ART OF WRITING.
“He that would write well,” says Roger Ascham, “must follow the advice of Aristotle, to speak as the common people speak, and to think as the wise think.”
Coleridge says: “To write or talk concerning any subject, without having previously taken the pains to understand it, is a breach of the duty which we owe to ourselves, though it may be no offence against the law of the land. The privilege of talking, and even publishing, nonsense, is necessary in a free state; but the more sparingly we make use of it, the better.”[[86]]
Much reading and good company are supposed to be the best methods of getting at the niceties and elegancies of a language; but this road is long and irksome. The great point is to acquire our most usual Anglicisms; all those phrases and peculiarities which form the characteristics of our language. Nearly eighty years since, Mr. Sharp took upon himself to say that we had no grammar capable of teaching a foreigner to read our authors; adding, “but of this I am sure, that we have none by which he can be enabled to understand our conversation.”
What an annoyance are long speakers, long talkers, and long writers—people who will not take time to think, or are not capable of thinking accurately! Once when Dr. South had preached before Queen Anne, her majesty observed to him, “You have given me a most excellent discourse, Dr. South; but I wish you had had time to make it longer.” “Nay, madam,” replied the doctor, “if I had had time, I should have made it shorter.”
Method in treating your subject is of great importance. Southey has well illustrated the absence of this quality. A Quaker, by name Benjamin Lay (who was a little cracked in the head, though sound at the heart), took one of his compositions to Benjamin Franklin, that it might be printed and published. Franklin, having looked over the manuscript, observed that it was deficient in arrangement: “It is no matter,” replied the author; “print any part thou pleaseth first.” Many are the speeches, and the sermons, and the treatises, and the poems, and the volumes, which are like Benjamin Lay’s book: the head might serve for the tail, and the tail for the body, and the body for the head; either end for the middle, and the middle for either end; nay, if you could turn them inside out, like a polypus or a glove, they would be no worse for the operation.[[87]]
Free Translation is a rare accomplishment. Sir John Denham, who is declared by Johnson “to have been one of the first that understood the necessity of emancipating translation from the drudgery of counting lines and interpreting single words,” gives the same praise to Sir Richard Fanshawe, whom he addresses thus:
That servile path thou nobly dost decline,
Of tracing word by word and line by line;
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue,
To make translations and translators too:
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense, but truer to his fame.
Dryden said, all the translations of the old school “want to be translated into English;” and verbal translation he compares to “dancing on ropes with fettered legs.” Education cannot do all that Helvetius supposes, but it can do much. Elle fait danser l’ours,—It makes a bear dance. It is said that some insects take the colour of the leaf that they feed upon. “I was common clay till roses were planted in me,” says some aromatic earth, in an eastern fable.
To unlearn is harder than to learn, and the Grecian flute-player was right in requiring double fees from those pupils who had been taught by another master. “I am rubbing their father out of my children as fast as I can,” said a clever widow of rank and fashion.
The Education of princes, or indeed the spoilt children of rich and distinguished parents, must be the experimentum crucis of teaching. “If Fénelon did succeed, as it is recorded he did, in educating the Dauphin, his success was little less than a miracle. How can any man, though of advanced age and of high reputation, perhaps also of a sacred profession and of elevated station, be expected to preserve any useful authority over a child (probably a wayward little animal), if he, the tutor, must always address the pupil by his title, or at least must never forget that he is heir to a throne?”
There is some truth in the following remarks by a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine, upon information overmuch:
We deal largely in general knowledge—an excellent article, no doubt; but one may have too much of it. Sometimes ignorance is really bliss. It has not added to my personal comfort to know to a decimal fraction what proportion of red earth I may expect to find in my cocoa every morning; to have become knowingly conscious that my coffee is mixed with ground liver and litmus, instead of honest chicory; and that bisulphuret of mercury forms the basis of my cayenne. It was once my fate to have a friend staying in my house who was one of these minute philosophers. He used to amuse himself after breakfast by a careful analysis and diagnosis of the contents of the teapot, laid out as a kind of hortus siccus on his plate. “This leaf, now,” he would say, “is fuchsia; observe the serrated edges: that’s no tea-leaf—positively poisonous. This now, again, is blackthorn, or privet—yes, privet; you may know it by the divisions in the panicles: that’s no tea-leaf.” A most uncomfortable guest he was; and though not a bad companion in many respects, I felt my appetite improved the first time I sat down to dinner without him. It won’t do to look into all your meals with a microscope. Of course there is a medium between these over-curious investigations and an implicit faith in every thing that is set before you.
[86]. One fine morning, a stalwart anti-Newtonian, properly accredited, presented himself to Baron Maseres, in the library of his mansion at Reigate: “I am come to talk over my favourite subject,” he said (it was, to overturn the universe!). “I am happy to see you,” replied the Baron; “but before we commence, I must ask you if you consider yourself proficient in mathematics?” The anti-Newtonian was dumbfounded. “Then,” rejoined the Baron, “it would be unprofitable for us to begin;” and he passed on to a more genial topic.
[87]. The Doctor.