“The chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer,” says Professor Raleigh, is “the necessity at all times and at all costs to mean something,” or to find meaning for words. This no doubt is a hard task. The trouble begins when one has the words first. To invoke ideas with words is a much more difficult experience than the reverse process. But probably all true writers have something to say before they have the desire to say it, and in proportion as the thought is vital and real is its expression easy.
When I meet the stylist, with his straining for verbal effects, I love to recall this passage from Whitman. “The great poet,” he says, “swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome. I will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest, like curtains. I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is. Let who may, exalt or startle or fascinate or soothe; I will have purpose, as health or heat or snow has, and be as regardless of observation. What I experience or portray shall go from my composition without a shred of my composition. You shall stand by my side and look in the mirror with me.”
This is the same as saying that the great success in writing is to get language out of the way and to put your mind directly to the reader’s, so that there be no veil of words between you. If the reader is preoccupied with your words, if they court his attention or cloud his vision, to that extent is the communication imperfect. In some of Swinburne’s poems there is often such a din and echo of rhyme and alliteration that it is almost impossible to hear what the man is really saying.
To darken counsel with words is a common occurrence. Words are like lenses,—they must be arranged in just such a way, or they hinder rather than help the vision. When the adjustment is as it should be, the lens itself is invisible; and language in the hands of the master is as transparent. Some of the more recent British poets affect the archaic, the quaint, the eccentric, in language, so that one’s attention is almost entirely occupied with their words. Reading them is like trying to look through a pair of spectacles too old or too young for you, or with lenses of different focus.
But has not style a value in and of itself? As in the case of light, its value is in the revelation it makes. Its value is to conceal itself, to lose itself in the matter. If humility, or self-denial, or any of the virtues becomes conscious of itself and claims credit for its own sake, does it not that moment fall from grace? What incomparable style in the passage I have quoted from Whitman when we come to think of it, but how it effaces itself and is of no account for the sake of the idea it serves! The more a writer’s style humbles itself, the more it is exalted. There is nothing true in religion that is not equally true in art. Give yourself entirely. All selfish and secondary ends are of the devil. Our Calvinistic grandfathers, who fancied themselves willing to be damned for the glory of God, illustrate the devotion of the true artist to his ideal. “Consider the lilies of the field, ... they toil not, neither do they spin.” The style of the born poet or artist takes as little thought of itself, and is the spontaneous expression of the same indwelling grace and necessity.
III
I once overheard a lady say to a popular author, “What I most admire about your books is their fine style.” “But I never think about my style” was his reply. “I know you don’t,” said his admirer, “and that is why I like it so much.” But we may regard him as thinking about his style, when he fancied himself thinking only about his matter. In his case the style and the matter were one. When he was consciously occupied only with the substance and texture of his thought, he was occupied with his style. Every effort to make the idea flow clear and pure, to give it freshness and fillip, or to seize and embody in words a mental or emotional impression in all its integrity, without blur or confusion, is an effort in style. It is like taking the alloys and impurities out of a metal; the style or beauty of it is improved. The making of iron into steel is a process of purification. When Froude was questioned about his style, he confessed that he had never given any thought to the subject; his aim had been to say what he had to say in the most direct and simple way possible. He was conscious only of trying to see clearly and to speak truly. I suppose this is the case with all first-class minds, in our day at least: the main endeavor is directed toward the matter, and not toward the manner; or rather, it is to make the one identical with the other. In no page of Froude’s, nor in any writer of equal range and seriousness, are we conscious of the style as something apart and that claims our admiration on its own account, as we are in the case of Walter Pater, for example. Such men as Pater are enamored of style itself, and cultivate it for its own sake. They conceive of it as an independent grace and charm that may be imparted to any subject by dint of an effort directed to verbal arrangement and sequence alone.
IV
There is a good deal of wisdom in Voltaire’s saying that “all styles are good that are not tiresome.” Voltaire’s own style certainly had the merit of not tiring. Even in the English translation I never cease to marvel at its grace and buoyancy. In keeping with this dictum is the remark I heard concerning a certain living writer, namely, that he had the best style in literature to-day because one could read fifty pages of his and not know that one was reading at all; it was pure expression—offered no resistance.
This offering no resistance, this ease and limpidity—a getting rid of all friction in the written page—herein certainly lies the secret of much that is winsome in literature. How little friction the mind encounters in Addison, in Lamb, or in the best of our own prose writers; and how much in Meredith, and the later writings of Henry James! Is not friction to be got rid of as far as possible in all departments of life? One does not want his shoes to pinch, nor his coat to bind, neither does he want to waste any strength on involved sentences, or on cryptic language. Did you ever try to row a boat in water in which lay a sodden fleece of newly fallen snow? I find the reading of certain books like that. Some of Browning’s poems impede my mind in that way.