thing unteachable, al-
though it may be discovered, fostered and

[22]

THE INBORN TALENT

developed. It can no more be created by
teachers of rhetoric or grammar than a
singing-master can create a voice. But the
would-be singer has this big advantage
over the would-be writer, in that he can
easily find a teacher of authority who will
tell him in the course of a single interview
frankly and conclusively whether his case
is hopeless or not — while the young au-
thor has no chance of getting such an opin-
ion, and if he had would probably refuse
to credit it.

The result is that most new writers are
left to learn their value, slowly and pain-
fully, in the unsparing school of experience.
And the nature of the lesson is best grasped
by applying it to the analogous art of
painting. Suppose the young artist left
quite to himself, thrown wholly on his own
judgment, regarding subject and composi-
tion, colour, light and shade. He paints
and paints, picture after picture, with only

[23]

THE INBORN TALENT

his instinct to tell him whether they are
good or bad — and every now and then
someone having authority comes along and
blots them out with turpentine or a palette
knife, and with no word of explanation.
The young artist tries again, and still
again — and if he has the Inborn Talent,
it is conceivable that he may grow slowly
through his own efforts, helped only by
this purely destructive criticism, until he
achieves real greatness. As a matter of
fact, this is not the road over which the
great painters have travelled, but it is the
road by which the masters of literature
have attained their goal.

Now let us suppose, for the sake of
argument, that a young writer is in no
haste to see himself In print, that he would
be glad to have some sort of systematic in-
struction through a period of years, anal-
ogous to that of the other arts and crafts :
what possible avenues are open to him?

[24]

THE INBORN TALENT

The Inborn Talent, of course, cannot be
taught; but the technique of good writing
not only can be taught, but ought to be.
Yet at present, and I say this advisedly,
we have not a single well equipped school
of instruction in technique — nothing
which even pretends to do for writing
what the conservatories do for vocal and
instrumental music, and schools like the
Beaux Arts for painting and architecture.
The odd thing is that people have fallen
into the habit of thinking that we do pos-
sess such opportunities for Instruction.
Our schools and colleges and universities
are paying more attention than ever to
rhetoric and theme writing. Children
daily puzzle their parents with intricacies
of sentence diagrams and strange nomen-
clature of grammar undreamed of In an
earlier generation. And yet the average
city editor will tell you that the young col-
lege graduate has almost as much to un-

[25]

THE INBORN TALENT

learn as to learn before he becomes a use-
ful member of the staff. The late David
Graham Phillips, who heartily concurred
in this view of the value of college English,
was fond of telling the story of how and
why he lost his first newspaper position.
It was when he was fresh from his studies
at Princeton, that after a good deal of
persistence he obtained a position on a
leading western newspaper, to which he
offered his services free of salary. Al-
though It was mid-winter and the city
room was barn-like in temperature, he tells
how he used to sit at his desk with the per-
spiration of mental labour pouring from
his brow, while he struggled to make liter-
ature with a capital L from such material
as ** This afternoon John Smith, a house-
painter, fell off a ladder and broke his
arm." Mr. Phillips had held his unsal-
aried position for about ten days when the
higher power who presided over the

[26]

THE INBORN TALENT

paper's destinies happened to come through
the city room. "Who is that man?" he
asked, indicating Mr. Phillips. The city
editor explained. " Discharge him," came
the curt mandate. " But we are getting
him for nothing," protested the city editor.
" I don't care if he is paying for the privi-
lege," came the rejoinder; " discharge him
immediately! I can't bear to see any hu-
man being work so hard I "

The trouble is that in writing we have
confused the medium with the art ; we have
been content, a good deal of the time, to
teach language where we meant to teach
technique. Writing differs from the other
arts in this: that from earliest childhood,
its medium of expression has been more
or less familiar, more or less skilfully
employed. A child of five who cannot
put together simple sentences that express
his physical needs is considered mentally
deficient; whereas, if he can already whistle

[27]

THE INBORN TALENT

or sing a popular alf correctly his family
indicate the fact with pride; and if he can
draw a cow that really looks like a cow
-and not like an abnormal table endowed
with horns and tail, he is an infant prodigy.
But if we could conceive of a race of in-
telligent deaf mutes whose customary mode
of communication was a highly developed
picture language, then we might imagine
a manual skill of draughtsmanship acquired
from early childhood that would place the
medium of the painter on an equality with
that of the writer to-day.

Now in our schools and colleges, with
the best intentions in the world, what is
actually achieved goes very little beyond
an increased dexterity in the use of the
medium, language. Grammar and rhet-
oric, even the ability to say quite accu-
rately certain simple and obvious things, do
not make up the technique of good writ-
ing, any more than the ability to draw a

[ 28 ]

THE INBORN TALENT

circle or a straight line or to match colours
makes up the technique of good painting.
And even those few courses which the Eng-
lish departments of our larger universi-
ties have in recent years established for
the benefit of their graduate students —
courses in the structure of the short story
and the play and the novel — ^although
they are an encouraging step in the right
direction, are not either in kind or in de-
gree quite comparable to the practical
training that is open to students in every
other branch of art. The best instruction
in any craft or profession is a practical
training by someone who has already
proved himself a master of it. The in-
structors in our medical schools, our sem-
inaries, our schools of law, are nearly al-
ways men who have won their reputation in
the sick chamber, the pulpit, the court-
room. And this is the one logical source
of learning. Yet in authorship the chance

[29]

THE INBORN TALENT

of working directly under the guidance of
a master has, so far as I can recall, been
exemplified in practice on a large scale
only once in the history of letters — and
that was In the special brand of historical
romance tirelessly produced by the author
of Les Trois Mousquetaires and his ap-
prentices— ^satirically designated as Du-
mas et Cie, Fahrique de Romans. College
instruction in the art of writing is, with a
few brilliant exceptions, given by men who
are trained critics rather than creative
writers — men who know infinitely more
about taking a work to pieces than about
putting it together. Dissecting Is an impor-
tant part of class work In a course in bot-
any, but It does not help us to a knowledge
of how to grow a rose. And you will learn
more about building a cathedral by watch-
ing It go together, stone by stone, than by
seeing a gang of professional wreckers
dustily pulling it down.

[30]

THE INBORN TALENT

Are we to understand, then, someone
win ask, that the English courses in col-
leges and graduate schools are a waste
of time? Emphatically no, not by any
means, so long as we do not mistake the
nature of their help. So far as they go
they are of distinct value to a student with
ambition for authorship — valuable in the
same way that courses in literature and
foreign languages are valuable; but they
carry him no further in his technical train-
ing than college courses in biology or con-
stitutional history carry a student forward
in the practice of medicine or the law.

Professor A. S. Hill, whose English
courses are a pleasant memory to Harvard
men of the older generation, wrote pes-
simistically only a few years ago, in a little
volume entitled Our English:

Under the most favourable conditions, the
results of English composition as practiced in
college are, it must be confessed, discouraging.

[31]

THE INBORN TALENT

The shadow of generations of perfunctory writers
seems to rest upon the paper, and only here and
there is it broken by a ray of light from the
present. ... I know of no language —
ancient or modern, civilized or savage — so in-
sufficient for the purposes of language, so dreary
and inexpressive, as theme-language in the mass.

The practical question, then, Is : In the
absence of special training-schools what
advice should be given to a beginner?
Are there any lines of special study that
he may follow, any form of self-training
that he may put himself through? The
answer is: Yes, there Is the theoretical
help of text-books on technique, and there
is the practical training of journalism.
But It is well to remember, on the one
hand, that all the text-books ever written
on the English novel will not make a novels
ist, any more than Ruskln's Modern Paint'
ers, even though committed to memory,
would make a Mlllais or a Bouguereau.

[32]

THE INBORN TALENT

A newspaper training is a good, whole-
some tonic, especially as an antidote to
the stilted heaviness of the academic style.
It gives a certain fluency, a certain collo-
quial tone that makes for freedom. " To
the wholesome training of severe newspa-
per work when I was a very young man, I
constantly refer my first successes," was
Dickens's stereotyped reply to the questions
of American reporters.* And yet one hesi-

♦The late Edouard Rod declared himself even
more emphatically in favour of a newspaper training:
"Journalism is an excellent school: it stimulates slug-
gish minds, it disciplines roving imaginations, it
brings into direct contact with the public certain
writers who otherwise would have remained unknown
to the general public, and who during the process of
becoming known, learn reciprocally to know their
public. This is useful and healthy: because it is, af-
ter all, for others that we write. . . . The school
of journalism is exacting and wearisome, it is true;
but that is not an evil. Certain writers, they tell you,
in the slang of the editorial room, * write themselves
dry ; ' but it is only those who had nothing of im-
portance to lose."

[33]

THE INBORN TALENT

tates to recommend it with the same assur-
ance with which it was to be recommended
a quarter century ago. For if the younger
generation of American writers have any
one conspicuous fault in common, it is that
of too journalistic a style.

But there is one question which every
amateur writer should ask himself in ad-
vance of everything else, and that is:
Has he the Inborn Talent? Has he any
talent at all, anything worth the saying —
worth, that is, the trouble of learning to
say in the best possible manner? Has he
ideas ? — not mere raw material, in the
form of things seen and experiences lived
— but ideas about them that may be of
importance or interest to some portion of
the world at large. Let us ask this direct
question of every man and woman who
reads these pages: Have you taken any
pains to satisfy yourself that you possess
this Inborn Talent? If not, do so without

[343

THE INBORN TALENT

delay, before you scatter futile ink over
another sheet of wasted paper. And It
is not just a question of having or not
having the creative Instinct, but of hav-
ing it in sufficient degree to make Its de-
velopment really worth while. For the
Inborn Talent in a writer may be com-
pared to the grade of ore In a mine — the
question Is not simply whether there Is any
precious metal there at all, but whether it
is present In paying quantities. It is well
to find out, if you can, just how richly
your talent will assay, and then work it ac-
cordingly.

But, you may retort, how is any one to
find out whether he has talent? Who is
to be the judge? How can the author
himself or any one else know surely
whether repeated rejections through a
course of months mean hopeless medi-
ocrity or the handicap of crude methods
— whether Improvement Is a matter of

[35]

THE INBORN TALENT

being born again or merely of buckling
down and laboriously learning the job?
And just here, of course, lies the real diffi-
culty of making this advice practical.
No one can answer this first and most im-
portant question for you — no one, at
least, so authoritatively as to convince you
even against your will. But you yourself
can answer a few frank questions that will
go a long way toward enlightening you:
Why are you trying to write? What
preparations have you had that make you
believe you are qualified? How long ago
did you begin to try? What sort of en-
couragement have you so far received?
These are questions which no one else can
answer for you; for no two cases are pre-
cisely alike. But you cannot answer them
honestly without having a strong convic-
tion steal over you either that you have or
that you have not the Inborn Talent.
Do you write, for instance, as the born

C36]

THE INBORN TALENT

artist paints or the born musician plays,
because you feel a compelling necessity
for self-expression? Or do you write
as the house painter wields his brush or
the barrel-organ man turns his handle,
merely for the sake of the dollars or the
dimes? Have you strong prejudices In
regard to the kind of writing you are
ready to do ? Or are you willing to write
in any form, on any subject, from a sonnet
to a breakfast food advertisement? Most
of us at one time or another have found
ourselves under the temporary necessity of
doing something more or less in the nature
of " hack-work,'' work that not only meant
drudgery but that took us away from big-
ger, finer things. Yet it is not the willing-
ness to do " hack-work " and to do it
cheerfully and thoroughly, when the oc-
casion demands, that proves we lack the
Inborn Talent — it Is the failure to dis-
tinguish between what is " hack-work '*

[37]

THE INBORN TALENT

and what Is not; the spirit of indifference
which looks upon all kinds of writing in-
discriminately as a marketable produce,
that degrades authorship from a profes-
sion to a trade.

Or again, what has been your prepara-
tion, up to the time when you send off
your first essay or poem or story, stamps
enclosed, to take Its chances with some
editor? Does your real apprenticeship
begin now with Its toll of disappointments
and delays; manuscripts that grow soiled
and shabby and one by one are consigned
to the waste-basket? Or have you been
unconsciously apprenticed to literature
from early childhood, surrounded by an
atmosphere of books, absorbing, because
you could not help it, correct Ideas of form
and technique from the daily conversation
around you? Are you still In the first en-
thusiasm of youth with your views of life
still mainly rose-coloured dreams? Or

C38]

THE INBORN TALENT

have you spent the first thirty or forty
years of your life face to face with hard
realities, in the activities of business or of
travel and adventure — as a soldier of
fortune rather than man of letters ? It does
not follow that in the one case you have*
the inborn literary instinct and that in the
other you have not. Ruskin at the age of
five had already entered upon his appren-
ticeship. Before he had learned to write,
he had taught himself a makeshift method
of vertical printing with a pencil, and had
undertaken a story in three-volume form,
the name of which escapes the memory,
and really does not matter. The sig-
nificant thing about it is that this preco-
cious child of five was already so saturated
with the atmosphere of books, so familiar
with their form and make-up, that with
the imitative fidelity of his age, he added
to his own work a carefully compiled page
of errata. Sir Walter Besant, after hav-

[39]

THE INBORN TALENT

ing endured a six years' exile, occupying a
Colonial Professorship on the island of
Mauritius, records upon his return, "I be-
gan life again at the age of thirty-one ; my
capital was a pretty extensive knowledge
acquired by voracious and indiscriminate
reading."

Mr. Morgan Robertson, the writer of
sea stories, is a conspicuous example of a
man who for years had lived apart from
books, one decade before the mast, and
another as an expert diamond setter and
then suddenly surprised himself by reveal-
ing the Inborn Talent. But his is an ex-
ceptional case. There are a good many
men whose love of adventure has given
them a rich variety of experience, whose
early life has been spent in the danger-
places of the world. They are apt to
think that they possess the gift because
they have the material — and yet these
two things have practically nothing in

[40]

THE INBORN TALENT

common. It is not the material but
the instinct to use it in the right way
that makes the Inborn Talent. It is quite
a common experience to have men come
for advice who have spent years in queer,
out-of-the-way corners of the earth and
have had adventures rich in thrills and
shudders, such as would make Robinson
Crusoe or Treasure Island sound a little
tame; and almost invariably what they say
is this: "We have the material. Teach
us the technique ! " Yet in the majority of
cases even a knowledge of technique would
probably not make stories that they would
write sound otherwise than commonplace.
For it is one of the commonest things in the
world to find that men can live adventur-
ous lives without being really aware of it
in a big dramatic sense — that they can
pass through places of great danger,
inimitable strangeness, matchless beauty;
and yet when they come to write them

[41]

THE INBORN TALENT

down, they might just as well be describing
adventures in their own back yard.

The Inborn Talent, then, is something
distinct from thfe material of our experience
and the technical use we make of that ma-
terial. Just what it is proves rather baf-
fling to define. But at least it includes sev-
eral different elements: First, the art of
really seeing — the artist's eye, which
looks through and beyond the mere out-
ward material aspect and sees the vision
of some great, unpainted picture. Sec-
ondly, a fine instinct for the value of words
— a gift that is something quite different
from mere richness of vocabulary on the
one hand, and the possession of style, on the
other. Vocabulary may be increased at
will by patiently memorising a dictionary;
and style is a matter of cadence and sound
sequence — it is quite possible to write
rather sad trash in an impeccable style.
But a sense of the value of words, an in-

[42]

THE INBORN TALENT

stinct for finding, within the limits of our
spoken language, the precise word and
phrase that will as nearly as possible convey
a thought that is perhaps bigger or subtler
than any spoken words — this indeed
stamps the possessor as having the In-
born Talent. And lastly, it includes the
possession of ideas, as distinct from knowl-
edge. You may know a vast number of
useful facts, such as that a straight line is
the shortest distance between two points —
but such knowledge no more constitutes the
Inborn Talent than such a definition con-
stitutes literature. But ideas, big, vital
ideas, of the compelling sort that force
themselves into written words, in the face
of obstacles and disappointments and the
inertia of public indifference, are the very
essence of the creative spirit, the golden
hallmark of the Inborn Talent.

[43]

II

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

CHAPTER II

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

Let us assume, from this point onward,
that any would-be writer, whose eye hap-
pens to fall upon these pages, possesses in
some degree that quality which is inborn
and not made — the potential force of au-
thorship. The next all-important ques-
tion is, how is this inborn talent to be best
developed? What is the first faculty for
a young author to cultivate ? The answer
may be given with emphatic assurance:
TThe faculty of self-criticism. Yet a good
many teachers will answer differently; they
will tell you that in writing, as in every-
thing else that is worth doing well, the
one indispensable factor is perseverance,
industry, the tenacity that sticks to a task

[47]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

until that task is mastered. In a certain
sense the teachers who say this are right.
There is just one way of learning to do a
thing, and that is by doing it — doing it
over and over, until the trick of it is mas-
tered — and this holds just as true of the
trick of constructing a short story as of
that of kneading bread. But all the in-
dustry in the world will not take you far if
it is misdirected. No amount of wasted
flour and wasted energy will make a baker
of you, if you cannot tell good bread from
bad — and no amount of straining thought
and patient twisting and untwisting of the
threads of a plot will make a good short
story if you do not know the right twist
from the wrong.

For this reason, a young author who
has developed the power of self-criticism
enjoys a distinct advantage. He has
within him the ability to help himself as no
one else can help him. Others may tell

[ 48 ]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

him whether his work Is good or bad ; but
only the author himself Is in a position to
know just what he was trying to do and
how far short he has fallen of doing it. It
Is easy for a critic of broad sympathies and
keen discernment to point out a writer's
faults and to show how a specific piece of
bad writing may be worked over and im-
proved. But in a big, general way It may
be said boldly that no one can teach a
writer how to remedy his faults, no one
can provide a golden rule for his future
avoidance of them. Suppose, for Instance,
that an author's trouble is In plot construc-
tion. It may be easy to tell him where his
plot IS wrong and explain to him the prin-
ciple that he has violated. But If he Is
to obtain any real and lasting profit he
must find out for himself how to set the
trouble right. Of course, you might con-
struct the plot for him — but then It would
be your plot and not his ; you would be, not
[49]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

his teacher, but his collaborator; and his
working out of your plot would almost
surely result in bad work. Or suppose
again that his fault is one of style. You
may point out that his prose lacks rhythm,
that his language is pompous, or high-col-
oured, or vulgar. You may remedy spe-
cific paragraphs with a rigorous blue pencil;
but the writer must learn for himself how
to acquire an ear for rhythm or a sense of
good taste in word and phrase.

Unfortunately the power to judge one's
own work with the detachment and impar-
tiality of an outsider is so rare a quality
that we may seriously question whether any
author ever acquires it in an absolute sense.
Many writers of distinction have been to
the end of their lives notoriously unable
to discriminate l^etween their good work
and their bad. Wordsworth is a flagrant
case in point.* Mark Twain, in our own

♦Walter Pater, in Appreciations, says: "Nowhere

[50]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

generation, is another — or else the genius
that produced Tom Sawyer and Innocents
Abroad would never have allowed such
sorry stuff as Adaw/s Diary to don the dig-
nity of print. Other writers, even some of
the greatest, can get the proper outside
perspective of their work only by some sys-
tematic method, some mechanical device.
Balzac, for instance, needed the imperson-
ality of the printed page before he could
judge the value of his writings or do any
effective revision; it was only through re-
is there so perplexed a mixture as in Wordsworth's
own poetry, of work touched with intense and indi-
vidual power, with work of almost no character at all.
... Of all poets equally great he \^ould gain
most by a skilfully made anthology." And similarly
Lowell, in his essay entitled " Shakespeare Once
More:"

" His (Wordsworth's) poems are Egyptian sand-
wastes, with here and there an oasis of exquisite
greenery, a grand image Sphynx-Hke, half burled in
drifting commonplaces, or a solitary pillar of some
towering thought."

[51]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

peated sets of proof sheets that much of
his work slowly grew into final shape.*

Now this vital power of self-criticism,
which even great writers have, many of
them, developed slowly and painfully, is
at best rudimentary in the average begin-
ner. Every writer, whether he will or not,
puts a good deal of himself into his work;
and every amateur writer is inordinately
pleased with that part of his work which
he feels to be distinctive, that quality which
stamps It as his own. It may bristle with
mannerisms, as a hedgehog bristles with
spines — nevertheless it is the part dearest
to him, the part that he is slowest to recog-
nise as wrong. He cannot see himself as
others see him. How is this rudimentary
sense to be developed? First of all, it
would seem, by learning to criticise others.
Writing in this respect does not differ from

* See page 163.

[52]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

shoeing a horse or making a pair of trou-
sers. If you have not learned to judge
whether a horse is well shod or a pair of
trousers well cut, then you may go through
life without knowing the quality of your
own work as blacksmith or tailor. What
you must do is to go to blacksmiths and to
tailors of recognised skill and patiently
study their methods and their results until
you make yourself an expert on these sub-
jects— 'perhaps, even, until you discover
ways in which their work may be improved.
And the same rule holds good, If instead
of horseshoes and trousers you wish to learn
the craftsmanship of essay and sonnet.

Now, it IS far easier to say. Learn to
criticise others, than it is to tell how to
go to work to learn. But the first and
weightiest rule Is this: begin by reading
the best models in whatever line of work
you are desirous of taking up. Go to the

[53]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

fountain-head, read the books themselves,
don't read what someone else has written
about them — or if you do, at least make
such reading a secondary matter. If your
chosen field Is the short story, spend your
time In reading the recognised masterpieces
of Poe and Maupassant, Kipling and O.
Henry, In preference to the best text-book
ever written on short-story structure. If
your life work Is lyric poetry, then by all
means read lyrics, memorise lyrics, the best
you can find and the more the better. You
may get some help from critical studies,
but you will get vastly more from the
knowledge which you slowly and labori-
ously dig out for yourself. When some-
one once wrote to Matthew Arnold on be-
half of a young woman who thought that
she possessed the poetic gift and wished to
know If there was such a thing as a dic-
tionary of rhymes, he replied : " There is
a Rhyming Dictionary and there Is a book
[54]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

called a Guide to English Verse Compo-
sition* But all this IS sad lumber, and the
young lady had much better content herself
with imitating the metres she finds most
attract her in the poetry she reads. No-
body, I imagine, ever began to good pur-
pose in any other way.'* '^

It is rather surprising and extremely
suggestive to find how many of the world's
great writers were insatiable and omnivo-
rous readers in early youth. Pope records
that as a boy " I took to reading by myself,
for which I had a very great eagerness and
enthusiasm. ... I followed every-
where as my fancy led me, and was like
a boy gathering flowers in the fields and
woods just as they fell his way." Moore,
in his Life of Byron, gives a list which the
author of Childe Harold jotted down from
memory, of books read before he was
twenty * — a list so varied and extensive

* In the list referred to, the books are grouped under

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

as to make many a mature man of letters
of his day feel sadly delinquent. George
Eliot, at about the same age, writes to a
friend as follows: "My mind is an as-
semblage of disjointed specimens of his-
tory, ancient and modern, scraps of poetry
picked up from Shakespeare, Cowper,
Wordsworth and Milton; newspaper top-
ics; morsels of Addison and Bacon, Latin
verbs, geometry, entomology and chemis-
try; reviews and metaphysics.'' Theophile
Gautier is perhaps, the most extreme in-

the headings, History, Biography, Law, Philosophy,
Geography, Poetry, Eloquence, Divinity, and Miscel-
laneous, concluding with the following paragraph:
"All the books here enumerated I have taken down
from memory. I recollect reading them and can
quote passages from any mentioned. I have, of
course, omitted several in my catalogue, but the greater
part of the above I perused before the age of fifteen.
... I have also read (to my regret at present)
about four thousand novels, including the works of
Cervantes, Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, Mackenzie,
Sterne, Rabelais, Rousseau, etc."

[56]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

stance that can be cited. He learned to
read at the age of five. " And since that
time," he adds, " I may say, like Apelles,
Nulla dies sine linea.'' And his biogra-
pher, Maxime du Camp, says further;

This IS literally true; I do not think there,
ever existed a more indefatigable reader than
Gautier. Any book was good enough to satisfy
this tyrannical taste, that at times seemed to
degenerate into a mania. . . • He took
pleasure in the most mediocre novels, equally
with books of high philosophic conceptions, and
with works of pure science. He was devoured
with the thirst for learning, and he used to say,
" There is no conception so poor, no trash so de-
testable, that it does not teach something from
which one may profit." He would read diction-
aries, grammars, prospectuses, cook-books, alman-
acs. ... He had no sort of system about
his reading; whatever book came under his hand
he would open with a sort of mechanical move-
ment, nor lay it down again until he had turned
the closing page.

[57]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

Now there may be some disadvantages
in this sort of voracious and undisciplined
reading, In which many a famous author
has confessedly indulged. But at least it
tends toward forming an independent taste
and avoiding the slavish echoing of cut-
and-dried academic judgments. In an es-
say entitled " Is it Possible to Tell a Good
Book from a Bad One?" Mr. Augustine
Birrell remarks pertinently: "To admire
by tradition is a poor thing. Far better
really to admire Miss Gabblegoose's nov-
els than to pretend to admire Miss Aus-
ten's." There is nothing so deadening to
the critical faculty as the blind acceptance
of text-book and encyclopedic verdicts.
No critical estimate of any author, living
or dead, is ever quite final. As Anatole
France is fond of reminding us, even
Homeri has not been admired for precisely
the same reasons during any two consecu-
tive centuries. " The works that everyone

[58]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

admires are those that no one examines.
We receive them as a precious burden,
which we pass on to others without having
looked at them." And in much the same
vein, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once
wrote: " Nothing is interesting to all the
world. An author who is spoken of as
universally admired will find, if he is fool-
ish enough to inquire, that there are not
wanting intelligent persons who are indif-
ferent to him, nor yet those who have a
special emphatic dislike to him." Unless
you are devoid of literary taste, you must
find pleasure in a certain number of the
recognised masters; but you are under no
obligation to admire them all.* The abil-
ity to give an intelligent reason' for differ-
ing from the accepted estimate of Milton,

♦This is practically the thought of Thoreau, when
he wrote: " If the writers of the brazen age are most
suggestive to thee, confine thyself to them and leave
those of the Augustan age to dust and the bookworm."

[59]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

or Fielding, or Dickens, is not a bad test
of the possession of the critical gift. " A
man," says George Eliot, "who dares to
say that he finds an eminent classic feeble
here, extravagant there, and in general
overrated, may chance to give an opinion
which has some genuine discrimination in
it concerning a new worker or a living
thinker."

As a basis, then, for forming a sound
critical estimate of books, one needs : first,
a broad acquaintance with the best authors,
the wider and more catholic the better;
secondly, an open and independent mind.
If, beyond this, your taste happens to run
to a serious study of criticism, its history,
Its methods, its controversies, all this will
tend to strengthen your self-confidence and
sureness of touch. Yet, for the purpose of
craftsmanship, the principles on which to
judge a book are few and simple. You
are not required to dogmatise about the ul-

[60]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

timate value, In the universal scheme of
things, of the newest novel or the youngest
verse. As a craftsman you are interested
primarily in its possible present value to
you. Accordingly, there is just one way
in which to judge the books you read, the
new books equally with the old: and that
is, to ask yourself what was the author's
underlying purpose, what special means
he took to accomplish it, and whether or
not he attained his goal. The further
question, whether the thing was worth do-
ing at all, concerns the craftsman only in-
directly— just as the question whether a
cube and cone and pyramid are worth re-
producing in black and white need never
trouble the art student. If his purpose is
to draw a cube or a cone, then his one con-
cern is to find out how to do it in the best
possible way. The moral or ethical value
of a painting or a book Is not a' part of the
craftsmanship of art or of literature. The
[6i]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

one paramount question is always : What
did the author try to do, and how near did
he come to doing it? This form of criti-
cism, which seeks to classify books accord-
ing to the author^s purpose, is very nearly
what Mr. Howells had in mind when he
wrote :

It is hard for the critic to understand that it is
really his business to classify and analyse the
fruits of the human mind very much as the nat-
uralist classifies the objects of his study, rather
than to praise or blame them; that there is a
measure of the same absurdity In his trampling
on a poem, a novel or an essay that does not please
him as in a botanist grinding a plant underfoot
because he does not find it pretty. He does not
conceive that it is his business rather to identify
the species, and then explain how and where the
species Is Imperfect and irregular.

It has already been said that the young
writer can get comparatively small aid

[62]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

from volumes of criticism and mono-
graphs on how to write ; that he should go
to the authors who have produced litera-
ture rather than to those who tell others
how to produce it. There is, however, one
class of critical essay, the importance of
which, to the young writer, can hardly be
overrated; and that is the criticism written
by men who have proved themselves mas-
ters of the art they criticise. I have in
mind such essays as that of Poe, in which
he analyses the structure of The Raven;
Maupassant's introduction to Pierre et
Jean; and Valdes's introduction to La Her-
mana San Sulpicio; Trollope's chapter on
the novel in his Autobiography; and in
general the various critical writings of
Zola and Anatole France, Henry James
and William Dean Howells — the list
could be amplified at pleasure — in which
they allow themselves to theorise freely
about their conception of the art they prac-

[63]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

tise and the methods by which they strlv'e
to produce their results. Every page of
such criticism is in the nature of a crafts^
man's confessions — they are full of price-
less illumination.

Yet It cannot be too strongly insisted
that, In writing far more than in painting,
there Is a great deal that cannot be taught
and that you must think out for yourself.
One reason, undoubtedly, is that the crafts-
manship of letters is more elastic than that
of the other arts — there Is scope for a
greater freedom and originality. Henry
James, In The Art of Fiction, shrewdly
says: "The painter is able to teach the
rudiments of his practice, and it Is possible,
from the study of good work (granted the
aptitude) both to learn how to paint and
to learn how to write. Yet . . . the
literary artist would be obliged to say to
his pupil much more than the other, * Oh,
well, you must do It as you can.' " Again,

[643

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

there are some things which an author can-
not teach because he does not quite know
how or why he did a certain thing. Often-
times a novelist achieves some of his hap-
piest results unconsciously,* and by sheer in-
stinct; and then, again, a carefully planned
chapter or in some cases an entire vol-
ume fails of its effect, and the reason of the
failure eludes him.f These are the sort

♦Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, writing the chapter de-
scribing how Rawdon Crawley, released from the
sponging house, returns to his home to find Lord
Steyne in Becky's company and hurls the noble black-
guard to the ground, gives the final touch with
"Becky admired her husband, strong, brave and vic-
torious." After he had written these words the novel-
ist dropped his pen and brought his fist down on the
table. "By God! That's a stroke of genius!"

t Mr. Henry James's own confessions regarding The
Aivkivard Age, contained in the preface to the " New
York Edition," seems very much to the point: "That
I did, positively and seriously — ah, so seriously ! —
emulate the levity of Gyp and by the same token, of
that hardiest of flowers fostered in her school, M.
Henri Lavedan, is a contribution to the history of The

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

of questions which a young writer should
have constantly before him, in all his read-
ing : Why is a certain chapter tedious and
a certain other chapter tingling with an
almost painful suspense ? And did the au-
thor mean to achieve these results, or has
he simply failed in what he tried to do?
Take, for example, two passages from Kip-

Aivkivard Age that I shall obviously have had to
brace myself In order to make. . . . My private
inspiration had been in the Gyp plan (artfully dis-
simulated, for dear life, and applied with the very
subtlest consistency, but none the less kept in secret
view) ; yet I was to fail to make out in the event that
the book succeeded in producing the impression of any
plan on any person. No hint of that sort of success,
or of any critical perception at all in relation to the
business, has ever come my way. ... I had
meanwhile been absent in England, and it was not
until my return, some time later, that I had from my
publisher any news of our venture. But the news
then met at a stroke all my curiosity: *I am sorry to
say the book has done nothing- to speak of ; I've never
in all my experience seen one treated with more gen'
eral and complete disrespect.' "

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THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

ling; not perhaps the best we might find
for the purpose, but at least they are to the
point — the one conveying the sense of
dragging, monotonous hours, the other
that of tremendous speed, the conquest of
time and space. On the one hand we have
in The Light that Failed the unforgettable
picture of Dick sitting, day after day, in
his unending darkness, dumbly turning over
Maisie's letters, which he is never to read;
on the other, in Captains Courageous, we
see Harvey Cheyne's father speeding across
the breadth of the American continent,
goaded by an intolerable impatience to
reach the son, whom by a miracle the waves
have given back to him. Now, the first
case is flawless. The second, much praised
and often quoted, is off the key. That
private car of the elder Cheyne, " hum-
ming like a giant bee '' across mountain and
prairie, by the very sense of motion it con-
veys, robs us of a true perception of the

[67]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

way in which time seems to drag to the im-
patient man within it.

But above all, in your reading, do not
be content with studying the so-called
masterpieces of literature. It is wise to
know the Decameron and Don Quixote^
Richardson, and Smollett, and Sterne;
but the modern writer can no more de-
pen Jupon them as models than the modern
painter can depend upon Botticelli and
Ghirlandajo. A knowledge of Elisa-
bethan footgear, or of the relative artistic
value of the moccasin and the sabot, is of
little value to a modern shoemaker. What
he wants to know is how shoes, the best
sort of shoes, are made to-day, by the lat-
est methods. And it is precisely the same
with literature. There is no demand to-
day for a new Hamlet, a second Paradise
Lost, another Sir Roger de Coverley, or
even a Tom Jones, David Copperfield or
Vanity Fair, The technique of writing is
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THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

constantly in a state of transition; and
however much we may delight in the meth-
ods of a generation or a century ago, we
do not tolerate them at the hands of mod-
ern writers. Take for instance the modern
novel ; its form and structure — one might
almost say its spirit, too — have been rad-
ically changed from that of Thackeray
and Dickens. And it does not help us
nearly so much, as writers, to know which
of the two is the greater novelist, as to
understand in what respects Henry James
and Maupassant are better craftsmen than
either of them. Professor Woodberry, in
The Appreciation of Literature, insists
that, even for the general reader, "the
serious study of one's own literature is
most fruitfully begun by acquaintance with
those authors who are in vogue and nearly
contemporary." In the case of the would-
be writer it is not merely most fruitful,
but absolutely imperative, to keep abreast

C 69 ]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

of the best contemporary work that is done
in the field of his own labours. And by
** best work " I do not mean only such
books as seem likely to stand the test of
time, books that are unmistakably big in
theme, in purpose and in technical skill:
contemporary works of this class are so
few that the apprentice's lesson would be
soon ended. No, I go much further than
that and include all the new books which ex-
hibit even in some single direction, an en-
couraging tendency, the evidence of some
problem faced and solved, some interest-
ing innovation attempted. Above all, in
your reading, avoid that narrow provincial
spirit that limits your range to the works
of your own countrymen. The American
writer cannot afford to ignore what is be-
ing done in his own field by Englishmen.
And if he has the time and the gift of
languages he will be the broader and bet-
ter artist for keeping abreast of the best

[70]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

thought and best work of France and Ger-
many and Italy.

And in all your studies let the two great
essentials, reading and writing, go hand In
hand. Clarify your impressions by trans-
ferring them to paper. They may never
be of value to anyone else, but they will
be of inestimable service to you, as mile-
stones of your own progress. " Of late
years," wrote Trollope at the close of his
Autobiography, " I have found my greatest
pleasure in our old English dramatists, not
from excessive love of their work, but
from curiosity in searching their plots and
examining their character. If I live a few
years longer, I shall, I think, leave in my
copies of these dramatists, down to the
close of James I., written criticisms on
every play." In Zola's published Lettres
de Jeunesse, letters written between the
ages of twenty and twenty-two, the chief
interest centres in their testimony of the

[71]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

eagerness with which he devoured books,
the earnestness with which he thought
about them, and the enthusiasm with which
he poured out his opinions upon paper.
Through those rapid, immature and often
turgid pages one sees already the germs of
ideas that later came to fruition, the ori-
gin of many of his articles of literary faith.
And not so far removed was the method
by which an author of widely different
quality and creed learned his craftsman-
ship. This paragraph from Stevenson's
letters, though often quoted, will hurt no
one to read once again :

All through my boyhood and youth I was
known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler ;
and yet I was always busy on my private end,
which was to learn to write. I always kept two
books in my pocket, one to read, the other to
write in. As I walked, my mind was busy fitting
what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat
by the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil

[72]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

and a penny version-book would be in my hand,
to note down the features of the scene or com-
memorate some halting stanzas. . . . And
what I wrote was for no ulterior use; it was
written consciously for practice. ... I had
vowed that I would learn to write. That was
a proficiency that tempted me, and I practiced,
to acquire it, as a man learns to whittle, in a
wager with myself.

But in all your studies of other writers,
the living and the dead, cultivate independ-
ence. Never slavishly imitate. Take
what you find best from the technique of
each book you read and reject the rest.
Notice what qualities and what defects the
authors you read have in common and what
are their individual sins and virtues. In
learning your lesson from them, do not
be afraid of independence, so long as you
know the reason why. But as Miss Ellen
Terry remarks aptly, in her volume of au-
tobiography, before you are allowed to be

[73]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

eccentric you must have learned where the
centre is. Mistrust the extravagant indi-
vidualism of youth ; realise that there is no
virtue in being different, unless the dif-
ference produces some deliberately sought
result. To come down from your apart-
ment by the fire-escape will no doubt make
you conspicuous — but there is really no
point in doing so unless the elevator has
stopped running and the stairs ^ are on
fire. In writing we want some better and
more logical reason for eccentricity than a
mere peacock vanity, a desire to attract at-
tention. Where a literary form is well es-
tablished, do your share in maintaining it,
excepting when you have some excellent
reason for making a change. The chances
are that in doing a thing differently from
the established formula you will not do it
half so well. Only a madman would try
to write a sonnet in fifteen lines, just for
the sake of being different from others.

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THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

Yet George Meredith made use of a six-
teen-line form of verse In his Modern
Love, which Is often loosely spoken of as a
sonnet sequence — and he was justified in
doing so because he knew exactly why he
did It. The poem Is not merely a series of
separate and complete thoughts, connected
by a single thread, like pearls strung on the
same string, after the fashion of Shakes-
peare's sonnets, or the Sonnets from the
Portuguese. They form a continuous
piece of narrative, and for that reason the
extra two lines help the forward movement,
where the formal sestet of the sonnet
would have continually broken in with a
misplaced sense of finality. Many a rule
of rhetoric and prosody and technique may
be broken — provided always that you
have a reason that justifies you. The early
stories of Kipling fairly bristled with
strange phrases, words forced into new
partnerships, and what Mr. Gosse has

[75]

THE POWER OF SELF-CRITICISM

called " the noisy, newspaper bustle of his
little peremptory sentences." And yet,
more often than not, he justified himself,
because he knew so well what he was about
— and knew also that he was succeeding In
expressing his thoughts a little better than
they could have been expressed In any other
and more conventional way. So remem-
ber, in writing, to be Independent; on oc-
casion be even boldly innovative, so long
as you can be so intelligently.

[76]

Ill

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

CHAPTER III

THE author's purpose

At the moment of beginning this chapter,
which is to concern itself with The Au-
thor's Purpose, a memory comes back, very
clear and distinct, of a certain Sunday
many years ago, and of a rather prim old
lady who had been to hear an eccentric and
sensational preacher, and who came away
shaking her head and murmuring in scan-
dalised wonderment : " Why, he didn't
even give out a text! " Now, whether
the preacher really had dispensed with a
text or whether the bewildered old lady
had simply lost sight of it is immaterial;
what does matter is that in the sermon we
have at least one type of composition in
which there is a clearly understood conven-

[79]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

tion that the writer's purpose shall be de-
fined beyond all question, and at the very
start. In other literary forms, unfortu-
nately, the need of having a purpose is more
easily overlooked, because that purpose is
more or less disguised, instead of being em-
bodied in a specified chapter and verse.
Yet, the mere circumstance that the poet
and the novelist, for instance, differ from
the preacher In not having to announce In
advance the theme of their discourse does
not alter the fact that " Beauty is truth,
truth beauty," is the text of the Ode on a
Grecian Urn, and that Owen Wister's The
Virginian is an eloquent attempt to recon-
cile the New England conscience to the
rude ethics of Western justice.

Now, the average person who might be
very quick to note the omission of a Sunday
morning text will quite complacently read
a novel or a short story that does not pos-
sess even a rudimentary central idea with-

[80]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

out being aware that there is anything
wrong with it. But wait until someone
happens to ask such a reader what the book
he chances to be reading Is about. If the
answer is crisp and concise you may know
without reading it yourself that the book
has something In it that Is worth while ; if,
on the contrary, the answer comes uncer-
tainly and long-drawn out, something to
the effect that "It is about a man and a
girl and they are talking together and a
lot of things have happened," and so on In-
definitely, you may be pretty sure that the
book has no central idea at all.

Now the one way of bringing home to
a young writer the necessity of having a
definite purpose is to make him form the
habit of literary criticism which was urged
In the preceding chapter. After we have
once learned to ask ourselves regarding
each new poem or essay or novel that comes
our way: Did the author know what he
[8i]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

was trying to do and has he succeeded in
doing It? — then we are in a position to
know that the most exasperating of all
books is that which apparently has no cen-
tral idea, no definite purpose — the amor-
phous, jelly-fish type of book that can no
more be measured by a definite standard
than we can measure a puff of cigarette
smoke. And almost equally hopeless is the
book in which the author has confused his
purposes, leaving us vaguely guessing be-
tween several solutions ; or, again, the book
in which the author*s purpose and form are
hopelessly out of proportion — either a lit-
tle tupenny purpose, like a seed pearl bur-
ied in a gypsy setting; or else a great big
ethical principle squandered on a triolet,
like a Koh-i-noor set for a little finger-ring.
When we learn to recognise what bad work-
manship these fundamental faults produce
in others, then we are prepared to lay down
the following rules for our own work : that

[82]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

we will always begin with a clearly defined
purpose, single, not complex ; that this pur-
pose shall receive consistent development
from the first line of our work to the last ;
and that we shall strive for a nicely bal-
anced relationship between our central pur-
pose and the setting we have chosen for it.
It IS well, however, to understand at
the outset just what we mean by this
term, The Author's Purpose. It is used
in this chapter in a very broad and elas-
tic sense. It is something far broader
than a deliberate intention to teach a
lesson or to preach a creed — although
these of course are among the subdivisions
of the author's purpose. Perhaps the
most general, all-embracing definition that
may be given is to call it simply the thing
which the author has set his heart upon
saying, the one main idea that he must get
across to his audience, whether he succeeds
in saying anything else or not. It comes

[83]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

very near to being synonymous with the
germ idea, the nucleus or starting point of
the whole work — but for the fact that an
author's starting-point, the initial incident,
the intuitive flash or whatever it may be
that sets him moving along a particular
path, may in some special cases be alto-
gether lost to sight by the time he is ready
to write his opening sentence.

Now it makes no difference when or
where or how a writer stumbles upon the
idea which is to serve as his central pur-
pose. It may spring from his head at a mo-
ment's notice like Athena, full armoured — •
as was the case with the late Frank Norris,
who, as has often been told, came one morn-
ing to his publisher's office, pale and trem-
bling all over with excitement, and gasping
out, almost inarticulately, " IVe got a big
idea! A great big idea! The biggest
idea ever!" It was the outlined scheme
for his trilogy of the Epic of the Wheat — -■
[84]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

the trilogy which began with The Octopus
and The Pit, and which poor Norris did
not live to round out with The fVolf,^ Or,
again, the controlling purpose of a work
may not be born until the structure has
risen some distance toward completion and
the author suddenly discovers that he is
building better than he knew. But when
this happens he must look carefully to his

* Compare the account given by de Louvenjoul of
Balzac's first conception of the idea of bringing to-
gether under one title, La Comedie Humaine, all the
novels he had already published. He hutried to
the house of his sister, Mme. Surville, to announce
the great event. His sister beheld him enter the
parlor with his hat slightly tilted over one ear, his
chest thrust out, his walking stick held aloft, like the
staff of a drum-major, while from between his lips
came a martial " Boom, boora-de-de boom ! " and he
strode forward in cadenced solemnity, as if he were
actually at the head of a regiment. Reaching the
sofa where his sister sat, he suddenly came to a halt:
then in a tone that was at once grave and comical,
he said:

"Madam, salute a Genius!"

[85]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

foundations to see if they be stout enough
to bear the weight of the heavier structure.
Otherwise it would be better to tear it
down, stone from stone, and begin all over
again. No thumb rule can be given for
the discovery or manufacture of the Au-
thor's Purpose. If you find yourself com-
pelled to ask, like the little prince in Les
Rois En Exile, *^ Donnez moi des idees sur
les chosesy then you had better lay aside
your ambition to write.* But perhaps the

♦Interesting in this connection is Daudet's own
statement of the origin of Kings in Exile:

" Of all my books this {Kings in Exile) is unques-
tionably the one which I found most difficulty in
standing on its feet, the one which I carried longest
in my head in the stage of title and vague outline, as
it appeared to me one October evening on Place du
Carrousal, in the tragic rent in the Parisian sky caused
by the fall of the Tuileries.

"Dethroned princes exiling themselves in Paris af-
ter their downfall, taking up their quarters on Rue de
Rivoli, and when they woke in the morning and raised
the shades at their windows, discovering those ruins —
such was the first vision of Kings in Exile."

[86]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

advice given by Thoreau is as good as any
that can be devised for stimulating a slug-
gish imagination:

It would be a true discipline for the writer to
take the least film of thought that floats in the
twilight sky of his mind for his theme, about
which he has scarcely one idea (that would be
teaching his ideas how to shoot), make a lec-
ture of this, by assiduity and attention get per-
chance two views of the same, increase a little
the stock of knowledge, clear a new field instead
of manuring the old.

The great trouble is that ideas, real ideas
such as are likely to be of any importance
or interest to a considerable number of peo-
ple, are not so plentiful as to be easily
found. They frequently represent well-
nigh half the battle in a literary achieve-
ment of any importance. It is always so
much easier to echo than to originate. One
thing is certain: the central idea will not
come at command; it must be patiently

[87]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

hoped for, watched for, struggled for; it
usually represents a good deal of hard
work and a good deal of discouragement.
Gibbon, as the whole world knows, re-
ceived his inspiration for his monumental
history one evening in Rome, as he sat mus-
ing among the ruins of the Capitol, while
the barefooted friars were singing vespers
in the Temple of Jupiter. Yet he records,
regarding the subsequent writing of his
history: ^

At the outset, all was dark and doubtful ; even
the title of the work, the true era of the Decline
and Fall of the Empire, the limits of the intro-
duction, the division of the chapters, and the order
of the narrative; and I was often tempted to
cast away the labour of seven years.

The uncertainty, the false start, the
work which must be begun anew and on a
different plan, have all been rather elo-
quently generalised by Mr. Henry James
in his preface to The Awkward Age:
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THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

When I think of my many false measurements
that have resulted, after much anguish, in decent
symmetries, I find the whole case a theme for
the philosopher. The little ideas one wouldn't
have treated save for the design of keeping them
small, the developed situation that one would
never with malice prepense have undertaken, the
long stories that had thoroughly meant to be
short, the short subjects that had underhandedly
plotted to be long, the hypocrisy of modest be-
ginnings, the audacity of misplaced middles, the
triumph of intentions never entertained — with
these patches, as I look about, I see my experience
paved: an experience to which nothing is want-
ing save some grasp of its final lesson.

Occasionally it may happen that the
central idea comes in a sort of miraculous
flash, an Inspiration, a dream, such as was
the case with Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and
Mr, Hyde: " In the small hours of one
morning," says Mrs. Stevenson, " I was
awakened by cries of horror from Louis.

[89]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

Thinking he had a nightmare, I awakened
him. He said angrily, * Why did you wake
me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale.'
I had awakened him at the first transfor-
mation scene." So clearly did Stevenson
have his germ idea in mind that the tale
was written off in all the white heat of in-
spiration; yet it is recorded that that first
draft had to be destroyed and the work be-
gun anew, because the original plan lacked
what we now think of as the underlying
idea of the whole story, namely, the dual
nature of the hero. In Stevenson's first
conception Dr. Jekyll was equally bad at
heart in both his natural and his acquired
form.

Now it is quite true that the author's
purpose, as a question of craftsmanship,
concerns no one but himself; but there is
one important reservation. The author's
purpose must be suited to the literary form
in which he chooses to work. He must

[90]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE .

decide In advance whether he means to be
a preacher or an artist; for he cannot suc-
cessfully be both. If he Is a born fighter
and his chosen weapons are words, It makes
no difference which side of a controversy
he espouses; he may fight for Whigs or
Tories, slavery or emancipation, Christian
Science or the Church of Rome — but to
succeed he must put the whole vigour of
his personality into it. Polemics can never
be successfully made a matter of art for
art's sake. On the other hand, In pure lit-
erature, whatever private feelings an au-
thor may have, whatever bias he may let
us guess at, he has no business to Intrude It
deliberately Into his written text. Mr.
Frederic Harrison In his Memories and
Thoughts has expressed this same Impor-
tant truth In a way that makes for remem-
brance :

Mark Pattlson, of Oxford, used to say to a
pupil who happens now to be both a brilliant

[91]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

writer and a leading statesman : " My good
friend, you are not the stuff of which men of
letters are made. You want to make people do
something or you want to teach something.
That IS fatal to pure literature."

Once or twice in my life I have taken up the
pen in a vein of literary exercise, as a man turns
to a game of billiards or to gardening after his
day's work. But the demon soon arises and I
find myself in earnest, trying to bring men over
to one side. It is hopeless to make a man of
letters out of a temper like that. Literature is
art, and the artist should never preach.*

♦And Lord Macaulay, writing of poetry in his
Essay on Milton, comes curiously near saying the same
thing in slightly different words:

" Analysis is not the business of the poet. His office
is to portray, not to dissect. His creed . . . will
no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than
the notions which a painter may have conceived re-
specting the lachrymal glands or the circulation of
the blood will aflFect the tears of his Niobe or the
blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a
book on the motives of human actions, it is by no
means certain that it would have been a good one."

[92]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

And similarly Marion Crawford in his
little monograph on The Novel: What It
Is, writes as follows:

In art of all kinds the moral lesson is a mis-
take. It is one thing to exhibit an ideal worthy
to be imitated, though inimitable in all its per-
fection, but so clearly noble as to appeal directly
to the sympathetic string that hangs untuned in
the dullest heart; to make man brave without
arrogance, woman pure without prudishness, love
enduring yet earthly, not angelic, friendship sin-
cere but not ridiculous. It is quite another mat-
ter to write a " guide to morality," or a " hand-
book for practical sinners " and call either one
a novel, no matter how much fiction it may con-
tain. Wordsworth tried the moral lesson and
spoiled some of his best work with botany and
the Bible.

It is the disregard of this important ax-
iom of literature that has produced that
hybrid monstrosity, the so-called Novel-
with-a-Purpose. Of all the purposes which

[93]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

by any chance may actuate a writer the
most mistaken purpose and the one most
destructive to good art is that of forcibly
bringing people over to think as he does
by a deliberate and conscienceless distor-
tion of life as we see it around us. There
was not merely a degree of grotesqueness
in the old-fashioned Sunday-school story
of the good little boy who had plum pud-
ding and the bad little boy who went fish-
ing and was drowned. There was an im-
morality about it as well, the immorality
that always attaches to a deliberate perver-
sion of our experiences of life. And the
same immorality attaches to any novelist
who takes upon himself the privilege of the
Deity and says " Vengeance is mine," for-
getful of the fact that in this world at least
rewards and punishments of human acts
are meted out quite inexorably in accord-
ance with the laws of nature.

Having digressed to this extent upon

[94]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

the special subject of the purpose novel,
we must in fairness go a little further
in order to make clear a distinction
about which a good deal of confusion ex-
ists in the minds of many readers and writ-
ers. It may be defined as the distinction
between the Novel-with-a-Purpose, on the
one hand, and the Author-with-a-Purpose,
on the other. There is no logical reason
why an author should not have the strong-
est sort of prejudices, convictions, enthusi-
asms; only, he must not be trying to force
them down the reader's throat. He may
believe, like Harriet Beecher Stowe, that
slavery is a crime ; he may agree with Zola
that race suicide is a national menace. A
sincere belief of that sort is the surest guar-
antee of powerful workmanship, so long as
the author records only what he sees, so
long as he remembers that life itself is
the most potent teacher of its own les-
sons. But so soon as he becomes mistrust-

[95]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

ful or impatient of life and tries dishon-
estly to magnify the facts and distort sta-
tistics, then his book becomes a Novel-
with-a-Purpose, more potent to antagonise
than to convince. A good object lesson
on the distinction between the Novel-with-
a-Purpose and the Author-with-a-Purpose
is afforded by the Russians. Owing to
Russian censorship writers with strong
doctrines to preach found themselves
driven to the form of fiction as the only
vehicle in which the lessons they wished
to teach could reach the public. But they
were wise enough to recognise that the ex-
isting conditions around them, the condi-
tions they were most eager to correct,
would speak for themselves without any
perversion or interference In their part.
As Mr. Howells in My Literary Passions
forcefully puts it:

When I remembered the deliberate and impa-

[96]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

tient moralising of Thackeray, the clumsy ex-
egesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and
winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpeting and
limelighting of Dickens, and even the fine and
impotent analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a
joyful enthusiasm that I realised the great art
of Tourguenief . . . here was a master
who was apparently not trying to work out a plot,
who was not even trying to work out a char-
acter, but was standing aside from the whole
affair and letting the characters work the plot
out.

But whatever a writer's purpose may
be, and whatever type of literature he has
chosen in which to express it, he has got tq
do something more than Idly say to him-
self one fine day, " I think I will write (let
us say) a sonnet about a pearl, or a novel
about the beef trust," — and then on an-
other fine day formulates his first line or
his opening sentence without the slightest
idea what Is coming next or where he even-

[97]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

tually proposes to arrive. He must take
the time and trouble to sit down and work
out in detail just precisely what he is try-
ing to do and what is the best way of do-
ing it. It is not only in the department
of the drama that a scenario is indispen-
sable. Every piece of writing that aspires
to be anything more than ephemeral is as
much in need of a detailed ground plan as
a Gothic cathedral or a modern office
building. All beginners who cherish the
dangerous fallacy that a masterpiece of
prose or verse can be flung off in a white
heat of inspiration would do well to commit
to memory a large part of Poe's essay on
The Philosophy of Composition^ of which
the following are perhaps the most weighty
and apposite paragraphs:

Most writers, — poets in especial, — prefer to
have it understood that they compose by a species
of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition ; and would

[98]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

positively shudder at letting the public take a
peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacil-
lating conditions of thought, at the true pur-
poses seized only at the last moment, at the in-
numerable glimpses of ideas that arrived not at
the maturity of full viev^r, at the fully matured
fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable, at
the cautious selection and rejection, at the pain-
ful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at
the vrheels and pinions, the tackle of scene-shift-
ing, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's
feathers, the red paint and the black patches,
which in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred
constitute the properties of the literary histrio.

For my own part, I have neither sympathy
with the repugnance alluded to, nor at any
time the least difficulty in recalling to mind the
progressive steps of any of my compositions; and
since the interest of an analysis or reconstruc-
tion, such as I have considered a desideratum, is
quite independent of any real or fancied interest
in the things analysed, it will not be regarded
as a breach of decorum on my part to show the
modus operandi by which some one of my own

[99]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

works was put together. I select The Raven
as most generally known. It is my design to
render it manifest that no one point in its com-
position is referable either to accident or intuition ;
that the work proceeded step by step to its com-
pletion with the precision and rigid consequence
of a mathematical problem.

Poe, of course, is an extreme case. A
poem or a story that develops with the
rigid consequence of a mathematical prob-
lem is necessarily too artificial to pass as
a transcript from life. But a study of
Poe's analysis of The Raven — quite aside
from the question whether he actually
wrote the poem, as he says he did, or
merely succeeded in making himself think
he did so * — compels us to face, for our-

*Poe wrote the Raven, later the genesis of this
Raven. This — the after-stroke — American pleas-
antry, no doubt, but admired and emulated by our
young school. The devil of the thing is to find the
raven, the dry sob, the foreboding nevermore. — Daudet,
Notes from Life.

[lOO]

THE author;? ,reXP9?^^i}i'i i\

selves, In all our own work, the artistic
demand for unity of effect, simplicity of
means, singleness of purpose. Learn to
do as much as possible of the sheer drudg-
ery of composition at the start; every
hour spent In careful drafting should save
two in the actual writing. An extreme
case which none the less is a case In point,
is, contained In the following anecdote
given by Mr. A. E. Davidson In his Life
of Alexandre Dumas:

Dumas often declared that, when once he
had mapped out in his mind the scheme of a
novel or a play, the work was practically ac-
complished, since the mere writing of it pre-
sented no difficulty, and could be performed as
fast as the pen could travel. Someone begged
leave to dispute this assertion, and the result
was a wager. Dumas had at that time in his
head the plan of the Chevalier de Maison Rouge,
of which he had not yet written a word, and
he now made a bet of one hundred louis with

[lOl]

■; vfl^rKF/A^yXHOR'S PURPOSE

his sceptical friend that he would write the first
volume of the novel in seventy-two hours (in-
cluding the time for meals and sleep). The
volume was to be formed by seventy-five large
foolscap pages, each page containing forty-five
lines and each line fifty letters. In sixty-six
hours Dumas had done the work, — 3375 lines —
in his fair, flowing hand, disfigured by no eras-
ures,— and the bet was won with six hours to
spare.

Dumas, however, was a striking excep-
tion in being able to dispense with re-
vision. Alternate elimination and expan-
sion is the method by which great works of
literature have usually reached their final
form — and it is far easier to expand and
cut, expand and cut again, in the mere
rough outline than in the fully developed
book. Don't shirk your plot construction
— and here I am using the phrase in an
all-embracing sense — an essay or a ser-
mon deserves careful plotting as much as
[102]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

a novel — plot construction is a whole-
some discipline ; and while there is not one
chance in a hundred that you will overdo
it, there is every chance that you will all
the time be teaching yourself some new
and useful trick, some clever short-cut,
some way of knitting your whole structure
more firmly together. It would be well
if every young writer were to reduce to a
ten-word limit his central idea before even
starting to plot his story; keep those ten
words inscribed upon a cardboard, hang-
ing above his desk, and ask himself, with
each incident, each character, each shift
of scene, " To what degree does this help
on my central idea? Is it essential, or
only a digression? If not actually re-
lated, has it a symbolic significance that
justifies it structurally? In any case, is it
the best, the very last and best thing I
can do?" If not, then cut it out ruth-
lessly and try again, and yet again, until
[103]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

you are sure that the best of which you are
capable Is found.

Of course, it Is quite easy for someone
to object that many of the greatest masters
of the past have not composed In this man-
ner; that Fielding and Smollett, Dickens
and Thackeray were notoriously loose In
plot construction, and that Trollope him-
self acknowledges, " I have never troubled
myself about the construction of plots and
am not now Insisting on thoroughness In
a branch of work In which I myself have
not been very thorough.'' And the ob-
jector might go a step further and ask:
Did Shakespeare, when he was writing
Hamlet, Inscribe above his desk, " To be
or not to be, that Is the question," as a re-
minder that his theme was the tragedy of
a vacillating nature; or similarly, when
he wrote Othello, " A man not easily jeal-
ous but, when roused, perplexed In the ex-
treme"; or again for Macbeth, " Vault-
[104]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

Ing ambition that o'erleaps itself, and falls
on the other " ? And of course the an-
swer Is obvious enough: that the masters
of literature are great enough to break
the rules; that had Shakespeare constructed
as Ibsen did, English literature would have
been robbed of some of its noblest lines;
and that when we speak of the craftsman-
ship of writing we are speaking of rules
that must be mastered before one has
earned the right to break them.

Remember, also, in choosing the au-
thors who are to be your models, to exer-
cise discrimination regarding the partic-
ular qualities that you will copy from each
of them. Go to Dickens and Thackeray
for character drawing, if you choose, but
not for plot. And similarly, remember
that Trollope was able to say of his char-
acters :

There Is a gallery of them, and of all that gal-

[105]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

lery I may say that I know the tone of the voice,
and the colour of the hair, every flame of the
eye, and the very clothes they wear. Of each
man I could assert whether he would have said
these words or the other words ; of every woman,
whether she would then have smiled or so have
frowned. When I shall feel that this intimacy
ceases, then I shall know that the old horse should
be turned out to grass.

But if you want a model of careful con-
struction from among the early novelists,
you can do no better than turn to Haw-
thorne. " Hawthorne's method," says
Andrew Lang, " is revealed in his pub-
lished note-books. In them he jotted the
germ of an idea, the first notion of a sin-
gular, perhaps supernatural situation.
Many of these he never used at all; on
others he would dream and dream till the
persons in the situations became characters
and the thing was evolved into a story.
Thus he may have invented such a prob-
[io6]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

lem as this : * The effect of a great, sudden
sin on a simple and joyous nature/ and
thence came all the substance of The
Marble Faun/' As a matter of fact, The
Marble Faun Is a very wonderful example
of close construction admirably disguised.
It has all the effect of a vast canvas, a
prodigality of material In character, and
Incident, and panoramic scene; but under
examination. It reveals little by little the
nice balance of all its parts, the rigid
economy of Its means, the fine art that
has subordinated every part to a consist-
ent development of the central Idea, a
conservation of the unity of purpose.

Second only In Importance to having
a purpose Is the necessity of clothing that
purpose In a suitable form. Some themes
lend themselves to a variety of different
treatments. A great war may give us both
an epic and an opera-boufe, an Iliad and
La Belle Helene, The sin of Intemper-
[107]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

ance jfinds expression at one time in a
UAssommoir and at another in a Tarn
O'Shanter, And in general the rule may-
be laid down, that the form in which any
central idea is to be clothed depends less
upon the idea than upon the individual
ability of the author. But the practical
distinction of this is really not great. You
may have conceived some light, frothy lit-
tle idea, such as would make a graceful
triolet; It makes no difference whether a
triolet Is the biggest thing lurking in that
idea, or whether someone else might take
It and develop It Into something of much
greater dignity — in either case it Is an
error of judgment on your part to give
that little idea the misplaced dignity of an
elegy or a sonnet. Or perhaps you have
hit upon a really big situation deserving
of the broad treatment of a Hardy or a
Meredith; if you are able to see it In that
broad, big way be careful not to squander
[io8]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

it on a short story or hammock novel, no
matter how many other writers might, with
more limited vision, have chosen to do the
smaller thing.

Just precisely what literary form is the
best possible form in which to clothe a
central idea is another of those many
things that cannot be taught, because it
IS so peculiarly personal to each writer.
My own conviction is that it is something
largely instinctive; that a short-story
theme usually presents Itself to the mind
In the first instance as a short story, a
dramatic theme as a drama, and the mate-
rial for a long novel as a long novel and
nothing else. The Anglo-Saxon writer,
however, both in England and America,
is very largely a writer of one or at most
two literary forms. This is in marked
contrast to the Continental habit. In
France and Italy it Is quite in the ordi-
nary course of things for a young writer
[109]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

to begin with a volume of verse,* follow
it up with collected essays, usually of liter-
ary criticism, then a novel or two, a four-
act play — and at that time he has reached
a point where he feels at liberty to confine
himself to whichever form he finds most
congenial. A man with this sort of train-
ing may, of course, have wasted himself
to some extent in misplaced efforts, in at-
tempting certain things for which he was
not temperamentally fitted; but he seldom
makes the mistake of trying to fit an idea
into the wrong literary framework. It is
the other type of craftsman, so common in
this country; the man who starts with a

* " Maupassant began by writing verses ; that seems
to be the rule, the versified form being the inevitable
one for the dawn of literature and for the budding
writer as well. Nearly all the masters of contem-
porary prose have begun by writing verse, even M.
Alexandre Dumas himself. Later they have proved
their critical taste by not repeating the experiment." —
Rene Doumic, Essay on Maupassant.

[no]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

feed idea that he is to be a dramatist and
nothing else, or a lyric poet and nothing
else, or an essay writer and nothing else —
who is all the time trying to force his ideas
into a shape for which they were not
meant. If, for instance, a man cannot and
will not write anything but a sonnet; If
he is unable to think in any other terms
than those of a sonnet, then whenever an
idea comes to him that is not a sonnet
idea, he must either reject it altogether or
else produce a sonnet that had better not
have been written. For these reasons it
cannot be too forcibly urged upon young
writers to keep their minds open by the
practice of several different forms at
once. You are sure to be eventually a
better dramatist for having had some
practice In narrative fiction; and you will
probably write a better short story if you
have occasionally done a little literary
criticism. There is more common sense

[III]

THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE

than appears on the surface in the casual
confession by Mr. A. C. Benson in his
lightful volume From a College Window:

The two things I have found to be of infinite
service to myself in learning to write prose have
been keeping a full diary and writing poetry.

It IS interesting to remember In this con-
nection that George Meredith once wrote:

Writing for the stage would be a corrective of
a too incrusted scholarly style, Into which some
great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers
to a definite plan and English.

In other words, in literature as well as
in life there are some occasions when the
longest way round Is the shortest way
home, and one of them Is the art of ac-
quiring a particular branch of literary
form by the practice of forms that are
radically different.

[112]

IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

CHAPTER IV

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

There are few of us who have not, at
one time or another, been drawn into the
childish pastime of attempting to trace a
pig with our eyes blindfolded. We us-
ually began bravely enough by drawing
two fairly symmetrical ears, and if the
pencil was not quite as steady as It might
have been, as It proceeded to delineate the
snout, the general effect was rather credit-
able; at least, the bystanders had not yet
found adequate cause for merriment. But
when It came to the legs, our sense of
proportion weakened, wavered, slipped ut-
terly from us; those four legs straggled
across the paper In riotous disorder like
the distortions of a convex mirror, the

[IIS]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

pencil wobbled more and more hopelessly
and the last mad dash for the finish
landed, as likely as not, in the middle of
the fore leg instead of at the starting
point, the tail curled in a fantastic cork-
screw from the middle of the back, and
the eye, added as an afterthought, gazed
at us in a detached sort of way some inches
from the rest of the drawing. All this
may seem irrelevant to the Craftsmanship
of Writing, but unfortunately it is not.
*One of the commonest experiences in a
critic's ordinary routine is to come across
literary efforts of various form and magni-
tude which convey the impression that they
too have been constructed with the eyes
blindfolded.* The mala difference is that

♦Writers should remember Carlyle's advice: "To
the poet, as to every other, we say, first of all. See,
If you cannot do that, it is of no use to keep stringing
rhymes together, jingling sensibilities against each
other, and name yourself a foet; there is no hope for
you."

[ii6]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

the general effect is more saddening than
ludicrous. And the reason for this, of
course, is that there is nothing especially
discreditable to the average man or woman
to be unable to draw a pig with their eyes
blindfolded, while for the literary crafts-
man to be careless and slovenly in his tech-
nique of form is not only discreditable but
without excuse.

Now, having introduced this metaphor
of the pig, let us go a step further and
find out clearly to what extent it applies
to the literary craftsman. There is no
hard and fast rule regarding form, whether
we are speaking of drawing a pig or writ-
ing a short story; in either process there is
ample latitude for individual expression
— there is no such absolute uniformity re-
quired as in minting a gold eagle or mould-
ing a Rogers group. Your literary or ar-
tistic pig may be fat or lean, contented or
disgruntled, small, round and pink, or ra-

[117]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

zor-backed and black and bristling — but
you have no right to take liberties with
his recognised anatomical 'structure —
draw any kind of a pig you choose, so long
as it remains a pig. In other words, you
have no right to profess to be working in
a certain recognised literary form, and
then so distort the leading characteristics
of that form that it becomes something
entirely different. " The confusion of
kinds," says Henry James, *' is the inele-
gance of letters and the stultification of
values."

It aoes not by any means follow that an
author is not free to invent new literary
forms or varieties, if he has the inventive
power. There is no rule in art forbidding
the unusual, the new or even the grotesque.
There is no reason why we should not
have, from time to time, something un-
dreamed of in the philosophy of literary
form, any more than there is a reason

[1.18]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

why the sculptor should not carve a grif-
fin out of stone, although he never saw a
griffin in the flesh. Otherwise we should
have been deprived of some of the most
interesting experiments in English litera-
ture: Gulliver's Travels, and Pilgrim's
Progress, the De Cover ley Papers, Alice's
Adventures, the Jungle Books, and Red-
coat Captain — the list could be pro-
longed indefinitely. But any writer who
wishes to discard the accepted forms and
make new forms for himself would do well
to remember what Ruskin said regarding
the difference between the Lombard grif-
fin and the classical griffin, in his chapter
on the Grotesque:

" Well, but," the reader says, " what do you
mean by calling either of them true? There
never were such beasts in the world as either
of these."

No, never; but the difference is, that the
Lombard workman did really see a griffin in his

["9l

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

imagination, and carved it from the life, meaning
to declare to all ages that he had verily seen with
his immortal eyes such a griffin as that; but the
classical workman never saw a griffin at all, nor
anything else; but put the whole thing together
by line and rule.

In other words, if a writer is big
enough, inspired enough — call it what
you will — to see with his Immortal eyes
some new and better form, then let him
use it fearlessly, provided that he is quite
sure that it is a new form and not a dis-
torted old one. For it is a much rarer
and harder thing to produce a glorified
griffin than a misshapen pig.

Yet the necessity of studying the tech-
nique of form in all its minutest de-
tails is so little understood and so slowly
grasped by the average beginner In
writing that it is a temptation to in-
sist upon its paramount importance even
to the point of tediousness. So many
[120]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

young writers have their answer all pat:
What, they ask, is the use of putting so
much stress on form? The great writers
of the past were notoriously loose and care-
less in construction; look at the rambling,
episodic character of Homer and Cer-
vantes and Rabelais; and were Fielding
and Thackeray and Dickens much better
in their technique of plot? Of course, all
this is perfectly true; and the chief reason
why so many young writers — and older
ones, too, for that matter — are slow to
appreciate the importance of good tech-
nique, is the conservative force of tradi-
tion — the great masters of the past, who
wrote before the more elaborate technique
of to-day had been developed, did thus and
so; and if good enough for them, why not,
is the argument, good enough for us? No
less a person than the Spanish novelist,
Sefior Valdes, betrays in this regard a
curious lack of critical acumen: The

[121]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

Latin races, he grants, are accustomed to
give greater attention to unity of structure ;
the Anglo-Saxons and the Slavs, on the
contrary, prefer a greater variety of in-
terest, a more prodigal abundance of life :

One of the best contemporary Russian nov-
els, War and Peace, might with very little ef-
fort be divided In two, because it contains two
perfectly defined actions, which are carried on
side by side throughout the whole course of
the book. Which of these conceptions of the
composition of a novel Is the true one? In my
opinion, both of them. To decide In favour
of one of them would be to assert the Inferiority
of the novels written according to the other —
and that seems to me unjust. Dickens, Thack-
eray, Gogol, Tolstoy are as excellent novelists as
Balzac, George Sand, Flaubert and Manzoni.*

The fallacy of Senor Valdes*s argument,
of course, is his failure to recognise that
while the English and Russian novelists

* From preface to La Hermana San Sulplcio,
[122]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

whom he names are as great, if not
greater, than the French and Italian, their
greatness is not due to their looser method
of construction, but in spite of it. There
is progress in the art of writing, as well as
in other arts, and the wise modern writer
profits by the improved methods. The
tales of Boccaccio are inimitable specimens
of their kind; but now that we have the
modern conception of what a short story
should be, as formulated by Poe and Mau-
passant and Kipling, it would seem scarcely
worth while for any writer of to-day delib-
erately to revert to the cruder form of the
early Italian novella, Balzac's Contes Dro-
lattques are likely to remain the last at-
tempt of the sort to gain literary recogni-
tion. Don Quixote is one of the three or
four indisputably greatest books in the
world — but that is no reason why any
twentieth-century tyro in novel writing
should take Cervantes for his model and
[123]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

imitate successfully all his faults of con-
struction, while the magic that makes the
book unique forever eludes it imitators.

It seems inevitable that in discussing the
technique of form the argument should
tend constantly to revert to prose rather
than poetry, and to the novel in preference
to all other prose forms. And it is quite
natural that this should be so. The ne-
cessity of structure in verse is in a way axio-
matic; it enters into the very definition.
In short, in all verse, from the greatest to
the least, there is something which may
not unjustly be called architectural in the
way it IS built. Indeed, the more formal
types, like the rondeau, the ballade, the
rondel, the sonnet, offer to the eye, as
they lie upon the printed page, as definite
a suggestion of a ground plan as any blue
print of the modern draughtsman. The
regularity of recurring rhymes, the mar-
shalled lines of numbered syllables and

[124]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

stresses Inevitably suggest the methodical
courses of brick and masonry, the stately
rows of Doric columns or Gothic pinna-
cles. Every great epic is a temple in
words, every nursery rhyme a structure of
toy blocks, playthings of uncomprehend-
ing merriment. Carlyle was not the first
writer to liken the Divine Comedy to a
cathedral; but no one has ever worded it
so well :

A true inward symmetry, what we call an
architectural harmony, reigns in it, proportion-
ates it all ; . . . the three kingdoms, Inferno y
Purgatorio, Paradiso, look out on one another
like compartments of a great edifice; a great^^
supernatural world-cathedral piled up there, stern,
solemn, awful; Dante's World of Souls!

Now in prose, and especially in fiction,
which enjoys the advantage of being the
most elastic of all literary forms, the
architectural element is far less in evi-

[125]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

dence, because the best technique In fic-
tion demands the most careful framework,
most carefully disguised. But, supposing
that a young writer says quite frankly, " I
recognise the truth of all you say; I be-
lieve in the importance of the Technique
of Form, and I want to learn and obey the
rules of the best construction. If I try to
write a novel, I want it to be a novel in
the best sense, and not a string of short
stories. If I write a short story, I want
to feel sure that it is truly a short story
in spirit and inherent purpose, as well as
in outward form. But how am I to de-
cide what particular artistic form is best
adapted to be my medium of expression?
What I want to write is (let us say) a
novel ; but are my ideas big enough ? Are
they inherently long-story ideas, or are
they foredoomed never to be anything
more than short stories?'* This point
was touched upon briefly in the preceding

[126]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

chapter; but it is so extremely important
to the individual writer, and a miscom-
prehension of it has led so many beginners
astray, that a certain amount of repetition
seems justifiable, especially as it paves the
way to another thought of some importance.
The greatest mistake that a young
writer can make is that of thinking of
ideas as being in any sense a lot of square
pegs that must not be placed in round
holes, or vice versa. An idea is not fore-
ordained to any exclusive appropriation
by any one artistic form; it is not inevi-
tably the beginning of a sonnet or of a
four-act drama, any more than a ball of
yarn is necessarily destined, as It comes
from the spinning-wheel, either for an
afghan or a pair of stockings. Ideas are
the raw material of literature; what they
are to be worked into, depends not upon
the ideas themselves, but upon the indi-
vidual author's bent of mind, the way in
[127]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

which his thoughts naturally take shape.
We are too apt to think of a thought, a
really big and important thought, as we
think of a precious stone, something crys-
tallised and unyielding, something which
^an be cut and polished, to be sure, but
only in accordance with its natural angles
and lines of cleavage. We would come
nearer the truth if we likened ideas to
pure gold in the ingot, that may be worked
into any shape, applied to any purpose,
forming the standard of value in the world
of letters, yet capable of being spread out
to infinitesimal thinness, In order to give
cheapness the glitter of a spurious worth.
What Is wrought from the Ingot depends
upon the skill and genius of the gold-
smith; It IS not the fault of the elemental
gold. If, instead of delicate miracles of the
jeweller's art, It finds Itself debased to an
electro bath for Ten-Cent Store cuff-but-
tons I

[128]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

It follows that we can do no poorer
service to a young writer than to per-
suade him that an idea which he has al-
ready seen clearly in one form, must not
be used in that form, but for something
quite different. We sometimes hear a
young poet receive advice, somewhat af-
ter this fashion : " Yes, the idea that you
have in mind for a sonnet is a good idea
in itself, but the trouble with it is that it
is not a sonnet idea; it never could make
a good sonnet ; give it up I ** It always
seemed to me that it must take an uncom-
mon amount of boldness to assume such a
responsibility as that! The utmost that
anyone has a right to say is, " That is an
idea from which I, myself, could not make
a good sonnet; I, individually, cannot see
it in the sonnet form," or, perhaps, if the
intimacy between the adviser and would-
be poet justifies this attitude : " From
what I know of your previous work, I can-
[129]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

not believe that you could give this par-
ticular Idea the adequate treatment and de-
velopment for a sonnet; give It up, not on
account of the idea's limitations, but be-
cause of your own." But the usual and
safe rule Is that every writer must find out
for himself what shape he may best give
his Ideas — and thkt is why It is generally
wiser, if a writer has critical friends whose
advice he values, to get his start by him-
self, have his first draught finished, or
at least well advanced, before asking for
a critical opinion. It often happens that
an Idea which, when presented in the
rough, seems to the critic quite hopeless,
becomes with even a slight degree of
working-up, not only promising, but tri-
umphantly vindicated. Think how absurd
it would sound to say to a goldsmith:
" Don't try to make a ring out of that
piece of gold wire; there Isn't a ring in that
wire, there is nothing but a scarf-pin I"
[130]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

Yet that is precisely the sort of mislead-
ing advice that is not infrequently given
to story writers. Many an author has
wasted months on a bad novel, when he
could have used the same idea in a good
short story; many a short story has spoiled
an idea that might have served for a bal-
lad or an elegy, or a musical comedy — not
because there was any incongruity in the
ideas themselves, but because the author
failed to follow his natural bent.

But, whatever form a young writer uses,
it is his first duty to master the technique
of that form, to familiarise himself with
its entire history, to learn not only how the
best authors have used that form in the
past, but also how the modern generation
is modifying it to-day. I am continually
amazed at being asked by beginners, " Isn't
it better for me to read as little as pos-
sible of contemporary books? Am I not
in danger of losing my originality if I fill

[131]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

my mind with the ideas of others? Is it
not bad for my style to read any books
except the recognised classics?" Per-
sonally, I have little patience with such an
attitude of mind. The man or woman
who has so little originality or inventive
power as to be bewildered, stunted, over-
whelmed by contact with the thoughts of
others, offers a rather hopeless case any-
how; the great majority of normal human
beings find something stimulating rather
than deadening in wide reading; and to
the craftsman who is really interested in
his art it must be a very hopeless book
indeed that does not give him something
upon which to whet his inventive faculty.
The very imperfections of a plot in any
current penny-dreadful may suggest, by
the glaring way in which an opportunity
is missed, a new twist that might be given
< — and so you have the starting point of a
new and perhaps a big story. And in any
[132]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

case a writer cannot afford to be Ignorant
of what is being done to-day in his own
field. Such neglect Is only a few degrees /
worse than for a lawyer to refuse to rec-
ognise the authority of a case decided
later than 1850, or for a physician to ig-
nore modern methods of treating disease,
lest he should lose the originality of his
own methods. The comparison is not
quite so far-fetched as perhaps at first
sight it may seem. The fact that there
were some brilliant surgeons half a cen-
tury ago in no way minimises the impor-
tance of the antiseptic methods of to-day;
and the inclusion of Tom Jones and
Roderick Random and Tristram Shandy
among the English classics does not alter
the fact that there exists to-day a tech-
nique of fiction such as was not remotely
dreamed of by Sterne or Smollett or
Fielding. One of the first things for a
beginner to learn, if he would master the

[133]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

technique of form, is to distinguish be-
tween the writers who have already mas-
tered it and those who have become great
in spite of poor technique. It is the dif-
ference between a rough diamond and a
polished rhinestone — ^the value may lie
wholly in the stone or wholly in the cut-
ting. But best of all is the author who
combines a flawless technique with the
greatness of genius — a perfect cutting
and a perfect stone.

For the sake of being specific, let us
take one or two examples: for instance,
the case of a young writer who wishes to
learn the best way in which to write son-
nets. Here, as everywhere else, there is a
certain measure of the art which cannot be
taught. If he has not the inborn instinct
that will tell him what thoughts are beau-
tiful and what are not; if he has not a
natural sense of harmony that will dis-
tinguish between a pleasing sequence of

[134]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

sounds and a discord, it is rather futile to
try to help him. But, granted that he pos- ,
sesses these elemental and indispensable
qualities, the first thing to do, of course,
is to put him in the way of knowing what
a sonnet is. Now, the shortest and sim-
plest — I was on the point of saying, the
laziest — way to do this would be to pick
out some one or two of the great English
sonnets, Milton's sonnet on his blindness,
or Wordsworth's sonnet to Milton, and
say to him: " Here is your model; study
the verse scheme and try to do something
like it." And of course the student in
question would be no more fitted for writ-
ing a sonnet than a child is prepared to
read when it has mastered only the letter a.
What he ought to do is to learn the his-
tory of the sonnet, to study the develop-
ment of its form with all permissible vari-
ations of rhyme, in Italian as well as in
English; to know in what respect the

[135]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

Shakespearean sonnets differ from those
of Milton, and his again from Keats or
Rossetti. He should know what consti-
tutes a perfectly regular sonnet and what
are its pardonable irregularities. Then,
and not till then, he is qualified to pass
judgment upon a sonnet, either his own
or those of others — and, it may be, is ca-
pable of producing a sonnet good enough
to be given to the world at large.

Or let us take another and far com-
moner case, that of the would-be writer
whose interest lies mainly in fiction. It
does not matter whether he prefers the
short-story form or that of the novel; his
training in either case will be practically
the same. What he needs most is a pa-
tient study of the authors who have paid
strict attention to the technique of form:
in English, Henry James and Mr. How-
ells, Kipling and Hewlett, Gissing and
George Moore are only a few whose meth-

[136]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

ods when properly understood are full of
Illuminating suggestion. And the French
are in this respect especially helpful, far
more so than the Russians: Turgeneff
himself is reported by Henry James to
have confessed frankly in conversation
that one fault of his own work was '' que
cela manque d* architecture. But," he
added, " I would rather, I think, have too
little architecture than too much, — when
there is danger of Its interfering with my
measure of the truth. The French of
course like more of it than I give, — hav-
ing by their own genius such a hand for
it; and Indeed one must give all one can."
There are probably no two novelists to
whom the architecture, the underlying and
hidden framework of the plot, means pre-
cisely the same thing, or who have anything
like the same method of developing it.
Each writer must learn by experience what
method brings him Individually the best re-
[137]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

suits. One man may prefer to carry the
rough outline of the plot in his head; an-
other can do nothing without an elaborate
scenario; a third prefers a diagram, with
lines crossing and Intercrossing, to show the
points at which the lives of the different
characters Intersect. Nothing would be
more helpful than a collection of confes-
sions from our leading novelists as to just
how their plots were built up, step by step.
Here, for instance, is a curious sidelight
from Henry James's preface to The Awk-
ward Age^ that has already given several
suggestive Illustrations to these articles :

I remember that in sketching my project ( The
Awkward Age) I drew on a sheet of paper
. . . the neat figure of a circle consisting of
a number of small rounds disposed at equal
distances about a central object. The central
object was my situation, to which the thing would
owe its title, and the small rounds represented
so many distinct lamps, as I liked to call them,

[138]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

the function of each of which would be to light
with all due intensity one of its aspects. . . .
Each of my " lamps " would be the light of a
" single social occasion '* in the history and inter-
course of the characters concerned, and would
bring out to the full the latent colour of the
scene in question, and cause it to illustrate, to
the last drop, its bearing on my theme.

The whole world knows Emile Zola's
elaborate system of ** documentation," the
long and toilsome preparation that he went
through before writing even the first para-
graph of his opening chapter. If, for in-
stance, he was going to write a novel on
the life of the theatre, so he once told that
indefatigable Italian traveller and story
teller, Edmondo de Amicis, he would be-
gin by jotting down all that he could re-
member of his own personal experience in
regard to plays and playwrights, theatrical
managers and actors; he would then secure
all the books he could find that bore upon

[139]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

the subject, would consult friends regard-
ing their experiences, carefully noting down
all the details and anecdotes they could
give him. Then he would secure letters
of introduction to leading members of the
theatrical world, spending long hours in
the Green Room and at rehearsals, saturat-
ing himself with the spirit and the atmos-
phere of the stage. And out of all this,
the plot would little by little take form,
almost unconsciously.

According to Zola, this method was by
no means peculiar to himself, but was
very much the method of Alphonse
Daudet as well; and Daudet himself has
told frankly of a certain little green note-
book from whose pages came Numa Ron-
mestan and certain other stories besides.
But unlike Zola, Daudet admitted that he
could not always control the details of his
plots and that there were times when the

[140]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

story took the matter into its own hands, in
spite of him. Speaking, for instance, of
the criticism against the commonplace death
from consumption of one of the characters
in Numa Roumestan, he gives the follow-
ing explanation:

But why consumptive? Why that sentimental
and romantic death, that commonplace contriv-
ance to arouse the reader's emotion? Why, be-
cause one has no control over his work; because,
during its gestation, when the idea is tempting
us and haunting us, a thousand things become
involved in it, dragged to the surface and gath-
ered en route, at the pleasure of the hazards of
life, as sea-weed becomes entangled in the meshes
of a net. When I was carrying Numa in my
brain I was sent to take the waters at Allevard;
and there, in the public rooms, I saw youthful
faces, drawn, wrinkled, as if carved with a knife ;
I heard poor, expressionless, husky voices, hoarse
coughs, followed by the same furtive movement
with the handkerchief or the glove, looking for

[141]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

the red spot at the corner of the lips. Of those
pallid, impersonal ghosts, one took shape in my
book, as if in spite of me, with the melancholy
curriculum of the watering place and its lovely
pastoral surroundings, and it has all remained
there.

It IS somewhat difficult to give general
advice regarding the best way to study the
technique of form in fiction. The method
of diagramming is certainly full of sug-
gestive surprises. I have myself gained
some rather happy results In the way of
discovering, where one of my lines trailed
off Into space like a lost comet, that the
particular character which that line repre-
sented had little or no structural importance
In the story. But to a good many writers
the diagram method would be of Infinitely
more trouble than help. To them I would
give the more general advice, to try and
think of their art In terms of painting; to
think of the story they have to tell as being
[142]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

a picture that they are to put upon canvas ;
and that, like any other picture, it must be
subject to the ordinary laws of perspective,
— all of which has been quite admirably
expressed in the following paragraph by
Trollope :

*' But," the young novelist will say, " with so
many pages to be filled, how shall I succeed if
I thus confine myself? How am I to know be-
forehand what space this story of mine will re-
quire? . • . If I may not be discursive
should the occasion require, how shall I complete
my task? The painter suits the size of his can-
vas to his subject, and must I in my art stretch
my subject to my canvas? " This must undoubt-
edly be done by the novelist ; and if he will learn
his business, may be done without injury to his
effect. He may not paint different pictures on
the same canvas, which he will do If he allows
himself to wander away to matters outside his
own story; but by studying proportion in his
work, he may teach himself so to tell his story

[143]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

that it shall naturally fall into the required
length. Though his story should be all one, yet
it may have many parts. Though the plot itself
may require but few characters, it may be so en-
larged as to find its full development in many.
There may be subsidiary plots, v^^hich shall all
tend to the elucidation of the main story, and
which will take their places as part of one and
the same work — as there may be many figures
on a canvas which shall not to the spectator seem
to form themselves into separate pictures.

Now, if you cultivate the habit of think-
ing of fiction In the terms of painting, the
first question that you are likely to ask of
each book that you read is : At what point
did the artist set up his easel; from what
angle did he see his story? Did he look
down upon his little world from some high
eminence with the all-seeing eye of Omnis-
cience; or did he deliberately limit the
range of vision to a definite angle, a single
street or room, or only so much of life as
[H4]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

falls beneath the eyes of one of his own
characters? When the technique of fiction
was in its infancy, these various methods
were indiscriminately used ; but now we de-
mand of an author first of all that he shall
be consistent. If he professes to tell us, as
Mr. James did, What Maisie Knew, we
would have a perfect right to resent being
told anything that Maisie did not know;
if we are to see a story solely from the out-
side point of view, — and Verga's Caval-
leria Rusticana is probably as perfectly con-
sistent a piece of work of that sort as was
ever produced, being so wholly objective
that it has the effect of a moving-picture, —
then we might resent with equal right any
attempt to get inside of a character's brain
and to tell us what he is thinking of. Sec-
ondly, having found out the author's point
of view, we want to ask ourselves what the
size of his canvas is: how big a story he
has to tell and what are his dimensions in

[145]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

point of time as well as space. There are
a hundred ways of telling any story. Don't
make the mistake of assuming that the au-
thor has necessarily chosen the best way.
You are entitled to your own opinion; try
to find out for yourself just why he began
his story where he did, why he spread it
over a certain range of days and of miles,
why he had nine characters instead of
eleven, or fifty-seven instead of forty-three,
— in other words, when dealing with a
modern novel by an author whose tech-
nique is supposedly good, cultivate the
habit of assuming that the novel contains
nothing, not even of the most trivial char-
acter, that was not the result of some de-
liberate purpose, carefully calculated to
play its part in the design of the book as a
whole. Unfortunately, you will run across
many things in the novels of even the best
craftsmen that are not the result of any
such careful planning; and you will even

[146]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

more frequently find carefully planned ef-
fects which have failed of their purpose.
And whenever you do run across a clear
case of miscalculation, congratulate your-
self upon your discovery; for you can gen-
erally learn a more valuable and lasting
lesson from the blunder of a better crafts-
man than yourself than you can from a
dozen of the same writer's successes.

Yet all this advice is quite futile if the
student of craftsmanship cannot bring to
his task a certain degree of intelligence
and plodding patience. A sort of half
understanding of the authors you study
becomes that dangerous thing which we
are told is the penalty attached at all
times to a little knowledge. Unintelli-
gent imitation will often render grotesque
what would otherwise have been a really
good piece of work. A short time ago
a manuscript came into my hands of a
story carefully written, full of a glow of

" [147]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

verbal colour and up to a certain point
not without interest. It was plain that the
writer had saturated himself with the im-
aginative stores of the French school,
such as Prosper Merimee's Venus Ullle
and Gautier^s Pied de Momie. He had
caught the trick of telling a story which
apparently was due to supernatural
causes, yet could, if the reader preferred,
be explained on simple and rational
grounds. The story was somewhat after
this sort: there was a fantastic piece of
jewelry from which a single gem was
missing; the jewelry was undoubtedly of
great antiquity and it possessed mys-
terious properties calculated to inspire
both curiosity and awe. The missing gem
is recovered under curious circumstances,
and no sooner is it replaced than the pos-
sessor forthwith goes into a trance and
witnesses very vividly a painful tragedy
re-enacted from the vanished centuries.
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THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

All this would have been very well in-
deed but for one trifling mistake; the his-
torical scene that is re-enacted in the vi-
sion was (let us say) the death of Julius
Caesar, following without variation the
traditional account. Of course, as a mys-
.tery story, the purpose was defeated.
The moment the name Cssar was men-
tioned the reader knew what to expect
and there was no surprise held in reserve.
By way of contrast and to show how a
story based upon a perfectly familiar
historical incident may be handled in or-
der not only to justify itself but to give
the keenest possible shock of surprise at
the end, one has only to recall that amaz-
ing bit of irony by Anatole France, La
Procurateur de Judee, in which Pontius
Pilate is talking in his old age with an-
other Roman, indulging in reminiscences
of his long-ago governorship in Palestine.
Gradually, the friend brings up one mem-
[149]

THE TECHNIQUE OF FORM

ory after another, drawing closer and
closer to the crowning event that has
stamped itself upon his brain, the Cruci-
fixion. Then comes the ironic surprise
that gives the story its peculiar twist.
Pontius Pilate shakes his head. " I don^t
remember," he says slowly. *' But then,
there were so many cases brought before
me in those years! "

[150]

V
THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

CHAPTER V

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

It was the Roman poet, Ovid, who once
said, at least in substance, " It is a fact
that some authors cannot correct. They
compose with pleasure and with ardour;
but they exhaust all their force. They fly
with but one wing, when they revise their
work; the first fire does not return." *

What was true in Ovid's day has been
equally true in all periods of literary pro-
duction. There are always certain au-
thors, eminently brilliant some of them,
who not only cannot revise, but rather
pride themselves on their inability to do
so. Byron, for instance, is a striking case

* Quoted in this form by Disraeli, Curiosities of Lit-
erature, who goes on to cite numerous interesting cases
of industrious revision.

C153]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

in point. He is said to have written with
astonishing rapidity — The Corsair in ten
days, The Bride of Ahydos in four days;
while it was printing he added and cor-
rected, but without recasting. To quote
his own words :

I told you before that I can never recast any-
thing. I am like the tiger. If I miss the first
spring, I go grumbling back to my jungle again ;
but if I do it, it is crushing.

Now, the ability to get one's thoughts
upon paper with great rapidity is in itself
an admirable gift. There is a freshness,
a spontaneity, and oftentimes a crude
strength in the first rough draft which
must inevitably be partly sacrificed in the
process of final polishing. There is a
great deal of truth in Thoreau's advice:

Write while the heat is In you. When the
farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the iron

[154]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

quickly from the fire to the wood, for every mo-
ment it is less effectual to penetrate it. . . .
The writer who postpones the recording of his
thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a
hole with. He cannot influence the minds of
his audience.

" Write while the heat is in you " is, so
far as it goes, excellent advice. Pages
written under great heat and pressure are
not unlikely to turn out diamonds in the
rough — for this is Nature's way of mak-
ing diamonds. The trouble with the ad-
vice is that it does not go half far enough ;
it tells only half the truth; it fails to point
out that all the fire in the world will never
do the effective finishing, or add the final
lustre, like a little slow and patient rub-
bing, after- the ideas have grown cold. In
other words, one of the most fatal mistakes
a young writer can make is in thinking
that writing is just a matter of inspiration ;

[155]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

that you either have the inborn talent, or
you have not; that if you have it, you need
only to plunge into a sort of vortex of
creative energy, a fine sibylline frenzy —
and your inborn talent will do the rest.
That, of course, is arrant nonsense, and
very disastrous nonsense, as well — be-
cause, if you once get the idea firmly
fixed in your mind that a masterpiece can
spring, like Pallas Athene, perfected from
its author's brain, then good-bye to all
hope for that honest drudgery, that lov-
ing patience over infinite detail, which is
such an essential accompaniment of the
creative gift that it almost justifies that
threadbare paradox that genius is the art
of taking infinite pains.

Now this, of course, is precisely what
genius is not, and never can be, in litera-
ture any more than in the other arts. No
amount of patient juggling with the con-
tents of unabridged dictionaries will give

[1563

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

birth to a great poem, if there is not the
inspiration of a great thought back of it.
The statement that if, according to the
law of permutations, you toss a sufficient
number of Greek alphabets up in the air,
and keep on doing so for a sufficient
number of times, they will sooner or later
come down arranged to form the text of
the Iliad, may be all right in higher
mathematics, but it is not helpful to the
Craftsmanship of Writing. But just be-
cause technique will not produce im-
mortal epics all by itself, there is no
sense in leaping to the other extreme,
and either shirking it or discarding it
altogether. The best laid stone-ballast
railway track in the world won*t take us
anywhere unless we run trains upon it, but
that is no reason for expecting our little
intellectual railway trains to run themselves
without any guide rails at all. Undisci-
plined genius is an erratic, irresponsible

[157]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

thing that people may admire on occasion,
but dare not trust, for they never know
what it is likely to do next. As between
two artists of equal inborn talent a wise
man would every time give preference to
the one who, in addition to his inborn tal^
ent, shows the best command of that tech'
nical part of craftsmanship which comes
only from persistent drilling. This, I
take it, is the real point of that almost
threadbare story of how Pope Benedict
IX., wishing to have some paintings
executed in St. Peter^s, and having heard
of the fame of the Florentine, Giotto,
sent for some specimen or design by
which he might judge Giotto's work; and
how Giotto, with a turn of his hand,
made a perfectly symmetrical circle and
delivered it to the messenger, saying,
*' This is my design.'* This perfect circle
was no evidence of an inborn talent, for
nature does not endow any one of us at

[158]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

birth with the power of making perfect
circles — whatever she may do for spiders
in regard to equilateral polygons. But it
was evidence of a trained hand, a perfect
technique; and that is a pretty important
matter to be assured of if you are order-
ing work done by a genius, whether you
happen to be Pope Benedict IX. or any-
body else.

The whole point of this illustration of
Giotto's circle is, not merely that it is
something which has to be learned, but that
the learning costs an infinitude of prac-
tice. It is apparently such a simple thing
to do and yet you can keep on trying and
trying, day after day, month after month;
and probably never in the whole course
of your life reach the point where you
won't have to say, " Yes, that is pretty
good, but I ought to do better.'* That is
precisely the feeling that a conscientious
craftsman ought to have in regard to his

[159]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

writing. He may or may not be satis-
fied with the inspiration behind his work.
For that, there Is no rule; it depends
upon the individual case. But in regard
to the technical side, it would be well if
he could always feel that it would be pos-
sible to do it just a little bit better —
always feel that there is some one per-
fect way of building the structure or
rounding the sentence that elusively keeps
just beyond his reach.

Consequently, one of the first ideas that
every young writer should promptly get
into his head is that, whatever degree of
talent he may have, there is no escape from
a certain amount of tedious drudgery, if
he ever expects to accomplish anything of
real importance. It does not follow that
the man who frankly says that he cannot
revise his work after it is once written Is
necessarily in the second grade of author-
ship, any more than the man who admits

[1 60]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

that he cannot map out his whole work in
all its details before writing his opening
sentence. There is no hard and fast rule
as to the point at which the real drudgery
of writing shall begin. Some authors have
served their time in the ranks, as it
were, before their first book has ever
seen print; they have learned their craft
pretty thoroughly by a thousand abortive
efforts that have either never been set
down on paper at all or else have gone
speedily into the scrap-basket or the fur-
nace fire. This does not mean that they
will be relieved of the necessity of prun-
ing and polishing; but it does mean that
a long and faithful apprenticeship reduces
the amount of such detail work to a mini-
mum. Then again some writers have
the trick of doing most of their verbal
sand-papering in advance, turning and
twisting each sentence a thousand times in
their brain, before ever committing it
[i6i]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

to paper. That, when we stop to think
of it, is the original, the natural way in
which literary composition was evolved.
The primitive sagas, the early folk tales
were all slowly crystallised into shape, not
only before they were reduced to writing,
but before there was any writing into which
to reduce them.

But it makes no difference at what point
an author gets in his really hard work;
there can be no definite rules laid down for
preparation or for revision. There is no
magic in a second re-writing or a third, in a
fifth or a tenth revised proof. If the first
draft of your sentence satisfies you, a sec-
ond writing is a waste of time. But fifty
re-writings are none too much if the
forty-ninth still fails to content you.
Every writer must in this respect work
out his own particular method. A few
years ago the statement went the rounds
of the literary columns that Mr. Maurice

[162]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

Hewlett made a practice of re-writing all
of his stories no less than four times;
that each of these drafts was made with
all the care that he could bestow upon it
and when finished promptly destroyed;
that the second would contain only so
much of the first and the third only so
much of the second as, by its excellence
or its striking and peculiar phrasing,
stamped itself upon his memory. Whether
or not he really works in that way, such a
method would, of course, account for
many of Mr. Hewlett's peculiarities of
style. But it might prove extremely dis-
astrous to another author.

Some writers apply the Gospel of In-
finite Pains from the first moment of
their conception of a plot down to the
last revision of the page proofs. Balzac
was one of these. His erratic and la-
boured methods of revision, as recorded
by Theophile Gautier in his Portraits

[163]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS
Contemporains, are such an interesting
object lesson of the extent to which the
fever for revision may be carried that it
seems worth while to quote him here
rather extensively :

His method of proceeding was as follows:
When he had long borne and lived a subject, he
wrote, in a rapid, uneven, blotted, almost hiero-
glyphic writing, a species of outline on several
pages. These pages went to the printing of-
fice, from which they were returned in placards,
that is to say, in detached columns in the centre
of large sheets. He read these proofs attentively,
for they already gave to his embryo work that
impersonal character vi^hich manuscript never
possesses; and he applied to this first sketch the
great critical faculty with wrhich he was gifted,
precisely as though he were judging of another
man's work.

Then he began operations: approving or dis-
approving, he maintained or corrected, but above
all he added. . . . After some hours, the

[164]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

paper might have been taken for a drawing of
fireworks by a child. Rockets, darting from the
original text, exploded on all sides. Then there
were crosses: simple crosses, crosses re-crossed,
like those of a blazon, stars, suns, Arabic figures,
letters, Greek, Roman or French, all imaginable
signs, mingled with erasures. Strips of paper,
fastened on by wafers or pins, were added to the
insufficient margins, and were rayed with
lines of writing, very fine to save room, and
full themselves of erasures; for a correction
was hardly made before that again was cor-
rected. . . .

The following day, the proofs came back
. . . the bulk of course doubled. Balzac set
to work again, always amplifying. . . .
Often this tremendous labour ended with an in-
tensity of attention, a clearness of perception of
which he alone was capable. He would see that
the thought was warped by the execution, that an
episode predominated; that a figure which he
meant should be secondary for the general effect
was projecting out of its plan. Then, with one

[165]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

stroke of his pen, he bravely annihilated the result
of four or five nights of labour. He wsls heroic
at such times.

Balzac, of course, was one of the co-
]ossals, and all of his methods, whether
right or wrong, were colossal like himself.
The vast majority of us will never write
a Comedie Humaine nor overspread our
proof sheets with mad pyrotechnics of
erasures. Nevertheless, the essence of
Balzac's method is a sound one. You
can follow no better plan, provided your
mind works that way, than to get your
whole initial thought down on paper in
the first heat of creation; and then, after
a day or two, re-write and amplify, and
re-write and amplify again, building up,
little by little, filling in the details, smooth-
ing the rough places until your work finally
reaches a stage that you are content to keep
as its permanent form. Yet even then, if
you are a convert to the Gospel of Infinite
[i66]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

Pains, you will still find some changes to
make in your proof sheets, some further
amendment to work into your second an3
third editions.

But, of course, it is possible to carry
anything too far, even such an apparently
limitless thing as Infinite Pains. Flau-
bert was the signal instance of this. His
pursuit of perfection verged upon mania;
his tireless zeal in connection with every
detail of whatever work he had on hand for
the moment was in the nature of a fixed
idea. Zola, in his Romanciers Natural-
istes, has given an admirably detailed ac-
count of Flaubert's methods of work iri
pursuit of " that perfection which made
up the joy and the torment of his ex-
istence." When he had once got a rough
draft upon paper the " chase after docu-
ments " began with as much method as
possible :

He read above all a considerable number of

[167]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

works; or rather one should say that he merely
skimmed them, going with an instinct of which
he was rather proud, to the one page, the one
phrase that would be of use to him. Often a
work of five hundred pages would give him only
a single note which he painstakingly transcribed ;
often also such a volume would give him nothing
at all. Here we find an explanation of the seven
years which he spent on an average on each one
of his books; for he lost at least four in his pre-
paratory readings.

And as he read, his notes piled up,
overflowed his portfolios, became un-
wieldy, mountainous. To give some idea
of his conscientiousness in gathering ma-
terial, Zola mentions that before writing
U Education Sentimentale he ran through
the entire collection of Charivari, in or-
der to saturate himself with the spirit of
petty journalism, under Louis-Philippe;
and that it was out of the words found
in that collection that he created the char-
[i68]

THE GOSPEL OE INFINITE PAINS

acter of Hussonnet. At last an hour
would come when, as Flaubert put it, he
would feel the " need of writing " :

When he began the work of composition he
would first write quite rapidly a piece consisting
of a whole episode, five or six pages at most.
Sometimes, when the right word would not come,
he would leave it blank. Then he would start in
again with this same piece, and it would be a
matter of two or three weeks, sometimes more, of
impassioned labour over those five or six pages.
He wanted them perfect, and I assure you that
perfection to him was not a simple matter. He
weighed each word, examining not only the mean-
ing but the conformation as well. Avoidance of
repetitions, of rhymes, of harsh sounds was merely
the rough beginning of his task. He went so
far as not to allow the same syllables to recur in
a phrase; sometimes a single letter got on his
nerves and he would search for words in which it
did not occur; then again he sometimes had
need of a definite number of r's to give a rolling
effect to a sentence.

[1693

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

All this is given here not as an ex-
ample to be imitated by the young literary
craftsman but as a sort of ultimate stand-
ard by which to measure the extent and
the earnestness of his own efforts. Your
latest story, perhaps, came back this
morning accompanied by its third rejec-
tion slip. In writing that story did you
take the trouble to work it over for the
third or fourth time? Did you erase and
rearrange the opening sentence endlessly
until you knew all its possible variations
by heart? Did you wake up suddenly in
the night with a happy idea that would
just fit into page seventeen and could not
wait till morning? — or did you on the
other hand, simply sit down quite com-
fortably one day, possessed only of pen,
ink and paper and a good working idea,
and dash off your five thousand words at
top speed while the heat that Thoreau
speaks of was still in you? And, as you
[170]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

signed your name, did you say to youn
self, " Well, I suppose some of this is a
bit ragged, but it will have to go as it is " ?
If the second is the case, then your col-
lection of rejection slips deserves to multi-
ply. You may be a genius, but you are
not a craftsman. Better a hundred times
the exaggeration, the hair-splittings, the
reductio ad absurdum of Flaubert's Infi-
nite Pains than such deliberate slovenli-
ness. If you think that your lot is a
hard one and that literature at best is a
steady grind with slow results, read
just one more paragraph on Flaubert's
method and perhaps you will readjust your
ideas.

One Sunday morning (writes Zola) we found
him drowsy, broken with fatigue. The day be-
fore, in the afternoon, he had finished a page of
Bouvard et Pecuchet, with which he felt very
much pleased and he had gone to dine in town,
after having copied it out on a large sheet of Hoi-

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

land paper that he was accustomed to use. When
he returned about midnight, instead of retiring at
once, he had to give himself the pleasure of re-
reading that page. But he became greatly dis-
turbed, discovering that he had repeated himself
within a space of two lines. Although there was
no fire in his study and it was very cold, he ob-
stinately set to work to get rid of that repetition.
Then, finding other words which displeased him,
he gave up the attempt to change them all and
went to bed in despair. But once in bed, it was
impossible to sleep; he turned and turned again,
thinking always of those devils of words. All at
once he hit upon a happy correction, sprang to
the floor, relighted his candle and returned in his
night-shirt to his study to write out the new
phrase. After that he crawled back, shivering
beneath the coverlets. Three times, he sprang
up and re-lighted his candle, in order to change
the position of a word or to alter a comma. At
last, in desperation, dominated by the demon of
perfection, he took his page with him, bundled
his muffler around his ears, tucked himself in on
all sides in his bed and until daybreak cut and
[172]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

pruned his page, covering it all over w^ith pencil
strokes. That vi^as the way Flaubert vi^orked.
We all have manias of this sort, but with him it
was this sort of mania from one end of his books
to the other.

It is somewhat of a comfort to turn
from a writer whose efforts were so vastly
in excess of the bulk of his actual produc-
tion and take up another novelist who holds
a fairly eminent position in English litera-
ture and who, through long years of re-
markable average fertility, succeeded in
making the quality of his writing keep
steady pace with the quantity — -Anthony
Trollope. His advice to young writers is
not only interesting but valuable, provided
it be taken understandingly. It has seemed
worth while to quote from him rather often
in these pages. Here is still another pas-
sage that is apropos :

Nulla dies sine linea. Let that be their motto,
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THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

And let their work be to them as is his common
work to the common labourer. No gigantic
efforts will then be necessary. He need tie no
wet towels round his brow, nor sit for thirty
hours at his desk without moving, — as men have
sat, or said that they have sat. More than nine-
tenths of my literary work has been done in the
last twenty years, and during twelve of those
years I followed another profession. I have
never been a slave to this work, giving due time,
if not more than due time, to the amusements I
have loved. But I have been constant, — and
constancy in labour will conquer all difficulties.
Gutta cavat lapidem non vi, sed saepe cadendo.

Steady, plodding work: that is Trol-
lope's panacea for success in literature.
*' Let their work be to them as is his work
to the common labourer," that is the one
phrase to be treasured up and committed
to memory. The art of writing — that is
the part that savours of genius, the part
for which we cannot prescribe rules, the

[174]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

part which makes laws unto Itself. But the
craftsmanship Is a different matter. It may
be congenial labour, but labour it must al-
ways be, differing in kind but not In de-
gree from that of the hewer of wood or
the tiller of the field. The great thing is
to make it honest labour, to be quite sure
that we are not skimping it or doing It
grudgingly. We must each of us find our
own best working hours, must decide for
ourselves whether we will sit thirty hours
at a stretch without moving, and then do
nothing more for a week, or whether we
will accept the monotony of systematic
daily effort from breakfast until luncheon,
day in and day out, whether we feel like
it or not. Some men can work that way,
and some men cannot : and that is all there
is about It; they cannot tell you why, they
simply find that that is their individual
case. Now, there is no virtue in one way
more than in another ^ — ^but whatever

[175]

THE GOSPEL OF INFINITE PAINS

method of work you follow remember al-
ways that there Is no such thing as a royal
road to literary achievement, that it always
means sooner or later work, work of the
hardest, most earnest sort, and often the
hardest of all work where It shows the
least. For the greatest triumph of writ-
ing, as of other arts. Is to conceal most
carefully those spots upon which you have
most conscientiously practised the Gospel
of Infinite Pains.

ri7«]

VI
THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

CHAPTER VI

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

We have seen in an earlier chapter that
the first step towards good craftsmanship
is to have a clear underlying purpose, and
also that the resulting written work will be
judged largely in accordance with the de-
gree of nearness that it has attained in
carrying that purpose out. But it is neces-
sary to remember always that your book
will be judged not according to the pur-
pose as you have formulated it somewhere
in the background of your own brain, but
as you have expressed it in your written
words. There is small use in having any
underlying purpose at all until you have
learned how to convey your meaning to
others, — in other words, until you have

[179]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

learned the paramount importance of clear-
ness.

Clearness is so inseparable an element of
all good writing that many a critic and
rhetorician has regarded it as a term almost
synonymous with that illusive quality called
style. Professor A. S. Hill, for instance,
who for so many years occupied the chair
of English at Harvard University, chose
to divide style under three heads : to the in-
tellectual quality of style he gave the name,
" Clearness; " to the emotional, " Force; "
and to the aesthetic, " Elegance." And
many another teacher of rhetoric has sim-
ilarly invented his own special classifica-
tion and definition. But according to the
ordinary and common sense understanding
of the terms, clearness is not so much an
element of style as it is a condition prece-
dent to it, just as health is not beauty, but
a condition precedent to beauty. Clear-
ness may be that crystal transparency of
[i8o]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

word and phrase that belongs to finished
art, or it may be the mere dry bones of fact
picked clean of the last shred and frag-
ment of adornment. For example, a wash-
ing list or a recipe for making Dill pickles
may be perfectly clear, but there is a mani-
fest absurdity in speaking of either as pos-
sessing style. But whether the dividing
line between clearness and style is vague or
sharply defined, there can be no question
that if one must choose between the two
evils it is far better to sacrifice the second
of these qualities than the first. The
writer who has said something definite
and intelligible has achieved a tangible re-
sult even though he may have said it very
badly ; but the writer whose meaning is ob-
scure has accomplished nothing at all, how-
ever well balanced and harmonious his
phrases may sound. It is well to remem-
ber that the true function of words, like
that of all building materials, is to be use-
[i8i]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

ful first and ornamental afterwards; and
that for the greater part of what we have
to say the simplest phrasing is the best, just
as the really well dressed man is he whose
clothes possess that quiet refinement which
does not obtrude. But a scorn of flamboy-
ant neckties and checkerboard trousers is
no excuse for going to the opposite extreme
of a blue flannel shirt and overalls; and
when Stendhal in his intolerance of over
elaboration and rhetorical flourish boasted
that he formed his own style by daily read-
ings of the Civil Code, he erred as badly
on his side as the models he avoided erred
on theirs. The best evidence that you are
in sound bodily health is that it does not
occur to you to think about it; and sim-
ilarly a healthy literary style is that which
does nothing overtly to direct our attention
to it.

Now it seems as though the quality of
clearness ought to need no definition; as

[182]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

though anyone possessed of normal under-
standing ought to grasp the fact that it sim-
ply denotes the ability to express in words
any particular thought that you may have
shaped in your mind and to express it in
such succinct and unmistakable terms that
any reader of ordinary intelligence will re-
ceive in his own brain a faithful image of
that thought and be able at request to mir-
ror it faithfully back to you in his own
words. Yet, as a matter of fact, clearness
is a quality that is either very much misun-
derstood or else quite wantonly disre-
garded. There are a large number of
writers, and able writers too, who seem to
think that they are quite clear enough if
they get their thoughts down in a form
capable of being understood by the reader
who goes to work to extract the meaning
with something of that energy with which
one applies the nut-cracker to a refractory
nut. This whole question of clearness

[183]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

has been so admirably discussed by An-
thony TroUope in his Autobiography that
I cannot do a greater service to young writ-
ers than by quoting It In Its entirety:

Any writer who h^ read even a little will
know what is meant by the word intelligible.
It is not sufficient that there be a meaning that
may be hammered out of the sentence, but that
the language should be so pellucid that the
meaning should be rendered without an effort
of the reader; — and not only some proposition
of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no
l^ss, which the writer has intended to put into
his words. What Macaulay says should be re-
membered by all writers : " How little the all-
important art of making meaning pellucid is
studied now! Hardly any popular author ex-
cept myself thinks of it." The language used
should be as ready and as efficient a conductor
of the mind of the writer to the mind of the
reader as the electric spark which passes from
one battery to another battery. In all written

[184]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

matter the spark should carry everything; but
in matters recondite the recipient will search to
see that he misses nothing, and that he takes
nothing away too much. The novelist cannot
expect that any such search will be made. A
young writer, who will acknowledge the truth
of what I am saying, will often feel himself
tempted by the difficulties of language to tell
himself that some one little doubtful passage,
some single collocation of words, which is not
quite what it ought to be, will not matter. I
know well what a stumbling-block such a pas-
sage may be. But he should leave nothing be-
hind him as he goes on. The habit of writing
clearly soon comes to the writer who is a severe
critic to himself.

As a broad generalization, the conclud-
ing words of the above passage may be ac-
cepted as true enough in the case of the
writer who has learned self-criticism and
whose fault lies simply in a careless or
slovenly use of English. But unfortu-

[185]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

nately there are many kinds and grades of
obscurity ranging all the way from the ob-
scurity of Ignorance and stupidity to the
obscurity that comes of too much learning
and of halr-splltting analysis, — all the way
from an inability to think clearly down to
an erudition with which the reader cannot
keep pace. There is nothing to be gained
by classifying and distinguishing, after the
fashion of a school rhetoric, the various
kinds of obscurity that it is possible to find
in literature, — by dividing what is ambig-
uous from what is vague and again what Is
vague from what Is really obscure ; because,
while it is possible to make such a classifi-
cation to almost any degree of minuteness
that you choose, all these different kinds of
verbal turbidness go back to one or more of
the four primal causes that stand in the
way of clearness; and the important thing
is to get these four causes definitely in our
minds,

[i86]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

The simplest way in which to approach
the whole question is to recognize that
when we write a book or a magazine ar-
ticle we are under a sort of implied ^ con-
tract to the class of readers whom we are
trying to reach, — that we have pledged
ourselves to tell them something which we
assume that they want to know. Now, in
order to fulfil this obligation, we must
bring about what the legal fraternity are
fond of speaking of as " a meeting of
minds," — and of course there can be no
meeting of minds unless we have learned
to write intelligibly. There is no implied
contract to write with any specified degree
of form and elegance, any more than there
is any agreement on the part of the express
company which delivers the book or mag-
azine to bring it in an automobile or a
coach-and-four. The express company
simply agrees to deliver the goods; and
when we write, we agree, first of all, to

[187]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

deliver the ideas, and if we are obscure we
have not delivered them.

Now in order that the minds of author
and reader shall meet, there are four con-
ditions requisite : first, that the author shall
know what he is trying to say ; second, that
he shall be able to say it In the simplest
terms; third, that his language shall be
adapted to the requirement of his readers ;
fourth, that his thoughts shall not be be-
yond their range of comprehension. Per-
haps you have been criticised for your want
of clearness and you come to me for help.
The first thing to find out is which of the
above four requisites is your stumbling-
block. Of course, if the trouble comes
from the first, an inability to think clearly;
If your thoughts are a muddle, if you are
too lazy to straighten them out, there is no
use in talking to you about how to write
clearly. There Is no use In expecting clear-
ness from a slough; and the more accu-
[i88]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

rately you succeed in mirroring back your
own mental attitude the more hopelessly
turbid what you write Is bound to be. The
first thing to do Is to try to guide your
thoughts Into a straight channel and get
them gradually Into the habit of flowing
deep and clear, — somewhat after the fash-
Ion that marshlands are redeemed by a sys-
tem of irrigation ditches. Your trouble
may be simply Inexperience, or laziness ; or
again it may be a constitutional inability to
think logically, a fundamental lack of one
vital element of the Inborn talent.

But let us assume that you have learned
to think clearly. The next step is to learn
to write as clearly as you think. If your
stumbling-block lies at this point, there is
hope for you. If you know what you want
to say and yet manage to tangle up your
thoughts in a snarl of words, that is sheer
bad writing and there Is no excuse for It.
No one who can think straight has any

[189]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

business to write badly. There is no ne-
cessity for it, because it is the easiest of all
errors for which to obtain outside help.
It is a simple question of fact whether a
given paragraph does or does not convey
the meaning you want it to when read by
the casual reader of average intelligence.
It is not a matter of expert judgment; it in-
volves no canon of art any more than the
question whether a landscape painter's pic-
ture of a Holstein cow looks like a cow or a
black and white sign-post. If a country-
bred child, looking at that cow, calls it a
sign-post, all the art critics in the world
cannot free that painter from the reproach
of obscurity. So, if you are in doubt
whether or not you write clearly you need
not apply to a professional critic. You
can always find someone near at hand to
help you, some patient, long-suffering mem-
ber of your immediate family circle, and
[190]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

preferably someone who Is not literary, —
someone who more nearly represents the
so-called " general public." Read your
paragraphs to him and then ask him,
" What does this mean to you? What
have I tried to say? " If your amateur
critic is dubious, If he arrives at a wrong
Idea, or catches the right one only after an
obvious effort, then what you have written
Is badly done and must be written over.
Now of course he cannot tell you just why
it Is badly done, or what particular words
and phrases are misleading, or what would
be the simplest twist by which to remedy
them. He simply throws the burden back
on you where It belongs; you will have to
grope for the remedy; and a little groping,
a little more hard work will not hurt you.
What your friend has done Is simply to
serve a purpose analogous to that of re-
translation In the case of documents such

[191]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

as patent-right papers or international
treaties, where the first translator turns the
original from English into French, and a
second translator reconverts it into Eng-
lish,— and if the last version differs from
the original, the translation must be all
done over.

But besides the practical method of ex-
perimenting with your writings on your
friends, there are a few simple principles
to keep in mind that will often save you
from stumbling. Do not let rules of rhe-
toric and style stand in the way of clear-
ness; cheerfully break any one of them
rather than be obscure. It may be villain-
ously bad style to allow the same word to
recur half a dozen times upon a page ; but
it would be better to repeat that word half
a dozen times within a single line rather
than to lack clearness. Professor Barrett
Wendell offers a case in point when he
writes :

[192]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

Clearness I may best define as the distinguish-
ing quality of a style that cannot be misunder-
stood. To be thoroughly clear, it is not enough
that style express the writer's meaning; style
must so express this meaning that no rational
reader can have any doubt as to what the mean-
ing is. To come as near clearness as I could, for
example, I deliberately avoided pronouns in that
last sentence, repeating style and meaning with a
clumsiness defensible only on the score of lucidity.

And Macaulay, discussing the use of the
French word, ahhe, in place of the English,
abbot, expresses the same rule even more
forcibly :

We do not like to see French words introduced
into English composition: but, after all, the first
law of writing, that law to which all other laws
are subordinate, is this, that the words employed
shall be such as convey to the reader the meaning
of the writer. Now an abbot is the head of a
religious house; an abbe is quite a different sort
of person. It is better undoubtedly to use an
English word than a French word ; but it is bet-

[193]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

ter to use a French word than to misuse an Eng-
lish word.

And In this connection we must not for-
get the words of the genial Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table: " The divinity student
looked as if he would like to question my
Latin. No sir, I said, — you need not
trouble yourself. There Is a higher law
in grammar not to be put down by Andrew
and Stoddard."

If you would be clear cultivate simplicity
and brevity. But remember that brevity
is not always synonymous with the smallest
possible number of words. As Edgar
Allan Poe once wisely wrote : " The most
truly concise style is that which most rap-
idly transmits the sense. . . . Those
are mad who admire brevity which squan-
ders our time for the purpose of economiz-
ing our printing-ink and paper.*' Never
hesitate to use as many words as are re-
[194]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

quired to convey your meaning, your whole
meaning and nothing but your meaning, be-
yond the shadow of a doubt. A rather
good way to acquire a simple style is to try
to write more in the manner of ordinary
conversation. And the reason for this
may be readily understood by analogy with
a simple rule for fencing, laid down in one
of Marion Crawford's Italian novels, by
his memorable duelist, the melancholy
Spicca. We are accustomed, Spicca ex-
iplained, from early childhood, to point at
things with our index finger; indeed,
through immemorial generations it has be-
come a sort of inborn instinct. We have
no need to close one eye and carefully
sight along the finger: we point with an
accuracy that is almost incredible. But
it does not come naturally to us to
point with a stick or a sword; and
that is why Spicca acquired his wonderful
dexterity by simply laying his index finger

[195]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

along the blade of his weapon and pointing
with that. In like manner, we have all
been accustomed from childhood to point,
as it were, with spoken words; and this
we do with a fair degree of accuracy, for
otherwise we should frequently fail to ob-
tain what we want. But we have not been
accustomed from childhood to point with
written words; so it is at least an experi-
ment worth trying to lay the index finger
of ordinary conversation along the written
line and see if this does not improve the
accuracy of our aim.

Some reader is almost certain to raise
the objection that the result of such an ex-
periment will be an excess of colloquialism.
But there Is no foundation for any such
fear. It would be impossible by any means
short of a phonograph to emulate the care-
lessness, the redundancy, the elisions and
slurrings of even rather careful conversa-
tion. In fiction where a trained and ob-

[196]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

servant author deliberately tries his best to
make the conversation of his characters
quite like that of real life, he almost invar-
iably errs on the side of artificiality, al-
ways makes them speak a little more care-
fully than they really do. And what holds
true of conversation of course applies with
double strength to narrative description or
critical analysis. But the effect of the col-
loquial tone while never quite reaching the
level of actual conversation does tend to
make the general tone of serious reading
lighter and more inviting. " The writ-
ing," says Miss Edgeworth, " which has
least the appearance of literary manufac-
ture almost always pleases me the best;"
while St. Beuve is still more outspoken:
*' To accustom oneself," he says, " to write
as one speaks and as one thinks, is that not
already a long step towards accustoming
oneself to think wisely? "

One method which I personally have

[197]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

found to work well, both in my own case
and in that of other writers of my acquaint-
ance, is to thresh out a difficult episode or
problem in conversation, talking the whole
thing over, sometimes with several people
in succession, and thus gradually clarifying
the underlying thought and crystallising the
form of its expression. It often happens
that some phrase or expression which has
baffled and eluded us for days in the pri-
vacy of our study suddenly flashes into defi-
nite shape in the heat of a discussion; or
the one tantalising word that a phrase
lacked to clinch the meaning beyond ques-
tion leaps to the tip of the speaker's tongue
when it had persistently refused to come at
the call of the pen. And after all is not
this a perfectly natural and easily under-
stood consequence of the way in which the
whole art of literary composition must have
developed? Authorship antedates by un-
measured centuries the discovery of letters

[198]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

and the art of writing. The Inherited
habit of composition in the form of oral
verse and prose is vastly older than our
modern practice of secluding ourselves and
scratching down rows of little black sym-
bols on a white expanse of paper, or still
more incongruously tapping celluloid keys
with the tips of our fingers. The whole
advantage of the conversational method,
however, has nowhere been more delight-
fully expressed than by Oliver Wendell
Holmes, through the lips of the Auto-
crat :

I rough out my thoughts in talk, as an artist
models in clay. Spoken language is so plastic, —
you can pat or coax, and spread and shave, and
rub out and fill up, and stick on so easily, when
you work that soft material, that there is noth-
ing like It for modeling. Out of It come the
shapes which you turn into marble or bronze in
your immortal books, if you happen to write
such.

[199]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

But it does no good to think and to
write clearly, unless you write in a language
intelligible to the class of readers whom
you are trying to reach. The most crys-
talline prose of the clearest French thinkers
remains meaningless to the reader possessed
of only a smattering of Ollendorf. As
our familiarity with a foreign tongue pro-
gresses, the very last stage of proficiency is
that complete and instantaneous compre-
hension, as the eye glances down the printed
page, with no sense of effort, no conscious-
ness of an intervening veil. In a minor
degree, we all know how irksome even a
very clever dialect story may become; the
page is studded over with words and
phrases that convey, first of all, a sense of
strangeness. An account of a horse-race
or a prize-fight, in the sporting columns of
our daily papers may be admirably lucid to
the readers for whom it is intended ; but to
many of us it speaks in an unknown tongue.
[200]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

Professor Barrett Wendell, in his chapter
on Clearness, already referred to, gives a
rather amusing example drawn from foot-
ball parlance. Centre-rush and half-back,
and a score of similar words, he admits,
are regularly constructed compounds
formed from perfectly familiar English
words and yet to him devoid of any definite
meaning. But, he goes on to say, he has
been informed and he believes that there
are students in his own lecture courses to
whom these same words have a real signifi-
cance. Similarly, a treatise on some spe-
cial branch of physics or botany or civil
engineering may be couched in the clearest
possible terms and yet convey no meaning
at all to the reader unversed In those
sciences. For instance, I open quite at
random the fourth volume of a recent Ref-
erence Handbook of the Medical Science
and I learn :

Double hemiplegia is synonymous with cere-
[201]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

bral paraplegia, both indicating a paraplegia of
intracranial origin, involving the cerebral motor-
tracts.

A peripheral paraplegia may be produced by a
multiple neuritis involving the peripheral nerves
of both lower extremities in such a symmetrical
manner as closely to resemble spinal-cord lesions.

I am quite prepared to believe that there
is nothing intricate in the thought that lies
concealed behind this barrier of technical
vocabulary; I simply realise that I am not
one of the readers for whom it was in-
tended. But for me It might just as well
be the " washing list In Babylonian cunei-
form " of which we are told by Gilbert and
Sullivan's Modern Major General.

If you are writing upon a technical sub-
ject for a special public, you must use a
special vocabulary. If you are the sport-
ing editor on a dally paper, you must write
of football In football jargon; but on the
other hand, if you are discussing the edu-
[202]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

cational value of football In a pedagogical
magazine, you will use a different and sim-
pler terminology. And In each case what
you write may be quite clear to the audience
for whom you intend it. The only thing
to guard against is the chance of making a
mistake In your audience, the danger of at-
tributing to them a special knowledge
which they do not possess. For that rea-
son, it is a good plan to underrate rather
than overrate the average intelligence of
your readers. Any physician can under-
stand what has happened if you say that a
man has broken the bones of his forearm,
but readers who are not physicians may
have to stop and think if you write that he
has suffered a fracture of both radius and
ulna.

And in the fourth place, your vocabulary

may be of the simplest and yet your work

may convey to a large majority of readers

a sense of Inpenetrable density. There

[203]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

are, for instance, some branches of
higher mathematics in which a person
with a fair average knowledge of algebra
and geometry will encounter no terms or
symbols that are strange to his eye ; and yet
the meaning of what he reads will leave his
mind absolutely blank. The difficulty in
this case lies outside of any question of
craftsmanship; it is inherent in the subject
matter itself. When you come across a
book or article of this type you have to
recognize that it Is not intended for you, or
at least that you are not yet ripe for It.
The novels of Mr. Henry James are one
of the best possible instances of* this type
of book. Mr. James has mannerisms,
many of them; he has a curious, and to
some readers an exasperatingly confusing
way of introducing all his modifiers, his
provisos and saving clauses parenthetically
before reaching the conclusion of his main
sentence. But all of these things put to-
[204]

THE QUESTION OF CLEARNESS

gether would not account for the difficulty
that many people find in reading Henry
James. The real secret of his obscurity
lies much deeper. It is because he is at-
tempting to pursue his analysis of the hu-
man heart and soul to an unattainable
point; to differentiate motives with a hair-
splitting minuteness. His books are a
form of experimental psychology too intri-
cate and erudite ever to be expressed with
perfect clearness. And when we encounter
this sort of obscurity we must recognise
that it is something which is inherent in the
subject matter itself; in other words, that
the book is one of limited appeal to a spe-
cially chosen audience.

[205]

VII
THE QUESTION OF STYLE

CHAPTER VII

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

There is, I think, a good deal of unneces-
sary heartburn experienced by young writ-
ers regarding the question whether or not
they are beginning to form a style. It in-
dicates a hypochondriacal condition of
mind akin to the familiar tendency of so
many young medical students to believe
that they are suffering from various purely
imaginary diseases. A sound mind in a
sound body is too busy in performing the
numerous activities belonging to each day's
work to stop to count the heart-beats or the
rate of respiration. Any young writer,
possessed of something really worth say-
ing, and a certain driving energy that
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THE QUESTION OF STYLE

makes him bent upon saying it in the clear-
est and most forceful way that he possibly
can, ought to be too intent upon the task
at hand to be worrying about whether he is
forming a style, — whether, in other words,
his brave beginnings of to-day are corner-
stones in the arch of future fame.

Style is the aroma of literature, compar-
able to the bouquet of old wine. You can-
not age a new vintage over night by any
artificial process. No writer, by taking
thought, can add a cubit to his height as
a stylist. It is a matter of growth, and
slow ripening. We have seen that what
every young writer should first strive to
acquire is a clear-cut idea of what he Is
trying to accomplish; that, secondly, he
should aim at a technical skill which will
enable him to build the framework of his
creations, whatever their form may be,
solidly and according to the proportions
demanded by good art; and thirdly, that
[210]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

he must cultivate that infinite patience
which will strive to make all parts and all
aspects of his work tend toward a unity of
effect in subject and structure and lan-
guage. And when a writer has learned
thoroughly to do these things, he need no
longer worry about style, for style is noth-
ing else than the ability to express one's
thoughts in the best possible way.
" Style," says James Russell Lowell, " is
the establishment of a perfect mutual un-
derstanding between the worker and his
material." And Walter Pater expresses
very nearly the same thought in somewhat
different terms when he writes:

To give the phrase, the sentence, the struc-
tural member, the entire composition, song or
essay, a similar unity with its subject and with
itself: — style is in the right way when it tends
toward that.

The ability to express one's thoughts

[211]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

in the best possible way, — that is a rather
bigger contract than at first appears. Not
merely to express one's thoughts in the
clearest possible way, or the most forcible,
or the most florid, or the most faultlessly
grammatical way. It means a great deal
more than any one of these, or all of them
taken together. It means the nicest pos-
sible compromise between clearness, let us
say, on the one hand, and metaphor on the
other ; or between the realism of colloquial^
speech, and the dignity of narrative verse ;
or between the special effects of contrast
and a general effect of uniformity. In its
widest definition, there is nothing that can
be said or written in any language under
the sun that has not its special ideal of
style, — some one form most appropriate
to it : and to some degree the ability to at-
tain approximately this desired norm is an
element of the Inborn Talent; — just as
marksmanship of any kind is partly a mat-
[212]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

ter of practice and partly also a matter
of natural aptitude.

If you examine in succession a series of
definitions of style, taken at random from
various authorities, you will find the di-
vergence between them rather confusing.
The more you read, the more confused
you are likely to become. The trouble, of
course, is a lack of agreement on the part
of the authorities regarding the nature and
extent of the quality which they are trying
to define. One writer, for instance, as-
sumes that style is a combination of clear-
ness, force and elegance; another looks
upon style as a blending of a certain ab-
stract perfection of writing with the per-
sonal element, which at best Is manner and
at worst is mannerism, while still a third
considers style as something apart from the
personal equation, — a sort of ideal goal
towards which we press, but which we
never attain. The same discrepancy is

[213]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

noticeable in the use of the word, style, in
other connections, — take it, for instance,
in the matter of dress. Now clearness of
purpose in dress involves the intent of
clothing the body and keeping it warm ; and
in this elemental sense one hears people
speak of the style of clothes worn by peas-
ants, or artisans, or savage tribes. A cer-
tain proportion of people, on the other
hand, think of style in dress as a sort of
self-advertisement, a matter of force and
emphasis, a question of flamboyance and
the dernier cri. And there are still others
who, with a finer conservatism, understand
style to be that rare art in dress which ef-
fects a perfect compromise between the
prevailing fashion and the personality,
and which unerringly chooses, in color and
in form, the garment best designed to suit,
most completely and at the same time most
unobtrusively the individual need.

Now there is no logic in looking upon

[214]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

any one of these definitions of style as be-
ing right and the rest of them all wrong.
The one thing needful to know Is which
view any particular critic holds, for then
any apparent contradiction disappears. I
am inclined to think, however, for the pur-
pose of good craftsmanship, that the most
helpful view to hold is the third of those
given above : namely, that^tyle is an ideal
goalj towards which we struggle, but for-
ever unattainable. Try to think of style
in literature somewhat as you think of the
copper-plate line of Spencerian penman-
ship at the top of the page in a copy-book,
— as the model towards which the pupil
Is faithfully striving, but which it would be
undesirable for him to attain with complete
fidelity. Without some such model to fol-
low, no one ever acquires a good hand-
writing; but, on the other hand, no one
with any sort of individuality wants to
write like a copy-book. Think how char-

[215]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

acter in handwriting strengthens and
deepens with the passing years, — and it
will do this quite regardless of whether we
started with a good or bad model at the
top of our page. But what a gulf there is
between the handwriting that is clear, and
artistic and individual, and that which has
individuality and nothing else! And to
a far greater extent do we feel the differ-
ence between the writer who has style and
individuality, and him who has individu-
ality without style.

My advice, then, to the beginner in writ-
ing is : do not worry too much about your
style : do not be all the time counting your
literary pulse. Try to write as simply and
as clearly as you can and without self-con-
sciousness. In learning the rudiments of
your art you are like the novice in archery
learning to hit a target. Concentrate your-
self upon the task of making your verbal
shafts reach their mark. If you do this

[216]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

faithfully, ease and grace should follow
in their own due time.

Do not assume, however, that if you are
faithful, you will acquire one of the few
masterly styles in literature. It is given
to the very few to attain this. Be satis-
fied if you succeed in keeping near enough
to your copper-plate model so that your
mannerisms will be overlooked, or if you
succeed in say anything of such impor-
tance that your readers tl)ink more of what
you say than how you say it. Wine, as
said above, acquires bouquet only in the
course of years; but no number of years
can ever give bouquet to a poor vintage.
Nevertheless a good many attempts have
been made, and with some degree of ap-
parent success, to age, a literary style.
Certain writers have deliberately set them-
selves, as part of their apprenticeship, the
task of practicing the mannerisms of a
few recognized masters of English prose.
[217]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

Stevenson is a conspicuous example of this
practice, and the quality of his prose is
admittedly a result of such self-training.
In his essay, " A College Magazine," he
has himself outlined his method as fol-
lows:

Whenever I read a book or a passage that par-
ticularly pleased me, in which a thing was said
or an effect rendered with propriety, in which
there was either some conspicuous force or some
happy distinction in the style, I must sit down
at once and set myself to ape that quality. . . .
I thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to
Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne,
to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Bau-
delaire, and to Obermann. . . . That, like
it or not, is the way to learn to write.

Yet, where this method succeeds with
one man out of ten, it is quite likely to do
more harm than good to the nine others,
making them mere copyists, — like a young
painter who spends his days reproducing

[218]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

a Raphael or a Rubens, instead of remain-
ing under the open sky, learning to express
his own thoughts In his own way. Some
teachers, Indeed, question whether any
real benefit accrues from conscious imita-
tion of another man's style. Professor A.
S. Hill has put himself on record In the fol-
lowing emphatic manner:

In a great writer the style is the man, — the
man as made by his ancestors, his education, his
career, his circumstances, and his genius.

It IS idle, then, to attempt to secure a good
style by imitating this or that writer ; for the best
part of a good style is incommunicable. An imi-
tator may, if he applies himself closely to the task,
catch mannerisms and reproduce defects, and per-
haps superficial merits; but most valuable quali-
ties, those that have their root in character, he
will miss altogether, except in so far as his own
personality resembles that of his model.

Of course, between these two extremes;
the belief, on the one hand, that conscious
[219]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

imitation is the only way to learn to write ;
and on the other, that it is no way at all
to learn, the truth, as usual lies some-
where midway. Yet it is worth noting
that even Stevenson has not escaped re-
proach. Mr. H. D. Traill, for instance,
complains that his style * 'suffers somewhat
from its evidences of too conscious art";
Henry James says, in friendly criticism
that his style "has nothing accidental or
diffident; it is eminently conscious of its
responsibilities and meets them with a kind
of gallantry, — as if language were a
pretty woman, and a person who proposed
to handle it had, of necessity, to be some-
thing of a Don Juan." And Professor
Saintsbury is even more emphatic:

Adopting to the full, and something more than
the full, the modern doctrine of the all-impor-
tance of art, of manner, of style in literature,
Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate
studies in imitative composition. There is no
[220]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

doubt that he at last succeeded in acquiring a
style which was quite his own; but it was com-
plained, and with justice, that even to the last
he never obtained complete ease in this style;
its mannerism was not only excessive, but bore,
as even excessive mannerism by no means always
does, the marks of distinct and obvious efFort.

Now It Is quite likely that In reading
Stevenson you are not conscious of this
''distinct and obvious effort" of which
Professor Salntsbury speaks ; personally, I
always am, — although that does not pre-
vent me from appreciating his worth In
literature. But the fact strengthens me In
the conviction that I am right In saying
that to ask oneself continually, "Am I ac-
quiring a style?" Is apt to bring one little
profit. It Is like a novice In painting simi-
larly asking, "Am I learning to mix col-
ours?" A painter does not need to dis-
tress himself about the beauty and har-
mony of all the colours that he may sooner
[221]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

or later be called upon to mix, — the im-
portant thing is to do the best he can to
obtain the particular colour that he needs
for the moment. " Colour is a gift," says
Dick Heldar to Maisie, in The Light that
Failed, " Put it aside and think no more
about it." Similarly, although the paral-
lel is not wholly true, a beginner will cer-
tainly do himself no great harm by assum-
ing that in the craft of writing, style is a
gift that may for the time be put aside and
forgotten. Be sure that for the beginner
the least style is the best style. Do not
polish excessively; and when you do polish,
be sure that you have something that is
worthy of polishing. It is well to put a
lustre on solid mahogany; but it is foolish
to expend energy and good wax upon soft
pine.

Of course, if you want to go somewhat
deeply into the whole question, you might
[222]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

begin by reading what various recognised
stylists have said upon the subject; you
might make yourself familiar with De
Quincey's Essay on Style and Pater's; and
what Lowell has to say, and Stevenson too
and half a dozen more besides to whom
they will readily guide you. And the
chances are that after a few hours, or days,
of diligent reading you will come away with
a considerable sense of discouragement
and confusion ; because, while they all
fairly agree that style is a question of fit-
ting the method to the material; and that
there is not one style but there are many
styles, just as there may be many forms of
dress to suit different occupations; yet af-
ter all they do not lay down rules that are
really helpful. Some comfort is to be
gained out of Pater, if read understand-
ingly, for he has a broad sanity of outlook
that recognises merit in a great diversity
[223]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

of methods. Here, for instance, is a para-
graph which embodies the essence of all
he has to say on this subject and is well
worth pondering upon:

In the highest, as in the lowest literature, the
one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth: —
truth to bare facts in the latter, as to some per-
sonal sense of fact; diverted somewhat from
men's ordinary sense of it, in the former: truth
there as accuracy, truth here as expression, that
finest and most intimate form of truth, the
vraie verite. And what an eclectic principle this
really is! Employing for its one sole purpose —
that absolute accordance of expression to idea —
all other literary beauties and excellencies what-
ever : how many kinds of style it covers, explains,
justifies and, at the same time, safeguards!
Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evoca-
tion of " the phrase '* are equally good art. Say
what you have to say, what you have a will to
say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact
manner possible, with no surplusage : there is the
[224]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

justification of the sentence so fortunately born,
"entire, smooth and round," that it needs no
punctuation, and also (that is the point!) of the
most elaborate period, if it be right in its elabora-
tion. Here is the office of ornament; here also
the purpose of restraint in ornament. . . .
The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et le Noir is
nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les
Miserables is nothing in itself; and the restraint
of Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only
redoubled beauty, — the phrase so large and so
precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in serv-
ice to the more perfect adaptation of words to
their matter.

Literature, by finding its specific excellence in
the absolute correspondence of the term to- its
import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all
artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good
art.

it IS Pater who says of the author of
Madame B ovary, "If all high things have
their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might per-

[225]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

haps rank as the martyr of literary style " ;
and In support of this opinion he proceeds
to quote the following summary of Flau-
bert's literary creed:

Possessed of an absolute belief that there ex-
ists but one way of expressing one thing, one
word to call it by, one adjective to qualify, one
verb to animate it, he gave himself to super-
human labour for the discovery, in every phrase,
of that word, that verb, that epithet. In this
way, he believed in some mysterious harmony of
expression, and when a true word seemed to him
to lack euphony, still went on seeking another,
with invincible pains, certain that he had not yet
got hold of the word. ... A thousand pre-
occupations would beset him at the same moment,
always with this desperate certitude fixed in his
spirit: Amongst all the expressions in the world,
all forms and turns of expression, there is but
one — one form, one mode, — to express what I
want to say.

Now, theoretically Flaubert is right;
[226]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

there are no perfectly equivalent synonyms
either of words or phrases, — and even the
same phrase will take on shades of mean-
ing when spoken by different lips. When-
ever you utter a sentence you have ex-
pressed a thought in the only way in which
that particular thought down to the last
hair-splitting shade of meaning can be ex-
pressed. Change a syllable and you
change the meaning — that was Flaubert's
doctrine and it meant torture to him. And
the trouble, of course, was that he tried to
practise what can never be more than
theoretical. It would be a great comfort
to believe, with Emerson, that " There Is
no choice of words for him who clearly
sees the truth; that provides him with the
best word " ; but to most of us such clear-
ness of vision Is denied. If a writer could
really know down to the ultimate shade of
thought exactly what he wanted to say
and exactly the tone in which he wanted
[227]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

to say it, and if his brain was so equipped
that it had at command the entire contents
of the unabridged dictionary then, theo-
retically, the one inevitable word-sequence
ought forthwith to present itself to him.
In practice, however, there are a hundred
different ways that occur to us for saying
even some quite simple thing, each of them
not precisely what we want to say, but rep-
resenting a compromise, a sacrifice, on the
side of meaning, or of euphony, or of
rhythm. The one perfect way is the dream
of a visionary, a forever unattainable ideal.
We may come more or less near to it in
proportion to our ten talents or our two
talents or our one, but it always eludes us.
And the finer the artist, the more he is apt
to suffer because he sees so clearly how far
short he has fallen. Style, then, practi-
cally means the ability to choose the words
that will give us just the right meaning,
just the right harmony, just the right ca-
[228]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

dence. And if this is to be done worthily
we must attain our results so far as possi-
ble without straying afield for queer,
exotic words and phrases. It is, says
Lowell, "the secondary intellect which
asks for excitement in expression, and
stimulates itself into mannerism, which is
the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its
unconscious abnegation." And Maupas-
sant, in his well-known preface to Pierre
et Jean, wrote in similar strain:

There is no need of the bizarre, complicated,
extensive and Chinese vocabulary that they force
upon us to-day under the name of artistic writ-
ing to catch all the shades of thought; but it is
necessary to discern with extreme lucidity all the
modifications in the value of a word according
to the place it occupies. Let us have fewer
nouns, verbs and adjectives with meanings almost
incomprehensible, but let us bave more different
phrases.

In regard to vocabulary no better rule
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THE QUESTION OF STYLE

has been formulated down to the present
day than that old dictum of Quintilllan:
" Use only the newest of the old and the
oldest of the new." We may, of course,
assume In theory that no word is so obso-
lete that it may not under some special
conditions be revived; no slang so recent
as to be wholly barred out of print. D'An-
nunzio, the recognised master of modern
Italian style, has ransacked the early
writers for so many out-of-the-way words
that some of his later prose can be more
easily read by a college bred Anglo-Saxon
with a fair knowledge of the language
than by an equally intelligent Italian who
does not happen to be well grounded in
Latin and Greek. And in the opposite
scale, we have Mr. Kipling, who fearlessly
enriches our language with such words as
he thinks It needs. Nevertheless, the safe
norm lies in the simple, every-day vocabu-
lary. A good craftsman can accomplish
[230]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

wonderful things with a limited number
of tools: a certain eminent surgeon has
been known to perform successfully an ope-
ration for appendicitis with no other instru-
ment than a simple pair of scissors. One
trouble with many of us is that we over-
work just a few words and combinations of
words, and neglect other equally good com-
binations; we have the vice of the hack-
neyed phrase. A' well-known American
critic once said in conversation that he
would rather be caught stealing a watch
than saying that a book " filled a long-
felt want " — and unquestionably the two
offences differ in kind rather than de-
gree. It was Daudet who expressed the
philosophy of the hackneyed phrase
perhaps rather more felicitously than any
other :

What profound disgust must those epithets
feel which have lived for centuries with the same

[231]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

nouns! Bad writers cannot be made to compre-
hend this. They think divorce is not permitted
to words. There are people who write without
blushing: venerable trees, melodious accents.
Venerable is not an ugly word; put it with
another substantive — "your venerable burden,"
"most venerable worth," etc., — you see the
union is good. In short, the epithet should be
the mistress of the substantive, never its lawful
wife. Between words there must be passing
liaisons, but no eternal marriages. It is that
which distinguishes the original writer from
others.

It is that, an Anglo-Saxon critic finds
himself instinctively adding, that distin-
guishes just a few of the more prominent
British writers of the young school;
writers otherwise very wide apart indeed
— Rudyard Kipling and Maurice Hew-
lett, Joseph Conrad and Alfred Ollivant
and J. C. Snaith — to mention only a few
striking examples. Each of these has a
[232]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

style of his own; some of them, indeed,
have a number of styles, to be donned and
doffed upon occasion ; but the one trait that
they all have in common is a frank audac-
ity of new combinations, a tendency to
take liberties with noun and adjective, and
pair them off with as little ceremony as a
hostess pairs off her guests for a cotillion
— and with as little malice. De Quincey
wrote, not without a grain of literary snob-
bishness :

Like boys who are throwing the sun's rays
in the eyes of a mob by means of a mirror, you
must shift your lights and vibrate your reflec-
tions at every possible angle, if you would agi-
tate the popular mind extensively.

De Quincey, of course, had a certain
ingrained scorn of the popular mind. It
was quite unconsciously, while here intend-
ing to stigmatise a type of bad rhetoric,
that he actually gave us a rather vivid
[233]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

metaphor of the principle upon which lan-
guage tends constantly to renew itself.

And this brings us to a vital point in
the whole question of acquiring style. If
you are proposing to learn the craft of
building, or pottery making, or carpet
weaving, will you be satisfied to know noth-
ing beyond what has been done by England
or America? Or will you, just as a mat-
ter of business shrewdness, study what has
been done in the past in Greece and Rome,
in Egypt and Turkey and India? The
business man and the scientist always keep
a keen eye on the whole world. And the
man of letters cannot afford to do less.
If you run over the list of the world's
great stylists, you will find that they were,
relatively speaking, linguists. I use the
term, relatively speaking, advisedly; be-
cause in some countries and at certain
epochs, a man who knew one language be-
sides his own passed as a person of learn-
[234]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

ing; while in another, two or three extra
tongues carried slight distinction. One of
our professional humourists once said that
he knew a man who spoke seventeen lan-
guages, and never said anything of Impor-
tance in any of them. There Is a point at
which the brain becomes merely acquisi-
tive. But the possession of two or three
languages besides onee's own is the best
of all aids to a distinctive style. It was
James Russell Lowell who said : " The
practice of translation, by making us de-
liberate in the choice of the best equivalent
of the foreign word In our own language,
has likewise the advantage of continually
schooling us In one of the main elements
of a good styles — precision; and precision
of thought is not only exemplified by pre-
cision of language, but is largely dependent
on the habit of it."

There are, besides, certain advantages
to be gained from seeing the purely tech-

[235]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

nical difficulties of language managed with
masterly skill in a different medium from
our own. We may struggle for years to
acquire facility in avoiding harsh combi-
nations of final and initial letters, the ex-
asperating recurrence of some cacophonous
but necessary relative pronoun, the jerk
and jolt of an awkward rhythm — and at
the end of that time we shall not know as
much of the philosophy of a fluent and me-
lodious style as could have been learned by
one quarter of the effort through exam-
ining what can be done in a naturally musi-
cal language like Greek; a language in
which harsh final mutes have no existence
and in which one difficulty of a good prose
style was not that of interweaving poetic
rhythms, but rather of avoiding them.
And similarly we can learn to correct our
own tendencies to carry certain principles
of prose writing to excess by seeing these
same principles carried to a reductio ad

[236]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

absurdum, A good illustration of this
point Is contained in Zola's account of
Turgeneff's amazement as he listened to a
discussion between Flaubert and his friends
regarding that very point already referred
to, the pursuit of the one inevitable word :

Turgeneff opened enormous eyes. He evi-
dently did not understand; he declared that no
writer, in any language, had ever refined his style
to such an extent. At home, in Russia, nothing
of the kind existed. From that day forth, every
time that he heard us cursing the whas and the
which' s, I often saw him smile; and he said that
we were quite wrong not to make a franker use
of our language, which is one of the clearest and
simplest there are. I am of his opinion, I have
always been struck with the justice of his judg-
ment; it is perhaps because, being a stranger, he
sees us from the necessary distance and detach-
ment.

But whether you accept Turgeneff's
view and choose to cultivate the franker
[237]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

use of language ; or on the other hand are
pleased to pursue endlessly the elusive will-
o'-the-wisp of perfection, remember al-
ways that style ceases to be good the mo-
ment that It is cultivated for its own sake
and not simply as an integral part of the
whole unified structure. They teach a
great deal about the importance of onomat-
opoeia as practised by Homer and Vergil;
and I think that a great many young stu-
V dents gather the idea that It is a quality
which ought to flaunt itself before the eye
and ear so that as one scans certain lines
of the Iliad or the JEneid one's predominat-
ing thought should be: How wonderfully
the rhythm and the consonant pattern here
suggests the poet's meaning. Now this,
of course, is a fallacy, and there is no bet-
ter way of showing that fallacy than by
quoting Daudet's delicious little anec-
dote :

[238]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

I shall never forget the famous: Quadrupe-
dante putrem' sonitu quatit. ... It was al-
ways cited to us as an example of onomatopoeia,
and my teacher had persuaded me that one might
mistake it for the gallop of a horse.

One day, wishing to frighten my little sister,
who had a great fear of horses, I came up be-
hind her and cried, " Quadrupedante putrem/*
and so forth. Well, the little thing wasn't
frightened !

Onomatopoeia, like everything else per-
taining to style, is used properly when it
does not obtrude itself, when it helps us
to form a mental picture without our be-
ing aware by what agency the author has
attained his result. Take, for instance,
one of the most extreme instances in mod-
ern writing of an attempt to fit sound to
meaning — the libretti to Wagner's Ring,
When you read the text quietly by your-
self you feel that the whole thing has been
overdone ; the various tricks of alliteration

[239]

THE QUESTION OF STYLE

stick out like so many bristles. But when
this same text is applied to the purpose
for which it was intended, you notice none
of this, because the sound and the meaning
blend so perfectly with the rhythm of the
music.

And in all elements affecting style this
same principle applies. Any ornament
which is used solely because it is orna-
ment, solely because the author wishes to
use his subject to call attention to his man-
ner rather than make his manner do
obeisance to his theme, Is vulgar ornament,
as offensive to good taste as over-dress in
women. In style, as in everything else
pertaining to the craftsmanship of writing,
learn to practise ''that fine art which so
artfully ail things conceals."

[240]

VIII
THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

CHAPTER VIII

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

There seems to be a widespread and un-
fortunate belief that there Is no such thing
as a technique of translating; or that, If
there Is, It Is a negligible matter, — some-
thing which Is unconsciously absorbed
along with the power to render Into
English OUendorfian sentences after the
fashion of " No, I have not the green um-
brella of your deaf grandmother, but the
big Russian Is up a tree." Translation,
so the argument seems to run. Is an even
simpler matter than original work: the
latter requires pen. Ink and paper, and a
certain natural aptitude; translation re-
quires only pen, Ink and paper, — the for-
eign author Is expected to supply the nat-
[243]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

ural aptitude. Here, on the one hand, is
the book to be translated; and here, on
the other, is a stout, able-bodied dictionary
which can be relied on to give some sort of
an equivalent for each of the foreign
words. A little patient plodding and in-
dustrious thumbing of the pages, — and
there you are !

Such is the genesis of a good deal of
the mediocre translation which in recent
years has brought the whole craft into
disrepute. The prevailing modern atti-
tude, in this country at least, is well illus-
trated by a sentence in a popular novel of
the present season. The author, wishing
to impress upon us his heroine's want of
culture and of literary standards, remarks
that she will read anything, ranging all the
way from works of real worth to ten-cent
translations of French novels. It appar-
ently did not occur to that author that a
ten-cent translation of a French novel is
[244]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

quite as likely to be a masterpiece as are
the great majority of current American
novels which will probably never be trans-
lated into any sort of foreign edition, ten-
cent or otherwise.

Now, as a matter of fact, there is a
technique of translating and one which is
neither quickly nor easily acquired. Wal-
ter Pater's comparison of translating to a
copy of a picture made through tracing
paper sounds clever but is misleading.
Mechanical aid in rendering one language
into another is precisely the sort of aid
which must be most scrupulously avoided.
The mere ability to hold a pencil and copy
the strokes line by line does not even make
up the alphabet of the craft. You might
spend your life putting tracing paper over
Raphael's Madonna della Sedia without
ever getting more than a caricature of the
original. It takes a long apprenticeship
and a specially developed skill to enable a
[245]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

painter to produce on canvas a really
worthy copy of a great master.

And yet a good many beginners in writ-
ing persist in believing that there is a
market for their amateur translations.
They do not seem to realise that for sev-
eral reasons there is much more hope for
their crude original work than for their
equally crude distortions of the work of
someone else. Early work usually shows
a certain amount of proportion between
subject and execution. The great ma-
jority of short stories that may honestly
be called " not half bad " in workmanship
are also " not half bad " in theme. But
when a beginner attempts to translate one
of the world's classics, or even the latest
volume of some widely read modern
novelist, he is clothing big thoughts in
unworthy phrases and his deficiencies of
style are doubly glaring by contrast.

Nevertheless, the practice of translat-

[246]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

ing, as the quotation from James Russell
Lowell In the preceding chapter pointed
out, Is one of the best possible means of
acquiring style ; and If practised merely as
an exercise and without any misplaced
ambition for publication, It Is a training
which cannot be too strongly recommended
to the apprentice In the craft of writing.
The only trouble with LowelPs utterance
is that he limits the value of translation
to a single element of style, namely, pre-
cision. As a matter of fact, It Is one of
the most valuable aids which we possess
to acquiring an appreciation, not merely
of a precision of words, but of new rhythms
and new possibilities of linguistic effects.
A trained translator of sterling authors
soon learns that If he hopes to preserve,
with a fair amount of fidelity, the distinc-
tive quality of the original author, he must
convey over into his own language some-
thing of the linguistic harmony and the
[247]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

phrase cadence. The present writer
knows from experience how hard a task
this Is and what hours of labour It some-
times takes to reproduce in English a
single paragraph of French or Italian or
Spanish, with even an approximate re-
tention of the original sound pattern and
the original number of syllables. Of
course, It Is only now and then In some
passage of particular lyric beauty that care
like this becomes Imperative ; but the ordi-
nary hack translator seldom If ever trou-
bles himself at all about such matters. The
ambitious craftsman, on the contrary, may
well spend many a day and week after this
fashion because he will thus learn a sur-
prising amount of sheer linguistic gymnas-
tics. Translation, whether from Greek,
Latin, or some modern tongue, is to the
literary craftsman like chest weights and
Indian clubs to the college athlete : it brings
his mental muscles into training.

[248]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

Now if we want to train ourselves to
translate well, the first step is to get fixed
clearly in our minds on which of several
principles the best kind of translation is
based. It was Lowell who after subdivid-
ing translation under the two heads of
paraphrase and reproduction, went on to
say:

The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian
Urn; the reproduction, If by a man of genius,
such as the late Fitzgerald, is like Keat's Ode
which makes the figures move and the leaves
tremble again, if not with the old life, with a
sorcery which deceives the fancy.

As between literal paraphrase and a
certain degree of freedom, Lowell is un-
doubtedly right in deciding in favour of
the second. Common sense, as well as
the verdict of literary history, supports
the contention that any translation which
is to survive must be the work of some-
[249]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

body possessed of a certain individual
bigness, somebody who himself has some-
thing to say, something original with
which to replace that delicate and volatile
essence that is inevitably lost In the process
of transference. Of all the arts and
crafts, translation is most closely akin to
acting. The translator, like the actor,
must temporarily sink his personality in
that of another; he must speak not his own
thoughts, but the lines that are set down
for him. But every translator, like every
actor, has a right to his own conception of
his part; he can, so to speak, supply his
own gestures, his own stage business.
And, if he is an actor devoid of origi-
nality, if he has no ideas to supply, no ges- .
tures of his own, no power to make his
personality tell upon the stage, then at
best his must be a sorry performance.-
Edgar Allan Poe is not the only writer
who has formulated the following theory
[250]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

of the best translation ; but no one else has
expressed it half so well:

There is one point (never yet, I believe, no-
ticed) which, obviously, should be considered in
translation. We should so render the original
that the version should impress the people for
whom it is intended just as the original im-
presses the people for whom it (the original) is
intended.

Now, if we rigorously translate mere local
idiosyncrasies of phrase (to say nothing of idioms)
we inevitably distort the author's designed im-
pression. We are sure to produce a whimsical,
at least, if not always a ludicrous, effect — for
novelties, in a case of this kind, are incongruities
and oddities. A distinction, of course, should be
observed between those peculiarities which ap-
pertain to the nation and those which belong to
the author himself, for these latter will have a
similar effect upon all nations, and should be
literally translated. . . .

The phraseology of every nation has a taint
of drollery about it in the ears of every other na-

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

tion speaking a diflerent tongue. Now, to con-
vey the true spirit of an author, this taint should
be corrected, in translation. We should pride
ourselves less upon literality and more upon dex-
terity at paraphrase. Is it not clear that, by such
dexterity, a translation may he made t@ convey to
a foreigner a juster conception of an original than
could the original itself f

To produce upon an English reader the
identical impression produced by any par-
ticular original work upon an ancient
Greek or Roman, a modern Frenchman
or Italian is, of course, an unattainable
Ideal. The thing at best can be done only
approximately. In the case of the Iliad,
for instance, a certain dominant note felt
by every Greek must have been that of
intense patriotism, a thrill of pride at the
thought of his own nation's achievements,
— and of course no dexterity of transla-
tion could ever duplicate that thrill in the
alien Anglo-Saxon reader. But this is no
[252],

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

reason for adopting the fallacious theory
of translation laid down by Matthew
Arnold in his well-known essay On Trans-
lating Homer:

No one can tell him (the would-be translator)
how Homer affected the Greeks, but there are
those who can tell him how Homer affects them.
These are scholars, who possess, at the same time
with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste
and feeling. No translation will seem to them
of much worth compared with the original ; they
alone can say whether the translation produces
more or less the same effect upon them as the
original. They are the only competent tribunals
in this matter ; the Greeks are dead ; the unlearned
Englishman has not the data for judging; and no
man can safely confide in his own single judg-
ment of his own work. Let not the translator,
then, trust to his notions of what the ancient
Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose
himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what
the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he
will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him

[253]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

not trust to his own judgment of his own work;
he may be misled by individual caprices. Let
him ask how his work affects those who both
know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether
to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor
Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett
here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to
read the original gives them.

It is difficult to imagine any method of
translation better calculated to distort If
not destroy the spirit of the original than
this advice of Matthew Arnold's. What-
ever Impression the Iliad made upon the
ancient Greeks, it is safe to assume that
It was as far removed as possible from
the impression that it makes to-day upon
the typical middle-aged professor of dead
languages, profoundly versed in archae-
ology and syntax. It is very much as
though he were to say to the contempo-
rary translator of Flaubert or Maupas-

[254]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

sant: "Do not trouble yourself about
what the modern Frenchman thinks of
these authors; do not trouble yourself
about what the modern Englishman is
likely to think; put no faith in what you
yourself think, — but try to imagine that
you are translating for the benefit of a
small audience of people who know French
as well as English, who by long residence
have absorbed the customs of the country
and who by nature and training have
rather more interest in literature than they
have in life." Unfortunately for this
theory, it is the ordinary English reader
who is going to decide what he thinks of
a foreign author given to him in transla-
tion; he, and no one else, is the man who
must be satisfied. And you can satisfy
him only by remembering constantly that
a translator is an interpreter and guide.
It is not enough for him to know exhaus-
tively the meaning of the original, but he
[255]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

must also realise the limitations of his
English audience and foresee what por-
tions of a foreign-work will be unintelligi-
ble for other reasons than that of a for-
eign tongue. The translator of the high-
est type is in a measure an appreciative
and Indulgent critic whose first aim Is to
make his audience share his own enthusi-
asm for his subject, to bring out not merely
some one beauty, but all the beauties of
the original; to make us feel not merely
an author's theme but his individual style,
not only the action of his story but its
pervading atmosphere.

Let us ask ourselves briefly what are
the requirements for this ideal type of
translator. He must have, first of all, a
thorough mastery of the foreign language,
and secondly, of his own; he must have a
special and Intimate acquaintance with the
author he has undertaken to translate, and
lastly, he needs an Intuitive sense of the

[256]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

limitations of the public for whom he is
translating.

Now, when we speak of a thorough
mastery of a foreign language, we mean
that sort of knowledge which grasps the
sense of a printed page without conscious
effort, appreciating all those nicer subtle-
ties of language that lie beyond the reach
of grammar and lexicon. There are trans-
lators who from long practise can glibly
roll forth a smooth and readable transla-
tion from a book they have never seen
before at a speed which taxes the power
of their stenographer to keep pace with
them. No matter how experienced trans-
lators of this sort may be, they are to be
mistrusted for work demanding a fine lin-
guistic appreciation. There is in all work
of a high literary order a certain quality
peculiar to the genius of the language.
As your eye travels down the printed page
you catch something which you know can
[257]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

not be carried over In full measure Into
another tongue; you must pause and hesi-
tate and reconsider In a constant and ever
recurring effort to reduce such sacrifice to a
minimum. And for this reason, when you
see another translator pushing blithely on-
ward undaunted by such difficulties, the
natural conclusion is that he Is afflicted
with a certain mental color-blindness, se-
renely unaware that he is missing the more
delicate shading of verbal tones.

And the same nicety of sense of the
meaning of words, the rhythm and ca-
dence of sentences is demanded of the
translator regarding the language Into
which he is translating. A far greater
wealth of resource Is needed by him than
by the original craftsman. A writer who
is doing creative work Is free to choose
his own vocabulary; he may affect the ab-
ruptness and simplicity of Anglo-Saxon
monosyllables or he may emulate what

[258]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

Carlyle has called the " fine buckram
style" of Dr. Johnson; he may use few
words or he may roll them out in a rush-
ing, surging flood. But the translator is
in all these respects bound by his foreign
model; he, more than any other writer,
must be possessed of an infinite resource
of word and phrase, — because sometimes
only a hair's breadth lies between humour
and pathos, between the tragic and the
grotesque; and that hair's breadth the
translator is bound to preserve.

Thirdly, before trying to put into Eng-
lish even some very simple and very brief
piece of writing from a foreign pen, it is
your duty as a good craftsman to know
your author, — not merely to know the one
specimen of his work that you are trans-
lating but a sufficient number of his vol-
umes to give you the right to claim an
intimate knowledge of his style, his struc-
ture, his philosophy of life. You may be
[259]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

able to produce a fairly adequate render-
ing of line Passion Dans le Desert or of
La Fete a Coqueville without ever having
heard the phrases, Comedie Humaine or
Les Rougon-Macquart. Yet it is safe to
say that there would be something miss-
ing, something of that intangible person-
ality which lies behind the words and
which would persistently elude any trans-
lator who was not thoroughly Imbued with
the writings of Balzac or of Zola in their
entirety. I remember a striking Instance of
this in the case of a translation published
some years ago of Stendhal's Chartreuse
de Parme, Now anyone who Is familiar
with Stendhal knows that his style was
short, abrupt, rather bold, formed as he
himself ironically Insisted on a daily read-
ing of the Civil Code. But this the trans-
lator In question did not happen to know;
It was safe to assume that aside from the
Chartreuse de Parme he had never read
[260]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

a line of Stendhal. And not liking the
plainness of the style and quite missing the
terse, crisp forcefulness of it, he proceeded
to embellish it in the English translation,
smoothing and amplifying and incidentally
falling into numerous amusing blunders.
The simple statement, for instance, that a
carriage was heard " approaching at a
trot," was expanded by the translator into
" the brisk trot of the two sturdy little
horses," regardless of the fact that the
context showed that the carriage in ques-
tion was a one-horse vehicle.

And, fourthly, it is essential to keep in
mind the limitations of the special public
for whom you are translating. A version
of a classic author intended as a " crib "
for college students is necessarily a very
different sort of production from a ren-
dering intended for the general reader.
In the former case, the intention is to em-
phasize the points of difference between

[2613

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

classic habits of speech and thought, and
our own; in the latter, the intention is to
disguise these points of difference. The
one translation says: here is an unaccus-
tomed road, steep and craggy and full of
ruts; jolt over it as best you can. The
whole purpose of the other is to make the
road so smooth that you almost forget
that the road lies in a foreign country.

The words, almost forget, are used ad-
visedly. We have seen that the aim of
the ideal translation is to place us as nearly
as possible in the place of readers for
whom the original is intended. Now,
take a French novel, the scene of which is
laid in Paris. A Frenchman, reading this
novel, would on the one hand feel no sense
of strange environment; but, on the other,
he would not for a moment lose sight of
the fact that the action was taking place
in Paris, and there is but one Paris in the
whole wide world. Now, in translating,
[262]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

It Is Impossible to preserve both these im-
pressions; you must either In a measure
sacrifice the environment, the milieu, or else
you must convey to the Anglo-Saxon reader
some sense of strangeness. It Is a matter
of compromise, and no general rules can
be laid down. Take for example, the
whole question of street nomenclature:
To the reader with no knowledge of a
foreign tongue, rue and strasse and via
and calle necessarily strike the eye and ear
with a certain degree of queerness, — yet,
to call these foreign public ways streets
would seem still queerer. One expects the
signs in a foreign city to look different,
just as one expects to be wet when one
goes In swimming. It Is not the normal
rule of life to be wet, but It would seem
considerably queerer to go In swimming
and remain dry. It was possible for
Thackeray, In light verse, to say whimsi-
cally, " Rue Neuve des Petits Champs the
[263]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

name Is, The New Street of the Little
Fields ; *' but It would be sheer grotesque-
ness In serious prose to speak of the Place
of the Star, and the Avenue of the Elyslan
Fields.

Similarly, foreign titles of courtesy and
conventional terms of address cannot be
translated without producmg a curious hy-
brid effect utterly out of tone with the con-
text. Mme de Montespan has a foreign
sound; Mrj. De Montespan Is neither more
nor less than burlesque. Even the least
travelled modern reader knows that in
Berlin people greet each other as Herr and
Frau, in Florence as Signor and Signora,
and not as Mr. and Mrs. Of course there
are certain anomalous cases that are rather
baffling; In Germany especially the compli-
cated forms of address, Herr Ober-Lieu-
tenant, Frau Professorin, and the like, lead
the translator between a Scylla of incon-
sistency and a Charybdis of farce-comedy.

E264]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

Here, as always in translating, the one
safe rule is, compromise, — and in this the
instinct of the born translator is revealed.
But there are certain problems, certain
pitfalls, that cannot be foreseen, any more
than they can be classified, which every
now and then arise to disconcert and ham-
per the translator, usually at a moment
when everything seems to be running most
smoothly. There are, for instance, cer-
tain plays upon words, certain effects de-
pendent upon the sound or cadence of the
original that is simply untranslatable. Mr.
William Archer, in his preface to the col-
lected works of Ibsen, points out that this
type of difficulty is curiously frequent in
the writings of the great Norwegian dram-
atist, and cites in particular the following
illustration :

In not a few cases the difficulties have proved
sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one in-
stance. Writing of The Master Builder, a very

C265]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in
it " a curious example of perhaps inevitable
inadequacy. ... * Duty ! Duty ! Duty ! '
Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst,
* What a short, sharp, stinging word ! ' The
epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the
original she cries out, * Plight ! Plight ! Plight ! *
And the very vi^ord stings and snaps." I sub-
mit that in this criticism there is one superfluous
word — to wit, the " perhaps " which qualifies
" inevitable." ... It might be possible, no
doubt, to adapt Hilda's phrase to the English
word and say, " It sounds like the swish of a
whip lash," or something to that effect. But
this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or
wrongly, I hold inadmissible.

An analogous case, in my own experi-
ence, occurred In an attempt to translate
the opening chapter of Don Gesualdo,
from the Italian of Giovanni Verga. It
went quite smoothly, — Verga's style Is the
essence of simplicity, — until I reached the
place where the Trao Palace Is on fire, and
[266]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

old Don Ferdinando, " looking like a mad-
man, with a face of parchment, kept re-
peating asthmatlcally, precisely like a duck :
* This way I this way ! ' " Now, in Eng-
lish this statement seems devoid of signifi-
cance; it is not the habit of any ducks of
which we have ever had experience, to re-
peat " This way ! this way ! " It happens,
however, that what Don Ferdinando said
in Italian was, " Di qua I di qua ! " —
which seems to be fairly good duck lan-
guage, whether in Sicily or America, —
but unfortunately one of thos,e happy ef-
fects that refuse to be translated.

Lastly, a word or two of practical ad-
vice about the best way of achieving results
in translating. Remember that the trans-
lator is in a certain sense a dual personal-
ity; he must be on the one hand a born
Frenchman, and a born Englishman or
American on the other. Now, no one can
be to the full extent these two things at

[267]

THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING

once; and therefore no flawless piece of
translating can be produced at a single sit-
ting. The best way, then, is to saturate
yourself with the foreign language, and
make a first rough draft in English, as
complete as possible, but clumsy in vocabu-
lary and ragged in idiom. Put it away
for a few days ; and then, with the original
out of sight and out of mind, proceed to
recast and to refine. A good translation
is like a good vintage; the first draft is sim-
ply the pressing of the grapes, — the best
you can do is to make sure that you have
expelled the juice to the last drop. But
you must give it time to age, before it is
ready to be put on the market.

[268]

INDEX

PAGE

Adam's Diar^ 51

Addison, Joseph 56

^neid, The 238

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland . . . .119

Amicis, Edmondo de 139

Annunzio, Gabriele D' 230

Appreciation of Literature, The (Woodberry) . 69

Archer, William 265

Argent Dans La Litterature, V 15

Arnold, Matthew, 54, 253, 254

Art of Fiction, The (Henry James) .... 64

Assommoir, U 108

Austen, Jane 58

Autobiography of Walter Besant 14

Autobiography of Anthony Trollope . 63, 71, 184
Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, The . . 194, 199
Awkward Age, The 65, 66, 88, 138

Bacon, Francis (Lord Verulam) 56

Balzac, Honore de . 51, 85, 122, 123, 163, 166, 260

Baudelaire, Charles 218

Belle Helene, La 107

Benson, A. C 112

Besant, Sir Walter 14, 40

Bible, The 93

Birrell, Augustine . . , 58

Boccaccio, Giovanni 123

Botticelli, Sandro 68

Bouguereau » » 33

[269]

INDEX

PAGE

Bouvard et Pecuchet 171

Bride of Abydos, The 154

Browne, Sir Thomas 218

Byron, Lord 153

Camp, Maxime du 57

Captains Courageous 67

Carlyle, Thomas 116, 125, 259

Cavalleria Rusticana 145

Cervantes 56, 121, 123

Charivari 168

Chartreuse de Parme 260

Chevalier de Maison Rouge loi

Childe Harold 55

" College Magazine, A" (Stevenson) .... 218

Comedie Humaine, La 85, 166, 260

Conrad, Joseph 232

Contes Drolatiques, Les (Balzac) 123

Corsair, The (Byron) 154

Cowper, William 56

Crawford, Francis Marion 93, i95

Curiosities of Literature (Disraeli) . . . .153

Dante 125

Daudet, Alphonse .... 86, 100, 140, 231, 238

David CopperHeld 68

Davidson, A. K loi

Decameron, The 68

De Coverley Papers, The 119

Defoe, Daniel 218

De Quincey, Thomas 223, 233

Dickens, Charles . 33, 60, 69, 97, 104, 105, 121, 122

Disraeli, Benjamin 153

Divine Comedy, The 125

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 89, 90

Don Gesualdo (Verga) 266

Don Juan 220

[270]

INDEX

PAGE

Don Quixote 68, 123

Doumic, Rene no

Dumas, Alexandre 30, loi, 102, no

Edgeworth, Marie I97

Education Sentimentdle, U (Flaubert) ... 168

Eliot, George 56, 60, 97

Emerson, Ralph Waldo . . . . . . . .227

Epic of the Wheat (Frank Norris) .... 84

Essay on Milton (Macaulay) 92

Essay on Style (De Quincey) 223

Essay on Style (Pater) 223

Fete & Coqueville, La 260

Fielding, Henry .... 56, 60, 104, 121, 133

Fitzgerald, Edward 249

Flaubert, Gustave . 12, 122, 167, 169, 171, 173,224,

225, 226, 227, 237, 254

France, Anatole 58, 63, 149

From a College Window (Benson) . . . .112

Gautier, Theophile S6, 57, 148, 163

Ghirlandajo 68

Gibbon, Edward 88

Gilbert, Sir William 202

Gissing, George 136

Gogol 122

Gosse, Edmund 75

Gulliver's Travels 119

Gyp 65, 66

Hamlet 68, 104

Hardy, Thomas 108

Harrison, Frederic 91

Hawthorne, Nathaniel 97, 106, 218

Hazlitt, William 218

Henry, 0 54

[271]

INDEX

PAGE

Hermana San Sulpicio, La 63, 122

Hewlett, Maurice 136, 162, 163, 232

Hill, Professor A. S 31, 180, 219

Holmes, Oliver Wendell 59, 199

Homer 58, 121, 253, 238

Howells, William Dean .... 62, 6zt 96, 136

Ibsen, Henrik 105, 265

Iliad, The 107, 157, 238, 252, 254

Innocents Abroad 51

"Is It Possible to Tell a Good Book From a
Bad One?" (Augustine Birrell) .... 58

James, Henry, 63, 64, 65, 69, 88, 118, 136, 137, 138,

14s, 204, 205, 220

. Johnson, Dr. Samuel 259

Jungle Books, The 119

Keats, John 136, 249

Kipling, Rudyard . . , . 22, 54, (6, 67, 75, 123,

136, 230, 232

La Bfiiyere, Jean de 9

Lamb, Charles 218

Lang, Andrew 106

Lavedan, Henri 65

Lettres de Jeunesse (Zola) .71

Life of Byron (Moore) 55

Life of Alexandre Dumas (A. K Davidson) . loi

Light That Failed, The 22, 67, 222

Lovenjoul, Spoelberch de 85

Lowell, James Russell, 51, 211, 223, 229, 235, 247, 249

McTeague (Frank Norris) 8

Macaulay, Lord 92, 184, 193

Macbeth 104

Mackenzie, Henry ;.i . 56

[272]

INDEX

PAGE

Madame B ovary (Flaubert) 225

Manzoni, Alessandro 122

Marble Faun, The 107

Maupassant, Guy de, 12, 54, 63, 69, no, 123, 229, 254
Memories and Thoughts (F. Harrison) ... 91

Meredith, George 75, 108, 112

Merimee, Prosper 148

Milton, John 56, 59, I35, 136

Miserahles, Les 225

Modern Love 75

Modern Painters 32

Montaigne, Michel de 218

Montespan, Madame de 264

Moore, George 136

Moore, Thomas 55

Moran of the Lady Letty (Frank Norris) . . 8
My Literary Passions (Howells) 96

Norris, Frank . 8, 84

Notes From Life j^JDaudet) 100

Novel: What It Is, The (Crawford) .... 93
Numa Roumestan (Daudet) 140, 141

Obermann 218

Octopus, The (Frank Norris) 85

Ollivant, Alfred 232

On Translating Homer (Matthew Arnold) . . 253

Othello 104

Our English (A. S. Hill) 31

Ovid 153

Paradise Lost 68

Passion dans le Desert, Une 260

Pater, Walter 50, 211, 223, 225, 245

Pattison, Mark 91

Phillips, David Graham 26

Philosophy of Composition, The (Poe) ... 98

Pied de Momie (Gautier) ....... 148

[273]

INDEX

PAGE

Pierre et Jean (Maupassant) 63, 229

Pilgrim's Progress, The (Bunyan) . . . .119

Pit, The (Frank Norris) 85

Poe, Edgar Allan . . 54, 63, 98, 100, 123, 194, 250

Pope, Alexander 55

Portraits Contemporains (Gautier) .... 164
Procurateur de Judee, Le (Anatole France) . 149

Quintillian 230

Rabelais, Frangois 56, 121

Raven, The (Poe) 63, 100

Redcoat Captain (Ollivant) 119

Reade, Charles 97

Richardson, Samuel 56, 68

Robertson, Morgan 40

Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 41

Rod, Edouard 33

Roderick Random (Smollett) 133

Rois en Exile, Les (Daudet) 86

Romanciers Naturalist es (Zola) 167

Roman Empire, The Decline and Fall of the . 88

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 136

Rouge et le Noir, Le (Stendhal) 225

Rougon-Macquart, Les 260

Rousseau, Jean Jacques 56

Ruskin, John 32, 39, ii9

Sainte Beuve i97

Saintsbury, Professor George .... 220, 221

Sand, George 122

Scott, Sir Walter 224

Shakespeare, William . . 56, 75, 92, 104, 105, 136
" Shakespeare Once More " (Lowell) . . . .51

Smollett, Tobias 56, 68, 104, 133

Snaith, J. C 232

Sonnets From the Portuguese (Mrs. Browning) 75
Stendhal 182, 260, 261

[274]

INDEX

PAGE

Sterne, Laurence ....... 56, 68, 133

Stevenson, Robert Louis, ^2^ 89, 90, 218, 220^ 221, 2.22,

Stevenson, Mrs. Robert Louis 89

Stowe, Harriet Beecher 95

Sullivan, Sir Arthur 202

Tarn O'Shanter (Burns) 108

Terry, Ellen 73

Thackeray, William Makepeace . . 65, 69, 97, 104,

105, 121, 122, 263
Thoreau, Henry David .... 59, 87, 154, 170

Tolstoy, Count Leo 122

Tom Jones (Fielding) 68, 133

Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain) 51

Traill, H. D 220

Treasure Island (Stevenson) 41

Trois Mousquetaires, Les (Dumas) .... 30
Trollope, Anthony . . .63, 105, 143, 173, 174, 184

Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 133

Turguenief 97, 'i-Z?, 257

Twain, Mark 50

Valdes, Armando Palacio . . . , 6z, 121, 122

Vanity Fair (Thackeray) 65, 68

Venus D'llle (Merimee) 148

Verga, Giovanni 145, 266

Vergil 238

Wagner, Richard 239

War and Peace (Tolstoy) 122

Wendell, Barrett 192, 201

What Maisie Knew (Henry James) .... 145

Wister, Owen 80

Woodberry, Professor George 69

Wordsworth, William . . .50, 51, 56, 93, 135, 218

Zola, Emile, 15, 21, 63, 71, 95, i39, 140, 167, 168, 171,

237, 260

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