From a College Window by Arthur Christopher Benson (classic fiction .TXT) 📕

indeed they will not as a rule try to find out what they do think, but prefer to traffic with the conventional counters. Yet what a refreshment it is to meet with a perfectly sincere person, who makes you feel that you are in real contact with a human being! This is what we ought to aim at in writing: at a perfectly sincere presentment of our thoughts. We cannot, of course, all of us hope to have views upon art, upon theology, upon politics, upon education, because we may not have any experience in these subjects; but we have all of us experience in life, in nature, in emotion, in religion; and to express what we feel, as sincerely as we can, is certainly useful to ourselves, because it clears our view, leads us not to confuse hopes with certainties, enables us to disentangle what we really believe from what we conventionally adopt.

Of course this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our thoughts; we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred notions, all more or less bearing on the central thought, but the movements of which they cannot wholly control. Their thoughts are like a turbulent crowd, and one's business is to drill them into an ordered regiment. A writer has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and the cure for this natural vagueness is to choose small precise subjects, to say all that we have in our minds about them, and to stop when we have finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness and clearness.

I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I believe that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant practice; we must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty manuscripts altogether; we ought not to fret over them and rewrite them. The two things that I have found to be of infinite service to myself, in learning to write prose, have been keeping a full diary, and writing poetry. The habit of diarizing is easily acquired, and as soon as it becomes habitual, the day is no more complete without it than it is complete without a cold bath and regular meals. People say that they have not time to keep a diary; but they would never say that they had not time to take a bath or to have their meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice which brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has the immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready to hand; and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and frank expression.

And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self-expression. This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry need not be very good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the merits of my own; but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches the art of poise, of cadence, of choice in words, of picturesqueness. There comes a time when one abandons poetry, or is abandoned by it; and, after all, prose is the most real and natural form of expression. There arrives, in the case of one who has practised poetical expression diligently, a wonderful sense of freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he begins to use what has been material for poetry for the purposes of prose. Poetical expression is strictly conditioned by length of stanzas, dignity of vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme. How good are the days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy--these are the joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them easy and instinctive.

A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other writers; he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great authors. This system has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A sensitive literary temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to perpetuate the charming mannerisms of great writers. I have sometimes had to write critical monographs on the work of great stylists. It is a perilous business! If for several months one studies the work of a contagious and delicate writer, critically and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's sentences with a dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author whom one is supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my monograph has been completed, I have felt that it might almost have been written by the author under examination; and there is no merit in that. I am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular style. The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as vigorously, as forcibly as one can; if one does this sincerely, one's own personality will make the style; and thus I feel that people whose aim is to write vigorously should abstain from even reading authors whose style affects them strongly. Stevenson himself dared not read Livy; Pater confessed that he could not afford to read Stevenson; he added, that he did not consider his own style better than the style of Stevenson--rather the reverse--but he had his own theory, his own method of expression, deliberately adopted and diligently pursued. He therefore carefully refrained from reading an author whom he felt unconsciously compelled to imitate. The question of style, then, is one which a writer who desires originality should leave altogether alone. It must emerge of itself, or it is sure to lack distinctiveness. I saw once a curious instance of this. I knew a diligent writer, whose hasty and unconsidered writings were forcible, lively, and lucid, penetrated by his own poetical and incisive personality; but he set no store by these writings, and if they were ever praised in his presence, he said that he was ashamed of them for being so rough. This man devoted many years to the composition of a great literary work. He took infinite pains with it; he concentrated whole sentences into epithets; he hammered and chiselled his phrases; he was for ever retouching and rewriting. But when the book at last appeared it was a complete disappointment. The thing was really unintelligible; it had no motion, no space about it; the reader had to devote heart-breaking thought to the exploration of a paragraph, and was as a rule only rewarded by finding that it was a simple thought, expressed with profound obscurity; whereas the object of the writer ought to be to express a profound and difficult thought clearly and lucidly. The only piece of literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use, is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. "Don't be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones show." That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be visible.

The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface. How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded! But seen through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquillity, it all gives!

Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one's hand, one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its existence with a grateful heart. One who devotes himself to writing should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one's work makes on others. If one's work is generally contemned, it is bracing to know that one fails in one's appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest readers. High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a proof that one's standard is high and one's taste fastidious. Moreover, if one has done one's best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure, perhaps even encouragement, from a book. These are some of the pleasant rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one's eye on the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.

Of course there will come moods of discouragement to all authors, when they will ask themselves, as even Tennyson confesses that he was tempted to do, what, after all, it amounts to? The author must beware of rating his own possibilities too high. In looking back at one's own life, in trying to trace what are the things that have had a deep and permanent influence on one's character, how rarely is it possible to point to a particular book, and say, "That book gave me the message I most needed, made me take the right turn, gave