On the Art of Writing quotes

Indeed, Sir, the long and the short of the argument lie just here.

Literature is not an abstract Science, to which exact definitions can be applied. It is an Art rather, the success of which depends on personal persuasiveness, on the author’s skill to give as on ours to receive.

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go back with me to Plato’s wayfarers, whom we have left so long under the cypresses;

Well, our Indian Empire is yet in the making, while the works of Shakespeare are complete and purchasable in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely in pari materia; and moreover let us not be in a hurry to meet trouble halfway.

But in English Literature, which, like India, is still in the making, you have at once an Empire and an Emprise.

In that alone you have inherited something greater than Sparta. Let us strive, each in his little way, to adorn it.

Does the difference, then, perchance lie in ourselves? Will you tell me, “Oh, painting is a special art, whereas anyone can write prose passably well”? Can he, indeed? … Can you, sir?

Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit to having spoken English prose all your life without knowing it.

Indeed, when we try to speak prose without having practised it the result is apt to be worse than our own vernacular.

… will it be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and to hope to do without it—then will it be conceivable that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce its own double, its instrument of expression and the channel of its speculations and emotions.

“As if,” he exclaims finely, “language were the hired servant, the mere mistress of reason, and not the lawful wife in her own house!”

If you need further argument (but what serves it to slay the slain?)

let me remind you that you cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your bath hot or cold, or decide what to order for breakfast, without forecasting it to yourself in some form of words.

Words are, in fine, the only currency in which we can exchange thought even with ourselves.

Does it not follow, then, that the more accurately we use words the closer definition we shall give to our thoughts? Does it not follow that by drilling ourselves to write perspicuously we train our minds to clarify their thought?

nor need it disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely enough, very bad ones—in Charles Lamb’s phrase, very like what Petrarch might have written if Petrarch had been born a fool.

It is the impetus that I ask of you: the will to try.

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with bodily games;

But you have seen this morning’s newspaper: you have read of Captain Scott and his comrades, and in particular of the death of Captain Oates; and you know that the breed of Sidney is not extinct.

Gentlemen, let us keep our language noble: for we still have heroes to commemorate!

and he seems to unfold it so artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example, what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve us a far better dinner.

Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.

I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is this apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at the extreme of his difficulty—when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.

There is metaphor: there is ornament: there is a sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks—no such zeal, artistic or professional, animates—the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons.

Caution is its father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: its mother, Indolence.

It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in these times, safe: a thousand men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst.

a Jargoneer would have said that “among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable.”

How vile a thing⁠—shall we say?⁠—is the abstract noun! It wraps a man’s thoughts round like cotton wool.

Here is a pretty little nest of specimens, found in The Times newspaper by Messrs. H. W. and F. G. Fowler, authors of that capital little book The King’s English:—

Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse.

In literature as in life he makes himself felt who not only calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and redouble.

For another rule—just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train your suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon “as regards,” “with regard to,” “in respect of,” “in connection with,” “according as to whether,” and the like.

The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”—not “Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.”

The Gospel does not say “Consider the growth of the lilies,” or even “Consider how the lilies grow.” It says, “Consider the lilies, how they grow.”

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no writer of English so constantly chooses the concrete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches the general through the particular.

The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun.

When you write in the active voice, “They gave him a silver teapot,” you write as a man. When you write “He was made the recipient of a silver teapot,” you write jargon.

But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun. Somebody—I think it was FitzGerald—once posited the question, “What would have become of Christianity if Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the Parables?”

So long as you prefer abstract words, which express other men’s summarised concepts of things, to concrete ones which as near as can be reached to things themselves and are the firsthand material for your thoughts, you will remain, at the best, writers at secondhand.

If your language be Jargon, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond.

Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent.

Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: the difficulties it should approach with a fair front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking to evade or circumvent.

For the Style is the Man, and where a man’s treasure is there his heart, and his brain, and his writing, will be also.

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man (improbus homo) with his wicked inventions is forever making fools of our formulae.

Be consoled⁠—and, if you are wise, thank Heaven⁠—that genius uses our best-laid logic to explode it.

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in saying extraordinary things, in running up to the high emotional moments, the prose-writers explode and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins.

Doubtless the forty-seven were all good men and godly: but doubtless also good and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt with Alfred Steven’s tomb of the Duke of Wellington in St. Paul’s Cathedral; and you know what they did.

Individual genius such as Tyndale’s or even Shakespeare’s, though we cannot explain it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not incredibly, in the course of nature.

But that a large committee of forty-seven should have gone steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfering, seldom missing to improve:

with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up.” The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray’s.

It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

What madman, then, will say “Thus or thus far shalt thou go” to a prose thus invented and thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? Or who shall determine its range, whether of thought or of music?

but I take it as the handiest, and am going to build a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small suggestion of a guess.

Remember there is no harm in guessing so long as we do not pretend our guesswork to be something else.

I will ask you to consider first that in these pavements, laid bare for us as “the whistling rustic tends his plough,” we have work dating somewhere between the first and fifth centuries, work of unchallengeable beauty, work of a beauty certainly not rivalled until …

“The women doubtless would be largely spared”!—But I thank the professor for teaching me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what I am driving at.

The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did not extirpate the Britons, whatever you may hold concerning the Romans.

For, once again, men do not behave in that way, and certainly will not when a live slave is worth money. Secondly, the very horror with which men spoke, centuries after, of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a wholesale massacre was exceptional, monstrous.

Putting these things together, I retort upon the ethnologists—for I come from the West of England, where we suffer incredible things from them—“Semper ego auditor tantum?”

I hazard that the most important thing in our blood is that purple drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome.

You must, of course, take this for nothing more than it pretends to be—a conjecture, a suggestion. I will follow it up with two statements of fact, neither doubtful nor disputable.

and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without a thought of Giraud de Borneil—

Heigh! Brother mine, art a-waking or a-sleeping:

Mind’st thou the merry moon a many summers fled? Mind’st thou the green and the dancing and the leaping? Mind’st thou the haycocks and the moon above them creeping? …

And this vivacity, this new beat of the heart of poetry, is common to Chaucer and the humblest ballad-maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics printed yesterday, and it came straight to us out of Provence, the Roman Province.

It was the Provençal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the fairy tale, broke through the hedge of briers and kissed Beauty awake again.

You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in England alone but all over Europe, in Dante before our Chaucer, in the trouvères and minnesingers as well as in our ballad-writers.

In the first place they will correct your insularity of mind; or, rather, will teach you to forget it.

The Anglo-Saxon, it has been noted, ever left an empty space around his houses; and that, no doubt, is good for a house. It is not so good for the mind.

Secondly, we have a tribal habit, confirmed by Protestant meditation upon a Hebraic religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the written word and frowning down the drama, the song, the dance.

All lectures are too long.

Towards the close of my last, Gentlemen, I let fall a sentence which, heard by you in a moment of exhausted or languid interest, has since, like enough, escaped your memory even if it earned passing attention.

The loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend looked at him.

“Between us two,” he said, “it is all or naught,” and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other down stream.

You will never begin to understand literature until you understand something of life. These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature.

The loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend looked at him. “Between us two,” he said, “it is all or naught,” and cast his own cap to float and sink with the other down stream.

You will never begin to understand literature until you understand something of life.

These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons.

Some years ago I happened on a collection of Bulgarian proverbs of which my memory retains but two, yet each an abiding joy. In a lecture on English Literature in our Universities you will certainly not miss to apply the first, which runs,

“Many an ass has entered Jerusalem.”

The application of the second may elude you for a moment. It voices the impatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribe to what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes;

The application of the second may elude you for a moment. It voices the impatience of an honest Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to subscribe to what, in this England of ours, we call Church Purposes; and it runs,

“All these twopenny saints will be the ruin of the Church.”

Now far be it from me to apply the term “twopenny saint” to any existing University.

And God said, “Let there be light”: and there was light.

“Oh, thank you, Sir,” said the Bat and the Owl; “then we are off!”

I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always inhere a difficulty in correlating for the purposes of a Tripos a study of Literature itself with a study of these accessories; the thing itself being naturally so much more difficult:

But as I turned to leave, they chimed into an articulate sentence and the voice was the voice of Francis Bacon—“Regnum Scientiae ut regnum Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur.—

Into the Kingdom of Knowledge, as into the Kingdom of Heaven, whoso would enter must become as a little child.

”

Well, in this extraneous, professional, purchased ornamentation, you have something which Style is not: and if you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: “

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it⁠—wholeheartedly⁠—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

”

This goes very deep: it conditions all our criticism of art. Yet it conceals no mystery. You may see its meaning most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes—say Pure Mathematics with Acting.

Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man’s thought and emotion about things.

In Pure Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther away from the individual man. Two and two make four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon keep the tally.

Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man’s thought and emotion about things. In Pure Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, numbers, concepts, but still farther and farther away from the individual man.

Two and two make four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon keep the tally.

In Acting on the other hand almost everything depends on personal interpretation—on the gesture, the walk, the gaze, the tone of a Siddons, the rusé smile of a Coquelin, the exquisite, vibrant intonation of a Bernhardt. “English Art?” exclaimed Whistler, “there is no such thing!

It should react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle of language, and keeping him in touch with the great commonalty, the proletariat of speech.

For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin for its minting but only if its metal be base. So shall we bring out of our treasuries new things and old.

For it is with words as with men: constant intermarriage within the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be replenished from hardy plebeian blood.

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we can, rejecting no coin for its minting but only if its metal be base.

So shall we bring out of our treasuries new things and old.