II
Thus we do not always realise that learning to write is partly a matter of individual instinct. This is so even of that writing which, as children, we learnt in copybooks with engraved maxims at the head of the page. There are some, indeed, probably the majority, who quickly achieve the ability to present a passable imitation of the irreproachable model presented to them. There are some who cannot. I speak as one who knows, for I recall how my first schoolmaster, a sarcastic little Frenchman, irritated by my unchastenable hand, would sometimes demand if I wrote with the kitchen poker, or again assert that I kept a tame spider to run over the page, while a later teacher, who was an individualist and more tolerant, yet sometimes felt called upon to murmur, in a tone of dubious optimism: “You will have a hand of your own, my boy.” It is not lack of docility that is in question, but an imperative demand of the nervous system which the efforts of the will may indeed bend but cannot crush.
Yet the writers who cheerfully lay down the laws of style seldom realise this complexity and mystery enwrapping even so simple a matter as handwriting. No one can say how much atavistic recurrence from remote ancestors, how much family nervous habit, how much wayward yet deep-rooted personal idiosyncrasy deflect the child’s patient efforts to imitate the copperplate model which is set before him. The son often writes like the father, even though he may seldom or never see his father’s handwriting; brothers may write singularly alike, though taught by different teachers and even in different continents. It has been noted of the ancient and distinguished family of the Tyrrells that their handwriting in the parish books of Stowmarket remained the same throughout many generations. I have noticed, in a relation of my own, peculiarities of handwriting identical with those of an ancestor two centuries ago whose writing he certainly never saw. The resemblance is often not that of exact formation, but of general air or underlying structure.[[61]] One is tempted to think that often, in this as in other matters, the possibilities are limited, and that when the child is formed in his mother’s womb Nature cast the same old dice and the same old combinations inevitably tend to recur. But that notion scarcely fits all the facts, and our growing knowledge of the infinite subtlety of heredity, of its presence even in the most seemingly elusive psychic characters, indicates that the dice may be loaded and fall in accord with harmonies we fail to perceive. The development of Mendelian analysis may in time help us to understand them.
The part in style which belongs to atavism, to heredity, to unconscious instinct, is probably very large. It eludes us to an even greater extent than the corresponding part in handwriting because the man of letters may have none among his ancestors who sought expression in style, so that only one Milton speaks for a mute inglorious family, and how far he speaks truly remains a matter of doubt. We only divine the truth when we know the character and deeds of the family. There could be no more instructive revelation of family history in style than is furnished by Carlyle. There had never been any writer in the Carlyle family, and if there had, Carlyle at the time when his manner of writing was formed, would scarcely have sought to imitate them. Yet we could not conceive this stern, laborious, plebeian family of Lowland Scots—with its remote Teutonic affinities, its coarseness, its narrowness, its assertive inarticulative force—in any more fitting verbal translation than was given it by this its last son, the pathetic little figure with the face of a lost child, who wrote in a padded room and turned the rough muscular and reproductive activity of his fathers into more than half a century of eloquent chatter concerning Work and Silence, so writing his name in letters of gold on the dome of the British Museum.[[62]]
When we consider the characteristics, not of the family, but of the race, it is easier to find examples of the force of ancestry, even remote ancestry, overcoming environment and dominating style. Shakespeare and Bacon were both Elizabethans who both lived from youth upwards in London, and even moved to some extent almost in the same circles. Yet all the influences of tradition and environment, which sometimes seem to us so strong, scarcely sufficed to spread even the faintest veneer of similarity over their style, and we could seldom mistake a sentence of one for a sentence of the other. We always know that Shakespeare—with his gay extravagance and redundancy, his essential idealism—came of a people that had been changed in character from the surrounding stock by a Celtic infolding of the receding British to Wales.[[63]] We never fail to realise that Bacon—with his instinctive gravity and temperance, the suppressed ardour of his aspiring intellectual passion, his temperamental naturalism—was rooted deep in that East Anglian soil which he had never so much as visited. In Shakespeare’s veins there dances the blood of the men who made the “Mabinogion”; we recognise Bacon as a man of the same countryside which produced the forefathers of Emerson. Or we may consider the mingled Breton and Gascon ancestry of Renan, in whose brain, in the very contour and melody of his style, the ancient bards of Brittany have joined hands with the tribe of Montaigne and Brantôme and the rest. Or, to take one more example, we can scarcely fail to recognise in the style of Sir Thomas Browne—as later, may be, in that of Hawthorne—the glamour of which the latent aptitude had been handed on by ancestors who dwelt on the borders of Wales.
In these examples hereditary influence can be clearly distinguished from merely external and traditional influences. Not that we need imply a disparagement of tradition: it is the foundation of civilised progress. Speech itself is a tradition, a naturally developed convention, and in that indeed it has its universal applicability and use. It is the crude amorphous material of art, of music and poetry. But on its formal side, whatever its supreme significance as the instrument and medium of expression, speech is a natural convention, an accumulated tradition.
Even tradition, however, is often simply the corporeal embodiment, as it were, of heredity. Behind many a great writer’s personality there stands tradition, and behind tradition the race. That is well illustrated in the style of Addison. This style—with a resilient fibre underneath its delicacy and yet a certain freedom as of conversational familiarity—has as its most easily marked structural signature a tendency to a usage it has already been necessary to mention: the tendency to allow the preposition to lag to the end of the sentence rather than to come tautly before the pronoun with which in Latin it is combined. In a century in which the Latin-French elements of English were to become developed, as in Gibbon and Johnson, to the utmost, the totally different physiognomy of Addison’s prose remained conspicuous,—though really far from novel,—and to the sciolists of a bygone age it seemed marked by carelessness, if not licence, at the best by personal idiosyncrasy. Yet, as a matter of fact, we know it was nothing of the kind. Addison, as his name indicates, was of the stock of the Scandinavian English, and the Cumberland district he belonged to is largely Scandinavian; the adjoining peninsula of Furness, which swarms with similar patronymics, is indeed one of the most purely Scandinavian spots in England. Now in the Scandinavian languages, as we know, and in the English dialects based upon them, the preposition comes usually at the end of the sentence, and Scandinavian structural elements form an integral part of English, even more than Latin-French, for it has been the part of the latter rather to enrich the vocabulary than to mould the structure of our tongue. So that, instead of introducing a personal idiosyncrasy or perpetrating a questionable licence, Addison was continuing his own ancestral traditions and at the same time asserting an organic prerogative of English speech. It may be added that Addison reveals his Scandinavian affinities not merely in the material structure, but in the spiritual quality, of his work. This delicate sympathetic observation, the vein of gentle melancholy, the quiet restrained humour, meet us again in modern Norwegian authors like Jonas Lie.
When we put aside these ancestral and traditional influences, there is still much in the writer’s art which, even if personal, we can only term instinctive. This may be said of that music which at their finest moments belongs to all the great writers of prose. Every writer has his own music, though there are few in whom it becomes audible save at rare and precious intervals. The prose of the writer who can deliberately make his own personal cadences monotonously audible all the time grows wearisome; it affects us as a tedious mannerism. This is a kind of machine-made prose which indeed it requires a clever artisan to produce; but, as Landor said, “he must be a bad writer to whom there are no inequalities.” The great writers, though they are always themselves, attain the perfect music of their style under the stress of a stimulus adequate to arouse it. Their music is the audible translation of emotion, and only arises when the waves of emotion are stirred. It is not properly speaking a voluntary effect. We can but say that the winds of the spirit are breathed upon the surface of style, and they lift it into rhythmic movement. And for each writer these waves have their own special rate of vibration, their peculiar shape and interval. The rich deep slow tones of Bacon have nothing in common with the haunting, long-drawn melody, faint and tremulous, of Newman; the high metallic falsetto ring of De Quincey’s rhetoric is far away from the pensive low-toned music of Pater.
Imitation, as psychologists have taught us to realise, is a part of instinct. When we begin to learn to write, it rarely happens that we are not imitators, and, for the most part, unconsciously. The verse of every young poet, however original he may afterwards grow, usually has plainly written across it the rhythmic signature of some great master whose work chances to be abroad in the world; once it was usually Tennyson, then Swinburne, now various later poets; the same thing happens with prose, but the rhythm of the signature is less easy to hear.
As a writer slowly finds his own centre of gravity, the influence of the rhythm of other writers ceases to be perceptible except in so far as it coincides with his own natural movement and tempo. That is a familiar fact. We less easily realise, perhaps, that not only the tunes but the notes that they are formed of are, in every great writer, his own. In other words, he creates even his vocabulary. That is so not only in the more obvious sense that out of the mass of words that make up a language every writer uses only a limited number and even among these has his words of predilection.[[64]] It is in the meanings he gives to words, to names, that a writer creates his vocabulary. All language, we know, is imagery and metaphor; even the simplest names of the elementary things are metaphors based on resemblances that suggested themselves to the primitive men who made language. It is not otherwise with the aboriginal man of genius who uses language to express his new vision of the world. He sees things charged with energy, or brilliant with colour, or breathing out perfume, that the writers who came before him had overlooked, and to designate these things he must use names which convey the qualities he has perceived. Guided by his own new personal sensations and perceptions, he creates his metaphorical vocabulary. If we examine the style of Montaigne, so fresh and personal and inventive, we see that its originality lies largely in its vocabulary, which is not, like that of Rabelais, manufactured afresh, but has its novelty in its metaphorical values, such new values being tried and tempered at every step, to the measure of the highly individual person behind them, who thereby exerts his creative force. In later days Huysmans, who indeed saw the world at a more eccentric angle than Montaigne, yet with unflinching veracity and absolute devotion, set himself to the task of creating his own vocabulary, and at first the unfamiliarity of its beauty estranges us.