CHAPTER XVIII
LITERATURE AND ACTION
Literature as Speech Made Permanent—All Written Speech Not Literature—The Essence of Literature for Its Own Sake—Prose as a Fine Art—Some Interesting Aspects of Literature as an End in Itself—Their Comparative Triviality—No Literature Great Which Is Not More Than Literature—Literature as a Vehicle of Religion—Lucretius—The Reconstruction of Belief.
If we go back to the beginning of things, literature, needless to say, is a development of ordinary speech. It is speech which has been made permanent, partly, indeed, by oral tradition, but mainly by the art of writing. Without speech no human co-operation, other than the rudest, would be possible. Some men at least must speak so as to organize the tasks of others, and the latter must understand speech so as to do what the former bid them. When the Deity determined to confound the builders of Babel, or, in other words, to render co-operative work impossible, he did not cut off their hands, but he virtually took speech away from them, by rendering the language of each unintelligible to all the rest. Moreover, in the case of tasks the nature of which is highly complex, it is necessary not only that the organizers should make use of speech, but also that what they speak should systematically be written down. The writing down, indeed, is often the most important part of the matter, as in the case of an Act of Parliament or of the delicate and elaborate formulæ on which depends the production of chemicals or of great ships.
If written speech, then, of kinds such as these is literature, literature is obviously not antithetic to action, but is, on the contrary, action in one of its most important forms. To state the case thus, however, is stating no more than half of it. As a matter of fact, laws and chemical formulæ, however carefully written, are not what is meant by literature in the common sense of the word. Though the writing down of speech may in such cases be a form of action, it does not follow that all such written speech is literature. Let us compare the compositions of a child, whether in prose or verse, with a page out of the Nautical Almanac or a manual of household medicine. The child's compositions may intrinsically have no literary value, but they nevertheless represent genuine attempts at literature. A page from the Nautical Almanac or the manual of household medicine may be, for certain purposes, of the highest value imaginable, but the test of literary beauty would be the last test we should apply to them.
What, then, is the primary difference between written words that are literature and written words that are not? The primary difference relates to the objects at which severally the writers aim or the motive by which they are impelled to write. The child writes solely because literary composition is a pleasure to him, as for the sake of a similar pleasure another child takes to a piano. The astronomer and the doctor write to help men in navigating ships or mothers in dosing babies. Between written language which is not literature and written language which is the initial difference is this: that for the writers written language is, in the first case, something which it is not in the second. In the first case, the writer's concern with language, and the sole interest which written language has for him, are things which have no dependence on the merits of written language as such, except in so far as it is a means of accomplishing ulterior objects, with which otherwise the mere merits of language have nothing at all to do. Sound injunctions to a nurse, provided that their meaning was clear, would have far greater value in a hospital than mistaken injunctions written with a grace or majesty worthy of Plato or Tacitus. In the second case, writing is a feat the successful achievement of which is, for the writer, an object and a pleasure in itself; and how far success is achieved by him depends not alone on the pleasure which he derives from his own performances personally, but also, and we may say mainly, on the quantity of kindred pleasure which his writing communicates to his readers.
These observations become more and more true and pungent in proportion as language becomes a more complex instrument, its progress resembling the evolution of an organ from a shepherd's pipe. As it thus progresses, its delicate possibilities of melody, metaphor, and subtle emphasis increase, and masters of the literary art enchant with ever new surprises multitudes who have no capacity for the literary art themselves. So far, then, as literature is in this sense literature for its own sake, the contrast between literature and action is, with certain exceptions, justified. Exceptions, however, to this rule exist, and these, briefly stated, are as follows. When a writer writes a book—let us say, for example, a novel—the object of which is to give pleasure, his primary object in writing it may be either to please himself or else to make money by ministering to the taste of others. The importance of this distinction has been clearly brought out by Tolstoy, who defines art, and literary art in particular, as a means by which the artist contrives to arouse in others emotions and interests which he has experienced in his own person. Such being the case, then, there are, says Tolstoy, many works which partake of the nature of literature, but which are not examples of true literary art. Such, according to him, are our modern detective novels, or any novels the interests of which depend on the solution of a mystery, the reason being that the writer is acquainted with the mystery at starting, and experiences himself no emotion whatever with regard to it. His sole object is to titillate an emotion in others which he does not himself share, and from which, indeed, he is, by the nature of the case, precluded. This is a criticism which might doubtless be pressed too far; but it is within limits fruitful, and, bearing it here in mind, we may say that literature, if we take it in its pure form and regard it as an end in itself, is language, as used to express the personal emotions or personal convictions of the writer, and is raised by him to such a pitch of beauty, of strength or of delicacy that it is a source of pleasure to large classes of mankind apart from all thoughts of relationship, if any, to ulterior objects.
Thus pure literature, as legitimately contrasted with action, is a matter of great interest for a large number of people whom nobody would describe as literary or as persons of letters otherwise; and I may, therefore, say something of pure literature as estimated more particularly by myself.
Let me begin with prose, which, merely as a pleasurable art, instinct has urged me, from my earliest days, to cultivate. Of what good prose is I have always had clear notions; and, whether I have been successful in my efforts to achieve it or not, my personal experience of the process may not be without some interest. My own experience is that the composition of good prose—prose that seems good to myself—is a process which requires a very great deal of leisure. True excellence in prose, so I have always felt, involves many subtle qualities which are appreciable by the reader through their final effects alone, which leave no trace of the efforts spent in producing them, but which without such effort could rarely be produced at all.
As examples of these qualities I may mention a melody not too often resonant, which captivates the reader's attention, and is always producing a mood in him conducive to a favorable reception of what the writer is anxious to convey. Next to such melody I should put a logical adaptation of stress, or of emphasis in the construction of sentences, which corresponds in detail to the movements of the reader's mind—a halt in the words occurring where the mind halts, a new rapidity in the words when the mind, satisfied thus far, is prepared to resume its progress. To these qualities, as essential to perfection in prose, I might easily add others; but these are so complex and comprehensive that they practically imply the rest.
With regard, then, to these essentials, the practice which I have had to adopt in my own efforts to produce them has been more or less as follows. The general substance of what I proposed to say I have written out first in the loosest language possible, without any regard to melody, to accuracy, or even to correct grammar. I have then rewritten this matter, with a view, not to any verbal improvement, but merely to the rearrangement of ideas, descriptions, or arguments, so that this may accord with the sequence of questions, expectations, or emotions which are likely, by a natural logic, to arise in the reader's mind—nothing being said too soon, nothing being said too late, and nothing (except for the sake of deliberate emphasis) being said twice over. The different paragraphs would now be like so many stone blocks which had been placed in their proper positions so as to form a polylithic frieze, but each of which still remained to be carved, as though by a sculptor or lapidary, so as to be part of a continuous pattern or a series of connected figures. My next task would be to work at them one by one, till each was sculptured into an image of my own minute intentions. The task of thus carving each and fitting it to its next-door neighbors has always been, merely for its own sake, exceedingly fascinating to myself, but it has generally been long and slow. Most of my own books, when their general substance had been roughly got into order by means of several tentative versions, were, paragraph by paragraph, written again five or six times more, the corrections each time growing more and more minute, and finally the clauses and wording of each individual sentence were transposed, or rebalanced or reworded, whenever such processes should be necessary, in order to capture some nuance of meaning which had previously eluded me as a bird eludes a fowler.