In such matters as the “split infinitive” and the “post-habited preposition,” there should never have been any doubt as to the complete validity and authority of the questioned usages. But there are other points at which some even good critics may be tempted to accept the condemnation of the literary grammarians. It is sufficient to mention one: the nominative use of the pronoun “me.” Yet, surely, any one who considers social practice as well as psychological necessity should not fail to see that we must recognise a double use of “me” in English. The French, who in such matters seem to have possessed a finer social and psychological tact, have realised that je cannot be the sole nominative of the first person and have supplemented it by moi (mi from mihi). The Frenchman, when asked who is there, does not reply “Je!” But the would-be English purist is supposed to be reduced to replying “I!” Royal Cleopatra asks the Messenger: “Is she as tall as me?” The would-be purist no doubt transmutes this as he reads into: “Is she as tall as I?” We need not envy him.
Such an example indicates how independent the free and wholesome life of language is of grammatical rules. This is not to diminish the importance of the grammarian’s task, but simply to define it, as the formulator, and not the lawgiver, of usage. His rules are useful, not merely in order to know how best to keep them, but in order to know how best to break them. Without them freedom might become licence. Yet even licence, we have to recognise, is the necessary offscouring of speech in its supreme manifestations of vitality and force. English speech was never more syntactically licentious than in the sixteenth century, but it was never more alive, never more fitly the material for a great artist to mould. So it is that in the sixteenth century we find Shakespeare. In post-Dryden days (though Dryden was an excellent writer and engaged on an admirable task) a supreme artist in English speech became impossible, and if a Shakespeare had appeared all his strength would have been wasted in a vain struggle with the grammarians. French speech has run a similar and almost synchronous course with English. There was a magnificently natural force and wealth in sixteenth-century French: in Rabelais it had been even extravagantly exuberant; in Montaigne it is still flexible and various—ondoyant et divers—and still full of natural delight and freedom. But after Malherbe and his fellows French speech acquired orderliness, precision, and formality; they were excellent qualities, no doubt, but had to be paid for by some degree of thinness and primness, even some stiffening of the joints. Rousseau came and poured fresh blood from Switzerland into the language and a new ineffable grace that was all his own; so that if we now hesitate to say, with Landor, that he excels all the moderns for harmony, it is only because they have learnt what he taught; and the later Romantics, under the banner of Hugo, imparted colour and brilliance. Yet all the great artists who have wrestled with French speech for a century have never been able to restore the scent and the savour and the substance which Villon and Montaigne without visible effort could once find within its borders. In this as in other matters what we call Progress means the discovery of new desirable qualities, and therewith the loss of other qualities that were at least equally desirable.
Then there is yet another warning which, especially in recent times, is issued at frequent intervals, and that is against the use of verbal counters, of worn or even worn-out phrases, of what we commonly fall back on modern French to call clichés. We mean thereby the use of old stereotyped phrases—Goethe called them “stamped” or gestempelt—to save the trouble of making a new living phrase to suit our meaning. The word cliché is thus typographic, though, it so happens, it is derived from an old French word of phonetic meaning, cliqueter or cliquer (related to the German klatschen), which we already have in English as to “click” or to “clack,” in a sense which well supplements its more modern technical sense for this literary end. Yet the warning against clichés is vain. The good writer, by the very fact that he is alive and craves speech that is vivid, as clichés never are, instinctively avoids their excessive use, while the nervous and bad writer, in his tremulous anxiety to avoid these tabooed clichés, falls into the most deplorable habits, like the late Mr. Robert Ross, who at one time was so anxious to avoid clichés that he acquired the habit of using them in an inverted form and wrote a prose that made one feel like walking on sharp flints; for, though a macadamized road may not be so good to walk in as a flowered meadow, it is better than a macadamized road with each stone turned upside down and the sharp edge uppermost. As a matter of fact it is impossible to avoid the use of clichés and counters in speech, and if it were possible the results would be in the highest degree tedious and painful. The word “cliché” itself, we have seen, is a cliché, a worn counter of a word, with its original meaning all effaced, and even its secondary meaning now only just visible. That, if those folk who condemn clichés only had the intelligence to perceive it, is a significant fact. You cannot avoid using clichés, not even in the very act of condemning them. They include, if we only look keenly enough, nearly the whole of language, almost every separate word. If one could avoid them one would be unintelligible. Even those common phrases which it is peculiarly meet to call counters are not to be absolutely condemned. They have become so common to use because so fit to use, as Baudelaire understood when he spoke of “the immense depth of thought in vulgar locutions.”[[56]] There is only one rule to follow here,—and it is simply the rule in every part of art,—to know what one is doing, not to go sheeplike with the flock, ignorantly, unthinkingly, heedlessly, but to mould speech to expression the most truly one knows how. If, indeed, we are seeking clarity and the precise expression of thought, there is nothing we may not do if only we know how to do it—but that “if” might well be in capitals. One who has spent the best part of his life in trying to write things that had not been written before, and that were very difficult to write, may perhaps be allowed to confess the hardness of this task.
To write is thus an arduous intellectual task, a process which calls for the highest tension of the muscles in the escalade of a heaven which the strongest and bravest and alertest can never hope to take by violence. He has to be true,—whether it is in the external world he is working or in his own internal world,—and as truth can only be seen through his own temperament, he is engaged in moulding the expression of a combination which has never been seen in the world before.
It is sometimes said that the great writer seldom quotes, and that in the main is true, for he finds it difficult to mix an alien music of thought and speech with his own. Montaigne, it is also said, is an exception, but that is scarcely true. What Montaigne quoted he often translated and so moulded to the pattern of his own mind. The same may be said of Robert Burton. If it had not been so these writers (almost certainly Burton) could scarcely have attained to the rank of great authors. The significant fact to note, however, is not that the great writer rarely quotes, but that he knows how to quote. Schopenhauer was here a master. He possessed a marvellous flair for fine sayings in remote books, and these he would now and again let fall like jewels on his page, with so happy a skill that they seem to be created for the spot on which they fell. It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is really never doing anything else.[[57]]
It is not in writing only, in all art, in all science, the task before each is that defined by Bacon: man added to Nature. It is so also in painting, as a great artist of modern time, Cézanne, recognised even in those same words: “He who wishes to make art,” he once said to Vollard, “must follow Bacon, who defined the artist as ‘Homo additus Naturæ.’” So it is that the artist, if he has succeeded in being true to his function, is necessarily one who makes all things new.[[58]] That remarkable artist who wrote the Book of the Revelation has expressed this in his allegorical, perhaps unconscious, Oriental way, for he represents the artist as hearing the divine spirit from the throne within him uttering the command: “Behold, I make all things new. Write!” The command is similar whatever the art may be, though it is here the privilege of the writer to find his own art set forth as the inspired ensample of all art.
Thus it is that to write is a strenuous intellectual task not to be achieved without the exercise of the best trained and most deliberate rational faculties. That is the outcome of the whole argument up to this point. There is so much bad writing in the world because writing has been dominated by ignorance and habit and prudery, and not least by the academic teachers and critics who have known nothing of what they claim to teach and were often themselves singular examples of how not to write. There has, on the other hand, been a little good writing here and there in the world, through the ages, because a few possessed not only courage and passion and patience, but knowledge and the concentrated intellectual attention, and the resolution to seek truth, and the conviction that, as they imagined, the genius they sought consisted in taking pains.
Yet, if that were all, many people would become great writers who, as we well know, will never become writers; if that were all, writing could scarcely even be regarded as an art. For art, or one side of it, transcends conscious knowledge; a poet, as Landor remarked, “is not aware of all that he knows, and seems at last to know as little about it as a silkworm knows about the fineness of her thread.” Yet the same great writer has also said of good poetry, and with equal truth, that “the ignorant and inexpert lose half its pleasures.” We always move on two feet, as Élie Faure remarks in his “L’Arbre d’Éden,” the two poles of knowledge and of desire, the one a matter of deliberate acquirement and the other of profound instinct, and all our movements are a perpetual leap from one to the other, seeking a centre of gravity we never attain.[[59]] So the achievement of style in writing, as in all human intercourse, is something more than an infinite capacity for taking pains. It is also defined—and, sometimes I think, supremely well defined—as “grace seasoned with salt.” Beyond all that can be achieved by knowledge and effort, there must be the spontaneous grace that springs up like a fountain from the depth of a beautifully harmonious nature, and there must be also the quality which the Spaniards call “sal,” and so rightly admire in the speech of the women of the people of their own land, the salt quality which gives savour and point and antiseptic virtue.[[60]]
The best literary prose speech is simply the idealisation in the heaven of art of the finest common speech of earth, simply, yet never reached for more than a moment in a nation’s long history. In Greece it was immortally and radiantly achieved by Plato; in England it was attained for a few years during the last years of the seventeenth and the first years of the eighteenth centuries, lingering on, indeed, here and there to the end of that century until crushed between the pedantry of Johnson and the poetic licence of the Romantics. But for the rest only the most happily endowed genius can even attain for a rare moment the perfection of the Pauline ideal of “grace seasoned with salt.”
It is fortunate, no doubt, that an age of machinery is well content with machine-made writing. It would be in bad taste—too physiological, too sentimental, altogether too antiquated—to refer to the symbolical significance of the highly relevant fact that the heart, while undoubtedly a machine, is at the same time a sensitively pulsating organ with fleshy strings stretched from ventricle to valves, a harp on which the great artist may play until our hearts also throb in unison. Yet there are some to whom it still seems that, beyond mechanical skill, the cadences of the artist’s speech are the cadences of his heart, and the footfalls of his rhythm the footfalls of his spirit, in a great adventure across the universe.