The Selected Works of Arnold Bennett: Essays, Personal Development Books & Articles. Arnold Bennett
he is interested in words.
But no dictionary can pretend to be exhaustive in its treatment of any word; it cannot, for instance, follow a word into its combinations with other words; and it must necessarily leave much to the deductive powers of the student. Therefore the aspirant must pursue his inquiries into words beyond the covers of dictionaries. He must study words in English literature itself. And in order to learn the method of such study, he should read a book like the late Archbishop Trench’s On the Study of Words, published by Messrs. Kegan Paul, and now approaching its thirtieth edition. In the light of recent etymological research, Trench is admittedly inaccurate, but the spirit and the method in and by which he approaches and grasps his subject are admirable. His enthusiasm is as infectious as a cold which runs through a household. A later, more elaborate, and more accurate book is Words and their Ways in English Speech, by two American professors, J. B. Greenhough and G. L. Kittredge, published by Messrs. Macmillan: a simply delightful volume, which it is the duty of every literary aspirant to read, and to read again. The intimacy with words which must infallibly result from such study as I here indicate, will have its immediate result in an improvement'—an increased vigour, picturesqueness, subtlety, and adroitness — of the aspirant’s style. And let the worldly-minded remember that these qualities of vigour, picturesqueness, subtlety, and adroitness, ultimately stand for pounds per thousand.
The aspirant should study English grammar, a subject seldom treated with any glimmering of sense in high-schools, but one which a board school teacher may be trusted to teach satisfactorily. It is obviously a truism that the man who does not understand the grammatical principles which underlie the construction of English sentences, cannot rely on his ability to construct a sentence correctly. Yet how few writers, especially women - writers, are capable of “parsing” and “analysing” the sentences which they so cheerfully put together! The two manuals which I recom. mend in this connection are Dr. Richard Morris’s Primer of English Grammar and Mr. John Wetherell’s Exercises on Morris's English Grammar (both published by Messrs. Macmillan at a shilling each). They can be thoroughly mastered in quite a short time, with or without the assistance of a teacher. Again I must warn the aspirant not to scorn these beginnings of the great art of literature. It is always to the profit of a craftsman to “know his business,” and the writer who cannot with ease and assurance “parse” and “analyse,” emphatically does not know his business.
Writing.
The aspirant should study English composition. This advice may seem unnecessary, but many writers never study composition. They write — and trust in Heaven to save them from doing anything absolutely fatuous. They have no notion of the canons of composition. They commit literary sins against good form so atrocious that social sins of the same heinousness would banish them from the dinner-tables of decently - bred people. These writers abound, and their existence is a blot on English letters. No one can write correctly without deliberately and laboriously learning how to write correctly. On the other hand, every one can learn to write correctly who takes sufficient trouble. Correct writing is a mechanical accomplishment; it could be acquired by a stockbroker. The best book on the subject is Professor John Nichol’s English Composition, published by Messrs. Macmillan at a shilling. The companion volume, Questions and Exercises on English Composition, same publishers and price, should also be obtained. Professor Nichol deals with punctuation, but many students will be glad to have Stops; or, How to Punctuate, by Mr. Paul Allardyce, published by Mr. Fisher Unwin. In these quite small books the aspirant may gather all the technical information necessary to good composition, from the use of a comma to the placing of a participial phrase in a complex sentence, from the avoidance of solecisms to the proper management of similes and metaphors.
So guided, the aspirant should regularly practise writing. He must write for the sake of writing. He should write from five hundred to a thousand words a day, according to his leisure and facility. As an athlete trains, as an acrobat painfully tumbles in private, so must the literary aspirant write. I do not much care what he writes about, at the commencement, if only he writes enough; but the better his subjects the more useful and the more interesting will be his practice. He may try to report conversations (an excellent device), or to describe episodes, scenes, and persons. Or he may compose essays, articles, or short stories, "not necessarily with a view to publication, but as a guarantee of good faith.” The one paramount rule is that he must always write his best; he must never leave a sentence until he is convinced that he cannot improve it. Any lack of conscientious endeavour after the best will vitiate the most regular and persistent practice. Everything written should be read aloud, if possible to another person—not immediately, but after an interval of several days. The test of reading aloud is a severe one — perhaps the most severe test to which literature can be put— and it will certainly disclose errors, weaknesses, and crudities that might otherwise have escaped attention; it is particularly valuable as an aid to the decision of questions of punctuation, for where the voice of the reader pauses, there ought the comma to be.
Concurrently with his writing, the aspirant must read and study good models. I need not give a list of good models, since every one is acquainted with the names of the masterpieces of English literature. The important thing is that the aspirant should study most those masterpieces which most strongly appeal to him. If Thackeray, or Stevenson, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Charles Lamb specially attract him, let him, in the early stages, imitate Thackeray, Stevenson, Browne, or Lamb. Let him deliberately imitate them; the act will help him in the end to arrive at his own originality. He may even go so far as to paraphrase, from memory, the favourite passages of his favourite authors; the subsequent comparison of the paraphrase with the exemplar will be an education for him.
Two Difficulties.
There are two principal difficulties which beset the path of the beginner in composition. The first difficulty is the smallness of his vocabulary. He cannot express his meaning with exactitude, because at the moment of writing he cannot think of the precise word needed; he may be acquainted with the word, but it refuses to occur to him. Reading, including the perusal of dictionaries, will gradually conquer this difficulty. A more instant palliative of it is that wonderful collection of synonyms, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition, published by Messrs. Longman at half a guinea. Every writer should possess this volume, which by its ingenious index will enable him to recover any lost word, and by presenting him with a complete series of words relating to any given idea will help him to a final nicety of expression. I sang the virtues of Roget with some enthusiasm in my book Journalism for Women, and a leader-writer in the Daily News censured my song. An indiscreet use of Roget may, I admit, lead to verbosity and other affectations; but all indiscretions lead to mischief. My opinion that Roget’s Thesaurus is the most useful of all mechanical aids to good writing remains unchanged. I have seen the tattered tome on the desks of some of the most distinguished authors in England, and, for myself, nothing would induce me to part with my Roget except the publication of a revised and enlarged edition of him.
The second and more serious difficulty is the instinctive tendency of the young author to compose in phrases instead of in single words. In accounting for the tediousness of second-rate authors, Schopenhauer said that owing to their lack of clearly defined thought, their writing was “an indefinite, obscure interweaving of words, current phrases, worn-out terms of speech, and fashionable expressions.” And he added: “It is only intelligent writers who place individual words together with a full consciousness of their use, and select them with deliberation.” This sentence is the utterance of practical wisdom. The first sign of unintelligent writing, the first cause of tediousness, is the presence of ready-made, trite phrases. From an entirely respectable book, by an author of repute, which has just passed through my hands, I cull at random a handful of these phrases: Joined the majority [for “died”], strong-minded female, needless to say, terra firma, fondly imagined, absolutely non-plussed, deaf old party, respect due to the cloth, beat a hasty retreat, called into requisition, graciously volunteered, par excellence. Now it is obvious that this author was content largely to use secondhand, worn-out material for the expression of his ideas; that even if his ideas were originally distinct, they must have lost much of their distinctness in being thus forced into an old mould.