Appreciations, With An Essay on Style

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So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate
quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist
himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent
to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all
other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,
everywhere?--that architectural conception of work, which foresees
the end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every
part is conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but,
with undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first--a condition
of literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of
the artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity
of mind in style.

An acute philosophical writer, the late Dean Mansel (a writer whose
works illustrate the literary beauty there may be in closeness, and
with obvious repression or economy of a fine [22] rhetorical gift)
wrote a book, of fascinating precision in a very obscure subject, to
show that all the technical laws of logic are but means of securing,
in each and all of its apprehensions, the unity, the strict identity
with itself, of the apprehending mind. All the laws of good writing
aim at a similar unity or identity of the mind in all the processes
by which the word is associated to its import. The term is right,
and has its essential beauty, when it becomes, in a manner, what it
signifies, as with the names of simple sensations. To give the
phrase, the sentence, the structural member, the entire composition,
song, or essay, a similar unity with its subject and with itself:--
style is in the right way when it tends towards that. All depends
upon the original unity, the vital wholeness and identity, of the
initiatory apprehension or view. So much is true of all art, which
therefore requires always its logic, its comprehensive reason--
insight, foresight, retrospect, in simultaneous action--true, most of
all, of the literary art, as being of all the arts most closely
cognate to the abstract intelligence. Such logical coherency may be
evidenced not merely in the lines of composition as a whole, but in
the choice of a single word, while it by no means interferes with,
but may even prescribe, much variety, in the building of the sentence
for instance, or in the manner, argumentative, descriptive,
discursive, of this or that [23] part or member of the entire design.
The blithe, crisp sentence, decisive as a child's expression of its
needs, may alternate with the long-contending, victoriously intricate
sentence; the sentence, born with the integrity of a single word,
relieving the sort of sentence in which, if you look closely, you can
see much contrivance, much adjustment, to bring a highly qualified
matter into compass at one view. For the literary architecture, if
it is to be rich and expressive, involves not only foresight of the
end in the beginning, but also development or growth of design, in
the process of execution, with many irregularities, surprises, and
afterthoughts; the contingent as well as the necessary being subsumed
under the unity of the whole. As truly, to the lack of such
architectural design, of a single, almost visual, image, vigorously
informing an entire, perhaps very intricate, composition, which shall
be austere, ornate, argumentative, fanciful, yet true from first to
last to that vision within, may be attributed those weaknesses of
conscious or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, motive, or
member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, an
original structure in thought not organically complete. With such
foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written
out of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished.
With some strong and leading sense of the world, the [24] tight hold
of which secures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the
literary artist, I suppose, goes on considerately, setting joint to
joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardour, retracing
the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he
may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress,
readjusting mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or
at least not interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the
end comes, is burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes
delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds
himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition. His work
now structurally complete, with all the accumulating effect of
secondary shades of meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just
proportion of that ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes
expressive. The house he has built is rather a body he has informed.
And so it happens, to its greater credit, that the better interest
even of a narrative to be recounted, a story to be told, will often
be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great
writers who have been no artists, an unconscious tact sometimes
directing work in which we may detect, very pleasurably, many of the
effects of conscious art, yet one of the greatest pleasures of really
good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that
conscious artistic structure, and the pervading sense of it [25] as
we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, in truth, the kind of
constructive intelligence here supposed is one of the forms of the
imagination.

That is the special function of mind, in style. Mind and soul:--hard
to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough
practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict,
with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of
preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of
preponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a
fact, in certain writers--the way they have of absorbing language, of
attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a subtlety
which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable
inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static
and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By
soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not
another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact.
Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognise it; soul may
repel us, not because we misunderstand it. The way in which
theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is
perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean to indicate
generally in literature, by the word soul. Ardent religious
persuasion may exist, may make its way, without finding any
equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle [26] words to
various degrees, and when it really takes hold of them doubles its
force. Religious history presents many remarkable instances in
which, through no mere phrase-worship, an unconscious literary tact
has, for the sensitive, laid open a privileged pathway from one to
another. "The altar-fire," people say, "has touched those lips!"
The Vulgate, the English Bible, the English Prayer-Book, the writings
of Swedenborg, the Tracts for the Times:--there, we have instances of
widely different and largely diffused phases of religious feeling in
operation as soul in style. But something of the same kind acts with
similar power in certain writers of quite other than theological
literature, on behalf of some wholly personal and peculiar sense of
theirs. Most easily illustrated by theological literature, this
quality lends to profane writers a kind of religious influence. At
their best, these writers become, as we say sometimes, "prophets";
such character depending on the effect not merely of their matter,
but of their matter as allied to, in "electric affinity" with,
peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic
contact, on which account it is that it may be called soul, as
opposed to mind, in style. And this too is a faculty of choosing and
rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity-
-unity of atmosphere here, as there of design--soul securing colour
(or perfume, might [27] we say?) as mind secures form, the latter
being essentially finite, the former vague or infinite, as the
influence of a living person is practically infinite. There are some
to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as
operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the
quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a
book, and make way by intuition: yet, although they thus enjoy the
completeness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic
of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can
never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than,
what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of
which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed.

If all high things have their martyrs, Gustave Flaubert might perhaps
rank as the martyr of literary style. In his printed correspondence,
a curious series of letters, written in his twenty-fifth year,
records what seems to have been his one other passion--a series of
letters which, with its fine casuistries, its firmly repressed
anguish, its tone of harmonious grey, and the sense of disillusion in
which the whole matter ends, might have been, a few slight changes
supposed, one of his own fictions. Writing to Madame X. certainly he
does display, by "taking thought" mainly, by constant and delicate
pondering, as in his love for literature, a heart really moved, but
[28] still more, and as the pledge of that emotion, a loyalty to his
work. Madame X., too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts he
can send her are precepts of perfection in art, counsels for the
effectual pursuit of that better love. In his love-letters it is the
pains and pleasures of art he insists on, its solaces: he
communicates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that.
Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such divided or indirect
service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that, on
Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of what
was, from first to last, his leading passion, a somewhat solitary and
exclusive one.

I must scold you (he writes) for one thing, which shocks,
scandalises me, the small concern, namely, you show for art
just now. As regards glory be it so: there, I approve. But
for art!--the one thing in life that is good and real--can you
compare with it an earthly love?--prefer the adoration of a
relative beauty to the cultus of the true beauty? Well! I tell
you the truth. That is the one thing good in me: the one thing
I have, to me estimable. For yourself, you blend with the
beautiful a heap of alien things, the useful, the agreeable,
what not?--

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art,
and count everything else as nothing. Pride takes the place of
all beside when it is established on a large basis. Work! God
wills it. That, it seems to me, is clear.--+

I am reading over again the Aeneid, certain verses of which I
repeat to myself to satiety. There are phrases there which stay
in one's head, by which I find myself beset, as with those musical
airs which are for ever returning, and cause you pain, you love
them so much. I observe that I no longer laugh much, and am no
longer depressed. I am ripe. You talk of my serenity, and envy
me. It may well surprise you. Sick, [29] irritated, the prey
a thousand times a day of cruel pain, I continue my labour like
a true working-man, who, with sleeves turned up, in the sweat of
his brow, beats away at his anvil, never troubling himself whether
it rains or blows, for hail or thunder. I was not like that
formerly. The change has taken place naturally, though my will
has counted for something in the matter.--

Those who write in good style are sometimes accused of a neglect
of ideas, and of the moral end, as if the end of the physician
were something else than healing, of the painter than painting-
as if the end of art were not, before all else, the beautiful.

What, then, did Flaubert understand by beauty, in the art he pursued
with so much fervour, with so much self-command? Let us hear a
sympathetic commentator :--

Possessed of an absolute belief that there exists but one way of
expressing one thing, one word to call it by, one adjective to
qualify, one verb to animate it, he gave himself to superhuman
labour for the discovery, in every phrase, of that word, that
verb, that epithet. In this way, he believed in some mysterious
harmony of expression, and when a true word seemed to him to
lack euphony still went on seeking another, with invincible
patience, certain that he had not yet got hold of the unique
word.... A thousand preoccupations would beset him at the
same moment, always with this desperate certitude fixed in his
spirit: Among all the expressions in the world, all forms and
turns of expression, there is but one--one form, one mode--to
express what I want to say.

The one word for the one thing, the one thought, amid the multitude
of words, terms, that might just do: the problem of style was there!-
-the unique word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, essay, or song,
absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within.

[30] In that perfect justice, over and above the many contingent and
removable beauties with which beautiful style may charm us, but which
it can exist without, independent of them yet dexterously availing
itself of them, omnipresent in good work, in function at every point,
from single epithets to the rhythm of a whole book, lay the specific,
indispensable, very intellectual, beauty of literature, the
possibility of which constitutes it a fine art.

One seems to detect the influence of a philosophic idea there, the
idea of a natural economy, of some pre-existent adaptation, between a
relative, somewhere in the world of thought, and its correlative,
somewhere in the world of language--both alike, rather, somewhere in
the mind of the artist, desiderative, expectant, inventive--meeting
each other with the readiness of "soul and body reunited," in Blake's
rapturous design; and, in fact, Flaubert was fond of giving his
theory philosophical expression.--

There are no beautiful thoughts (he would say) without beautiful
forms, and conversely. As it is impossible to extract from a
physical body the qualities which really constitute it--colour,
extension, and the like--without reducing it to a hollow
abstraction, in a word, without destroying it; just so it is
impossible to detach the form from the idea, for the idea only
exists by virtue of the form.

All, the recognised flowers, the removable ornaments of literature
(including harmony and ease in reading aloud, very carefully
considered [31] by him) counted, certainly; for these too are part
of the actual value of what one says. But still, after all, with
Flaubert, the search, the unwearied research, was not for the smooth,
or winsome, or forcible word, as such, as with false Ciceronians, but
quite simply and honestly, for the word's adjustment to its meaning.
The first condition of this must be, of course, to know yourself, to
have ascertained your own sense exactly. Then, if we suppose an
artist, he says to the reader,--I want you to see precisely what I
see. Into the mind sensitive to "form," a flood of random sounds,
colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to
become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and,
in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it
sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity
thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and
it is just there, just at those doubtful points that the function of
style, as tact or taste, intervenes. The unique term will come more
quickly to one than another, at one time than another, according also
to the kind of matter in question. Quickness and slowness, ease and
closeness alike, have nothing to do with the artistic character of
the true word found at last. As there is a charm of ease, so there
is also a special charm in the signs of discovery, of effort and
contention towards a due end, as so often with Flaubert himself--in
the style which has [32] been pliant, as only obstinate, durable
metal can be, to the inherent perplexities and recusancy of a certain
difficult thought.

If Flaubert had not told us, perhaps we should never have guessed how
tardy and painful his own procedure really was, and after reading his
confession may think that his almost endless hesitation had much to
do with diseased nerves. Often, perhaps, the felicity supposed will
be the product of a happier, a more exuberant nature than Flaubert's.
Aggravated, certainly, by a morbid physical condition, that anxiety
in "seeking the phrase," which gathered all the other small ennuis of
a really quiet existence into a kind of battle, was connected with
his lifelong contention against facile poetry, facile art--art,
facile and flimsy; and what constitutes the true artist is not the
slowness or quickness of the process, but the absolute success of the
result. As with those labourers in the parable, the prize is
independent of the mere length of the actual day's work. "You talk,"
he writes, odd, trying lover, to Madame X.--

"You talk of the exclusiveness of my literary tastes. That
might have enabled you to divine what kind of a person I am in
the matter of love. I grow so hard to please as a literary
artist, that I am driven to despair. I shall end by not
writing another line."

"Happy," he cries, in a moment of discouragement at that patient labour,
which for him, certainly, was the condition of a great success--[33]

Happy those who have no doubts of themselves! who lengthen out,
as the pen runs on, all that flows forth from their brains. As
for me, I hesitate, I disappoint myself, turn round upon myself
in despite: my taste is augmented in proportion as my natural
vigour decreases, and I afflict my soul over some dubious word
out of all proportion to the pleasure I get from a whole page
of good writing. One would have to live two centuries to attain
a true idea of any matter whatever. What Buffon said is a big
blasphemy: genius is not long-continued patience. Still, there
is some truth in the statement, and more than people think,
especially as regards our own day. Art! art! art! bitter
deception! phantom that glows with light, only to lead one on
to destruction...

Again--

I am growing so peevish about my writing. I am like a man whose
ear is true but who plays falsely on the violin: his fingers
refuse to reproduce precisely those sounds of which he has the
inward sense. Then the tears come rolling down from the poor
scraper's eyes and the bow falls from his hand.

Coming slowly or quickly, when it comes, as it came with so much
labour of mind, but also with so much lustre, to Gustave Flaubert,
this discovery of the word will be, like all artistic success and
felicity, incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive
condition of mind, it must be recognised by like intuition on the
part of the reader, and a sort of immediate sense. In every one of
those masterly sentences of Flaubert there was, below all mere
contrivance, shaping and afterthought, by some happy instantaneous
concourse of the various faculties of the mind with each other, the
exact apprehension of what was needed to carry the meaning. And that
it fits with absolute justice will be a judgment of [34] immediate
sense in the appreciative reader. We all feel this in what may be
called inspired translation. Well! all language involves translation
from inward to outward. In literature, as in all forms of art, there
are the absolute and the merely relative or accessory beauties; and
precisely in that exact proportion of the term to its purpose is the
absolute beauty of style, prose or verse. All the good qualities,
the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression.

In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one
indispensable beauty is, after all, truth:--truth to bare fact in the
latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from
men's ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy,
truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of
truth, the vraie verite. And what an eclectic principle this really
is! employing for its one sole purpose--that absolute accordance of
expression to idea--all other literary beauties and excellences
whatever: how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and
at the same time safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply
pondered evocation of "the phrase," are equally good art. Say what
you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the
most direct and exact manner possible, with no surplusage:--there, is
the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, "entire,
smooth, and round," that it needs no punctuation, and also [35] (that
is the point!) of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its
elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose
of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of truth, that austerity
(the beauty, the function, of which in literature Flaubert understood
so well) becomes not the correctness or purism of the mere scholar,
but a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does
not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in
the portraiture of one's sense. License again, the making free with
rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging
aside or transforming all that opposes the liberty of beautiful
production, will be but faith to one's own meaning. The seeming
baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild
ornament of Les Miserables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of
Flaubert, amid a real natural opulence, only redoubled beauty--the
phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in
service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter.
Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as
they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative,
generative, sense in them.

In this way, according to the well-known saying, "The style is the
man," complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of
what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions
regarding style arising out of so many [36] natural scruples as to
the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of
things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction:
nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter
save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse,
abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really
characteristic or expressive, finds thus its justification, the
sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and
not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as
would have been his portrait by Raffaelle, in full consular
splendour, on his ivory chair.

A relegation, you may say perhaps--a relegation of style to the
subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon
transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the
conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every
lineament of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable
word, recognisable by the sensitive, by others "who have
intelligence" in the matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in
the evanescent and delicate region of human language. The style, the
manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really
uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely
sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. But let us hear
our French guide again.--

Styles (says Flaubert's commentator), Styles, as so many [37]
peculiar moulds, each of which bears the mark of a particular
writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas,
were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style:
that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of
expressing a thing, in all its intensity and colour. For him
the form was the work itself. As in living creatures, the
blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and
external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis,
in a work of art, imposed, necessarily, the unique, the just
expression, the measure, the rhythm--the form in all its
characteristics.

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