Talks on Writing English. First Series

by Arlo Bates

It is not that one imitates good authors. Any imitation is bad art, because there should always be in what is done the ring of genuine, personal conviction. The imitator is not giving expression to that within him which is so real and so strong that it will not be suppressed. He is trying to show that he can feel as some one else has felt, that he can write as somebody else has written. It is a sham, and the reader feels that it is a sham. Imitation, moreover, is at best but a reproduction of the more obvious peculiarities of work, while at worst it is a catching of tricks, mannerisms, and faults. It may be added, too, that it is oftener at its worst than at its best. Anybody can imitate the defects of a style, and few its virtues.

In these days nobody reads avowedly for style directly. There was once an idea that it was well to select an author of standing and deliberately attempt to catch his manner, or, as the phrase went, to “form one’s style on the master.” The idea was about as sensible as would be the notion that it were well for a young man not wholly satisfied with his features to “form” his nose after that of the Apollo Belvedere. Style is the expression of selfhood. No writer can embody his own individuality in the expression of the individuality of another. Learn from the masterpieces what is good use in diction, in construction, in arrangement; learn from them to be strenuous, persuasive, and sincere in whatever you do; but do not for a moment think of obtaining from them that personal flavor which can come only from the writer himself, and which is the thing which makes style in its highest sense.

It is the development of the personality of the writer which saves a composition from becoming mechanical. In the first of these talks I quoted the instructions which Flaubert gave to Guy de Maupassant, in which he said:—

Whatever may be the thing which one wishes to say, there is but one word for expressing it; only one verb to animate it, only one adjective to qualify it. It is essential to search for this word, for this verb, for this adjective, until they are discovered, and to be satisfied with nothing else.

This I commended to you as sound and necessary advice. From our present point of view, however, it is to be seen that this is the attitude of a student rather than that of an artist. In other words it is rather the way to learn to write than the way to write. So painfully minute a method as that which Flaubert recommended to his pupil would bring to an end all spontaneous or impassioned writing. The mind should be trained by these severe and careful methods until exactness of expression becomes a second nature. Then for good or for bad one must write as one is impelled to write at the particular moment. In revision the most strict requirements may be held to, so long as there is kept in mind the danger of revising the life out of imaginative writing and of refining until spontaneity is lost. Work should be revised with patient, with inexhaustible care; but it must be revised delicately. No formal correctness, no perfection of epithet or propriety of diction, can atone for the sacrifice of the intangible qualities which in the original form express the mood of the writer, and are to a composition what the personality is to a human being.

In all the talks which preceded this we have been considering work as that of the student who is preparing to write rather than as that of the author who is actually producing. When we talk of style we are dealing with the production of literature. The student who has not mastered details in the most painfully minute manner has not fitted himself for that perception of a subject on broad lines which is the condition of successful production. William Blake has said: “In order to know what is enough, it is necessary to know what is more than enough.” The student must have acquired thoroughly the highest degree of elaboration possible in order that he may be able to judge what is proper and effective in any given case. He cannot fairly judge how far it is safe to go, unless he is keenly aware of what it is to go too far.

In considering a literary work as a whole and in treating it as an expression of his own particular and peculiar individuality, it is well for a writer to bear in mind a phrase of Mr. George Saintsbury, the English critic. “The first rule of literature,” he says, “is that what is presented shall be presented not merely as it is, but transformed, and, if I may say so, disrealized.” This is easily and obviously true of fiction. It is manifestly impossible to give a realized picture of life as it actually exists, to tell everything which must have happened to characters, how they eat and sleep, shiver when getting into their baths in the morning, find their egg too much or too little cooked at breakfast, get out of breath in hurrying to catch a street-car, and all the rest of the innumerable trifles which make up the bulk of life. On this plan the simplest story would be expanded into as many volumes as “Clarissa Harlowe.” The same principle of selection and departure from reality is no less true of everything which is written. The thoughts which a philosopher weaves into a profound system do not come to him in sequence, beautifully arranged. If he followed the actual order of nature, he would put down a heterogeneous mass of reflections, good and bad mingled together, with no system apparent in them except after a painful study which no reader would be at all likely to give to the confused and confusing pages. Art is not nature. It is not the reproduction of nature. It is the invention of man to produce at will and to enshrine in permanent form those impressions, those emotions which come to him in rare and fleeting instants when his own consciousness reaches for a quick moment to the secret of that life which informs nature. Remember that the object of writing is not to reproduce the actual; that it is not even wholly that very different thing, to produce an impression of the actual; it is to embody and to make evident the truth which actualities express. Whoever takes up his pen to produce literature undertakes to make clearer the relation of man to nature and to life. He sets out to say in all sincerity what some fact of existence means to him. If he is content to be a mere scribe, simply an artisan of letters, he may deal with words in a mechanical fashion, and manufacture composition as one makes a deal table. This is honest work enough, but it is not the production of literature. It is the work of the hack-writer; of the reporter of life and not of the interpreter of life. To produce literature there must be an earnest attempt to embody the writer’s conception of some phase of existence. There must be that expression of his convictions and character which is what we mean when we use the word style in its higher meaning.

It is of style in this sense that Goethe was thinking, when he said:—

It is not language in itself and independently which is accurate, vigorous, lucid, or graceful, but the spirit which is embodied in it; and so it is not in the power of every one to give to his work the good qualities of expression that should belong to it. The question is whether nature has given to the writer intellectual and moral qualities which demand and shape out for themselves such an embodiment [as he has given them]—intellectual powers of intuition and penetration; and not less moral power, that he may be able to resist the evil demons who would hinder him in the unswerving loyalty that he must pay to truth.—Goethe: Natur-Aphorismen, iv.

There is no better way of testing what one has written than by comparing it with the work of great writers. See wherein their work excels yours. Do not thereupon say to yourself, “Oh, of course I am not to be expected to do as well as they.” Say rather: “In so far as my work has fallen short of the best that has been done, it has fallen short of what has been shown to be possible. Let me see how far I can bring it nearer to the standard.”