Talks on Writing English. Bates Arlo
about the same time: “Paradise Lost” has been commended by critics and admired by scholars; “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been and is the favorite book with thousands. The one has always been profoundly admired and the other has been loved. I do not mean that this is all that might be said of these classics, or that there are no other considerations in determining their worth, but they do serve to make more clear the fact that to reach the general reader it is necessary to write for the general reader.
Speaking the language of the average man includes also the confining of allusions to the range of his probable knowledge, the taking for granted nothing which he may not reasonably be supposed to know. The temptation to show erudition is at the elbow of every writer. When, near the beginning of this lecture, I referred in an easy manner to the Taj Mahal, I was instantly conscious that I had used the comparison with a pleasant sense of the air of superior knowledge which it might give. However it may be with you, the probabilities are that the ordinary reader would not be sufficiently familiar with the elaborate ornamentation of that wonder of the East to make my comparison to its jewelled walls effective, and I left it only because I wanted to use it here as an illustration.
It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional experiences of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. It must be remembered that all art is based on the assumption of a community of human feelings; in other words, upon the theory that the fundamental emotions are shared by all mankind. The more closely a writer holds to common humanity, to common human experience, the more wide will be the range of his work, and the more clear will he be in those very matters where clearness is most difficult of attainment. The more subtile and remote from ordinary human life are the emotions and the passions to be portrayed, the more absolute is the necessity of conveying them in terms of simple and common experience. Analyze one of the tragedies of Shakespeare or of the old Greek dramatists, and you will find that its tremendous effects are produced by means essentially simple. By keeping always within the range of the sympathies and feelings common to humanity, the masters are able to make every stroke tell; and this method is in the nature of things the only possible one. Common humanity can comprehend only what it has felt.
To gain Clearness it is necessary first to avoid all vagueness of thought and all vagueness of expression. It is needful to shun ambiguity of word or of phrase, and that more subtle ambiguity which may arise from ill-considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from bad arrangement of the parts of a composition. It is no less important to write with a constant remembrance of the audience addressed; to use their language, and to appeal to the emotions and experiences which are likely to be common to the average individual of the class for which one writes. Inexperienced writers may make the mistake of supposing that this is the rule by which mediocrity is to be reached; but as a matter of fact these are the principles upon which have been written the masterpieces of the world.
VI
PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED
Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions. Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work, yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has been lost.
We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance – the antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so on – might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour, – the prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways decent or indecent, – have not in themselves anything that can be called Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention, but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.
“The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he goes on to exemplify this thus: —
Compare these three simple statements: “I found him very agreeable one afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon;” “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house.” Now all that the word “wet” says is that the afternoon was watery; but it clearly implies that it was an afternoon when you would not care to be out of doors. All that the words “in a country house” state is a simple fact of locality; but they imply that you were in a place where not to be out of doors was probably a serious trial to the temper. So the last statement as a whole, “I found him very agreeable one wet afternoon in a country house,” suggests, though it does not state, that the person spoken of was one whose charms could overcome a pretty bad temper. At the same time it is a phrase which I fancy anybody would admit to hold the attention more strongly than either of its predecessors; and its superiority in force lies not so much in the bare facts which it adds to the first statement as in the thoughts and emotions it suggests. Still again, take this sentence from one of M. de Maupassant’s stories: “It was the 15th of August – the feast of the Holy Virgin, and of the Emperor Napoleon.” He states only two facts about the 15th of August, and these in the simplest of words. Neither by itself would hold one’s attention enough to remain long in memory. But put them together; think what the Holy Virgin means to Catholic Europe, and what the Emperor Napoleon means to those who are not subdued by the magic genius of Bonaparte, – and you have a sentence that when mid-August comes about will hover in your head. Yet the force of this – so greatly superior to the force of either statement by itself – lies not in what is actually said, but wholly in what is implied, suggested, connoted, in this sudden, unexpected antithesis.
The thing which the writer has caused the reader to think – or even to suppose himself to think – is sure to interest him. The dullest of bores is absorbed in his own words, and in effect that which the reader receives by suggestion is his own thought. What is denoted is the word of the writer; what is connoted is for the time being the thought of the reader.
It is not difficult to see that Clearness is an aid to Force; or, to put it more exactly, that a lack of Clearness will interfere with Force. Yet the one is by no means essential to the other. The diction of “The Ordeal of Richard Feverel,” that book so strong that it wrings the heart almost like a fierce personal sorrow, is in passages so obscure as to have given rise to the rather cheap mot that the novel would be successful if it were translated into English. Almost any page of Carlyle might also be cited in illustration; while that Clearness may fail to secure Force is proved by the pellucidly stupid lucubrations of an innumerable company of authors whom nobody could fail to understand if it were possible to keep awake to read them.
Connotation may be the result of various causes. It may be produced by a swiftness and briskness of motion which so awakens and quickens the mind that the reader is aroused to thought, and seizes each idea presented as if he had himself originated it. It is this sort of force that we mean when we speak of the vivacity or the brilliancy of a work. The secret lies chiefly in passing quickly from one significant point to another. This involves, it is apparent, the power of selecting the significant, and of bringing this out while avoiding the unessential.
The effectiveness of the sensational story depends largely upon a quality closely allied to this, although here it is a matter not so much of style as of material. The tale which moves rapidly from situation to situation, so that the reader seems to share the adventures of the characters,