When we advise the young writer to go honestly to work to say in the simplest manner what he really thinks and feels, one does not mean that by this course he is likely to write like the great prose masters, but that by this means alone can his work have the basic qualities of good literature,—directness, veracity, vitality, the beauty and reality of natural things. Genuineness first, grace and eloquence afterwards.
“The ugliest living face,” says Schopenhauer, “is better than a mask.” It is real, it is alive. So the simple, direct speech of a man in earnest is so much better than the perfunctory eloquence one is so often compelled to hear or to read. Reality, reality—nothing can make up for a want of reality.
Sainte-Beuve said, as I have already quoted, that the peasant always has style; the French peasant probably more often than any other. This is certainly so if we take such a character as Joan of Arc as a typical peasant. What adroitness, and at times, classic beauty in her answer to her judges! When they sought to entrap her with the question, “Do you know if you are in the grace of God?” she replied, “If I am not, may God place me there; if I am, may God so keep me.” Under pressure, the peasant mind, and indeed all other minds, are, at times, capable of these things. But usually the charm of rustic speech is in its plainness and simplicity, like that of other rural things, a bridge, a woodshed, a well-sweep, a log house,—no thought of style, thought of service only. But the beauty of what may be called the architectural style of the great prose masters,—Gibbon, Burke, Browne, Hooker, De Quincey,—like the beauty of a Greek temple or a Gothic cathedral, is quite another matter. What both have in common is the beauty of sincerity and reality.
The vernacular style of writers of the seventeenth century, like Walton, Fuller, Baxter, Jonson, is more in keeping with the taste of to-day than the rhetorical and highly wrought style of certain of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.
Hence, when we ascribe style to simple, homely things, or to speech, we mean something quite different from style when applied to the great compositions either in literature, music, or architecture.
Milton could plan and build the lofty rhyme and attain beauty; Wordsworth attains beauty by his sincerity and simplicity, and his fervent love of rural things. He has not style in the Miltonic sense. One has classic beauty, the other, natural or naïve beauty. The monumental works of the ancients were planned and wrought like their architecture, and have a beauty that rivals nature. Shakespeare rarely attains anything like classic beauty, and has any poem since Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” struck the note firmly and surely?
V
I have often asked myself why it is that the interviewer will sometimes get so much more wisdom out of a man, and so many more fresh and entertaining statements—in short, so much better literature—than the man can get out of himself. Is it because one’s best and ripest thoughts rise to the surface, like the cream on the milk, and does the interviewer simply skim them off? Maybe, in writing, we often dip too deep, make too great an effort. Interviews are nearly always interesting,—much more so than a formal studied statement by the interviewed himself. Many a piece of sound, excellent literature has been got out of a man who had no skill at all with the pen. His spoken word is vital and real; but in a conscious literary effort the fire is quenched at once. Hence the charm of letters, of diaries, of the simple narrations and recitals of pioneers, farmers, workers, or persons who have no conscious literary equipment. Who would not rather read a bit of real experience of a soldier in battle, such as a clever interviewer could draw out of him, than to read his general’s studied account of the same engagement? “To elaborate is of no avail,” says Whitman. “Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.” Only the great artist can rival or surpass the sense of reality we often find in common speech. Set a man to writing out his views or his experience and the danger is that he will be too formal; he will get himself up for the occasion; there will be no ease or indifference in his manner; he will go to delving in his mind, and we shall miss the simple, direct self-expression that we are after.
In Dr. Johnson’s talk, as reported by Boswell, we touch the real man; in the “Rambler” you touch only his clothes or periwig. His more formal writing seems the product of some kind of artificial put-on faculty, like the Sunday sermons one hears or the newspaper editorials one reads. The sermon is in what may be called the surpliced style, the Rambler in the periwigged style. Emerson said of Alcott that his conversation was wonderful, but that when he sat down to write his inspiration left him. Most men are wiser in company than in the study. What is interesting in a man is what he himself has felt or seen or experienced. If you can tell us that, we shall listen eagerly. The uncultured man does not know this, but seeks the far-off or the deep down.
Our thoughts, our opinions, are like apples on the tree: they must take time to ripen; and when they are ripe, how easily they fall! A mere nudge brings them down. How easily the old man talks; how full he is of wisdom! Time was when his tongue was tied; he could not express himself; his thoughts were half formed and unripe; they clung tightly to the bough. Set him to writing, and with great labor he produced some crude, half-formed notions of his own, mixed with the riper opinions of the authors he had read. But now his fruit has matured and it has mellowed; it has color and flavor; and his conversation abounds in wisdom.