Yes, and it is one of the objects that men do seek; for the history of literature proves abundantly that the world keeps a relish for that which feeds the soul as well as for that which ministers to the passion for beauty; if it crowns the literary artist, it has a wreath also for his humbler brother—if he is humbler—the originator and disseminator of thought. For it is to be considered that a man with a genius for writing is not therefore a man of original ideas, or indeed, so far as the necessity of the case goes, of any ideas at all. His gift may be—nay, perhaps is likely to be—purely artistic and literary, a faculty for seeing and describing. Thus we read of Sterne that he was a great author, “not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a sentence in his writings which can be called a thought, ... but because of his wonderful sympathy with and wonderful power of representing simple human nature.” Obviously, it is not to such as he that we are to go in search of wisdom. The man who furnishes us with that commodity, the quotable man, be his rank higher or lower, is one who thinks, or, lacking that, has an instinct for the discovery and expression of thought,—a man under the friction of whose pen ideas crystallize into handy and final shape, and so become current coin.
THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY
THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY
Clearness, directness, ease, precision,—these are literary virtues of a homely and primary sort. Reserve, urbanity, depth, force, suggestiveness,—these, too, are virtues, and happy the writer who has them. He is master of his art.
No good workman likes to be praised overmuch for the elementary qualities. Let some things be taken for granted, or touched upon lightly. Tell a schoolboy that he writes grammatically,—if you can,—but not the editor of a newspaper. Almost as well confide to your banker that you hold him for something better than a thief. “Simplicity be cursed!” a sensitive writer used to exclaim, as book after book elicited the same good-natured verdict. “They mean that I am simple, easily seen through. Henceforth I will be muddy, seeing it is beyond me to be deep.” But nature is inexorable, and with the next book it was the same story. Probably there is not a line of his work over which any two readers ever disputed as to its meaning. In vain shall such a man dream of immortality. Great books, books to which readers return, books that win vogue and maintain it, books for the study of which societies are organized and about which libraries accumulate, must be of a less flimsy texture,—in his own testy phrase, less “easily seen through.”
Consider the great classics of all races, the Bibles of the world. Not one but abounds in dark sayings. What another book the Hebrew Scriptures would be if the same text could never be interpreted in more than one way, if some texts could ever be interpreted at all! How much less matter for preaching! How much less motive for exegetical research! And withal, how much less appeal to the deepest of human instincts, the passion for the vague, the far-away, and the mysterious!
All religious teachers, in so far as they are competent and sincere, address themselves to this instinct. The worthier they are of their calling, the better do they appreciate the value of paradox and parable. The greatest of them made open profession of his purpose to speak over the heads of his hearers; and his followers are still true to his example in that particular, however they may have improved upon it in other respects. They no longer encourage evil by turning the other cheek to the smiter; not many of them foster indolence by selling all that they have and giving to the poor; but without exception they speak things hard to be understood. Therein, in part at least, lies their power; for mankind craves a religion, a revelation of the unseen and the unprovable, and is not to be put off with simple morality, with such commonplace and worldly things as honesty, industry, purity, and brotherly love. No church ever waxed great by the inculcation of these humble, earthly, every-day virtues.
In literature, the value of half-lights is recognized, consciously or not, by all who dabble in foreign tongues. Indeed, so far, at least, as amateurs are concerned, it is one of the chief encouragements to linguistic studies, the heightened pleasure of reading in a language but half understood. The imagination is put freshly in play, and time-worn thoughts and too familiar sentiments are again almost as good as new. Doudan, writing to a friend in trouble, drops suddenly into English, with a sentence or two about the universality of misfortune. “Commonplaces regain their truth in a strange language,” he explains; “if we complain of ordinary evils, we ought to do it in Latin.” The hint is worth taking. So long as we have something novel and important to communicate, we may choose the simplest words. “Clearness is the ornament of profound thoughts,” says Vauvenargues; but we need not go quite so far as the same philosopher when he bids us reject all thoughts that are “too feeble to bear a simple expression.” That would be to reduce the literary product unduly. Joubert is a more comforting adviser. “Banish from words all uncertainty of meaning,” he says, “and you have made an end of poetry and eloquence.” “It is a great art,” he adds, “the art of being agreeably ambiguous.”
Such tributes to the vague are the more significant as coming from Frenchmen, who, of all people, may be said to worship lucidity. Let us add, then, the testimony of one of the younger French writers, a man of our own day. “Humanity hardly attaches itself with passion to any works of poetry and art,” says M. Anatole France, “unless some parts of them are obscure and susceptible of diverse interpretations.” And in another place in the same volume (“Le Jardin d’Épicure”) we come upon this fine saying: “What life has of the best is the idea it gives us of an unknown something which is not in it.” How true that is of literature, also! The best thing we derive from a book is something that the author never quite succeeded in putting into it. What good reader (and without good reading there is no good writing) has not found a glimpse, a momentary brightness as of something infinitely far off, more exciting and memorable than whole pages of crystalline description?
Vagueness like this is one of the noblest gifts of a writer. Artifice cannot compass it. If a man would have it, let him pray for a soul, and refresh himself continually with dreams and high imaginings. Then if, in addition, he have genius, knowledge, and literary tact, there may be hope for him. But even then the page must find the reader.