Talks on Writing English

If we examine our feelings in regard to anything which we read, we find that it has been easily intelligible, or that it has bothered our comprehension; it has interested us, stirred us, or has left us indifferent or bored; and it has or has not produced in us a sense of beauty and elevation of mood. Neither these sensations nor the qualities which produce them are sharply separable; but the distinctions perceptibly exist, so that for purposes of study the qualities may conveniently be treated one at a time. It is easy to see that in understanding the meaning of a thing we most markedly use the intellectual faculties; that in liking or disliking we respond to an appeal to the emotions; and that in feeling beauty and appreciating the æsthetic, we necessarily employ the imagination. The first is a question of comprehension; the second of feeling; and the third of taste. Clearness is the intellectual principle of style; Force the emotional; and Elegance the æsthetic.

The Principles of Structure must precede and underlie those of Quality. Speaking broadly, we may say that it is idle to attempt to give to a composition or to a sentence Clearness, Force, or Elegance, unless it is already satisfactory in Unity, Mass, and Coherence. The closest attention to the laws of mechanical form, however, is not sufficient to secure quality. For the secret of that it is needful to go further.

It is in Clearness that the Principles of Quality are most obviously associated with those of Structure. If an author has carefully considered the Unity of his composition, if he has massed it properly in parts and as a whole, if he has looked well to its Coherence, – it is hardly possible that he should fail of being readily understood. Close attention to the mechanics of style will generally make a writer intelligible, provided always that he wishes his meaning to be apprehended easily, and that he himself knows what he is attempting to say.

These two considerations are of much practical importance. Sometimes writers do not choose to be clear. George Meredith seems often to write with the deliberate intention of forcing the reader to go slowly, – as if from the feeling that what can be read rapidly is in danger of being merely skimmed over. There are others, like Thomas Carlyle, who deliberately obscure what they write, apparently in the hope of adding by complexity an air of mystery to commonplaces and a meretricious dignity to wisdom.

Take, for instance, this sentence: —

If for the present, in our Europe, we estimate the ratio of Ware to Appearance of Ware so high even as One to a Hundred (which, considering the Wages of a Pope, Russian Autocrat, or English Game-Preserver, is probably not far from the mark), – what almost prodigious saving may there not be anticipated, as the Statistics of Imposture advances, and so the manufacture of Shams (that of Realities rising into clearer and clearer distinction therefrom) gradually declines, and at length becomes all but wholly unnecessary! – Carlyle: Sartor Resartus, ii. 3.

Here the lack of lucidity is intentional. The author has sacrificed it to the particular effect which he wished to produce. He sought to give to what he wrote an air of bizarre and piquant individuality, and it is for this that he so distorts and convulses his sentences. The purpose is as conscious as that which informs the gyrations of an acrobat. There is the same relation between a page of “Sartor Resartus” or the “French Revolution” and a page of ordinary prose that there is between the marvelous distortions of a contortionist and the walk of a gentleman, – each, of course, being well in its place.

Compare with the sentence just given, this passage from an undergraduate’s theme: —

Chaucer’s influence on the language was great, and he helped to put the language before the people in a way that had not been done before, so that it is evident that there was a great result from this. This was because he helped to change the English language, and in this way he was very influential in affecting the language.

Here an unhappy youth, engaged in all but mortal combat with an examination paper, was endeavoring to say something when he had nothing to say. Of course he could not but fail, since it is impossible to show clearly what one does not see clearly.

With these put also this, which again is from an undergraduate’s theme: —

If the student respects a professor, as many do, he can show his respect in many ways; if he does not, and there are teachers who do not command the respect of students (I do not consider the question to be confined to this school, and in some colleges there are men on the Faculty who are not respected, nor do they deserve to be) and I think a man should raise his hat only to ladies or to gentlemen that have ladies with them.

Here the writer knew fairly well what he wished to say, although he had not taken the trouble to think it out very sharply. His difficulty was that he lacked technical skill in expression.

These examples illustrate the causes from which obscurity may arise. The first is legitimate. Whether we agree that Carlyle or George Meredith or Browning has carried obscurity beyond the farthest limit at which it is permissible has nothing to do with the fact that there are times when it is the right of an author to sacrifice Clearness to some other effect which he seeks. It is, however, fair to say that in ordinary experience these emergencies are pretty nearly as rare as the appearance of white blackbirds; and that at least no writer has a right to discard Clearness until he has secured it. Certainly no one can successfully employ obscurity as a means of producing literary effect until he has acquired the art of writing with transparent simplicity.

Of the second cause it is sufficient to say here that no outward aid can enable the student to overcome it. To think sharply and lucidly is the result of self-discipline. It is a matter of mental exercise, and while a student may be sent to a mental as to a physical gymnasium, all strengthening of the mind as of the muscles must be the result of individual exertion. There has as yet been discovered no system of intellectual massage, by means of which the understanding may attain to the benefits of work without doing anything.

While rules or wise maxims help little in this matter of mental clearness, it is a thing so important and so universally essential in all intellectual training that it is difficult to pass it without a word more. If a new Dante were to people a new Inferno with sinners guilty of crimes intellectual, as the stern old Florentine peopled his with those who violated moral laws, the most populous circle would be devoted to those who mistakenly think themselves to think. There is a discouragingly large portion of mankind whose mental processes are apparently those of the oyster. They are mentally so indolent or incapable that the labor of reflecting is entirely beyond them. No student can afford to remain in doubt as to whether he really thinks, or merely indulges in vague mental impressions which are to genuine thought as is the dull smouldering of a heap of wet leaves in a November fog to a brisk beech-wood fire on a wide hearth in a winter night.

Macaulay is right when he says: “Propriety of thought and propriety of diction are commonly found together… Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas.” He might have added that it is of great importance that the writer be able to think of his subject as a whole. It is easy for the mind to grasp a small thing and it is proportionately harder for it to seize upon a greater; yet upon the power to hold work in the mind in its entirety must as surely depend success in writing as does all vigorous mental development.

The third cause of obscurity, inability to express the thought which one has, is at once the most common, and the most inexcusable. Here we are dealing with a tangible thing, to a great extent a matter of rule, and, at most, largely a question of study. There is no reason why a person of ordinary intelligence should not be able to express whatever he is able to think. Indeed, whoever has fully thought out an idea has already phrased it, and if he has even a moderate amount of training in composition should have no difficulty in expressing it on paper if he will but take the necessary pains.

It is evident that what is clear to one reader may be obscure to another. It follows that the first question to be decided is to what audience a composition is to be addressed. Few of us can understand this sentence from a treatise on comparative embryology.

The inner wall of each of the paired cavities forms a splanchnopleuric mesoblast, and the outer wall of the whole the somatic mesoblast.

This is clear to readers who understand the technical language of embryology; and for them the author wrote. Parallel examples might be given which would show how many sorts of writing there are which are clear to a limited audience only. The reports of base-ball games are unintelligible to the average English reader, while to the American the notes on cricket are equally meaningless. The criticisms of artists upon pictures seldom convey a definite impression to those not versed in the technical language of painting; and the same principle holds throughout all sorts of literature.

The whole matter then resolves itself into the simple maxim: Use the language of those addressed. There is somewhere a story of a lady who always spoke to her maid in French, because in taking the situation the girl had wrongfully claimed to know that tongue. The mistress held stubbornly to the position that the maid should understand, and she endured the discomforts of never being well served rather than abandon it. Much writing and not a little talking is all but as absurd. Constantly authors address themselves to the general public in language which they know or might know the general public will not understand. Whatever else the human race may be, it is not logical; there are few of us free from the fault of sometimes acting upon assumptions which we know to be false; and nowhere is this fact more strikingly illustrated than in composition.

This question of using the language of those addressed is one which meets every teacher at the very threshold of the class-room. The best instructor is not he who knows most, but he who imparts most; and he imparts most who most perfectly speaks the language of his pupils. It is of no use daily to fire over the heads of children all the wisdom of Solomon if it be embodied in a language which is not theirs. The teacher who really teaches does not take the attitude of the lady whose maid should have known French; he does not assume that pupils should understand what he says; he simply considers whether as a matter of fact they do understand. If they do not, he sets himself with patience to re-phrase it, and, if need be, re-phrase again, until he has put it into language which the children cannot fail to comprehend. It is not a question of what might be understood but of what must be. It is true that this calls for a patience which is almost divine, and there are teachers in the common schools to-day who are only preserved to us because the age of translation to heaven is past. There are unhappily others who do not understand that this patient and laborious seeking after the intellectual dialect of the pupil is the only possible means of imparting instruction; and thus it happens that some schools are taught in a language which, while it is English, is yet hardly more intelligible to the students than would be Choctaw or the speech of Borrioboola-Gha.

In writing, the safest guide in this respect is sound, homely common sense. Write without nonsense in the way of self-consciousness or affectation. Make it always a rule in general composition to aim at the simple, average man; to write so that the traditionally foolish wayfaring man need not err therein. Remember that the aim is not to write so that one may be understood, but to write so that one cannot be misunderstood.

Absurdly enough, human vanity comes in here. Untrained writers are apt to feel that they lower themselves if they condescend to write for the intellectual bourgeoisie. Many a clever young author has come to grief because he could not bring himself to use simple language lest it should seem that he had not command of a more elaborate diction. He has failed because he could not be willing to address the ordinary reader lest he thereby might appear to show that he had not the gift of speaking to the learned. The great writers are men who are free from this weakness; who are intent upon making their message understood, and not upon preserving a foolish appearance of superiority. Shakespeare did not disdain to write for the London apprentices brawling in the pit, or Homer to sing for semi-barbarians half-drunken at the feast. The masterpieces of literature which have been addressed to the educated few are revered; those which have been confessedly for the many have been read and lived upon. To take as instances two works written at about the same time: “Paradise Lost” has been commended by critics and admired by scholars; “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been and is the favorite book with thousands. The one has always been profoundly admired and the other has been loved. I do not mean that this is all that might be said of these classics, or that there are no other considerations in determining their worth, but they do serve to make more clear the fact that to reach the general reader it is necessary to write for the general reader.

Speaking the language of the average man includes also the confining of allusions to the range of his probable knowledge, the taking for granted nothing which he may not reasonably be supposed to know. The temptation to show erudition is at the elbow of every writer. When, near the beginning of this lecture, I referred in an easy manner to the Taj Mahal, I was instantly conscious that I had used the comparison with a pleasant sense of the air of superior knowledge which it might give. However it may be with you, the probabilities are that the ordinary reader would not be sufficiently familiar with the elaborate ornamentation of that wonder of the East to make my comparison to its jewelled walls effective, and I left it only because I wanted to use it here as an illustration.

It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional experiences of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. It must be remembered that all art is based on the assumption of a community of human feelings; in other words, upon the theory that the fundamental emotions are shared by all mankind. The more closely a writer holds to common humanity, to common human experience, the more wide will be the range of his work, and the more clear will he be in those very matters where clearness is most difficult of attainment. The more subtile and remote from ordinary human life are the emotions and the passions to be portrayed, the more absolute is the necessity of conveying them in terms of simple and common experience. Analyze one of the tragedies of Shakespeare or of the old Greek dramatists, and you will find that its tremendous effects are produced by means essentially simple. By keeping always within the range of the sympathies and feelings common to humanity, the masters are able to make every stroke tell; and this method is in the nature of things the only possible one. Common humanity can comprehend only what it has felt.

To gain Clearness it is necessary first to avoid all vagueness of thought and all vagueness of expression. It is needful to shun ambiguity of word or of phrase, and that more subtle ambiguity which may arise from ill-considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from bad arrangement of the parts of a composition. It is no less important to write with a constant remembrance of the audience addressed; to use their language, and to appeal to the emotions and experiences which are likely to be common to the average individual of the class for which one writes. Inexperienced writers may make the mistake of supposing that this is the rule by which mediocrity is to be reached; but as a matter of fact these are the principles upon which have been written the masterpieces of the world.

VI

PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED

Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions. Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work, yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has been lost.

We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance – the antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so on – might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour, – the prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways decent or indecent, – have not in themselves anything that can be called Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention, but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.

“The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he goes on to exemplify this thus: —

Compare these three simple statements: “I found him very agreeable one afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house.” Now all that the word “wet” says is that the afternoon was watery; but it clearly implies that it was an afternoon when you would not care to be out of doors. All that the words “in a country house” state is a simple fact of locality; but they imply that you were in a place where not to be out of doors was probably a serious trial to the temper. So the last statement as a whole, “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house,” suggests, though it does not state, that the person spoken of was one whose charms could overcome a pretty bad temper. At the same time it is a phrase which I fancy anybody would admit to hold the attention more strongly than either of its predecessors; and its superiority in force lies not so much in the bare facts which it adds to the first statement as in the thoughts and emotions it suggests. Still again, take this sentence from one of M. de Maupassant’s stories: “It was the 15th of August – the feast of the Holy Virgin, and of the Emperor Napoleon.” He states only two facts about the 15th of August, and these in the simplest of words. Neither by itself would hold one’s attention enough to remain long in memory. But put them together; think what the Holy Virgin means to Catholic Europe, and what the Emperor Napoleon means to those who are not subdued by the magic genius of Bonaparte, – and you have a sentence that when mid-August comes about will hover in your head. Yet the force of this – so greatly superior to the force of either statement by itself – lies not in what is actually said, but wholly in what is implied, suggested, connoted, in this sudden, unexpected antithesis.

The thing which the writer has caused the reader to think – or even to suppose himself to think – is sure to interest him. The dullest of bores is absorbed in his own words, and in effect that which the reader receives by suggestion is his own thought. What is denoted is the word of the writer; what is connoted is for the time being the thought of the reader.

It is not difficult to see that Clearness is an aid to Force; or, to put it more exactly, that a lack of Clearness will interfere with Force. Yet the one is by no means essential to the other. The diction of “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” that book so strong that it wrings the heart almost like a fierce personal sorrow, is in passages so obscure as to have given rise to the rather cheap mot that the novel would be successful if it were translated into English. Almost any page of Carlyle might also be cited in illustration; while that Clearness may fail to secure Force is proved by the pellucidly stupid lucubrations of an innumerable company of authors whom nobody could fail to understand if it were possible to keep awake to read them.

Connotation may be the result of various causes. It may be produced by a swiftness and briskness of motion which so awakens and quickens the mind that the reader is aroused to thought, and seizes each idea presented as if he had himself originated it. It is this sort of force that we mean when we speak of the vivacity or the brilliancy of a work. The secret lies chiefly in passing quickly from one significant point to another. This involves, it is apparent, the power of selecting the significant, and of bringing this out while avoiding the unessential.

The effectiveness of the sensational story depends largely upon a quality closely allied to this, although here it is a matter not so much of style as of material. The tale which moves rapidly from situation to situation, so that the reader seems to share the adventures of the characters, often owes as much to the swiftness of its progress as to the nature of the story told. It owes more, as a general thing, to the vividness with which the exciting situations are imagined and presented. The more real a thing seems to the reader, the more suggestive it must be to him, and the more likely is he to share the sensations set down, so that for the moment it seems as if he were actually experiencing them. In other words, the more real the narrative, the more suggestive it becomes.

One great means of producing this sense of reality either in narrative or in any other kind of composition, whether in the setting forth of thoughts, or in the telling of events, is in making what is written specific. The specific term is apt to be more suggestive than the general from the fact that it presents to the mind an idea which can be grasped readily. When one reads that the Indians are on the war-path and are ravaging the country, one has a vague feeling of horror; but if one is told that the Red Men have crossed the bounds of Big Lick Reservation, have murdered and scalped a settler named John Thing, have burned his cabin, and carried off his wife and children, there is no vagueness about it. The impression becomes at once vivid and forceful in what it denotes, and stirring in what it connotes.

It is from a misapplication of this fact that modern fiction has fallen into that vice which has been known as Realism – perhaps because it is less real than any other sort of fiction ever devised. It is apparently by a perception of the effectiveness of the specific, that Realists have been led into the error of believing in the effectiveness of the minute.

Before leaving the quality under discussion it is well to say a word about what is called “reserved force.” Our respect for a writer is always increased by feeling that he might do more than he is doing. We are led on by a desire to see what greater things he will accomplish. The feeling in reading an author who is evidently doing his utmost is not unlike that felt in crossing a bridge which shakes with the footfall. It may carry us over the stream, but on the other hand it may break under us. I once heard a lady explain her dislike for a certain youth by saying: “I never could endure a man who is always doing his darnedest!” The expression is unhappily vulgar, but it does seem to me to be humanly expressive. We do not like to feel that we have come to the end of the resources of a friend or of an author.

How then does a writer produce an impression of reserved force? The phrase meets one in book reviews, and to inexperienced writers is apt to convey little but bewilderment. One way in which the finished literary craftsman secures the impression of reserved power is by deliberately making the minor parts of his work weaker than those more important. In other words, he gains the effect of reserved strength by reserving strength. Often it is well in the revision of a composition to lessen the stress of expression in unimportant passages; to soften down, as it were, all portions except the high lights. The natural tendency of every earnest writer is to express himself as vigorously as possible, and in the first draft this is well, – provided always that he has the self-control and the skill so to modify in revision the less important parts that the emphasis shall be properly proportioned. Shading in literature is a matter which it is not easy to explain without examples much longer than it is possible to use here. It must be learned by the study of masterpieces. It is well to keep in mind, however, that it is oftener the result of a clever softening of minor passages than of a heavier emphasis upon important portions; and above all that the secret of shading and of reserved force as well is proportion. It is rather comparative than absolute stress which is effective. Vehemence is not vigor. Make up your mind clearly what points you wish to bring out most sharply; that is half of the process: then see to it that the remaining parts of the composition are kept subordinate to these; that is the rest of it.

Largely, too, is a sense of reserved force imparted by smoothness and ease of style. A style which is rough generally seems hard and labored. To carry the reader forward easily seems to be to carry him surely, and gives the impression that the writer could go faster and farther if he but chose.

One of the secrets of smoothness is the art of easy transition from one paragraph to another, from one sentence to another, from one thought to another. In Macaulay’s essay on “Machiavelli,” for instance, after speaking of the correspondence of the Italian, the author continues:

It is interesting and curious to recognize, in circumstances which elude the notice of historians, … the fierce and haughty energy which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable hatred of Cæsar Borgia.

We have mentioned Cæsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for a moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of Italy was so strongly personified, etc.

And so the essayist goes on to draw a comparison between Cæsar Borgia and Machiavelli, which he had of course intended from the first, but which he has had the art to introduce as if it were a sudden thought. The effect is as if the name of Borgia had suggested the parallel; and not only does this give an air of spontaneity, but it also impresses the reader with a feeling of security in the resources of the writer. If the mere mention of a famous name can bring so much from his mind, it is evident that that mind must be most abundantly stored.

More subtle, and therein so much the more admirable, is the art which links together the parts of a composition simply by closeness of meaning. To illustrate it would take too much room, but all the great essayists afford examples, and it is in them that this detail of literary skill may most conveniently be studied.

Another matter closely connected with Force is that of beginning and ending well. If the opening sentence of a composition interest the reader he is ready to go on, while an effective close leaves him with a pleasant impression of what he has been reading. In a composition divided into parts or chapters, it is especially important to see to it that the separate portions end effectively. The general verdict upon a book is largely made up of the sum of impressions received from the endings of sections. Here again the reader will find examples in all the masters, but a few may be given. In a vein almost familiar, but in entirely good taste, Lowell begins his superb essay on Chaucer: —

Will it do to say anything more about Chaucer? Can any one hope to say anything, not new but even fresh, on a topic so well worn?