By this time, if you have faithfully followed these instructions about observation, you will have discovered that the mere observation of unrelated facts amounts to very little. You will begin to see that no observation of the mind is simple. While you are observing, you are naturally doing something else, for you are classifying facts, seeing their relation one to another, recognizing similarities or differences, contrasts and harmonies. The mind works as a whole, not the memory separately, nor the judgment by itself. Each part is dependent upon each other part: they overlap one another; the operations of one faculty imply the operations of all the other faculties. It is for this reason that the student must seek to discipline each apparently isolated faculty of the mind.
In observing, it is not enough mentally to picture what you read. You must go even more into detail than that. You must observe words. Did you ever read “Martin Eden,” that wonderful study in mental development and self-analysis, written by Jack London, revealing in retrospect his own mental processes? It will more than pay you for the trouble of reading. Follow and practice what he therein describes. Words are things, but they are things only when you know them so intimately that they bring real concept to your mind the moment you see them. It is not enough that you can pronounce a word properly—that you seem to know it. Each word must mean something to you, and that something must be definite, so definite that no other can mean exactly the same thing.
One of the greatest dialectitians of our day was Monsignore Capel, the private confessor of Pope Leo XIII. Even in extemporaneous speech every word he used was the right word. No other word would have done just as well. He was once asked how he gained his power over words, and he replied to the effect that when he was a lad he had several tutors. One only, however, was a real and thorough teacher. He said: “My first day with him I shall never forget. He gave me a lesson in Cæsar, and then sent me away with six lines, which I was to translate and bring to him in the afternoon. That seemed easy. When I went to recite my lesson I followed my usual wont—gave a free and easy translation, which may have contained the sense of the original, or may not. He heard me through without a word. Then he began a dissection of my method of translation that made my hair stand on end, every drop of my blood tingle, every faculty of my brain respond, every power of my soul awaken to a sense of the hitherto untold, undreamed of, unbounded capacities of words. That man was a genius in quickening a lad’s dormant faculties into living, driving, whipping forces for good. He took each word of the original and demanded that I find its equivalent in English, and he showed me how to do it. I must never take to him an English word whose original parentage I could not trace. I must know all its mutations and their whys and wherefores. There could be no such thing as a free translation. It was either a strictly literal translation or my version, lazy or otherwise, in another language from that in which the author had written. From that day on, I began the study of words. I learned how to trace the history of words; the changes that had come into their meanings, and my teacher helped me to do it during the whole of the time I was in his hands. To him I owe whatever power I possess to-day.”
Read Trench’s book on words and then study John Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies.” Get hold of all the modern books on the subject. Read Shelley, Keats, George Sterling, Browning, Swinburne—any author who has great felicity of phrase, rare delicacy of expression, and seek to discover his secret, and you will be amazed at the potent force of words. For, of course, while words themselves are to be studied, it is in their relation one to another when put into sentences that their power, sweetness, beauty, charm, and music lie.
And here we come to the real work of observing. All else is preparatory to grasping the idea of the author. In his idea lies his inspiration. The words he uses may be good, medium, or indifferent, but if we grasp his idea, his high, intellectual and spiritual conception and aspirations, we have gained the chief thing. Words are a wonderful help in this. His power to arrange them, to give them new settings, new and richer cadences, will not fail to quicken our own intellect to readier and keener appreciation of his thought. Hence words should be deeply, attentively and earnestly studied by all authors and speakers in order that they may be able to arrange them in this masterly fashion. For this personal arrangement of words and phrases, this flow and rhythm, is that marvelous thing we call style. Several times in “Martin Eden” Jack London refers to this. He has his rude hero who is brought out of the streets, influenced by the love he feels for the heroine, determine to educate himself. He studies and begins to write.
He read to her a story [one of his own compositions], one that he flattered himself was among his very best. He called it “The Wine of Life,” and the wine of it, that had stolen into his brain when he wrote it, stole into his brain now as he read it. There was a certain magic in the original conception, and he adorned it with more magic and phrase and touch. All the old fire was reborn in him and he was swayed and swept away so that he was blind and deaf to the faults of it. But it was not so with Ruth. Her trained ear detected the weaknesses and exaggerations, the overemphasis of the tyro, and she was instantly aware each time the sentence-rhythm tripped and faltered. She scarcely noted the rhythm otherwise, except when it became too pompous, at which moments she was disagreeably impressed with its amateurishness.
Just before this he said to her: “I hope I am learning to talk, there seems to be so much in me I want to say. But it is all so big. I can’t find ways to say what is really in me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be spokesman. I feel—oh, I can’t describe it—I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I babble like a child. It is a great task to transmute feeling and sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It is a breath of the Universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter, and success and pain, and struggle and death; and see visions that arise in my brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass. But I have not succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech. My words seem gibberish to me, and yet I am stifled with desire to tell.”
That was her final judgment on the story as a whole—amateurish, though she did not tell him so. Instead, when he had done, she pointed out the minor flaws and said that she liked the story.