On Learning to Write

WE do not always realize that learning to write is partly a matter of instinct. This is so even of that writing which, as children, we learn in copybooks with engraved maxims at the head of the page. There are some, indeed, probably the majority, who quickly achieve the ability to present a passable imitation of the irreproachable model presented to them. There are some who cannot. I speak as one who knows, for I recall how my first schoolmaster, a sarcastic little Frenchman, irritated by my unchastenable hand, would sometimes demand if I wrote with the kitchen poker, or again assert that I kept a tame spider to run over the page; while a later teacher, who was an individualist and more tolerant, yet sometimes felt called upon to murmur, in a tone of dubious optimism, “ You will have a hand of your own, my boy; you will have a hand of your own.” In such cases, it is not lack of docility that is in question, but a categorical imperative of the nervous system which the efforts of the will may indeed bend but cannot crush.

Yet the writers who cheerfully lay down the laws of style seldom realize this complexity and mystery enwrapping even so simple a matter as handwriting. No one can say how much atavistic recurrence from remote ancestors, how much family nervous habit, how much wayward yet deep-rooted personal idiosyncrasy, deflect the child’s patient efforts to imitate the copperplate model which is set before him. The son often writes like the father, even though he may seldom or never see his father’s handwriting; brothers write singularly alike, though they may have been taught by different teachers and even in different continents. It has been noted of the ancient and distinguished family of the Tyrrells that their handwriting in the parish books of Stowmarket remained the same throughout many generations. I have noticed in a relative of my own, peculiarities of handwriting identical with those of an ancestor two centuries ago, whose writing he certainly never saw. The resemblance is often not that of exact formation, but of general air or underlying structure. One is tempted to think that often, in this as in other matters, the possibilities are limited, and that when the child is formed in Iris mother’s womb Nature casts the same old dice, and the same old combinations inevitably tend to recur. But that notion scarcely fits all the facts, and our growing knowledge of the infinite subtlety of heredity, of its presence even in the most seemingly elusive psychic characters, indicates that the dice may be loaded and fall in accord with harmonies we can seldom perceive.

The part in style which belongs to atavism, to heredity, to unconscious instinct, is probably very large. It eludes us to an even greater extent than the corresponding part in handwriting, because the man of letters may have none among his ancestors who sought expression in style, so that only one Milton speaks for a mute inglorious family, and how far he speaks truly remains a matter of doubt. We only divine the truth when we know the character and deeds of the family. There could be no more instructive revelation of family history in style than is furnished by Carlyle. There had never been any writer in the Carlyle family, and if there had, Carlyle, at the time when his manner of writing was formed, would scarcely have sought to imitate him. Yet we could not conceive this stern, laborious plebeian family of Lowland Scots — with its remote Teutonic affinities, its coarseness, its narrowness, its assertive inarticulative force — in any more fitting verbal translation than was given it by this its last son, the pathetic little figure with the face of a lost child, who wrote in a padded room and turned the rough muscular and reproductive activity of his fathers into more than half a century of eloquent chatter concerning Work and Silence, so writing his name in letters of gold on the dome of the British Museum.

It is easy indeed to find examples of the force of ancestry, even remote ancestry, overcoming environment and dominating style. Shakespeare and Bacon were both Elizabethans who lived from youth upwards in London, and even moved to some extent almost in the same circles. Yet all the influences of tradition and environment which sometimes seem to us so strong, sufficed scarcely to spread even the faintest veneer of similarity over their style, and we could seldom mistake a sentence of one for a sentence of the other. We always know that Shakespeare, with his gay extravagance and redundancy, his essential idealism, came of a people that had been changed in character from the surrounding stock by a Celtic infolding. We never fail to realize that Bacon, with his instinctive gravity and temperance, the suppressed ardor of his aspiring intellectual passion, his temperamental naturalism, was rooted deep in that East Anglian soil which he had never so much as visited. In Shakespeare’s veins there dances the blood of the men who made the Mabinogion ; we recognize Bacon as a man of the same countryside which produced the forefathers of Emerson. Or we may consider the mingled Breton and Gascon ancestry of Renan, in whose brain, in the very contour and melody of his style, the ancient bards of Brittany have joined hands with the tribe of Montaigne and Brantôme. Or, to take one more example, we can scarcely fail to recognize in the style of Hawthorne the glamour of which the latent aptitude had been handed on by ancestors who dwelt on the borders of Wales.

In these examples, hereditary influence can be clearly distinguished from merely external and traditional influence. Not that we need imply a disparagement of tradition. In tradition, we can never forget, we have the basis of all the sciences, of much that is essential in the arts; it is the foundation of civilized progress. Speech itself is a tradition and not a science or an art, though both may be brought to bear on it; it is a naturally developed convention, and in that indeed it has its universal applicability and use. We realize how far speech is from being either an art or a science by comparing it with music, which is both. Speech is only the crude amorphous material of music. To regard speech, even poetic speech, as a pure art like music, is an idle and unprofitable employment. On its formal side, whatever its supreme significance as the instrument and medium of expression, speech is a natural convention, an accumulated tradition.

Even tradition, however, is often simply the corporeal embodiment, as it were, of heredity. Behind many a great writer’s personality there stands tradition, and behind tradition, the race. That is well illustrated in the style of Addison. This style — with a resilient fibre underneath its delicacy, and yet a certain freedom as of conversational familiarity — has as its most easily marked structural signature a tendency to allow the preposition to lag to the end of the sentence rather than to come tautly before the pronoun with which in Latin it is combined. In a century in which the Latin-French elements of English became developed, as in Gibbon and Johnson, to the utmost, the totally different physiognomy of Addison’s prose was singularly conspicuous, and to the scientists of a by-gone age it seemed marked by carelessness, if not by license; at the best by personal idiosyncrasy. Yet, as a matter of fact, we know it was nothing of the kind. Addison, as his name alone indicates, was of the stock of the Scandinavian English, and the Cumberland district to which he belonged is largely Scandinavian; the adjoining peninsula of Furness, which swarms with similar patronymics, is indeed one of the most purely Scandinavian spots in England. Now, in the Scandinavian languages, and in the English dialects based upon them, the preposition comes usually at the end of the sentence, and Scandinavian structural elements form an integral part of English, even more than Latin-French; for it has been the part of the latter rather to enrich the vocabulary than to mould the structure of our tongue. So that, instead of introducing a personal idiosyncrasy, or perpetrating a questionable license, Addison was continuing his own ancestral traditions, and at the same time asserting an organic prerogative of English speech. It may be added that Addison reveals his Scandinavian affinities, not merely in the material structure, but in the spiritual quality of his work. This delicate sympathetic observation, the vein of gentle melancholy, the quiet, restrained humor, meet us again in Norwegian literature to-day.

When we put aside these ancestral and traditional influences, there is still much in the writer’s art which, even if personal, we can only term instinctive. This may be said of that music which, at their finest moments, belongs to all the great writers of prose. Every writer has his own music, though there are few in whom it becomes audible save at rare and precious intervals. The prose of the writer who can deliberately make his own personal cadences monotonously audible all the time grows wearisome; it affects us as a tedious mannerism. This is a kind of machine-made prose which, indeed, it requires a clever artisan to produce. But great writers, though they are always themselves, only attain the perfect music of their style under the stress of a stimulus adequate to arouse it. Their music is the audible translation of emotion, and arises when the waves of emotion are stirred. It is not, properly speaking, a voluntary effect. We can only say that the winds of the spirit are breathed upon the surface of style, and they lift it into rhythmic movement. And for each writer these waves have their own special rate of vibration, their peculiar shape and interval. The rich, deep, slow tones of Bacon have nothing in common with the haunting, long-drawn melody, faint and tremulous, of Newman; the high, metallic, falsetto ring of De Quincey’s rhetoric is far away from the pensive, low-toned music of Lafcadio Hearn,

Imitation, as Tarde and Baldwin have taught us to realize, is a part of instinct. When we begin to learn to write, it rarely happens that we are not imitators, and for the most part, unconsciously. The verse of every young poet, however original he may afterwards grow, usually has plainly written across it the rhythmic signature of some greater master whose work chances to be abroad in the world; once it was usually Tennyson, then Swinburne, now some still later poet; the same thing happens with prose, but the rhythm of the signature is less easy to hear.

As a writer slowly finds his own centre of gravity, the influence of the rhythm of other writers ceases to be perceptible except in so far as it coincides with his own natural movement and tempo. That is a familiar fact. We less easily realize, perhaps, that not only the tunes, but the notes that they are formed of, in every great writer are his own. In other words, he creates even his vocabulary. That is so not only in the more obvious sense that out of the mass of words that make up a language every writer uses only a limited number, and even among these has his words of predilection. It is in the meanings he gives to words, to names, that a writer creates his vocabulary. All language is metaphor; even the simplest names of the elementary things are metaphors based on resemblances that suggested themselves to the primitive men who made language. It is not otherwise with the aboriginal man of genius who uses language to express his new vision of the world. He sees things charged with energy, or brilliant with color, or soaked in perfume that the writers who came before him had overlooked, and to designate these things he must use names which convey the qualities he has perceived. Guided by his own new personal sensations and perceptions, he creates his metaphorical vocabulary. If we examine the style of Montaigne, so fresh and personal and inventive, we see that its originality lies largely in its vocabulary, which is not, like that of Rabelais, manufactured afresh, but has its novelty in its metaphorical values, such new values being tried and tempered at every step to the measure of the highly individual person behind them, who thereby exerts his creative force. In our own days, Huysmans, who indeed saw the world at a more eccentric angle than Montaigne, with unflinching veracity and absolute devotion, set himself to the task of creating his own vocabulary, and at first the unfamiliarity of its beauty estranges us.

We grow familiar in time with the style of the great authors, and when we read them we translate them easily and unconsciously, as we translate a foreign language we are familiar with; we understand the vocabulary because we have learned to know the special seal of the creative person who moulded the vocabulary. But at the outset the great writer may be almost as unintelligible to us as though he were writing in a language we had never learned. In the not so remote days when Leaves of Grass was a new book in the world, few who looked into it for the first time, however honestly, but were repelled, and perhaps even violently repelled. I remember that when, as a youth, Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads first reached me, I saw only picturesque hieroglyphics to which I had no key; while a few months later I wished to have the book always in my hands and to shout aloud its lines. Until we find the door and the clue, the new writer remains obscure. Therein lies the truth of Landor’s saying that the poet must himself create the beings who are to enjoy his Paradise.

For most of those who deliberately seek to learn to write, words seem generally to be felt as of less importance than the art of arranging them. It is thus that the learner in writing tends to become the devoted student of grammar and syntax. That is indeed a tendency which always increases. Civilization develops with a conscious adhesion to formal order, and the writer—wrriting by fashion or by ambition, and not by divine right of creative instinct — follows the course of civilization. It is an unfortunate tendency, for those whom it affects conquer by their number. As we know, writing that is real is not learned that way. Just as the solar system was not made in accordance with the astronomer’s laws, so writing is not made by the laws of grammar. Astronomer and grammarian alike can only come in at the end, to give a generalized description of what usually happens in the respective fields it pleases them to explore. When a new comet, cosmic or literary, enters their sky, it is their descriptions which have to be readjusted, not the comet. There seems to be no more pronounced mark of the decadence of a people and its literature than a servile and rigid subserviency to rule. It can only make for ossification, for anchylosis, for petrification, all the milestones on the road of death. In every age of democratic plebeianism, where each man thinks he is as good a writer as the others, and takes his laws from the others, having no laws of his own nature, it is down this steep path that men, in a flock, inevitably run.

We may find an illustration of the plebeian anchylosis of advancing civilization in the minor matter of spelling. The laws of spelling, properly speaking, are few or none, and in the great ages men have understood this and boldly acted accordingly. They exercised a fine personal discretion in the matter, and permitted without question a wide range of variation. Shakespeare, as we know, even spelled his own name in several different ways, all equally correct. When that great old Elizabethan mariner, Sir Martin Frobisher, entered on one of his rare and hazardous adventures with the pen, he created spelling absolutely afresh, in the spirit of simple heroism with which he was always ready to sail out into strange seas. His epistolary adventures are certainly more interesting than admirable, but we have no reason to suppose that the distinguished persons to whom these letters were addressed viewed them with any disdain. More anæmic ages cannot endure creative vitality even in spelling, and so it comes about that in periods when everything beautiful and handmade gives place to manufactured articles made wholesale, uniform, and cheap, the same principles are applied to words, and spelling becomes a mechanic trade. We must have our spelling uniform, even if uniformly bad. Just as the man who, having out of sheer ignorance eaten the wrong end of his asparagus, was thenceforth compelled to declare that he preferred that end, so it is with our race in the matter of spelling. Our ancestors, by chance or by ignorance, tended to adopt certain forms of spelling; and we, their children, are forced to declare that we prefer those forms. Thus we have not only lost all individuality in spelling, but we pride ourselves on our loss and magnify our anchylosis. In England it has become impossible to flex our stiffened mental joints sufficiently to press out a single letter, in America it is equally impossible to extend them enough to admit that letter. It is convenient, we say, to be rigid and formal in these things, and therewith we are content; it matters little to us that we have thereby killed the life of our words, and only gained the conveniency of death. It would be likewise convenient, no doubt, if men and women could be turned into rigid geometrical diagrams on Euclidian principles, as indeed our legislators sometimes seem to think that they already are; but we should pay for our conveniency with all the infinite variations, the beautiful sinuosities, that had once made up life.

There can be no doubt that, in the much greater matter of style, we have paid heavily for the attainment of our slavish adherence to mechanical rules, however convenient, however inevitable. The beautiful incorrection, as we are now compelled to regard it, that so often marked the great and even the small writers of the seventeenth century, has been lost, for all can now write what any find it easy to read, what none have any consuming desire to read. But when Sir Thomas Browne wrote his Religio Medici, it was with an art made up of obedience to personal law and abandonment to free inspiration which still ravishes us. It is extraordinary indeed how far incorrection may be carried and yet remain completely adequate even to complex and subtle ends. Pepys wrote his Diary at the outset of a life full of strenuous work and not a little pleasure, with a rare devotion indeed, but with a concision and carelessness, a single eye on the fact itself and an extraordinary absence of self-consciousness, which rob it of all claim to possess what we conventionally term style. Yet in this vehicle he has perfectly conveyed not merely the most vividly realized and delightfully detailed picture of a past age ever achieved in any language, but he has, moreover, painted a psychological portrait of himself which for its serenely impartial justice, its subtle gradations, its bold juxtapositions of color, has all the qualities of the finest Velasquez. There is no style here, we say, merely the diarist writing with careless poignant vitality for his own eye; and yet no style that we could conceive would be better fitted, or so well fitted, for the miracle that has here been effected.

One asks one’s self how it was that this old way of writing, as a personal art, gave place to the new way of writing, as a more impersonal pseudo-science, rigidly bound by formal and artificial rules. The answer, it seems to me, is to be found in the existence of a great new current of thought which began mightily to stir in men’s minds at the end of the seventeenth century. It will be remembered that it was during the early part of the eighteenth century, in both England and France, that the new devitalized though more flexible prose appeared, with its precision and accuracy, its conscious orderliness, its deliberate method. But only a few years before, over France and England alike, a great intellectual wave had swept, imparting to the mathematical and geometrical sciences, to astronomy, physics, and the allied studies, an impetus that they had never received before on so great a scale. Descartes in France and Newton in England stand out as the typical representatives of the movement. If that movement had to exert any influence on language — and we know how sensitively language reacts to thought — it could have been manifested in no other way than by the change which actually took place. And there was every opportunity for that influence to be exerted. This sudden expansion of the mathematical and geometrical sciences was so great and novel that interest in it was not confined to a small band of men of science; it excited the men in the street, the women in drawing-rooms; it was indeed a woman, a bright and gay woman of the world, who translated Newton’s great book into French. Thus it was that the new qualities of style were invented not merely to express new qualities of thought, but because new scientific ideals were moving within the minds of men. A similar reaction of thought on language took place at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when an attempt was made to vitalize language once more, and to break the rigid and formal moulds the previous century had constructed. The attempt was immediately preceded by the awakening of a new group of sciences, but this time the sciences of life, the biological studies associated with Cuvier and Lamarck, with John Hunter and Erasmus Darwin.

To admire the old writers, one may add, because for them writing was an art to be exercised freely and not a vain attempt to follow after the ideals of the abstract sciences, is by no means to imply contempt for that decorum and orderliness without which all written speech must be ineffective and obscure. The great waiters in the great ages have always observed this decorum and orderliness. But in their hands such observance was not a servile and rigid adherence to external rules, but a beautiful convention, an instinctive fine breeding, such as is naturally observed in human intercourse when it is not broken down by intimacy or by any great crisis of life or of death.

The freedom of art by no means involves the easiness of art. It may rather, indeed, be said that the difficulty increases with freedom, for to make things in accordance with patterns is ever the easiest task. The problem is equally arduous for those who, so far as their craft is conscious, seek an impersonal, as for those who seek a personal, idea of style. Flaubert sought — in vain, it is true — to be the most objective of artists in style, and to mould speech with heroic energy in shapes of abstract perfection. Nietzsche, one of the most personal artists in style, sought likewise, in his own words, to work at a page of prose as a sculptor works at a statue. Though the result is not perhaps fundamentally different whichever ideal it is that, consciously or instinctively, is followed, the personal road of style is doubtless theoretically the soundest, — usually also that which moves most of us more profoundly. The great prose writers of the Second Empire in France made an unparalleled effort to carve or paint impersonal prose, but its final beauty and effectiveness seem scarcely equal to the splendid energy it embodies. Jules de Goncourt, his brother thought, literally died from the mental exhaustion of his unceasing struggle to attain an objective style adequate to express the subtle texture of the world as he saw it. Yet, while the Goncourts are great figures in literary history, they have pioneered no new road, nor are they of the writers whom men continuously love to read.

Yet the great writers of any school bear witness, each in his own way, that deeper than these conventions and decorums of style, there is yet a law which no writer can escape from, a law which he must needs learn but can never be taught. That is the law of the logic of thought. All the conventional rules of the construction of speech may be put aside if a writer is thereby enabled to follow more closely and lucidly the form and process of his thought. It is the law of that logic that he must forever follow, and in attaining it alone find rest. He may say of it as devoutly as Dante, “ E la sua voluntade è nostra pace.” All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive, and are now false because dead. The simple and naked beauty of Swift’s style, sometimes so keen and poignant, rests absolutely on this truth to the logic of thought.

The twin qualities of flexibility and intimacy are of the essence of all progress in the art of language, and in their progressive achievement lies the attainment of great literature. If we compare Shakespeare with his predecessors and contemporaries, we can scarcely say that in imaginative force he is vastly superior to Marlowe, or in intellectual grip to Jonson, but he immeasurably surpasses them in flexibility and in intimacy. He was able with an incomparable art to weave a garment of speech so flexible in its strength, so intimate in its transparence, that it lent itself to every shade of emotion and the quickest turns of thought. When we compare the heavy and formal letters of Bacon, even to his closest friends, with the Familiar Letters of the vivacious Welshman, Howell, we can scarcely believe that the two men were contemporaries, so incomparably more expressive, so flexible and so intimate, is the style of Howell. All the writers who influence those who come after them have done so by the same method. They have thrown aside the awkward and outworn garments of speech, they have woven a simpler and more familiar speech, able to express subtleties or audacities that before seemed inexpressible. That has been done in English verse by Cowper and Wordsworth, in English prose by Addison and Lamb. When, as in the case of Carlyle or Browning, a great writer creates a speech of his own which is too clumsy to be flexible and too heavy to be intimate, he may arouse the admiration of his fellows, but he leaves no traces on the speech of the men who come after him.

No doubt it is possible for a writer to go far through the exercise of a finely attentive docility. By a dutiful study of what other people have said, by a refined cleverness in catching their tricks, and avoiding their subtleties, their profundities, and their audacities, by, in short, a patient perseverance in writing out copper-plate maxims in elegant copybooks, he can become at last, like Stevenson, the idol of the crowd. But the great writer can only learn out of himself. He learns to write as a child learns to walk. For the laws of the logic of thought are not other than those of the logic of physical movement. There is stumbling, awkwardness, hesitation, experiment, — before at last the learner attains the perfect command of that divine rhythm and perilous poise in which he asserts his supreme human privilege. But the process of his learning rests ultimately on his own structure and function, and not on others’ example.

The ardor and heroism of great achievement in style never grow less as the ages pass, but rather tend to grow more. That is so not merely because the hardest tasks are left for the last, but because of the ever increasing impediments placed in the path of style by the piling up of mechanical rules and rigid conventions. It is doubtful whether, on the whole, the forces of life really gain on the surrounding inertia of death. The greatest writers must spend the blood and sweat of their souls, amid the execration and disdain of their contemporaries, in breaking the old moulds of style and pouring their fresh life into new moulds. From Dante to Carducci, from Rabelais to Zola, from Chaucer to Whitman, the giants of letters have been engaged in this life-giving task, and behind them the forces of death swiftly gather again. Here there is always room for the hero. If all progress lies in an ever greater flexibility and intimacy of speech, a finer adaptation to the heights and depths of the mobile human soul, the task can never be finally completed. Every writer is called afresh to reveal new strata of life. By digging in his own soul he becomes the discoverer of the soul of his family, of his nation, of the race, of the heart of humanity. For the great writer finds style as the mystic finds God, in his own soul. It is the final utterance of a sigh, which none could utter before him, which all can utter after.

After all, it will be seen, we return at last to the point from which we started. Style is in a very small degree the deliberate and designed creation of the man who therein expresses himself. The self that he thus expresses is a bundle of inherited tendencies that came, the man himself can never entirely know whence. It is by the instinctive stress of a highly sensitive or slightly abnormal constitution, that he is impelled to distill these tendencies into the alien magic of words. The stilus wherewith he strives to write himself on the yet blank pages of the world may have the obstinate vigor of a metal rod, or the wild and quavering waywardness of an insect’s wing, but behind it lie forces that extend into infinity. It moves us because it is itself moved by pulses which, in varying measure, we also have inherited.