The “precious smack,” however, goes a long ways when there is nothing else to be had. The art of saying nothing well is the art of the bore or the art of the decadent, as you may interpret it. But a voice at my elbow quietly suggests that the distinction is still without a difference. The decadent, being always a bore, whether he has a precious smack or a smack of preciousness, has the art of saying nothing well and everything ill.
The good old days, when men who wrote were impressed with the value of original thought, were hard on brains, but easy on dictionaries. A tremendous idea was set for all time in a few words grabbed at random from a scant vocabulary. Even after “art for art’s sake” had come to stay, the great early poets were stingy in their verbal dealings with art. It is surprising to note how meagre is the vocabulary of Sappho, or of Theocritus, or of Pindar. And yet what incomparable riches of expression! The masters were in a flux of imagination, and to them a word had no value beyond its fitness to stand as a perfect sign of what the brain originated. But not so with us; we chase the word for the word’s sake. We imagine that there is something precious in verbal style quite independent of what it may be used upon. A cheese, although rotten, is made sweet enough, we think, by being wrapped in an artistic poster.
We are quite familiar with the phrase “good literature,” which has come to mean nothing and that wordy, or a good thing and that well written, according to the individual taste of the critic deciding the matter. But most generally we now take for granted that there is really nothing worth saying on account of its intrinsic value. As a new woman said of her kind the other day, “Oh, the female form is but a clothes-horse nowadays. A woman is suggested, not seen, by what she wears,” we may well say of thought: it is a mere word-rack, a peg upon which to hang attractive diction. Not unfrequently the thought is quite dispensed with and the phrasing hangs upon nothing.
If you have nothing to write, of course write it well. Good literature, like Homer’s and Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s, was well enough before Théophile Gautier invented style; but since then there has come a change, and now we demand, not new matter, but always a new manner. As for durability, we are satisfied with a season’s run; permanency is not desirable. Fame, which once was a thing to die for, has taken on the form of a spring jacket or summer cravat; you wear it till the next change in the weather. The art of saying nothing well is as fickle as the moon; for nothing and woman pride themselves upon varying their fashions; and what is good literature now but woman and nothing? Aminta and her George Meredith strut before us as if they owned the earth; but to-morrow there will be another woman and a new nothing.
The happiest literary folk in all the world must be those in Paris, who actually took Paul Verlaine seriously, and are now making obeisance to Stéphane Mallarmé. They seem to be, if we leave out certain provençal dialect writers and our own American critics, the only litterateurs upon earth who would heroically die rather than be right. M. Mallarmé expresses perfectly in a single phrase the whole ambition of his literary flock: “d’abord et toujours et irrésistiblement Verlaine.” But how charming a thing literature is in the hands of these poêtes maudits, as Verlaine styled them! To be sure, it is naught but nothing well said. Verlaine may have been right when he wrote his eulogy: “Absolus par l’imagination, absolus par l’expression, absolus comme les Reys Netos des meilleurs siècles;” there is much to be said about nothing, and more about such writers as Corbière, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, who have served to amuse a blasé crowd of the best fellows that ever lived, the Alexandrian Greek poets doubtfully excepted.
What Sir Walter Scott called “the big bow-wow” is not suited to the perfect expression of nothing. Browning’s diction gets on better at a pinch, when the poet has to resort to a dazzling display of blank verbal cartridges; for sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish a meaningless whiff of word-wind from a whizzing bullet of thought. We dodge with delight when either clips too near us. The other day I was auditing the book-bills of “Narcissus,” and found myself delicately and deliciously charmed by what under different circumstances would have been a mere lack of assets to back the paper. Style never went further nor came back with a more fragrant and savory load of nothing. From paragraph to paragraph one glides over a meandering smoothness. It is like bicycling on imaginary asphalt between immaterial clover fields. One hears bumblebees and sheep and kine; but never is there any visible or tangible matter of delectation: only a lulling composite noise; vox et præterea nihil. This voice of the hollow sphere and this dripping of melodious word-showers, to change the figures, combine to high perfection in the latest good literature. Think of what a fascination a style can have, when a young girl fresh from Vassar flings down a volume by William Sharp, or one by I. Zangwill, and rapturously exclaims: “Shakespeare and Scott are not in it for a minute longer!” How delightful to do good that evil may come!
It would be hardly fair to wring into this paper a consideration of the art of writing nothing ill. Walt Whitman and Stephen Crane have given practical demonstrations of what may be done at a venture in that field. Here again my own style persists in obscurity. Nothing to write and the poorest imaginable style, is not exactly the same with plenty to write and not a sentence ill written. The art of writing nothing and writing it ill might, however, be admirable in the hands of a master. For example, there is Andrew Lang’s eulogy of H. Rider Haggard’s stories, which I might cite in any part of this essay with perfect propriety and unqualified approval, as being strictly in point. When Mr. Lang has absolutely nothing for subject he is alluringly objective and revels in good literature. He is singularly expert in writing nothing ill.
But the art of writing nothing well, of writing so that nothing is well said, or whatever I mean, offers difficulties not readily foreseen by the ambitious candidate for authorhood. Nothing must ever be dressed up to look like a great something with an honorable ancestry and a congenital lease upon posterity, unless we accept the other interpretation of my caption. What could, on the other hand, be reasonably described as the bloomer-costume style of writing, by which effeminate imaginings are made to masquerade as virile and of the major origin, demands serious and exhaustive study. To achieve it William Watson has, we hope, a long life of self-reform before him; but some are born to it. Austin Dobson would not, apparently, give a penny to have it, albeit some of his best work neatly grazes the goal. Happy accident has done much on this score for Henry James, reading whose latest work one might exclaim with Mr. Sherburne Hardy: “But yet a woman!” And Mr. Howells should never go near a Shaker village if he has any regard for what old friends think of his style. It makes him say nothing with unusual delight.
When I get back to my Greek, as I usually do at the earliest moment, an essay like Aristotle’s on poetry makes me wonder how it has lived so long and kept so well, seeing that it says something without regard, at any point, to “lightness of touch” or to preciousness of phrasing. It is not good literature, measured by the standard of Robert Louis Stevenson’s style; but in its gnarls of diction are thoughts hard bound with fibres that are indestructible. Aristotle was too busy inside of his brain to have much respect for exterior frills; but where shall we find solider phrases than he snatched out of his stinted vocabulary? It is tough reading, almost as bad as Browning’s best, and the words grate together like teeth with sand between them; still, something is said. You remember his turns of diction by associating them with his thoughts; but you never dream of regarding him as a writer with a style-charm. His fascination comes from deep down, as if sent up by roots squeezed between bowlders.
And it is true that a permanent fascination of style is always due to something more than nothing well said. The attempt has been made in American criticism to stow a poem like Poe’s “Raven” away in the lumber garret as a mere word-trick; but there is something tremendously human in the spiritual adumbration by which that great poem sustains itself. Style is there, superb style; and the clutch of grim sorrow, the pang of despair, and the helplessness of a soul in the presence of fate, are there as well. Poe could not command Stevenson’s nimble diction, nor could he even understand what humor like Lowell’s was. The power in his work came from behind his lines out of a wellspring hidden in a strange and original mind. He “played with dictionaries” and feigned abstruse learning; but he said new and impressive things in a new and impressive style.