“Infinite riches in a little room;”
but it would need an inspired reader to make it.
QUOTABILITY
QUOTABILITY
There is a kind of writing by which the reader is led along, perhaps hurried along, if it be a narrative, without pause from beginning to end. Everything follows directly from what has gone before; the mind is held upon the same level of interest; and the impression produced is, as it were, a single impression. There is another kind of writing, which brings the reader now and then to a halt. He looks up from the page, perhaps, fixing his eyes upon vacancy, and turning the thought, or the expression of it, over in his mind; or he betakes himself to a book of extracts and conveys a sentence or two into its keeping; or, possibly, if he is one of the rare ones who buy books and read with pencil in hand, he may indite a note on the margin of the leaf, or at least set a mark there,—as one blazes a tree at the foot of which treasure is buried. The author has said something,—something in particular, fresh, surprising, original; something that seems to have come from his own mind; a thing to be pondered over and returned upon. For the moment there is no going further; the reader has turned thinker, or is lost in a dream. It is as if a man had been walking down a pleasant road bordered with hedges and fields, one much like another, and now of a sudden has rounded a corner, and sees before him a lake or a waterfall, something new, different, unexpected, at the sight of which he stops as by instinct. Or you may say, it is as if a man had been traveling steadily forward, thinking only of his journey’s end, and all at once catches the shine of a gold piece in the path, or sees by the wayside a flower so novel and beautiful that it must be stepped aside for and looked at.
We have had in America three writers, living in the same country village at the same time, who exemplified in a really striking manner these two styles of writing: Hawthorne on the one hand, and Emerson and Thoreau on the other.
Hawthorne’s work you may read from end to end without the temptation to transfer so much as a line to the commonplace book. The road has taken you through many interesting scenes, and past many a beautiful landscape; you may have felt much and learned much; you might be glad to turn back straightway and travel the course over again; but you will have picked up no coin or jewel to put away in a cabinet. This characteristic of Hawthorne is the more noteworthy because of the moral quality of his work. A mere story-teller may naturally keep his narrative on the go, as we say,—that is one of the chief secrets of his art; but Hawthorne was not a mere story-teller. He was a moralist,—Emerson himself hardly more so; yet he has never a moral sentence. The fact is, he did not make sentences; he made books. The story, not the sentence, nor even the paragraph or the chapter, was the unit. The general truth—the moral—informed the work. Not only was it not affixed as a label; it was not given anywhere a direct and separable verbal expression. If the story does not convey it to you, you will never get it. Hawthorne, in short, was what, for lack of a better word, we may call a literary artist.
Emerson and Thoreau, on the other hand, were journalizers. Their life was not to create, but to think, to see, to read, and to set down the results of it all, day by day. When Emerson would make a piece of literature,—a lecture, or an essay, or even a book,—he sought out related paragraphs from his diary, dove-tailed them together, disguising the joints more or less successfully, as might happen,—it was no great matter,—added collateral ideas as they occurred to him, and the job was done. It was done the more easily because the journal was not a receptacle for impressions hastily noted. Sentence and paragraph had been assiduously finished to a word, turned this way and that and settled finally into shape, before they went into it; for a journal, with him, was not a collection of rough jewels, but a drawer full of pearls and precious stones, each carefully cut and polished, ready for the setting or the string.
And what was true of Emerson was true in good degree of Thoreau, who followed the same general method, but with a less pronounced and continuous effect of discontinuity: partly, it would appear, because of a difference in the turn of his mind (more given to reason, and less to intuition), and partly because of the narrative form into which his natural historical bent almost of necessity carried him,—a form by which pages and whole chapters of his work are held pretty closely together.
If with Hawthorne we put Irving,—who was like him so far as the point now under consideration is concerned, fluidity of style and an absence of “passages,”—we have four of our American classics in well-contrasted pairs. One pair, we may say, did work that was like tapestry, woven throughout; the other’s product was rather like patchwork,—composed of rare and valuable stuff, but still patchwork.