The Art of Letters

by Robert Lynd

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn—

did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. He originally wrote “the wide casements” and “keelless seas”:

the wide casements, opening on the foam

Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not spoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to prove that Shelley’s assertion that “when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline” does not hold good for all poets? On the contrary, it is often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. Or rather it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that “the poet must be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind,” took care to add the warning that no one must think he “can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus.” Poe has uttered a comparable warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets in his Marginalia, where he declares that “this untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and art” must be “kick[ed] out of the world’s way.” Wordsworth’s saying that poetry has its origin in “emotion recollected in tranquillity” also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by contemplation and labour. How eagerly one would study a Shakespeare manuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shaping imagination of the poet at work upon his lines! Many people have the theory—it is supported by an assertion of Jonson’s—that Shakespeare wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it is evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Hamlet’s address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But one seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revision as Robert Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a great stylist to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be a great stylist in more than one poem, such as Childe Roland—which he wrote almost at a sitting. His inspiration, however, seldom raised his work to the same beauty of perfection. He is, as regards mere style, the most imperfect of the great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! If only Browning had had Tennyson’s desire for golden words!

It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before a single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the case with Menander, who described one of his plays as “finished” before he had written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but of expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. We who do not know Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father’s energetic struggle for perfection in writing:

When Anna Karénina began to come out in the Russki Vyéstnik [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures.

My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh.

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when “Lyóvotchka” came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post.

My father would carry them off to his study to have “just one last look,” and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more.