i^laJMAZtU^ ^y 
 

LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 SUGGESTIONS AND COUNSEL FROM 
 
 ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write; 
 whether I have profited or not, that is the way. 
 A College Magazine, in 
 "Memories and Portraits" 
 
 ,»'•>» e • 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 1920 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1888, I920, BY 
 
 CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
T/YI45 
 
 S?3 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAOI 
 
 I. How Stevenson Taught Himself to 
 Write from "A College Maga- 
 zine" i 
 
 n. Letter to a Young Gentleman Who 
 Proposes to Embrace the Ca- 
 reer of Art 7 
 
 ni. A Note on Realism 21 
 
 IV. Books Which Have Influenced Me 32 
 
 V. A Gossip on Romance 44 
 
 VI. The Craft in Telling a Story, from 
 
 "A Humble Remonstrance" . . . 66 
 
 VII. Miscellaneous Observations: 
 
 NOTES FOR THE STUDENT OF ANY ART 78 
 
 craftsmanship ln literature 79 y 
 
 importance of style in writing . 82 ' 
 
 danger of realism 83 
 
 difficulty for beginners 83 
 
 writing without effort 84 
 
 subjects for poems 87 4 
 
 Stevenson's method of writing. . 87 *" 
 
 holding the reader^ attention . 88 - 
 
 WORDS 88 
 
 EFFECTIVENESS OF PROFUSE DESCRIP- ^s 
 
 tion 9° 
 
 V 
 
 M66623 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 USE OF RECOLLECTIONS IN WRITING 91 
 BUILDING A CHARACTER FOR A STORY 94 
 HOW WE UNDERSTAND OTHER PEO- 
 PLE 95 
 
 WRITING CHARACTER STUDD2S 96 
 
 A TRICK OF HEROINES IOO 
 
 DIFFICULTY AND ADVANTAGE OF COL- 
 LABORATION IOI 
 
 THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVE IN 
 
 LITERATURE 102 
 
 SUBJECT FOR LITERATURE IO3 
 
 SPIRIT IN LITERATURE IO3 
 
 WHAT INTERESTS US IN ROBINSON 
 
 CRUSOE IO4 
 
 BOOKS WE RE-READ IO4 
 
 WHEN THE IMAGINATION GROWS 
 
 STALE 105 
 
 AN ANALYSIS OF THE FABLE FORM. 107 
 THE GENESIS OF "THE MASTER OF 
 
 BALLANTRAE " IIO 
 
 HOW THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT 
 FREED THE IMAGINATION IN WRIT- 
 ING 115 
 
 VIII. The Morality of the Profession 
 
 of Letters 120 
 
 IX. Popular Authors 138 
 
 X. Some Gentlemen in Fiction 159 
 
 XI. A Chapter on Dreams 176 
 
 XII. On Some Technical Elements of 
 
 Style in Literature 197 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 How Stevenson would have developed his 
 proposed book, The Art of Literature, we may 
 only guess, for the project never found tangible 
 form further than the " loose ends" in scattered 
 essays and random observations spontaneously 
 put into his pages by way of apt illustration or 
 to clinch the point in a criticism. Yet, in those 
 unjointed observations, the spirit of the book 
 was truly born and — as the brief character of 
 Julius Caesar dominates Shakespeare's play — 
 its personality pervades and colors all of Steven- 
 son's works. 
 
 He himself points out in his paper, "Fon- 
 tainebleau," that while he was learning to write 
 he spent much of his time in Barbizon in the 
 company of painters. Surrounded by this at- 
 mosphere in which art was made by the labor 
 of tie hands, and was obviously blundered or 
 created according to their skill in the principles 
 of technic — the necessity of a technic in all art 
 was made vividly clear to him. 
 
 "To find for all he had to say words of vital 
 aptness and animation — to communicate as 
 much as possible of what he has somewhere 
 called 'the incommunicable thrill of things' — 
 was from the first his endeavor — nay more, it 
 was the main passion of his life," says his great 
 friend Sidney Colvin. It is not unnatural, then, 
 
 vii 
 
viii INTRODUCTION 
 
 that he determined to achieve a technic in 
 writing and that his interest in the craft of 
 literature — the means of commanding expres- 
 sion — should have moved him deeply. 
 
 No writer ever took more pains to learn how 
 to write, and it is significant that no author in 
 modern times has been so successful in so many 
 forms of literature. It is significant, too, for his 
 theories of craftsmanship that he has gained the 
 interest of an astonishingly wide and varied 
 audience, and that along with the perfection in 
 form and style which gives pleasure chiefly to 
 the fastidious, he appeals (speaking from Col- 
 vin again) "rather to the universal, hereditary 
 instincts, to the primitive sources of imaginative 
 excitement in the race." 
 
 Of course, this tremendous practical success 
 of his books is what has kept his prescribed 
 canons of learning how to write before the 
 world — and to-day they have been so much 
 heralded that people who have not read half a 
 dozen pages in his books know something about 
 them. Yet, in spite of the constant reference to 
 them — in spite of discussion prolonged from 
 year to year — there has never before been a 
 systematic attempt to gather together and ar- 
 range in one volume all he has left directly on 
 the art of writing; — that is what this book has 
 tried to do. How significant such a collection 
 will be remains to be proved; at least, to any 
 one seriously concerned with the business of 
 learning to write, it will be interesting to ex- 
 amine, and the reader cannot turn away from 
 it except refreshed with the splendid saneness. 
 
INTRODUCTION ix 
 
 But he who comes seeking a macadamized, 
 mile-posted road to the secret of writing, or a 
 set of classroom rules to be duly worked out 
 with an academic niceness will be disappointed. 
 For definite as is the trade of writing, it is the 
 united cry of all good craftsmen in the profes- 
 sion of letters that for each man literature is an 
 uncharted sea and that the waves wash away 
 the track of every vessel that has gone before. 
 Yet, here is the log of one such vessel which 
 made her port with colors flying, and for those 
 who have a genuine taste for the sea — an in- 
 stinct for its language and hardships — there is 
 much to be learned which will help them on their 
 adventures. 
 
 In arranging the contents of this book, it has 
 been the plan to try to group them so the reader 
 may learn something of Stevenson's theory of 
 the craft of writing before he is led into a dis- 
 cussion of the intricate technical details. In 
 some cases, for instance in the passages from A 
 Humble Remonstrance, the editor has omitted 
 certain parts which if included in the present 
 scheme would uselessly tend to confuse the 
 reader. 
 
 John William Rogers, Jr. 
 
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to 
 write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but 
 to affect him precisely as you wish. This is com- 
 monly understood in the case of books or set orations; 
 even in making your will, or writing an explicit letter, 
 some difficulty is admitted by the world. But one 
 thing you can never make Philistine natures under- 
 stand; one thing, which yet lies on the surface, re- 
 mains as unseizable to their wits as a high flight of 
 metaphysics — namely, that the business of life is 
 mainly carried on by means of this difficult art of litera- 
 ture, and according to a man's proficiency in that art 
 shall be the freedom and the fulness of his intercourse 
 with other men. 
 
 — The Truth of Intercourse. 
 
HOW STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 
 TO WRITE: ;.,.., , 
 
 > > 
 
 From "A College Magazine", i# * * 
 
 • • •« t ' * ,> •• 
 
 All through my boyhood and youth, I was 
 known and pointed out for the pattern of an 
 idler; and yet I was always busy on my own 
 private end, which was to learn to write. I 
 kept always two books in my pocket, one to 
 read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind 
 was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate 
 words; when I sat by the roadside, I would 
 either read, or a pencil and a penny version- 
 book would be in my hand, to note down the 
 features of the scene or commemorate some 
 halting stanzas. Thus I lived with words. 
 And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, 
 it was written consciously for practice. It was 
 not so much that I wished to be an author 
 (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed 
 that I would learn to write. That was a pro- 
 ficiency that tempted me; and I practised to 
 acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager 
 with myself. Description was the principal 
 
 
2 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 field of my exercise; for to any one with senses 
 there is always something worth describing, 
 and town and country are but one continuous 
 subject. But I worked in other ways also; often 
 accompanied my walks with dramatic dia- 
 logues, in which I played many parts; and often 
 exercised myself in writing down conversations 
 Jtm memoiy. -. 
 
 This, was att excellent, no doubt; so were the 
 'diaries' I some time's tried to keep, but always 
 and very speedily discarded, finding them a 
 school of posturing and melancholy self-decep- 
 tion. And yet this was not the most efficient 
 part of my training. Good though it was, it 
 only taught me (so far as I have learned them 
 at all) the lower and less intellectual elements 
 of the art, the choice of the essential note and 
 the right word: things that to a happier con- 
 stitution had perhaps come by nature. And 
 regarded as training, it had one grave defect; 
 for it set me no standard of achievement. So 
 that there was perhaps more profit, as there 
 was certainly more effort, in my secret labours 
 at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage 
 that particularly pleased me, in which a thing 
 was said or an effect rendered with propriety, 
 in which there was either some conspicuous 
 force or some happy distinction in the style, I 
 must sit down at once and set myself to ape 
 
STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 3 
 
 that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew 
 it; and tried again, and was again unsuccessful 
 and always unsuccessful; but at least in these 
 vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in 
 harmony, in construction and the co-ordination 
 of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape 
 to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir 
 Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to 
 Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann. 
 I remember one of these monkey tricks, which 
 was called The Vanity of Morals: it was to have 
 had a second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; 
 and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, 
 the names were apt; but the second part was 
 never attempted, and the first part was written 
 (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, 
 from its ashes) no less than three times: first in 
 the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of 
 Ruskin, who had cast on me a passing spell, 
 and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas 
 Browne. So with my other works: Cain, an 
 epic, was (save the mark !) an imitation of Sor- 
 dellc: Robin Hood, a tale in verse, took an 
 eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, 
 Chaucer and Morris: in Monmouth, a tragedy, I 
 reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my 
 innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed 
 many masters; in the first draft of The King's 
 Pardon, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no 
 
4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 lesser man than John Webster; in the second 
 draft of the same piece, with staggering versa- 
 tility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, 
 and of course conceived my fable in a less seri- 
 ous vein — for it was not Congreve's verse, it 
 was his exquisite prose, that I admired and 
 sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I 
 had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the 
 famous city of Peebles in the style of the Book 
 of Snobs. So I might go on for ever, through 
 all my abortive novels, and down to my later 
 plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they 
 were not only conceived at first under the brac- 
 ing influence of old Dumas, but have met with 
 resurrections: one, strangely bettered by an- 
 other hand, came on the stage itself and was 
 played by bodily actors; the other, originally 
 known as Semiramis: a Tragedy, I have ob- 
 served on bookstalls under the alias of Prince 
 Otto. But enough has been said to show by 
 what arts of impersonation, and in what purely 
 ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on 
 paper. 
 
 That, like it or not, is the way to learn to 
 write; whether I have profited or not, that is 
 the way. It was so Keats learned, and there 
 was never a finer temperament for literature 
 than Keats's; it was so, if we could trace it 
 out, that all men have learned; and that is why 
 
STEVENSON TAUGHT HIMSELF 5 
 
 a revival of letters is always accompanied or 
 heralded by a cast back to earlier and fresher 
 models. Perhaps I hear some one cry out: But 
 this is not the way to be original! It is not; 
 nor is there any way but to be born so. Nor 
 yet, if you are born original, is there anything 
 in this training that shall clip the wings of your 
 originality. There can be none more original 
 than Montaigne, neither could any be more 
 unlike Cicero; yet no craftsman can fail to see 
 how much the one must have tried in his time 
 to imitate the other. Burns is the very type 
 of a prime force in letters: he was of all men the 
 most imitative. Shakespeare himself, the im- 
 perial, proceeds directly from a school. It is 
 only from a school that we can expect to have 
 good writers ; it is almost invariably from a 
 school that great writers, these lawless excep- 
 tions, issue. Nor is there anything here that 
 should astonish the considerate. Before he 
 can tell what cadences he truly prefers, the 
 student should have tried all that are possible; 
 before he can choose and preserve a fitting key 
 of words, he should long have practised the 
 literary scales; and it is only after years of such 
 gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions 
 of words swarming to his call, dozens of turns 
 of phrase simultaneously bidding for his choice, 
 and he himself knowing what he wants to do 
 
6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 and (within the narrow limit of a man's abil- 
 ity) able to do it. 
 
 And it is the great point of these imitations 
 that there still shines beyond the student's 
 reach his inimitable model. Let him try as he 
 please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very 
 old and a very true saying that failure is the 
 only highroad to success. I must have had 
 some disposition to learn; for I clear-sightedly 
 condemned my own performances. I liked 
 doing them indeed; but when they were done, 
 I could see they were rubbish. In consequence, 
 I very rarely showed them even to my friends; 
 and such friends as I chose to be my con- 
 fidants I must have chosen well, for they had 
 the friendliness to be quite plain with me. 
 "Padding," said one. Another wrote: "I can- 
 not understand why you do lyrics so badly." 
 No more could I ! Thrice I put myself in the 
 way of a more authoritative rebuff, by sending 
 a paper to a magazine. These were returned; 
 and I was not surprised nor even pained. If 
 they had not been looked at, as (like all ama- 
 teurs) I suspected was the case, there was no 
 good in repeating the experiment; if they had 
 been looked at — well, then I had not yet learned 
 to write, and I must keep on learning and 
 living. 
 
II 
 
 LETTER TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 
 
 WHO PROPOSES TO EMBRACE 
 
 THE CAREER OF ART 
 
 With the agreeable frankness of youth, you 
 address me on a point of some practical im- 
 portance to yourself and (it is even conceiv- 
 able) of some gravity to the world: Should you 
 or should you not become an artist? It is one 
 which you must decide entirely for yourself; 
 all that I can do is to bring under your notice 
 some of the materials of that decision; and I 
 will begin, as I shall probably conclude also, by 
 assuring you that all depends on the vocation. 
 
 To know what you like is the beginning of 
 wisdom and of old age. Youth is wholly ex- 
 perimental. The essence and charm of that 
 unquiet and delightful epoch is ignorance of 
 self as well as ignorance of life. These two 
 unknowns the young man brings together 
 again and again, now in the airiest touch, now 
 with a bitter hug; now with exquisite pleasure, 
 now with cutting pain; but never with indiffer- 
 ence, to which he is a total stranger, and never 
 7 
 
8 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 with that near kinsman of indifference, con- 
 tentment. If he be a youth of dainty senses 
 or a brain easily heated, the interest of this 
 series of experiments grows upon him out of 
 all proportion to the pleasure he receives. It 
 is not beauty that he loves, nor pleasure that 
 he seeks, though he may think so; his design 
 and his sufficient reward is to verify his own 
 existence and taste the variety of human fate. 
 To him, before the razor-edge of curiosity is 
 dulled, all that is not actual living and the hot 
 chase of experience wears a face of a disgusting 
 dryness difficult to recall in later days; or if 
 there be any exception — and here destiny steps 
 in — it is in those moments when, wearied or 
 surfeited of the primary activity of the senses, 
 he calls up before memory the image of trans- 
 acted pains and pleasures. Thus it is that such 
 an one shies from all cut-and-dry professions, 
 and inclines insensibly toward that career of 
 art which consists only in the tasting and re- 
 cording of experience. 
 
 This, which is not so much a vocation for 
 art as an impatience of all other honest trades, 
 frequently exists alone; and so existing, it will 
 pass gently away in the course of years. Em- 
 phatically, it is not to be regarded; it is not a 
 vocation, but a temptation; and when your 
 father the other day so fiercely and (in my 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 9 
 
 view) so properly discouraged your ambition, 
 he was recalling not improbably some similar 
 passage in his own experience. For the temp- 
 tation is perhaps nearly as common as the 
 vocation is rare. But again we have vocations 
 which are imperfect; we have men whose minds 
 are bound up, not so much in any art, as in 
 the general ars artium and common base of all 
 creative work; who will now dip into painting, 
 and now study counterpoint, and anon will be 
 inditing a sonnet: all these with equal interest, 
 all often with genuine knowledge. And of this 
 temper, when it stands alone, I find it difficult 
 to speak; but I should counsel such an one to 
 take to letters, for in literature (which drags 
 with so wide a net) all his information may be 
 found some day useful, and if he should go on 
 as he has begun, and turn at last into the 
 critic, he will have learned to use the necessary 
 tools. Lastly we come to those vocations 
 which are at once decisive and precise; to the 
 men who are born with the love of pigments, 
 the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or 
 the impulse to create with words, just as other 
 and perhaps the same men are born with the 
 love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the 
 turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man 
 love the labour of any trade, apart from any 
 question of success or fame, the gods have 
 
io LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 called him. He may have the general vocation 
 too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I 
 think he often has; but the mark of his calling 
 is this laborious partiality for one, this inex- 
 tinguishable zest in its technical successes, and 
 (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind, 
 to take his very trifling enterprise with a grav- 
 ity that would befit the cares of empire, and to 
 think the smallest improvement worth accom- 
 plishing at any expense of time and industry. 
 The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone 
 upon with the unreasoning good faith and the 
 unflagging spirit of children at their play. Is 
 it worth doing? — when it shall have occurred 
 to any artist to ask himself that question, it is 
 implicitly answered in the negative. It does 
 not occur to the child as he plays at being a 
 pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the 
 hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the can- 
 dour of the one and the ardour of the other 
 should be united in the bosom of the artist. 
 
 If you recognise in yourself some such de- 
 cisive taste, there is no room for hesitation: 
 follow your bent. And observe (lest I should 
 too much discourage you) that the disposition 
 does not usually burn so brightly at the first, 
 or rather not so constantly. Habit and prac- 
 tice sharpen gifts; the necessity of toil grows 
 less disgusting, grows even welcome, in the 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN n 
 
 course of years; a small taste (if it be only 
 genuine) waxes with indulgence into an ex- 
 clusive passion. Enough, just now, if you can 
 look back over a fair interval, and see that 
 your chosen art has a little more than held its 
 own among the thronging interests of youth. 
 Time will do the rest, if devotion help it; and 
 soon your every thought will be engrossed in 
 that beloved occupation. 
 
 But even with devotion, you may remind 
 me, even with unfaltering and delighted in- 
 dustry, many thousand artists spend their 
 lives, if the result be regarded, utterly in vain: 
 a thousand artists, and never one work of art. 
 But the vast mass of mankind are incapable of 
 doing anything reasonably well, art among the 
 rest. The worthless artist would not improb- 
 ably have been a quite incompetent baker. 
 And the artist, even if he does not amuse the 
 public, amuses himself; so that there will al- 
 ways be one man the happier for his vigils. 
 This is the practical side of art: its inexpug- 
 nable fortress for the true practitioner. The di- 
 rect returns — the wages of the trade — are 
 small, but the indirect — the wages of the life — 
 are incalculably great. No other business offers 
 a man his daily bread upon such joyful terms. 
 The soldier and the explorer have moments of 
 a worthier excitement, but they are purchased 
 
12 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 by cruel hardships and periods of tedium that 
 beggar language. In the life of the artist there 
 need be no hour without its pleasure. I take 
 the author, <with whose career I am best ac- 
 quainted; and it is true he works in a rebellious 
 material, and that the act of writing is cramped 
 and trying both to the eyes and the temper; 
 but remark him in his study, when matter 
 crowds upon him and words are not wanting — in 
 what a continual series of small successes time 
 flows by; with what a sense of power as of one 
 moving mountains, he marshals his petty char- 
 acters; with what pleasures, both of the ear 
 and eye, he sees his airy structure growing on 
 the page; and how he labours in a craft to 
 which the whole material of his life is tributary, 
 and which opens a door to all his tastes, his 
 loves, his hatreds, and his convictions, so that 
 what he writes is only what he longed to utter. 
 He may have enjoyed many things in this big, 
 tragic playground of the world; but what shall 
 he have enjoyed more fully than a morning of 
 successful work? Suppose it ill paid: the 
 wonder is it should be paid at all. Other men 
 pay, and pay dearly, for pleasures less desir- 
 able. 
 
 Nor will the practice of art afford you pleas- 
 ure only; it affords besides an admirable train- 
 ing. For the artist works entirely upon hon- 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 13 
 
 our. The public knows little or nothing of 
 those merits in the quest of which you are con- 
 demned to spend the bulk of your endeavours. 
 Merits of design, the merit of first-hand en- 
 ergy, the merit of a certain cheap accomplish- 
 ment which a man of the artistic temper easily 
 acquires — these they can recognise, and these 
 they value. But to those more exquisite re- 
 finements of proficiency and finish, which the 
 artist so ardently desires and so keenly feels, 
 for which (in the vigorous words of Balzac) he 
 must toil "like a miner buried in a landslip," 
 for which, day after day, he recasts and revises 
 and rejects — the gross mass of the public must 
 be ever blind. To those lost pains, suppose 
 you attain the highest pitch of merit, posterity 
 may possibly do justice; suppose, as is so prob- 
 able, you fail by even a hair's breadth of the 
 highest, rest certain they shall never be ob- 
 served. Under the shadow of this cold thought, 
 alone in his studio, the artist must preserve 
 from day to day his constancy to the ideal. It 
 is this which makes his life noble; it is by this 
 that the practice of his craft strengthens and ma- 
 tures his character; it is for this that even the 
 serious countenance of the great emperor was 
 turned approvingly (if only for a moment) on 
 the followers of Apollo, and that sternly gentle 
 voice bade the artist cherish his art. 
 
i 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 And here there fall two warnings to be made. 
 First, if you are to continue to be a law to your- 
 self, you must beware of the first signs of lazi- 
 ness. This idealism in honesty can only be 
 supported by perpetual effort; the standard is 
 easily lowered, the artist who says "// will 
 do" is on the downward path; three or four 
 pot-boilers are enough at times (above all at 
 wrong times) to falsify a talent, and by the prac- 
 tice of journalism a man runs the risk of be- 
 coming wedded to cheap finish. This is the 
 danger on the one side; there is not less upon 
 the other. The consciousness of how much the 
 artist is (and must be) a law to himself, de- 
 bauches the small heads. Perceiving recondite 
 merits very hard to attain, making or swallow- 
 ing artistic formulae, or perhaps falling in love 
 with some particular proficiency of his own, 
 many artists forget the end of all art: to please. 
 It is doubtless tempting to exclaim against the 
 ignorant bourgeois; yet it should not be for- 
 gotten, it is he who is to pajr us, and that 
 (surely on the face of it) for services that he 
 shall desire to have performed. Here also, if 
 properly considered, there is a question of 
 transcendental honesty. To give the public 
 what they do not want, and yet expect to be 
 supported: we have there a strange pretension, 
 and yet not uncommon, above all with painters. 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 15 
 
 The first duty in this world is for a man to pay 
 his way; when that is quite accomplished, he 
 may plunge into what eccentricity he likes; but 
 emphatically not till then. Till then, he must 
 pay assiduous court to the bourgeois who 
 carries the purse. And if in the course of these 
 capitulations he shall falsify his talent, it can 
 never have been a strong one, and he will have 
 preserved a better thing than talent — char- 
 acter. Or if he be of a mind so independent 
 that he cannot stoop to this necessity, one 
 course is yet open: he can desist from art, and 
 follow some more manly way of life. 
 
 I speak of a more manly way of life, it is a 
 point on which I must be frank. To live by a 
 pleasure is not a high calling; it involves pat- 
 ronage, however veiled; it numbers the artist, 
 however ambitious, along with dancing girls 
 and billiard markers. The French have a ro- 
 mantic evasion for one employment, and call its 
 practitioners the Daughters of Joy. The artist 
 is of the same family, he is of the Sons of Joy, 
 chose his trade to please himself, gains his liveli- 
 hood by pleasing others, and has parted with 
 something of the sterner dignity of man. Jour- 
 nals but a little while ago declaimed against 
 the Tennyson peerage; and this Son of Joy was 
 blamed for condescension when he followed the 
 example of Lord Lawrence and Lord Cairns and 
 
16 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Lord Clyde. The poet was more happily in- 
 spired; with a better modesty he accepted the 
 honour; and anonymous journalists have not 
 yet (if I am to believe them) recovered the 
 vicarious disgrace to their profession. When it 
 comes to their turn, these gentlemen can do 
 themselves more justice; and I shall be glad to 
 think of it; for to my barbarian eyesight, even 
 Lord Tennyson looks somewhat out of place in 
 that assembly. There should be no honours 
 for the artist; he has already, in the practice of 
 his art, more than his share of the rewards of 
 life; the honours are pre-empted for other 
 trades, less agreeable and perhaps more useful. 
 
 But the devil in these trades of pleasing is 
 to fail to please. In ordinary occupations, a 
 man offers to do a certain thing or to produce 
 a certain article with a merely conventional 
 accomplishment, a design in which (we may 
 almost say) it is difficult to fail. But the artist 
 steps forth out of the crowd and proposes to 
 delight: an impudent design, in which it is im- 
 possible to fail without odious circumstances. 
 The poor Daughter of Joy, carrying her smiles 
 and finery quite unregarded through the crowd, 
 makes a figure which it is impossible to recall 
 without a wounding pity. She is the type of 
 the unsuccessful artist. The actor, the dancer, 
 and the singer must appear like her in person, 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 17 
 
 and drain publicly the cup of failure. But 
 though the rest of us escape this crowning bit- 
 terness of the pillory, we all court in essence 
 the same humiliation. We all profess to be y/ 
 able to delight. And how few of us are! We 
 all pledge ourselves to be able to continue to 
 delight. And the day will come to each, and 
 even to the most admired, when the ardour 
 shall have declined and the cunning shall be 
 lost, and he shall sit by his deserted booth 
 ashamed. Then shall he see himself con- 
 demned to do work for which he blushes to take 
 payment. Then (as if his lot were not already 
 cruel) he must lie exposed to the gibes of the v 
 wreckers of the press, who earn a little bitter 
 bread by the condemnation of trash which they 
 have not read, and the praise of excellence 
 which they cannot understand. 
 
 And observe that this seems almost the neces- 
 sary end at least of writers. Les Blancs et les 
 Bleus (for instance) is of an order of merit very 
 different from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne; and 
 if any gentleman can bear to spy upon the 
 nakedness of Castle Dangerous, his name I 
 think is Ham: let it be enough for the rest of 
 us to read of it (not without tears) in the pages 
 of Lockhart. Thus in old age, when occupa- 
 tion and comfort are most needful, the writer 
 must lay aside at once his pastime and his 
 
18 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 breadwinner. The painter indeed, if he suc- 
 ceed at all in engaging the attention of the pub- 
 lic, gains great sums and can stand to his 
 easel until a great age without dishonourable 
 failure. The writer has the double misfortune 
 to be ill-paid while he can work, and to be in- 
 capable of working when he is old. It is thus 
 a way of life which conducts directly to a false 
 position. 
 
 For the writer (in spite of notorious examples 
 to the contrary) must look to be ill-paid. 
 Tennyson and Montepin make handsome live- 
 lihoods; but we cannot all hope to be Tenny- 
 son, and we do not all perhaps desne to be 
 Montepin. If you adopt an art to be your 
 trade, weed your mind at the outset of all de- 
 sire of money. What you may decently expect, 
 if you have some talent and much industry, is 
 such an income as a clerk will earn with a tenth 
 or perhaps a twentieth of your nervous output. 
 Nor have you the right to look for more; in the 
 wages of the life, not in the wages of the trade, 
 lies your reward; the work is here the wages. 
 It will be seen I have little sympathy with the 
 common lamentations of the artist class. Per- 
 haps they do not remember the hire of the 
 field labourer; or do they think no parallel will 
 lie? Perhaps they have never observed what 
 is the retiring allowance of a field officer; or do 
 
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN 19 
 
 they suppose their contributions to the arts of 
 pleasing more important than the services of a 
 colonel? Perhaps they forget on how little 
 Millet was content to live; or do they think, 
 because they have less genius, they stand ex- 
 cused from the display of equal virtues? But 
 upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a 
 man be not frugal, he has no business in the 
 arts. If he be not frugal, he steers directly for 
 that last tragic scene of le vieux saltimbanque; 
 if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to con- 
 tinue to be honest. Some day, when the butcher 
 is knocking at the door, he may be tempted, he 
 may be obliged, to turn out and sell a slovenly 
 piece of work. If the obligation shall have 
 arisen through no wantonness of his own, he is 
 even to be commended; for words cannot de- 
 scribe how far more necessary it is that a man 
 should support his family, than that he should 
 attain to — or preserve — distinction in the arts. 
 But if the pressure comes through his own 
 fault, he has stolen, and stolen under trust, and 
 stolen (which is the worst of all) in such a way 
 that no law can reach him. 
 
 And now you may perhaps ask me, if the 
 debutant artist is to have no thought of money, 
 and if (as is implied) he is to expect no honours 
 from the State, he may not at least look for- 
 ward to the delights of popularity? Praise, 
 
2o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 you will tell me, is a savoury dish. And in so 
 far as you may mean the countenance of other 
 artists, you would put your finger on one of the 
 most essential and enduring pleasures of the 
 career of art. But in so far as you should have 
 an eye to the commendations of the public or 
 the notice of the newspapers, be sure you would 
 but be cherishing a dream. It is true that in 
 certain esoteric journals the author (for in- 
 stance) is duly criticised, and that he is often 
 praised a great deal more than he deserves, 
 sometimes for qualities which he prided him- 
 self on eschewing, and sometimes by ladies 
 and gentlemen who have denied themselves 
 the privilege of reading his work. But if a 
 man be sensitive to this wild praise, we must 
 suppose him equally alive to that which often 
 accompanies and always follows it — wild ridi- 
 cule. A man may have done well for years, 
 and then he may fail; he will hear of his fail- 
 ure. Or he may have done well for years, and 
 still do well, but the critics may have tired of 
 praising him, or there may have sprung up some 
 new idol of the instant, some "dust a little 
 gilt," to whom they now prefer to offer sacri- 
 fice. Here is the obverse and the reverse of 
 that empty and ugly thing called popularity. 
 Will any man suppose it worth the gaining? 
 
m 
 
 A NOTE ON REALISM * 
 
 Style is the invariable mark of any master; 
 and for the student who does not aspire so 
 high as to be numbered with the giants, it is 
 still the one quality in which he may improve 
 himself at will. Passion, wisdom, creative 
 force, the power of mystery or colour, are al- 
 lotted in the hour of birth, and can be neither 
 learned nor simulated. But the just and dex- 
 terous use of what qualities we have, the pro- 
 portion of one part to another and to the whole, 
 the elision of the useless, the accentuation of 
 the important, and the preservation of a uni- 
 form character from end to end — these, which 
 taken together constitute technical perfection, 
 are to some degree within the reach of industry 
 and intellectual courage. What to put in and 
 what to leave out; whether some particular 
 fact be organically necessary or purely orna- 
 mental; whether, if it be purely ornamental, it 
 may not weaken or obscure the general design; 
 and finally, whether, if we decide to use it, we 
 * First published in the Magazine of Art in 1883. 
 
 21 
 
22 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 should do so grossly and notably, or in some 
 conventional disguise: are questions of plastic 
 style continually rearising. And the sphinx 
 that patrols the highways of executive art has 
 no more unanswerable riddle to propound. 
 
 In literature (from which I must draw my 
 instances) the great change of the past century 
 has been effected by the admission of detail. 
 It was inaugurated by the romantic Scott; and 
 at length, by the semi-romantic Balzac and his 
 more or less wholly unromantic followers, bound 
 like a duty on the novelist. For some time it 
 signified and expressed a more ample contem- 
 plation of the conditions of man's life; but it 
 has recently (at least in France) fallen into a 
 merely technical and decorative stage, which it 
 is, perhaps, still too harsh to call survival. 
 With a movement of alarm, the wiser or more 
 timid begin to fall a little back from these ex- 
 tremities; they begin to aspire after a more 
 naked, narrative articulation; after the suc- 
 cinct, the dignified, and the poetic; and as a 
 means to this, after a general lightening of this 
 baggage of detail. After Scott we beheld the 
 starveling story — once, in the hands of Vol- 
 taire, as abstract as a parable — begin to be 
 pampered upon facts. The introduction of 
 these details developed a particular ability of 
 hand; and that ability, childishly indulged, has 
 
A NOTE ON REALISM 23 
 
 led to the works that now amaze us on a rail- 
 way journey. A man of the unquestionable 
 force of M. Zola spends himself on technical 
 successes. To afford a popular flavour and at- 
 tract the mob, he adds a steady current of 
 what I may be allowed to call the rancid. 
 That is exciting to the moralist; but what more 
 particularly interests the artist is this tendency 
 of the extreme of detail, when followed as a 
 principle, to degenerate into mere feux-de-joie 
 of literary tricking. The other day even M. 
 Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible 
 colours and visible sounds. 
 
 This odd suicide of one branch of the realists 
 may serve to remind us of the fact which un- 
 derlies a very dusty conflict of the critics. All 
 representative art, which can be said to live, is 
 both realistic and ideal; and the realism about 
 which we quarrel is a matter purely of externals. 
 It is no especial cultus of nature and veracity, 
 but a mere whim of veering fashion, that has 
 made us turn our back upon the larger, more 
 various, and more romantic art of yore. A 
 photographic exactitude in dialogue is now the 
 exclusive fashion; but even in the ablest hands 
 it tells us no more — I think it even tells us less 
 — than Moliere, wielding his artificial medium, 
 has told to us and to all time of Alceste or 
 Orgon, Dorine or Chrysale. The historical 
 
24 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 novel is forgotten. Yet truth to the conditions 
 of man's nature and the conditions of man's 
 life, the truth of literary art, is free of the ages. 
 It may be told us in a carpet comedy, in a 
 novel of adventure, or a fairy tale. The scene 
 may be pitched in London, on the sea-coast of 
 Bohemia, or away on the mountains of Beulah. 
 And by an odd and luminous accident, if there 
 is any page of literature calculated to awake 
 the envy of M. Zola, it must be that Troilus 
 and Cressida which Shakespeare, in a spasm of 
 unmanly anger with the world, grafted on the 
 heroic story of the siege of Troy. 
 
 This question of realism, let it then be clearly 
 understood, regards not in the least degree the 
 fundamental truth, but only the technical 
 method, of a work of art. Be as ideal or as 
 abstract as you please, you will be none the 
 less veracious; but if you be weak, you run the 
 risk of being tedious and inexpressive; and if 
 you be very strong and honest, you may chance 
 upon a masterpiece. 
 
 A work of art is first cloudily conceived in 
 the mind; during the period of gestation it 
 stands more clearly forward from these swad- 
 dling mists, puts on expressive lineaments, and 
 becomes at length that most faultless, but also, 
 alas! that incommunicable product of the hu- 
 man mind, a perfected design. On the ap- 
 
A NOTE ON REALISM 25 
 
 proach to execution all is changed. The artist 
 must now step down, don his working clothes, 
 and become the artisan. He now resolutely 
 commits his airy conception, his delicate Ariel, 
 to the touch of matter; he must decide, almost 
 in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and 
 the particularity of execution of his whole de- 
 sign. 
 
 The engendering idea of some works is sty- 
 listic; a technical preoccupation stands them 
 instead of some robuster principle of life. And 
 with these the execution is but play; for the 
 stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and 
 all large originality of treatment wilfully fore- 
 gone. Such are the verses, intricately designed, 
 which we have learnt to admire, with a certain 
 smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang 
 and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases 
 where dexterity or even breadth of plastic style 
 takes the place of pictorial nobility of design. 
 So, it may be remarked, it was easier to begin 
 to write Esmond than Vanity Fair, since, in 
 the first, the style was dictated by the nature 
 of the plan; and Thackeray, a man probably of 
 some indolence of mind, enjoyed and got good 
 profit of this economy of effort. But the case 
 is exceptional. Usually in all works of art that 
 have been conceived from within outwards, 
 and generously nourished from the author's 
 
26 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 mind, the moment in which he begins to exe- 
 cute is one of extreme perplexity and strain. 
 Artists of indifferent energy and an imperfect 
 devotion to their own ideal make this ungrate- 
 ful effort once for all; and, having formed a 
 style, adhere to it through life. But those of a 
 higher order cannot rest content with a process 
 which, as they continue to employ it, must in- 
 fallibly degenerate towards the academic and 
 the cut-and-dried. Every fresh work in which 
 they embark is the signal for a fresh engage- 
 ment of the whole forces of their mind; and the 
 changing views which accompany the growth of 
 their experience are marked by still more sweep- 
 ing alterations in the manner of their art. So 
 that criticism loves to dwell upon and distin- 
 guish the varying periods of a ' Raphael, a 
 Shakespeare, or a Beethoven. 
 
 It is, then, first of all, at this initial and de- 
 cisive moment when execution is begun, and 
 thenceforth only in a less degree, that the ideal 
 and the real do indeed, like good and evil 
 angels, contend for the direction of the work. 
 Marble, paint, and language, the pen, the 
 needle, and the brush, all have their gross- 
 nesses, their ineffable impotences, their hours, 
 if I may so express myself, of insubordination. 
 It is the work and it is a great part of the delight 
 of any artist to contend with these unruly 
 
A NOTE ON REALISM 27 
 
 tools, and now by brute energy, now by witty 
 expedient, to drive and coax them to effect his 
 will. Given these means, so laughably inade- 
 quate, and given the interest, the intensity, and 
 the multiplicity of the actual sensation whose 
 effect he is to render with their aid, the artist 
 has one main and necessary resource which he 
 must, in every case and upon any theory, em- 
 ploy. He must, that is, suppress much and 
 omit more. He must omit what is tedious or 
 irrelevant, and suppress what is tedious and 
 necessary. But such facts as, in regard to the 
 main design, subserve a variety of purposes, he 
 will perforce and eagerly retain. And it is the 
 mark of the very highest order of creative art 
 to be woven exclusively of such. There, any 
 fact that is registered is contrived a double or a 
 treble debt to pay, and is at once an ornament 
 in its place, and a pillar in the main design. 
 Nothing would find room in such a picture 
 that did not serve, at once, to complete the 
 composition, to accentuate the scheme of col- 
 our, to distinguish the planes of distance, and 
 to strike the note of the selected sentiment; 
 nothing would be allowed in such a story that 
 did not, at the same time, expedite the prog- 
 ress of the fable, build up the characters, and 
 strike home the moral or the philosophical de- 
 sign. But this is unattainable. As a rule, so 
 
28 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 far from building the fabric of our works ex- 
 clusively with these, we are thrown into a 
 rapture if we think we can muster a dozen or a 
 score of them, to be the plums of our confection. 
 And hence, in order that the canvas may be 
 filled or the story proceed from point to point, 
 other details must be admitted. They must be 
 admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; many 
 without marriage robes. Thus any work of 
 art, as it proceeds towards completion, too often 
 — I had almost written always — loses in force 
 and poignancy of main design. Our little air 
 is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant 
 orchestration; our little passionate story drowns 
 in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or slip- 
 shod talk. 
 
 But again, we are rather more tempted to 
 admit those particulars which we know we can 
 describe; and hence those most of all which, 
 having been described very often, have grown 
 to be conventionally treated in the practice of 
 our art. These we choose, as the mason chooses 
 the acanthus to adorn his capital, because they 
 come naturally to the accustomed hand. The 
 old stock incidents and accessories, tricks of 
 workmanship and schemes of composition (all 
 being admirably good, or they would long have 
 been forgotten) haunt and tempt our fancy, 
 offer us ready-made but not perfectly appro- 
 
A NOTE ON REALISM 29 
 
 priate solutions for any problem that arises, 
 and wean us from the study of nature and the 
 uncompromising practice of art. To struggle, 
 to face nature, to rind fresh solutions, and give 
 expression to facts which have not yet been 
 adequately or not yet elegantly expressed, is 
 to run a little upon the danger of extreme self- 
 love. Difficulty sets a high price upon achieve- 
 ment; and the artist may easily fall into the 
 error of the French naturalists, and consider 
 any fact as welcome to admission if it be the 
 ground of brilliant handiwork; or, again, into 
 the error of the modern landscape-painter, who 
 is apt to think that difficulty overcome and 
 science well displayed can take the place of 
 what is, after all, the one excuse and breath of 
 art — charm. A little further, and he will re- 
 gard charm in the light of an unworthy sacri- 
 fice to prettiness, and the omission of a tedious 
 passage as an infidelity to art. 
 
 We have now the matter of this difference 
 before us. The idealist, his eye singly fixed 
 upon the greater outlines, loves rather to fill up 
 the interval with detail of the conventional 
 order, briefly touched, soberly suppressed in 
 tone, courting neglect. But the realist, with a 
 fine intemperance, will not suffer the presence 
 of anything so dead as a convention; he shall 
 have all fiery, all hot-pressed from nature, all 
 
3 o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 charactered and notable, seizing the eye. The 
 style that befits either of these extremes, once 
 chosen, brings with it its necessary disabilities 
 and dangers. The immediate danger of the 
 realist is to sacrifice the beauty and significance 
 of the whole to local dexterity, or, in the insane 
 pursuit of completion, to immolate his readers 
 under facts; but he comes in the last resort, 
 and as his energy declines, to discard all de- 
 sign, abjure all choice, and, with scientific thor- 
 oughness, steadily to communicate matter 
 which is not worth learning. The danger of 
 the idealist is, of course, to become merely null 
 and lose all grip of fact, particularity, or passion. 
 We talk of bad and good. Everything, in- 
 deed, is good which is conceived with honesty 
 and executed with communicative ardour. But 
 though on neither side is dogmatism fitting, and 
 though in every case the artist must decide for 
 himself, and decide afresh and yet afresh for 
 each succeeding work and new creation; yet 
 one thing may be generally said, that we of the 
 last quarter of the nineteenth century, breath- 
 ing as we do the intellectual atmosphere of our 
 age, are more apt to err upon the side of realism 
 than to sin in quest of the ideal. Upon that 
 theory it may be well to watch and correct our 
 own decisions, always holding back the hand 
 from the least appearance of irrelevant dexter- 
 
A NOTE ON REALISM 31 
 
 ity, and resolutely fixed to begin no work that 
 is not philosophical, passionate, dignified, hap- 
 pily mirthful, or, at the last and least, romantic 
 in design. 
 
IV 
 
 BOOKS WHICH HAVE INFLUENCED 
 ME* 
 
 The Editor f has somewhat insidiously laid a 
 trap for his correspondents, the question put 
 appearing at first so innocent, truly cutting so 
 deep. It is not, indeed, until after some recon- 
 naissance and review that the writer awakes to 
 find himself engaged upon something in the 
 nature of autobiography, or, perhaps worse, 
 upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful 
 brother whom we once all had, and whom we 
 have all lost and mourned, the man we ought 
 to have been, the man we hoped to be. But 
 when word has been passed (even to an editor) 
 it should, if possible, be kept; and if some- 
 times I am wise and say too little, and some- 
 times weak and say too much, the blame must 
 lie at the door of the person who entrapped me. 
 
 The most influential books, and the truest in 
 their influence, are works of fiction. They do 
 not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must 
 
 * First published in the British Weekly, May 13, 1887. 
 t Of the British Weekly. 
 
 33 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 33 
 
 afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not 
 teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards 
 unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they 
 clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us 
 from ourselves, they constrain us to the ac- 
 quaintance of others; and they show us the 
 web of experience, not as we can see it for our- 
 selves, but with a singular change — that mon- 
 strous, consuming ego of ours being, for the 
 nonce, struck out. To be so, they must be 
 reasonably true to the human comedy; and any 
 work that is so serves the turn of instruction. 
 But the course of our education is answered 
 best by those poems and romances where we 
 breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought 
 and meet generous and pious characters. 
 Shakespeare has served me best. Few living 
 friends have had upon me an influence so 
 strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The 
 last character, already well beloved in the read- 
 ing, I had the good fortune to see, I must think, 
 in an impressionable hour, played by Mrs. 
 Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, 
 more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the 
 influence quite passed away. Kent's brief 
 speech over the dying Lear had a great effect 
 upon my mind, and was the burthen of my re- 
 flections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly 
 generous did it appear in sense, so overpowering 
 
CO 
 
 / 
 
 34 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 in expression. Perhaps my dearest and best 
 friend outside of Shakespeare is D'Artagnan — 
 the elderly D'Artagnan of the Vicomte de 
 Bragelonne. I know not a more human soul, 
 nor, in his way, a finer; I shall be very sorry for 
 the man who is so much of a pedant in morals 
 that he cannot learn from the Captain of Mus- 
 keteers. Lastly, I must name the Pilgrim's 
 Progress, a, book that breathes of every beauti- 
 ful and valuable emotion. 
 
 But of works of art little can be said; their 
 influence is profound and silent, like the influ- 
 ence of nature; they mould by contact; we drink 
 them up like water, and are bettered, yet know 
 not how. It is in books more specifically di- 
 dactic that we can follow out the effect, and 
 distinguish and weigh and compare. A book 
 which has been very influential upon me fell 
 early into my hands, and so may stand first, 
 though I think its influence was only sensible 
 later on, and perhaps still keeps growing, for 
 it is a book not easily outlived: the Essais of 
 Montaigne. That temperate and genial pic- 
 ture of life is a great gift to place in the hands 
 of persons of to-day; they will find in these 
 smiling pages a magazine of heroism and wis- 
 dom, all of an antique strain; they will have 
 their "linen decencies" and excited ortho- 
 doxies fluttered, and will (if they have any 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 35 
 
 gift of reading) perceive that these have not 
 been fluttered without some excuse and ground 
 of reason; and (again if they have any gift of 
 reading) they will end by seeing that this old 
 gentleman was in a dozen ways a finer fellow, 
 and held in a dozen ways a nobler view of life, 
 than they or their contemporaries. 
 
 The next book, in order of time, to influence 
 me, was the New Testament, and in particular 
 the Gospel according to St. Matthew. I be- 
 lieve it would startle and move any one if they 
 could make a certain effort of imagination and 
 read it freshly like a book, not droningly and 
 dully like a portion of the Bible. Any one 
 would then be able to see in it those truths 
 which we are all courteously supposed to know 
 and all modestly refrain from applying. But 
 upon this subject it is perhaps better to be 
 silent. 
 
 I come next to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, a 
 book of singular service, a book which tumbled 
 the world upside down for me, blew into space 
 a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical il- 
 lusion, and, having thus shaken my tabernacle 
 of lies, set me back again upon a strong founda- 
 tion of all the original and manly virtues. But 
 it is, once more, only a book for those who have 
 the gift of reading. I will be very frank — I be- 
 lieve it is so with all good books except, per- 
 
36 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 haps, fiction. The average man lives, and must 
 live, so wholly in convention, that gunpowder 
 charges of the truth are more apt to discompose 
 than to invigorate his creed. Either he cries 
 out upon blasphemy and indecency, and crouches 
 the closer round that little idol of part-truths 
 and part-conveniences which is the contempo- 
 rary deity, or he is convinced by what is new, 
 forgets what is old, and becomes truly blas- 
 phemous and indecent himself. New truth is 
 only useful to supplement the old; rough truth 
 is only wanted to expand, not to destroy, our 
 civil and often elegant conventions. He who 
 cannot judge had better stick to fiction and the 
 daily papers. There he will get little harm, 
 and, in the first at least, some good. 
 
 Close upon the back of my discovery of 
 Whitman, I came under the influence of Her- 
 bert Spencer. No more persuasive rabbi ex- 
 ists, and few better. How much of his vast 
 structure will bear the touch of time, how 
 much is clay and how much brass, it were too 
 curious to inquire. But his words, if dry, are 
 always manly and honest; there dwells in his 
 pages a spirit of highly abstract joy, plucked 
 naked like an algebraic symbol but still joyful; 
 and the reader will find there a caput mortuum 
 of piety, with little indeed of its loveliness, but 
 with most of its essentials; and these two qual- 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 37 
 
 ities make him a wholesome, as his intellectual 
 vigour makes him a bracing, writer. I should 
 be much of a hound if I lost my gratitude to 
 Herbert Spencer. 
 
 Goethe's Life, by Lewes, had a great impor- 
 tance for me when it first fell into my hands — a 
 strange instance of the partiality of man's 
 good and man's evil. I know no one whom I 
 less admire than Goethe; he seems a very epit- 
 ome of the sins of genius, breaking open the 
 doors of private life, and wantonly wounding 
 friends, in that crowning offence of Werther, 
 and in his own character a mere pen-and-ink 
 Napoleon, conscious of the rights and duties 
 of superior talents as a Spanish inquisitor was 
 conscious of the rights and duties of his office. 
 And yet in his fine devotion to his art, in his 
 honest and serviceable friendship for Schiller, 
 what lessons are contained! Biography, usu- 
 ally so false to its office, does here for once 
 perform for us some of the work of fiction, re- 
 minding us, that is, of the truly mingled tissue 
 of man's nature, and how huge faults and shin- 
 ing virtues cohabit and persevere in the same 
 character. History serves us well to this effect, 
 but in the originals, not in the pages of the 
 popular epitomiser, who is bound, by the very 
 nature of his task, to make us feel the difference 
 of epochs instead of the essential identity of 
 
38 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 man, and even in the originals only to those 
 who can recognise their own human virtues and 
 defects in strange forms, often inverted and 
 under strange names, often interchanged. Mar- 
 tial is a poet of no good repute, and it gives a 
 man new thoughts to read his works dispassion- 
 ately, and find in this unseemly jester's serious 
 passages the image of a kind, wise, and self- 
 respecting gentleman. It is customary, I sup- 
 pose, in reading Martial, to leave out these 
 pleasant verses; I never heard of them, at 
 least, until I found them for myself; and this 
 partiality is one among a thousand things that 
 help to build up our distorted and hysterical 
 conception of the great Roman Empire. 
 
 This brings us by a natural transition to a 
 very noble book — the Meditations of Marcus 
 Aurelius. The dispassionate gravity, the noble 
 forgetfulness of self, the tenderness of others, 
 that are there expressed and were practised on 
 so great a scale in the life of its writer, make 
 this book a book quite by itself. No one can 
 read it and not be moved. Yet it scarcely or 
 rarely appeals to the feelings — those very mo- 
 bile, those not very trusty parts of man. Its 
 address lies further back: its lesson comes 
 more deeply home; when you have read, you 
 carry away with you a memory of the man 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 39 
 
 himself; it is as though you had touched a loyal 
 hand, looked into brave eyes, and made a noble 
 friend; there is another bond on you thencefor- 
 ward, binding you to life and to the love of 
 virtue. 
 
 Wordsworth should perhaps come next. 
 Every one has been influenced by Wordsworth, 
 and it is hard to tell precisely how. A certain 
 innocence, a rugged austerity of joy, a sight of 
 the stars, "the silence that is in the lonely 
 hills," something of the cold thrill of dawn, 
 cling to his work and give it a particular ad- 
 dress to what is best in us. I do not know that 
 you learn a lesson; you need not — Mill did not 
 — agree with any one of his beliefs; and yet 
 the spell is cast. Such are the best teachers: a 
 dogma learned is only a new error — the old one 
 was perhaps as good; but a spirit communi- 
 cated is a perpetual possession. These best 
 teachers climb beyond teaching to the plane of 
 art; it is themselves, and what is best in them- 
 selves, that they communicate. 
 
 I should never forgive myself if I forgot The 
 Egoist. It is art, if you like, but it belongs 
 purely to didactic art, and from all the novels 
 I have read (and I have read thousands) stands 
 in a place by itself. Here is a Nathan for the 
 modern David: here is a book to send the blood 
 
4 o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 into men's faces. Satire, the angry picture of 
 human faults, is not great art; we can all be 
 angry with our neighbour; what we want is to 
 be shown, not his defects, of which we are too 
 conscious, but his merits, to which we are too 
 blind. And The Egoist is a satire; so much 
 must be allowed; but it is a satire of a singular 
 quality, which tells you nothing of that obvi- 
 ous mote, which is engaged from first to last 
 with that invisible beam. It is yourself that is 
 hunted down; these are your own faults that 
 are dragged into the day and numbered, with 
 lingering relish, with cruel cunning and pre- 
 cision. A young friend of Mr. Meredith's (as 
 I have the story) came to him in an agony. 
 "This is too bad of you," he cried. " Willoughby 
 is me!" "No, my dear fellow," said the au- 
 thor; "he is all of us." I have read The Egoist 
 five or six times myself, and I mean to read it 
 again; for I am like the young friend of the 
 anecdote — I think Willoughby an unmanly 
 but a very serviceable exposure of myself. 
 
 I suppose, when I am done, I shall find that 
 I have forgotten much that was most influen- 
 tial, as I see already I have forgotten Thoreau, 
 and Hazlitt, whose paper "On the Spirit of 
 Obligations" was a turning-point in my life, 
 and Penn, whose little book of aphorisms had a 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 41 
 
 brief but strong effect on me, and Mitford's 
 Tales of Old Japan, wherein I learned for the 
 first time the proper attitude of any rational 
 man to his country's laws — a secret found, and 
 kept, in the Asiatic islands. That I should 
 commemorate all is more than I can hope or 
 the Editor could ask. It will be more to the 
 point, after having said so much upon improv- 
 ing books, to say a word or two about the im- 
 provable reader. The gift of reading, as I have 
 called it, is not very common, nor very generally 
 understood. It consists, first of all, in a vast 
 intellectual endowment — a free grace, I find I 
 must call it — by which a man rises to under- 
 stand that he is not punctually right, nor 
 those from whom he differs absolutely wrong. 
 He may hold dogmas; he may hold them pas- 
 sionately; and he may know that others hold 
 them but coldly, or hold them differently, or 
 hold them not at all. Well, if he has the gift of 
 reading, these others will be full of meat for 
 him. They will see the other side of proposi- 
 tions and the other side of virtues. He need not 
 change his dogma for that, but he may change 
 his reading of that dogma, and he must supple- 
 ment and correct his deductions from it. A 
 human truth, which is always very much a 
 lie, hides as much of life as it displays. It is 
 
42 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 men who hold another truth, or, as it seems to 
 us, perhaps, a dangerous lie, who can extend 
 our restricted field of knowledge, and rouse our 
 drowsy consciences. Something that seems 
 quite new, or that seems insolently false or 
 very dangerous, is the test of a reader. If he 
 tries to see what it means, what truth excuses 
 it, he has the gift, and let him read. If he is 
 merely hurt, or offended, or exclaims upon his 
 author's folly, he had better take to the daily 
 papers; he will never be a reader. 
 
 And here, with the aptest illustrative force, 
 after I have laid down my part-truth, I must 
 step in with its opposite. For, after all, we are 
 vessels of a very limited content. Not all men 
 can read all books; it is only in a chosen few 
 that any man will find his appointed food; and 
 the fittest lessons are the most palatable, and 
 make themselves welcome to the mind. A 
 writer learns this early, and it is his chief sup- 
 port; he goes on unafraid, laying down the law; 
 and he is sure at heart that most of what he 
 says is demonstrably false, and much of a 
 mingled strain, and some hurtful, and very 
 little good for service; but he is sure besides 
 that when his words fall into the hands of any 
 genuine reader, they will be weighed and win- 
 nowed, and only that which suits will be as- 
 
BOOKS WHICH INFLUENCED ME 43 
 
 similated; and when they fall into the hands 
 of one who cannot intelligently read, they come 
 there quite silent and inarticulate, falling upon 
 deaf ears, and his secret is kept as if he had not 
 written. 
 
V 
 
 A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 
 
 In anything fit to be called by the name of 
 reading, the process itself should be absorbing 
 and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, 
 be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the 
 perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, ka- 
 leidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep 
 or of continuous thought. The words, if the 
 book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in 
 our ears like the noise of breakers, and the 
 story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand 
 coloured pictures to the eye. It was for this 
 last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved 
 our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled 
 period of boyhood. Eloquence and thought, 
 character and conversation, were but obstacles 
 to brush aside as we dug blithely after a cer- 
 tain sort of incident, like a pig for truffles. 
 For my part, I liked a story to begin with an 
 old wayside inn where, "towards the close of 
 the year 17 — ," several gentlemen in three- 
 cocked hats were playing bowls. A friend of 
 mine preferred the Malabar coast in a storm, 
 with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling 
 44 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 45 
 
 fellow of Herculean proportions striding along 
 the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate. This 
 was further afield than my home-keeping fancy 
 loved to travel, and designed altogether for a 
 larger canvas than the tales that I affected. 
 Give me a highwayman and I was full to the 
 brim; a Jacobite would do, but the highwayman 
 was my favourite dish. I can still hear that 
 merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit 
 lane; night and the coming of day are still re- 
 lated in my mind with the doings of John Rann 
 or Jerry Abershaw; and the words "postchaise," 
 the "great North road," "ostler," and "nag" 
 still sound in my ears like poetry. One and all, 
 at least, and each with his particular fancy, we 
 read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence 
 or character or thought, but for some quality 
 of the brute incident. That quality was not 
 mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of 
 these was welcome in its place, the charm for the 
 sake of which we read depended on something 
 different from either. My elders used to read 
 novels aloud; and I can still remember four 
 different passages which I heard, before I was 
 ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure. 
 One I discovered long afterwards to be the ad- 
 mirable opening of What will he Do with It: it 
 was no wonder I was pleased with that. The 
 other three still remain unidentified. One is a 
 
46 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at 
 night, and people groping on the stairs by the 
 light that escaped from the open door of a 
 sickroom. In another, a lover left a ball, and 
 went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he 
 could watch the lighted windows and the fig- 
 ures of the dancers as they moved. This was 
 the most sentimental impression I think I had 
 yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to 
 the sentimental. In the last, a poet, who had 
 been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked 
 forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night 
 and witnessed the horrors of a wreck* Dif- 
 ferent as they are, all these early favourites have 
 a common note — they have all a touch of the 
 romantic. 
 
 Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the 
 poetry of circumstance. The pleasure that we 
 take in life is of two sorts — the active and the 
 passive. Now we are conscious of a great 
 command over our destiny; anon we are lifted 
 up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and 
 dashed we know not how into the future. Now 
 we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely 
 pleased by our surroundings. It would be 
 hard to say which of these modes of satisfac- 
 tion is the more effective, but the latter is 
 
 * Since traced by many obliging correspondents to the gal- 
 lery of Charles Kingsley. 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 4 7 
 
 surely the more constant. Conduct is three 
 parts of life, they say; but I think they put it 
 high. There is a vast deal in life and letters 
 both which is not immoral, but simply a-moral; 
 which either does not regard the human will at 
 all, or deals with it in obvious and healthy re- 
 lations; where the interest turns, not upon 
 what a man shall choose to do, but on how he 
 manages to do it; not on the passionate slips 
 and hesitations of the conscience, but on the 
 problems of the body and of the practical in- 
 telligence, in clean, open-air adventure, the 
 shock of arms or the diplomacy of life. With 
 such material as this it is impossible to build a 
 play, for the serious theatre exists solely on 
 moral grounds, and is a standing proof of the 
 dissemination of the human conscience. But it 
 is possible to build, upon this ground, the most 
 joyous of verses, and the most lively, beautiful, 
 and buoyant tales. 
 
 One thing in life calls for another; there is a 
 fitness in events and places. The sight of a 
 pleasant arbour puts it in our mind to sit 
 there. One place suggests work, another idle- 
 ness, a third early rising and long rambles in 
 the dew. The effect of night, of any flowing 
 water, of lighted cities, of the peep of day, of 
 ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the mind 
 an army of anonymous desires and pleasures. 
 
48 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Something, we feel, should happen; we know 
 not what, yet we proceed in quest of it. And 
 many of the happiest hours of life fleet by us 
 in this vain attendance on the genius of the 
 place and moment. It is thus that tracts of 
 young fir, and low rocks that reach into deep 
 soundings, particularly torture and delight me. 
 Something must have happened in such places, 
 and perhaps ages back, to members of my race; 
 and when I was a child I tried in vain to in- 
 vent appropriate games for them, as I still 
 try, just as vainly, to fit them with the proper 
 story. Some places speak distinctly. Certain 
 dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain 
 old houses demand to be haunted; certain 
 coasts are set apart for shipwreck. Other spots 
 again seem to abide their destiny, suggestive 
 and impenetrable, "miching mallecho. ,, The 
 inn at Burford Bridge, with its arbours and green 
 garden and silent, eddying river — though it is 
 known already as the place where Keats wrote 
 some of his Endymion and Nelson parted from 
 his Emma — still seems to wait the coming of 
 the appropriate legend. Within these ivied 
 walls, behind these old green shutters, some 
 further business smoulders, waiting for its hour. 
 The old Hawes Inn at the Queen's Ferry makes 
 a similar call upon my fancy. There it stands, 
 apart from the town, beside the pier, in a cli- 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 49 
 
 mate of its own, half inland, half marine — in 
 front, the ferry bubbling with the tide and the 
 guardship swinging to her anchor; behind, the 
 old garden with the trees. Americans seek it 
 already for the sake of Lovel and Oldbuck, who 
 dined there at the beginning of the Antiquary. 
 But you need not tell me — that is not all; 
 there is some story, unrecorded or not yet 
 complete, which must express the meaning of 
 that inn more fully. So it is with names and 
 faces; so it is with incidents that are idle and 
 inconclusive in themselves, and yet seem like 
 the beginning of some quaint romance, which 
 the all-careless author leaves untold. How 
 many of these romances have we not seen de- 
 termine at their birth; how many people have 
 met us with a look of meaning in their eye, and 
 sunk at once into trivial acquaintances; to how 
 many places have we not drawn near, with 
 express intimations — "here my destiny awaits 
 me" — and we have but dined there and passed 
 on ! I have lived both at the Hawes and Bur- 
 ford in a perpetual flutter, on the heels, as it 
 seemed, of some adventure that should justify 
 the place; but though the feeling had me to 
 bed at night and called me again at morning 
 in one unbroken round of pleasure and sus- 
 pense, nothing befell me in either worth re- 
 mark. The man or the hour had not yet come; 
 
50 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 but some day, I think, a boat shall put off from 
 the Queen's Ferry, fraught with a dear cargo, 
 and some frosty night a horseman, on a tragic 
 errand, rattle with his whip upon the green 
 shutters of the inn at Burford.* 
 
 Now, this is one of the natural appetites with 
 which any lively literature has to count. The 
 desire for knowledge, I had almost added the 
 desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than 
 this demand for fit and striking incident. The 
 dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell, himself a 
 story, as the feeblest of children uses invention 
 in his play; and even as the imaginative grown 
 person, joining in the game, at once enriches it 
 with many delightful circumstances, the great 
 creative writer shows us the realisation and the 
 apotheosis of the day-dreams of common men. 
 His stories may be nourished with the realities 
 of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the 
 nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the 
 ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind 
 of thing should fall out in the right kind of 
 place; the right kind of thing should follow; 
 and not only the characters talk aptly and 
 think naturally, but all the circumstances in a 
 tale answer one to another like notes in music. 
 
 * Since the above was written I have tried to launch the 
 boat with my own hands in Kidnapped. Some day, perhaps, 
 I may try a rattle at the shutters. 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 51 
 
 The threads of a story come from time to time 
 together and make a picture in the web; the 
 characters fall from time to time into some at- 
 titude to each other or to nature, which stamps 
 the story home like an illustration. Crusoe 
 recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting 
 over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the 
 great bow, Christian running with his fingers 
 in his ears, these are each culminating mo- 
 ments in the legend, and each has been printed 
 on the mind's eye forever. Other things we 
 may forget; we may forget the words, although 
 they are beautiful; we may forget the author's 
 comment, although perhaps it was ingenious 
 and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which 
 put the last mark of truth upon a story and fill 
 up, at one blow, our capacity for sympathetic 
 pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of 
 our mind that neither time nor tide can efface 
 or weaken the impression. This, then, is the 
 plastic part of literature: to embody character, 
 thought, or emotion in some act or attitude 
 that shall be remarkably striking to the mind's 
 eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to 
 do in words; the thing which, once accomplished, 
 equally delights the schoolboy and the sage, 
 and makes, in its own right, the quality of 
 epics. Compared with this, all other purposes 
 in literature, except the purely lyrical or the 
 
52 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, 
 facile of execution, and feeble in result. It is 
 one thing to write about the inn at Burford, or 
 to describe scenery with the word-painters; it 
 is quite another to seize on the heart of the 
 suggestion and make a country famous with a 
 legend. It is one thing to remark and to dis- 
 sect, with the most cutting logic, the complica- 
 tions of life, and of the human spirit; it is quite 
 another to give them body and blood in the 
 story of Ajax or of Hamlet. The first is litera- 
 ture, but the second is something besides, for 
 it is likewise art. 
 
 English people of the present day* are apt, I 
 know not why, to look somewhat down on in- 
 cident, and reserve their admiration for the 
 clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. 
 It is thought clever to write a novel with no 
 story at all, or at least with a very dull one. 
 Reduced even to the lowest terms, a certain 
 interest can be communicated by the art of 
 narrative; a sense of human kinship stirred; 
 and a kind of monotonous fitness, comparable 
 to the words and air of Sandy's Mull, pre- 
 served among the infinitesimal occurrences re- 
 corded. Some people work, in this manner, 
 with even a strong touch. Mr. Trollope's in- 
 imitable clergymen naturally arise to the mind 
 * 1882. 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 53 
 
 in this connection. But even Mr. Trollope 
 does not confine himself to chronicling small 
 beer. Mr. Crawley's collision with the Bishop's 
 wife, Mr. Melnette dallying in the deserted 
 banquet-room, are typical incidents, epically 
 conceived, fitly embodying a crisis. Or again 
 look at Thackeray. If Rawdon Crawley's blow 
 were not delivered, Vanity Fair would cease to 
 be a work of art. That scene is the chief gan- 
 glion of the tale; and the discharge of energy 
 from Rawdon's fist is the reward and consola- 
 tion of the reader. The end of Esmond is a 
 yet wider excursion from the author's custom- 
 ary fields; the scene at Castlewood is pure Du- 
 mas; the great and wily English borrower has 
 here borrowed from the great, unblushing 
 French thief; as usual, he has borrowed admira- 
 bly well, and the breaking of the sword rounds 
 off the best of all his books with a manly, mar- 
 tial note. But perhaps nothing can more 
 strongly illustrate the necessity for marking in- 
 cident than to compare the living fame of 
 Robinson Crusoe with the discredit of Clarissa 
 Harlowe. Clarissa is a book of a far more 
 startling import, worked out, on a great can- 
 vas, with inimitable courage and unflagging 
 art. It contains wit, character, passion, plot, 
 conversations full of spirit and insight, letters 
 sparkling with unstrained humanity; and if the 
 
54 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 death of the heroine be somewhat frigid and 
 artificial, the last days of the hero strike the 
 only note of what we now call Byronism, be- 
 tween the Elizabethans and Byron himself. 
 And yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, 
 with not a tenth part of the style nor a thou- 
 sandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of 
 the arcana of humanity and deprived of the 
 perennial interest of love, goes on from edition 
 to edition, ever young, while Clarissa lies upon 
 the shelves unread. A friend of mine, a Welsh 
 blacksmith, was twenty-five years old and 
 could neither read nor write, when he heard a 
 chapter of Robinson read aloud in a farm kitchen. 
 Up to that moment he had sat content, huddled 
 in his ignorance, but he left that farm another 
 man. There were day-dreams, it appeared, 
 divine day-dreams, written and printed and 
 bound, and to be bought for money and en- 
 joyed at pleasure. Down he sat that day, 
 painfully learned to read Welsh, and returned 
 to borrow the book. It had been lost, nor 
 could he find another copy but one that was in 
 English. Down he sat once more, learned Eng- 
 lish, and at length, and with entire delight, read 
 Robinson. It is like the story of a love-chase. 
 If he had heard a letter from Clarissa, would he 
 have been fired with the same chivalrous ar- 
 dour? I wonder. Yet Clarissa has every qual- 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 55 
 
 ity that can be shown in prose, one alone ex- 
 cepted — pictorial or picture-making romance. 
 While Robinson depends, for the most part and 
 with the overwhelming majority of its readers, 
 on the charm of circumstance. 
 
 In the highest achievements of the art of 
 words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral 
 and romantic interest, rise and fall together by 
 a common and organic law. Situation is ani- 
 mated with passion, passion clothed upon with 
 situation. Neither exists for itself, but each 
 inheres indissolubly with the other. This is 
 high art; and not only the highest art possible 
 in words, but the highest art of all, since it 
 combines the greatest mass and diversity of the 
 elements of truth and pleasure. Such are epics, 
 and the few prose tales that have the epic 
 weight. But as from a school of works, aping 
 the creative, incident and romance are ruth- 
 lessly discarded, so may character and drama 
 be omitted or subordinated to romance. There 
 is one book, for example, more generally loved 
 than Shakespeare, that captivates in childhood, 
 and still delights in age — I mean the Arabian 
 Nights — where you shall look in vain for 
 moral or for intellectual interest. No human 
 face or voice greets us among that wooden 
 crowd of kings and genies, sorcerers and beggar- 
 men. Adventure, on the most naked terms, 
 
56 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 furnishes forth the entertainment and is found 
 enough. Dumas approaches perhaps nearest of 
 any modern to these Arabian authors in the 
 purely material charm of some of his romances. 
 The early part of Monte Cristo, down to the 
 finding of the treasure, is a piece of perfect 
 story- telling; the man never breathed who 
 shared these moving incidents without a tremor; 
 and yet Faria is a thing of packthread and 
 D antes little more than a name. The sequel is 
 one long-drawn error, gloomy, bloody, unnatural 
 and dull; but as for these early chapters, I do 
 not believe there is another volume extant 
 where you can breathe the same unmingled at- 
 mosphere of romance. It is very thin and 
 light, to be sure, as on a high mountain; but 
 it is brisk and clear and sunny in proportion. 
 I saw the other day, with envy, an old and a 
 very clever lady setting forth on a second or 
 third voyage into Monte Cristo. Here are 
 stories which powerfully affect the reader, which 
 can be reperused at any age, and where the 
 characters are no more than puppets. The 
 bony fist of the showman visibly propels them; 
 their springs are an open secret; their faces are 
 of wood, their bellies filled with bran; and yet 
 we thrillingly partake of their adventures. And 
 the point may be illustrated still further. The 
 last interview between Lucy and Richard Feverel 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 57 
 
 is pure drama; more than that, it is the strong- 
 est scene, since Shakespeare, in the English 
 tongue. Their first meeting by the river, on 
 the other hand, is pure romance; it has nothing 
 to do with character; it might happen to any- 
 other boy and maiden, and be none the less de- 
 lightful for the change. And yet I think he 
 would be a bold man who should choose be- 
 tween these passages. Thus, in the same book, 
 we may have two scenes, each capital in its 
 order: in the one, human passion, deep calling 
 unto deep, shall utter its genuine voice; in the 
 second, according circumstances, like instru- 
 ments in tune, shall build up a trivial but de- 
 sirable incident, such as we love to prefigure for 
 ourselves; and in the end, in spite of the critics, 
 we may hesitate to give the preference to either. 
 The one may ask more genius — I do not say it 
 does; but at least the other dwells as clearly in 
 the memory. 
 
 True romantic art, again, makes a romance 
 of all things. It reaches into the highest ab- 
 straction of the ideal; it does not refuse the most 
 pedestrian realism. Robinson Crusoe is as real- 
 istic as it is romantic: both qualities are pushed 
 to an extreme, and neither suffers. Nor does 
 romance depend upon the material importance 
 of the incidents. To deal with strong and deadly 
 elements, banditti, pirates, war and murder, is 
 
58 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 to conjure with great names, and, in the event 
 of failure, to double the disgrace. The arrival 
 of Haydn and Consuelo at the Canon's villa is a 
 very trifling incident; yet we may read a dozen 
 boisterous stories from beginning to end, and not 
 receive so fresh and stirring an impression of 
 adventure. It was the scene of Crusoe at the 
 wreck, if I remember rightly, that so bewitched 
 my blacksmith. Nor is the fact surprising. 
 Every single article the castaway recovers from 
 the hulk is "a joy for ever" to the man who 
 reads of them. They are the things that should 
 be found, and the bare enumeration stirs the 
 blood. I found a glimmer of the same interest 
 the other day in a new book, The Sailor's Sweet- 
 heart, by Mr. Clark Russell. The whole busi- 
 ness of the brig Morning Star is very rightly 
 felt and spiritedly written; but the clothes, the 
 books and the money satisfy the reader's mind 
 like things to eat. We are dealing here with 
 the old cut-and-dry, legitimate interest of treas- 
 ure trove. But even treasure trove can be made 
 dull. There are few people who have not 
 groaned under the plethora of goods that fell 
 to the lot of the Swiss Family Robinson, that 
 dreary family. They found article after article, 
 creature after creature, from milk kine to pieces 
 of ordnance, a whole consignment; but no in- 
 forming taste had presided over the selection, 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 59 
 
 there was no smack or relish in the invoice; and 
 these riches left the fancy cold. The box of 
 goods in Verne's Mysterious Island is another 
 case in point: there was no gusto and no glam- 
 our about that; it might have come from a shop. 
 But the two hundred and seventy-eight Aus- 
 tralian sovereigns on board the Morning Star 
 fell upon me like a surprise that I had expected; 
 whole vistas of secondary stories, besides the 
 one in hand, radiated forth from that discov- 
 ery, as they radiate from a striking particular 
 in life; and I was made for the moment as happy 
 as a reader has the right to be. 
 
 To come at all at the nature of this quality 
 of romance, we must bear in mind the peculiar- 
 ity of our attitude to any art. No art pro- 
 duces illusion; in the theatre we never forget 
 that we are in the theatre; and while we read 
 a story, we sit wavering between two minds, 
 now merely clapping our hands at the merit of 
 the performance, now condescending to take 
 an active part in fancy with the characters. 
 This last is the triumph of romantic story- 
 telling: when the reader consciously plays at 
 being the hero, the scene is a good scene. Now 
 in character-studies the pleasure that we take 
 is critical; we watch, we approve, we smile at 
 incongruities, we are moved to sudden heats of 
 sympathy with courage, suffering or virtue. 
 
60 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 But the characters are still themselves, they are 
 not us; the more clearly they are depicted, the 
 more widely do they stand away from us, the 
 more imperiously do they thrust us back into 
 our place as a spectator. I cannot identify 
 myself with Rawdon Crawley or with Eugene 
 de Rastignac, for I have scarce a hope or fear 
 in common with them. It is not character but 
 incident that woos us out of our reserve. Some- 
 thing happens as we desire to have it happen to 
 ourselves; some situation, that we have long 
 dallied with in fancy, is realised in the story 
 with enticing and appropriate details. Then 
 we forget the characters; then we push the hero 
 aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own 
 person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, 
 and then only, do we say we have been reading 
 a romance. It is not only pleasurable things 
 that we imagine in our day-dreams; there are 
 lights in which we are willing to contemplate 
 even the idea of our own death; ways in 
 which it seems as if it would amuse us to be 
 cheated, wounded or calumniated. It is thus 
 possible to construct a story, even of tragic im- 
 port, in which every incident, detail and trick 
 of circumstance shall be welcome to the read- 
 er's thoughts. Fiction is to the grown man 
 what play is to the child; it is there that he 
 changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 61 
 
 and when the game so chimes with his fancy 
 that he can join in it with all his heart, when it 
 pleases him with every turn, when he loves to 
 recall it and dwells upon its recollection with 
 entire delight, fiction is called romance. 
 
 Walter Scott is out and away the king of the 
 romantics. The Lady of the Lake has no indis- 
 putable claim to be a poem beyond the inherent 
 fitness and desirability of the tale. It is just 
 such a story as a man would make up for him- 
 self, walking, in the best health and temper, 
 through just such scenes as it is laid in. Hence 
 it is that a charm dwells undefinable among 
 these slovenly verses, as the unseen cuckoo fills 
 the mountains with his note; hence, even after 
 we have flung the book aside, the scenery and 
 adventures remain present to the mind, a new 
 and green possession, not unworthy of that 
 beautiful name, The Lady of the Lake, or that 
 direct, romantic opening, — one of the most 
 spirited and poetical in literature, — "The stag 
 at eve had drunk his fill." The same strength 
 and the same weaknesses adorn and disfigure 
 the novels. In that ill-written, ragged book, 
 The Pirate, the figure of Cleveland — cast up by 
 the sea on the resounding foreland of Dunross- 
 ness — moving, with the blood on his hands and 
 the Spanish words on his tongue, among the 
 simple islanders — singing a serenade under the 
 
62 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 window of his Shetland mistress — is conceived 
 in the very highest manner of romantic inven- 
 tion. The words of his song, "Through groves 
 of palm," sung in such a scene and by such a 
 lover, clench, as in a nutshell, the emphatic 
 contrast upon which the tale is built. In Guy 
 Mannering, again, every incident is delightful 
 to the imagination; and the scene when Harry 
 Bertram lands at Ellangowan is a model in- 
 stance of romantic method. 
 
 " 'I remember the tune well,' he says, 'though 
 I cannot guess what should at present so strongly 
 recall it to my memory.' He took his flageolet 
 from his pocket and played a simple melody. 
 Apparently the tune awoke the corresponding 
 associations of a damsel. . . . She immediately 
 took up the song — 
 
 " 'Are these the links of Forth, she said; 
 Or are they the crooks of Dee, 
 Or the bonny woods of Warroch Head 
 That I so fain would see?' 
 
 " 'By heaven!' said Bertram, 'it is the very 
 ballad.' " 
 
 On this quotation two remarks fall to be 
 made. First, as an instance of modern feeling 
 for romance, this famous touch of the flageolet 
 and the old song is selected by Miss Braddon 
 for omission. Miss Braddon's idea of a story, 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 63 
 
 like Mrs. Todgers's idea of a wooden leg, were 
 something strange to have expounded. As a 
 matter of personal experience, Meg's appear- 
 ance to old Mr. Bertram on the road, the ruins 
 of Derncleugh, the scene of the flageolet, and 
 the Dominie's recognition of Harry, are the 
 four strong notes that continue to ring in the 
 mind after the book is laid aside. The second 
 point is still more curious. The reader will 
 observe a mark of excision in the passage as 
 quoted by me. Well, here is how it runs in the 
 original: "a damsel, who, close behind a fine 
 spring about half-way down the descent, and 
 which had once supplied the castle with water, 
 was engaged in bleaching linen." A man who 
 gave in such copy would be discharged from the 
 staff of a daily paper. Scott has forgotten to 
 prepare the reader for the presence of the 
 " damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the 
 spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, 
 face to face with his omission, instead of trying 
 back and starting fair, crams all this matter, 
 tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. 
 It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is 
 abominably bad narrative besides. 
 
 Certainly the contrast is remarkable; and it 
 is one that throws a strong light upon the sub- 
 ject of this paper. For here we have a man of 
 the finest creative instinct touching with perfect 
 
64 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 certainty and charm the romantic junctures of 
 his story; and we find him utterly careless, 
 almost, it would seem, incapable, in the tech- 
 nical matter of style, and not only frequently 
 weak, but frequently wrong in points of drama. 
 In character parts, indeed, and particularly in 
 the Scotch, he was delicate, strong and truthful; 
 but the trite, obliterated features of too many 
 of his heroes have already wearied two genera- 
 tions of readers. At times his characters will 
 speak with something far beyond propriety 
 with a true heroic note; but on the next page 
 they will be wading wearily forward with an 
 ungrammatical and undramatic rigmarole of 
 words. The man who could conceive and 
 write the character of Elspeth of the Craig- 
 burnfoot, as Scott has conceived and written 
 it, had not only splendid romantic, but splen- 
 did tragic gifts. How comes it, then, that he 
 could so often fob us off with languid, inar- 
 ticulate twaddle? 
 
 It seems to me that the explanation is to be 
 found in the very quality of his surprising 
 merits. As his books are play to the reader, 
 so were they play to him. He conjured up the 
 romantic with delight, but he had hardly 
 patience to describe it. He was a great day- 
 dreamer, a seer of fit and beautiful and humor- 
 ous visions, but hardly a great artist; hardly, 
 
A GOSSIP ON ROMANCE 65 
 
 in the manful sense, an artist at all. He pleased 
 himself, and so he pleases us. Of the pleasures 
 of his art he tasted fully; but of its toils and 
 vigils and distresses never man knew less. A 
 great romantic — an idle child. 
 
VI 
 
 THE CRAFT IN TELLING A STORY 
 
 From "A Bumble Remonstrance" 
 
 Whether a narrative be written in blank 
 verse or the Spenserian stanza, in the long 
 period of Gibbon or the chipped phrase of 
 Charles Reade, the principles of the art of 
 narrative must be equally observed. The choice 
 of a noble and swelling style in prose affects 
 the problem of narration in the same way, if 
 not to the same degree, as the choice of mea- 
 sured verse; for both imply a closer synthesis of 
 events, a higher key of dialogue, and a more 
 picked and stately strain of words. 
 
 The art of narrative, in fact, is the same, 
 whether it is applied to the selection and illus- 
 tration of a real series of events or of an imag- 
 inary series. Boswell's Life of Johnson (a work 
 of cunning and inimitable art) owes its success 
 to the same technical manoeuvres as (let us 
 say) Tom Jones: the clear conception of cer- 
 tain characters of man, the choice and presen- 
 tation of certain incidents out of a great num- 
 ber that offered, and the invention (yes inven- 
 
 66 
 
TELLING A STORY 67 
 
 tion) and preservation of a certain key in 
 dialogue. In which these things are done with 
 the more art — in which with the greater air of 
 nature — readers will differently judge. Bos- 
 welPs is, indeed, a very special case, and al- 
 most a generic; but it is not only in Boswell, it 
 is in every biography with any salt of life, it is 
 in every history where events and men, rather 
 than ideas, are presented — in Tacitus, in Car- 
 lyle, in Michelet, in Macaulay — that the novel- 
 ist will find many of his own methods most 
 conspicuously and adroitly handled. He will 
 find besides that he, who is free — who has the 
 right to invent or steal a missing incident, who 
 has the right, more precious still, of wholesale 
 omission — is frequently defeated, and, with all 
 his advantages, leaves a less strong impression 
 of reality and passion. 
 
 What, then, is the object, what the method, 
 of an art, and what the source of its power? 
 The whole secret is that no art does " compete 
 with life." Man's one method, whether he 
 reasons or creates, is to half-shut his eyes 
 against the dazzle and confusion of reality. 
 The arts, like arithmetic and geometry, turn 
 away their eyes from the gross, coloured and 
 mobile nature at our feet, and regard instead a 
 certain figmentary abstraction. Geometry will 
 tell us of a circle, a thing never seen in nature; 
 
68 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 asked about a green circle or an iron circle, it 
 lays its hand upon its mouth. So with the arts. 
 Painting, ruefully comparing sunshine and flake- 
 white, gives up truth of colour, as it had al- 
 ready given up relief and movement; and in- 
 stead of vying with nature, arranges a scheme 
 of harmonious tints. Literature, above all in 
 its most typical mood, the mood of narrative, 
 similarly flees the direct challenge and pursues 
 instead an independent and creative aim. So 
 far as it imitates at all, it imitates not life but 
 speech: not the facts of human destiny, but the 
 emphasis and the suppressions with which the 
 human actor tells of them. The real art that 
 dealt with life directly was that of the first men 
 who told their stories round the savage camp- 
 fire. Our art is occupied, and bound to be oc- 
 cupied, not so much in making stories true as 
 in making them typical; not so much in captur- 
 ing the lineaments of each fact, as in marshalling 
 all of them towards a common end. For the 
 welter of impressions, all forcible but all dis- 
 creet, which life presents, it substitutes a cer- 
 tain artificial series of impressions, all indeed 
 most feebly represented, but all aiming at the 
 same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all 
 chiming together like consonant notes in music 
 or like the graduated tints in a good picture. 
 From all its chapters, from all its pages, from 
 
TELLING A STORY 69 
 
 all its sentences, the well-written novel echoes 
 and re-echoes its one creative and controlling 
 thought; to this must every incident and char- 
 acter contribute; the style must have been 
 pitched in unison with this; and if there is any- 
 where a word that looks another way, the book 
 would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost 
 said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, in- 
 finite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work 
 of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-con- 
 tained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life 
 imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate 
 thunder; art catches the ear, among the far 
 louder noises of experience, like an air artificially 
 made by a discreet musician. A proposition of 
 geometry does not compete with life; and a 
 proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous 
 parallel for a work of art. Both are reasonable, 
 both untrue to the crude fact; both inhere in 
 nature, neither represents it. The novel, 
 which is a work of art, exists, not by its re- 
 semblances to life, which are forced and ma- 
 terial, as a shoe must still consist of leather, 
 but by its immeasurable difference from life, 
 which is designed and significant, and is both 
 the method and the meaning of the work. 
 
 The life of man is not the subject of novels, 
 but the inexhaustible magazine from which 
 subjects are to be selected; the name of these 
 
70 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 is legion; and with each new subject the true 
 artist will vary his method and change the 
 point of attack. That which was in one case 
 an excellence, will become a defect in another; 
 what was the making of one book, will in the 
 next be impertinent or dull. First each novel, 
 and then each class of novels, exists by and for 
 itself. I will take, for instance, three main 
 classes, which are fairly distinct: first, the novel 
 of adventure, which appeals to certain almost 
 sensual and quite illogical tendencies in man; 
 second, the novel of character, which appeals 
 to our intellectual appreciation of man's foibles 
 and mingled and inconstant motives; and third, 
 the dramatic novel, which deals with the same 
 stuff as the serious theatre, and appeals to our 
 emotional nature and moral judgment. 
 
 And first for the novel of adventure. The 
 luxury, to most of us, is to lay by our judg- 
 ment, to be submerged by the tale as by a bil- 
 low, and only to awake, and begin to distin- 
 guish and find fault, when the piece is over and 
 the volume laid aside. There never was a 
 child but has hunted gold, and been a pirate, 
 and a military commander, and a bandit of the 
 mountains; but has fought, and suffered ship- 
 wreck and prison, and imbrued its little hands 
 in gore, and gallantly retrieved the lost battle, 
 and triumphantly protected innocence and 
 
TELLING A STORY 71 
 
 beauty. Desire is a wonderful telescope, and 
 Pisgah the best observatory. Now, while it is 
 true that the author of the work in question 
 has never, in the fleshly sense, gone questing 
 after gold, it is probable that he has ardently 
 desired and fondly imagined the details of such 
 a life in youthful day-dreams; and the author, 
 counting upon that, and well aware (cunning 
 and low-minded man!) that this class of in- 
 terest, having been frequently treated, finds a 
 readily accessible and beaten road to the sym- 
 pathies of the reader, addressed himself through- 
 out to the building up and circumstantiation of 
 this boyish dream. Character to the boy is a 
 sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair 
 of wide trousers and a liberal complement of 
 pistols. The author, for the sake of circum- 
 stantiation and because he was himself more or 
 less grown up, admitted character, within cer- 
 tain limits, into his design; but only within cer- 
 tain limits. Had the same puppets figured in a 
 scheme of another sort, they had been drawn 
 to very different purpose; for in this elementary 
 novel of adventure, the characters need to be 
 presented with but one class of qualities — the 
 warlike and formidable. So as they appear 
 insidious in deceit and fatal in the combat, they 
 have served their end. Danger is the matter 
 with which this class of novel deals; fear, the 
 
72 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 passion with which it idly trifles; and the char- 
 acters are portrayed only so far as they realise 
 the sense of danger and provoke the sympathy 
 of fear. To add more traits, to be too clever, 
 to start the hare of moral or intellectual inter- 
 est while we are running the fox of material 
 interest, is not to enrich but to stultify your 
 tale. The stupid reader will only be offended, 
 and the clever reader lose the scent. 
 
 The novel of character has this difference 
 from all others: that it requires no coherency 
 of plot, and for this reason, as in the case of 
 Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of 
 adventure. It turns on the humours of the 
 persons represented; these are, to be sure, em- 
 bodied in incidents, but the incidents them- 
 selves, being tributary, need not march in a 
 progression; and the characters may be stati- 
 cally shown. As they enter, so they may go 
 out; they must be consistent, but they need not 
 grow. Here Mr. James * will recognise the note 
 of much of his own work: he treats, for the 
 most part, the statics of character, studying it 
 at rest or only gently moved; and, with his 
 usual delicate and just artistic instinct, he 
 avoids those stronger passions which would de- 
 form the attitudes he loves to study, and change 
 his sitters from the humourists of ordinary life 
 * Henry James, the novelist. 
 
TELLING A STORY 73 
 
 to the brute forces and bare types of more 
 emotional moments. In his recent Author of 
 BeltraffiOy so just in conception, so nimble and 
 neat in workmanship, strong passion is indeed 
 employed; but observe that it is not displayed. 
 Even in the heroine the working of the passion 
 is suppressed; and the great struggle, the true 
 tragedy, the scene-drfaire, passes unseen be- 
 hind the panels of a locked door. The delec- 
 table invention of the young visitor is intro- 
 duced, consciously or not, to this end: that Mr. 
 James, true to his method, might avoid the 
 scene of passion. I trust no reader will suppose 
 me guilty of undervaluing this little master- 
 piece. I mean merely that it belongs to one 
 marked class of novel, and that it would have 
 been very differently conceived and treated 
 had it belonged to that other marked class, of 
 which I now proceed to speak. 
 
 I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel 
 by that name, because it enables me to point 
 out by the way a strange and peculiarly Eng- 
 lish misconception. It is sometimes supposed 
 that the drama consists of incident. It con- 
 sists of passion, which gives the actor his op- 
 portunity; and that passion must progressively 
 increase, or the actor, as the piece proceeded, 
 would be unable to carry the audience from a 
 lower to a higher pitch of interest and emotion. 
 
74 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 A good serious play must therefore be founded 
 on one of the passionate cruces of life, where 
 duty and inclination come nobly to the grapple; 
 and the same is true of what I call, for that 
 reason, the dramatic novel. I will instance a 
 few worthy specimens, all of our own day and 
 language: Meredith's Rhoda Fleming, that won- 
 derful and painful book, long out of print,* 
 and hunted for at book-stalls like an Aldine; 
 Hardy's Pair of Blue Eyes; and two of Charles 
 Reade's, Griffith Gaunt and The Double Marriage, 
 originally called White Lies, and founded (by 
 an accident quaintly favourable to my nomen- 
 clature) on a play by Maquet, the partner of 
 the great Dumas. In this kind of novel the 
 closed door of The Author of Beltrqffio must be 
 broken open; passion must appear upon the 
 scene and utter its last word; passion is the 
 be-all and the end-all, the plot and the solu- 
 tion, the protagonist and the deus ex machina 
 in one. The characters may come anyhow 
 upon the stage: we do not care; the point is, 
 that, before they leave it, they shall become 
 transfigured and raised out of themselves by 
 passion. It may be part of the design to draw 
 them with detail; to depict a full-length char- 
 acter, and then behold it melt and change in 
 the furnace of emotion. But there is no obliga- 
 * Now no longer so, thank heaven ! 
 
TELLING A STORY 75 
 
 tion of the sort; nice portraiture is not required; 
 and we are content to accept mere abstract 
 types, so they be strongly and sincerely moved. 
 A novel of this class may be even great, and 
 yet contain no individual figure; it may be 
 great, because it displays the workings of the 
 perturbed heart and the impersonal utterance 
 of passion; and with an artist of the second 
 class it is, indeed, even more likely to be great, 
 when the issue has thus been narrowed and the 
 whole force of the writer's mind directed to 
 passion alone. Cleverness again, which has its 
 fair field in the novel of character, is debarred 
 all entry upon this more solemn theatre. A 
 far-fetched motive, an ingenious evasion of the 
 issue, a witty instead of a passionate turn, 
 offend us like an insincerity. All should be 
 plain, all straightforward to the end. Hence 
 it is that, in Rhoda Fleming, Mrs. Lovel raises 
 such resentment in the reader; her motives are 
 too flimsy, her ways are too equivocal, for the 
 weight and strength of her surroundings. 
 Hence the hot indignation of the reader when 
 Balzac, after having begun the Duchesse de 
 Langeais in terms of strong if somewhat swollen 
 passion, cuts the knot by the derangement of 
 the hero's clock. Such personages and inci- 
 dents belong to the novel of character; they 
 are out of place in the high society of the pas- 
 
76 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 sions; when the passions are introduced in art 
 at their full height, we look to see them, not 
 baffled and impotently striving, as in life, but 
 towering above circumstance and acting sub- 
 stitutes for fate. 
 
 But the point is not merely to amuse the 
 public, but to offer helpful advice to the young 
 writer. And the young writer will not so much 
 be helped by genial pictures of what an art may 
 aspire to at its highest, as by a true idea of 
 what it must be on the lowest terms. The 
 best that we can say to him is this: Let him 
 choose a motive, whether of character or pas- 
 sion; carefully construct his plot so that every 
 incident is an illustration of the motive, and 
 every property employed shall bear to it a 
 near relation of congruity or contrast; avoid a 
 sub-plot, unless, as sometimes in Shakespeare, 
 the sub-plot be a reversion or complement of 
 the main intrigue; suffer not his style to flag 
 below the level of the argument; pitch the key 
 of conversation, not with any thought of how 
 men talk in parlours, but with a single eye to 
 the degree of passion he may be called on to 
 express; and allow neither himself in the nar- 
 rative nor any character in the course of the 
 dialogue, to utter one sentence that is not part 
 and parcel of the business of the story or the 
 discussion of the problem involved. Let him 
 
TELLING A STORY 77 
 
 not regret if this shortens his book; it will be 
 better so; for to add irrelevant matter is not to 
 lengthen but to bury. Let him not mind if he 
 miss a thousand qualities, so that he keeps un- 
 flaggingly in pursuit of the one he has chosen. 
 Let him not care particularly if he miss the 
 tone of conversation, the pungent material de- 
 tail of the day's manners, the reproduction of 
 the atmosphere and the environment. These 
 elements are not essential: a novel may be 
 excellent, and yet have none of them; a passion 
 or a character is so much the better depicted as 
 it rises clearer from material circumstance. In 
 this age of the particular, let him remember the 
 ages of the abstract, the great books of the past, 
 the brave men that lived before Shakespeare 
 and before Balzac. And as the root of the 
 whole matter, let him bear in mind that his 
 novel is not a transcript of life, to be judged by 
 its exactitude; but a simplification of some side 
 or point of life, to stand or fall by its significant 
 simplicity. For although, in great men, work- 
 ing upon great motives, what we observe and 
 admire is often their complexity, yet under- 
 neath appearances the truth remains unchanged: 
 that simplification was their method, and that 
 simplicity is their excellence. 
 
VII 
 MISCELLANEOUS OBSERVATIONS 
 
 I 
 Notes for the Student of Any Art 
 
 i. Keep an intelligent eye upon all the others. 
 It is only by doing so that you come to see what 
 Art is: Art is the end common to them all, it 
 is none of the points by which they differ. 
 
 2. In this age beware of realism. 
 
 3. In your own art, bow your head over tech- 
 nique. Think of technique when you rise and 
 when you go to bed. Forget purposes in the 
 meanwhile; get to love technical processes; to 
 glory in technical successes; get to see the world 
 entirely through technical spectacles, to see it 
 entirely in terms of what you can do. Then 
 when you have anything to say, the language 
 will be apt and copious. 
 
 4. See the good in other people's work; it 
 will never be yours. See the bad in your own, 
 and don't cry about it; it will be there always. 
 Try to use your faults; at any rate use your 
 knowledge of them, and don't run your head 
 against stone walls. Art is not like theology; 
 
 78 
 
OBSERVATIONS 79 
 
 nothing is forced. You have not to represent 
 the world. You have to represent only what 
 you can represent with pleasure and effect, 
 and the only way to find out what that is is 
 by technical exercise. 
 
 — Letter to Trevor Haddon. 
 
 Craftsmanship in Literature 
 
 Seriously, from the dearth of information 
 and thoughtful interest in the art of literature, 
 those who try to practise it with any deliberate 
 purpose run the risk of finding no fit audience. 
 People suppose it is "the stuff" that interests 
 them; they think, for instance, that the 
 prodigious fine thoughts and sentiments in 
 Shakespeare impress by their own weight, not 
 understanding that the unpolished diamond is 
 but a stone. They think that striking situa- 
 tions, or good dialogue, are got by studying 
 life; they will not rise to understand that they 
 are prepared by deliberate artifice and set off 
 by painful suppressions. 
 
 — Letter to Henry James. 
 
 Tms purely artistic society is excellent for 
 the young artist. The lads are mostly fools; 
 they hold the latest orthodoxy in its crudeness; 
 
So LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 they are at that stage of education, for the most 
 part, when a man is too much occupied with 
 style to be aware of the necessity for any mat- 
 ter; and this, above all for the Englishman, is 
 excellent. To work grossly at the trade, to 
 forget sentiment, to think of his material and 
 nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king's 
 highway of progress. Here, in England, too 
 many painters and writers dwell dispersed, un- 
 shielded, among the intelligent bourgeois. 
 These, when they are not merely indifferent, 
 prate to him about the lofty aims and moral 
 influence of art. And this is the lad's ruin. 
 For art is, first of all and last of all, a trade. 
 The love of words and not a desire to publish 
 new discoveries, the love of form and not a 
 novel reading of historical events, mark the 
 vocation of the writer and the painter. The 
 arabesque, properly speaking, and even in 
 literature, is the first fancy of the artist; he 
 first plays with his material as a child plays 
 with a kaleidoscope; and he is already in a 
 second stage when he begins to use his pretty 
 counters for the end of representation. In 
 that, he must pause long and toil faithfully; 
 that is his apprenticeship; and it is only the 
 few who will really grow beyond it, and go for- 
 ward, fully equipped, to do the business of 
 real art — to give life to abstractions and sig- 
 
OBSERVATIONS 81 
 
 nificance and charm to facts. In the mean- 
 while, let him dwell much among his fellow- 
 craftsmen. They alone can take a serious in- 
 terest in the childish tasks and pitiful successes 
 of these years. They alone can behold with 
 equanimity this fingering of the dumb key- 
 board, this polishing of empty sentences, this 
 dull and literal painting of dull and insignificant 
 subjects. Outsiders will spur him on. They 
 will say, "Why do you not write a great book? 
 paint a great picture?" If his guardian angel 
 fail him, they may even persuade him to the 
 attempt, and, ten to one, his hand is coarsened 
 and his style falsified for life. 
 
 And this brings me to a warning. The life of 
 the apprentice to any art is both unstrained 
 and pleasing; it is strewn with small successes 
 in the midst of a career of failure, patiently 
 supported; the heaviest scholar is conscious of 
 a certain progress; and if he come not appreci- 
 ably nearer to the art of Shakespeare, grows 
 letter-perfect in the domain of A-B, ab. But 
 the time comes when a man should cease 
 prelusory gymnastic, stand up, put a violence 
 upon his will, and for better or worse, begin the 
 business of creation. This evil day there is a 
 tendency continually to postpone. 
 
 — Fontainebleau. 
 
82 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 in 
 
 Importance of Style in Writing 
 
 It was by his style, and not by his matter, 
 that Burns affected Wordsworth and the 
 world. There is, indeed, only one merit worth 
 considering in a man of letters — that he should 
 write well; and only one damning fault — that 
 he should write ill. We are little the better for 
 the reflections of the sailor's parrot in the 
 story. And so, if Burns helped to change the 
 course of literary history, it was by his frank, 
 direct, and masterly utterance, and not by his 
 homely choice of subjects. That was imposed 
 upon him, not chosen upon a principle. He 
 wrote from his own experience, because it was 
 his nature so to do, and the tradition of the 
 school from which he proceeded was fortunately 
 not opposed to homely subjects. But to these 
 homely subjects he communicated the rich 
 commentary of his nature; they were all steeped 
 in Burns; and they interest us not in them- 
 selves, but because they have been passed 
 through the spirit of so genuine and vigorous a 
 man. Such is the stamp of living literature; 
 and there was never any more alive than that 
 of Burns. 
 
 — Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 
 
OBSERVATIONS 83 
 
 IV 
 
 Danger of Realism 
 
 Beware of realism; it is the devil; 't is one 
 of the means of art, and now they make it the 
 end ! And such is the farce of the age in which 
 a man lives, that we all, even those of us who 
 most detest it, sin by realism. 
 
 — Letter to Trevor Haddon. 
 
 V 
 
 Difficulty for Beginners 
 
 Anybody can write a short story — a bad one, 
 I mean — who has industry and paper and time 
 enough; but not everyone may hope to write 
 even a bad novel. It is the length that kills. 
 The accepted novelist may take his novel up 
 and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, 
 and write not any more than he makes haste to 
 blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature 
 has certain rights; instinct — the instinct of 
 self-preservation — forbids that any man (cheered 
 and supported by the consciousness of no previ- 
 ous victory) should endure the miseries of un- 
 successful literary toil beyond a period to be 
 measured in weeks. There must be something 
 for hope to feed upon. The beginner must have 
 
84 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 a slant of wind, a lucky vein must be running, 
 he must be in one of those hours when the words 
 come and the phrases balance of themselves — 
 even to begin. And having begun, what a dread 
 looking forward is that until the book shall be 
 accomplished! For so long a time the slant is 
 to continue unchanged, the vein to keep run- 
 ning; for so long a time you must hold at com- 
 mand the same quality of style; for so long a 
 time your puppets are to be always vital, al- 
 ways consistent, always vigorous. I remember 
 I used to look, in those days, upon every three- 
 volume novel with a sort of veneration, as a 
 feat — not possibly of literature — but at least of 
 physical and moral endurance and the courage 
 of Ajax. 
 
 — My First Book — "Treasure Island" 
 
 VI 
 
 Writing Without Effort 
 
 When truth flows from a man, fittingly 
 clothed in style and without conscious effort, it 
 is because the effort has been made and the 
 work practically completed before he sat down 
 to write. It is only out of fulness of thinking 
 that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit; 
 and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at 
 his desk, it was because he had been vigor- 
 
OBSERVATIONS 85 
 
 ously active during his walk. For neither clear- 
 ness, compression, nor beauty of language, 
 come to any living creature till after a busy 
 and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject 
 on hand. Easy writers are those who, like 
 Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with 
 a less degree of perfection than is legitimately 
 within the compass of their powers. We hear 
 of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but 
 in face of the evidence of the style itself and of 
 the various editions of Hamlet, this merely 
 proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were 
 unacquainted with the common enough phenom- 
 enon called a fair copy. He who would recast 
 a tragedy already given to the world must fre- 
 quently and earnestly have revised details in 
 the study. Thoreau himself, and in spite of 
 his protestations, is an instance of even ex- 
 treme research in one direction; and his effort 
 after heroic utterance is proved not only by the 
 occasional finish, but by the determined exag- 
 geration of his style. "I trust you realize what 
 an exaggerator I am — that I lay myself out to 
 exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at 
 the explanation: "Who that has heard a strain 
 of music feared lest he should speak extrava- 
 gantly any more forever ? " And yet once more, 
 in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with his 
 meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, 
 
86 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 was ever expressed but with this sort of em- 
 phasis, that for the time there seemed to be no 
 other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative 
 and a parabolical writer, not because he loved 
 the literature of the East, but from a desire that 
 people should understand and realise what he 
 was writing. He was near the truth upon the 
 general question; but in his own particular 
 method, it appears to me, he wandered. Litera- 
 ture is not less a conventional art than painting 
 or sculpture; and it is the least striking, as it 
 is the most comprehensive of the three. To 
 hear a strain of music, to see a beautiful woman, 
 a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to 
 make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in 
 language. Now, to gain that emphasis which 
 seems denied to us by the very nature of the 
 medium, the proper method of literature is by 
 selection, which is a kind of negative exaggera- 
 tion. It is the right of the literary artist, as 
 Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave 
 out whatever does not suit his purpose. Thus 
 we extract the pure gold; and thus the well- 
 written story of a noble life becomes, by its 
 very omissions, more thrilling to the reader. 
 But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to 
 exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner clas- 
 sical tradition, and to put the reader on his 
 guard. And when you write the whole for the 
 half, you do not express your thought more 
 
OBSERVATIONS 87 
 
 forcibly, but only express a different thought 
 which is not yours. 
 
 — Henry David Thoreau. 
 
 VII 
 
 Subjects for Poems 
 
 The contemporaries of Burns were surprised 
 that he should visit so many celebrated moun- 
 tains and waterfalls, and not seize the oppor- 
 tunity to make a poem. Indeed, it is not for 
 those who have a true command of the art of 
 words, but for peddling, professional amateurs, 
 that these pointed occasions are most useful 
 and inspiring. As those who speak French im- 
 perfectly are glad to dwell on any topic they 
 may have talked upon or heard others talk 
 upon before, because they know appropriate 
 words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse 
 rejoices to behold a waterfall because he has 
 learned the sentiment and knows appropriate 
 words for it in poetry. 
 
 — Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Stevenson's Method of Writing 
 
 I used to write as slow as judgment; now I 
 write rather fast; but I am still "a slow study," 
 and sit a long while silent on my eggs. Uncon- 
 
88 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 scious thought, there is the only method: 
 macerate your subject, let it boil slow, then 
 take the lid off and look in — and there your 
 stuff is, good or bad. 
 
 — Letter to Craibe Angus. 
 
 IX 
 
 Holding the Reader's Attention 
 
 Familiarity has a cunning disenchantment; 
 in a day or two she can steal all beauty from the 
 mountain-tops; and the most startling words 
 begin to fall dead upon the ear after several rep- 
 etitions. If you see a thing too often, you no 
 longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you 
 no longer hear it. Our attention requires to 
 be surprised; and to carry a fort by assault, or 
 to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of 
 mankind, are feats of about an equal difficulty 
 and must be tried by not dissimilar means. 
 
 — Lay Morals. 
 X 
 
 Words 
 
 Language is but a poor bull's-eye lantern 
 wherewith to show off the vast cathedral of 
 the world; and yet a particular thing once said 
 in words is so definite and memorable, that it 
 makes us forget the absence of the many which 
 remain unexpressed; like a bright window in a 
 
OBSERVATIONS 89 
 
 distant view, which dazzles and confuses our 
 sight of its surroundings. There are not words 
 enough in all Shakespeare to express the merest 
 fraction of a man's experience in an hour. The 
 speed of the eyesight and the hearing, and the 
 continual industry of the mind, produce, in 
 ten minutes, what it would require a laborious 
 volume to shadow forth by comparisons and 
 roundabout approaches. If verbal logic were 
 sufficient, life would be as plain sailing as a 
 piece of Euclid. But, as a matter of fact, we 
 make a travesty of the simplest process of 
 thought when we put it into words; for the 
 words are all coloured and forsworn, apply in- 
 accurately, and bring with them, from former 
 uses, ideas of praise and blame that have noth- 
 ing to do with the question in hand. So we 
 must always see to it nearly, that we judge by 
 the realities of life and not by the partial terms 
 that represent them in man's speech; and at 
 times of choice, we must leave words upon one 
 side, and act upon those brute convictions, 
 unexpressed and perhaps inexpressible, which 
 cannot be flourished in an argument, but which 
 are truly the sum and fruit of our experience. 
 Words are for communication, not for judgment. 
 This is what every thoughtful man knows for 
 himself, for only fools and silly schoolmasters 
 push definitions over far into the domain of 
 conduct; and the majority of women, not learned 
 
9 o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 in these scholastic refinements, live all-of-a-piece 
 and unconsciously, as a tree grows, without car- 
 ing to put a name upon their acts or motives. 
 
 — Walt Whitman. 
 
 XI 
 
 Effectiveness of Profuse Description 
 
 [Speaking of "Notre Dame de Paris "] 
 Old Paris lives for us with newness of life: 
 we have ever before our eyes the city cut into 
 three by the two arms of the river, the boat- 
 shaped island "moored" by five bridges to 
 the different shores, and the two unequal 
 towns on either hand. We forget all that 
 enumeration of palaces and churches and con- 
 vents which occupies so many pages of admi- 
 rable description, and the thoughtless reader 
 might be inclined to conclude from this, that 
 they were pages thrown away; but this is not 
 so: we forget, indeed, the details, as we forget 
 or do not see the different layers of paint on 
 a completed picture; but the thing desired has 
 been accomplished, and we carry away with us 
 a sense of the "Gothic profile" of the city, of 
 the "surprising forest of pinnacles and towers 
 and belfries," and we know not what of rich 
 and intricate and quaint. 
 
 — Victor Hugo's Romances. 
 
OBSERVATIONS 91 
 
 XII 
 
 Use of Recollections in Writing 
 
 When we are looking at a landscape we think 
 ourselves pleased; but it is only when it comes 
 back upon us by the fire o' nights that we can 
 disentangle the main charm from the thick of 
 particulars. It is just so with what is lately 
 past. It is too much loaded with detail to be 
 distirct; and the canvas is too large for the eye 
 to encompass. But this is no more the case 
 when our recollections have been strained long 
 enough through the hour-glass of time; when 
 they have been the burthen of so much thought, 
 the charm and comfort of so many a vigil. 
 All that is worthless has been sieved and sifted 
 out of them. Nothing remains but the bright- 
 est lights and the darkest shadows. When we 
 see a mountain country near at hand, the spurs 
 and haunches crowd up in eager rivalry, and 
 the whole range seems to have shrugged its 
 shoulders to its ears, till we cannot tell the 
 higher from the lower: but when we are far 
 off, these lesser prominences are melted back 
 into the bosom of the rest, or have set behind 
 the round horizon of the plain, and the highest 
 peaks stand forth in lone and sovereign dig- 
 nity against the sky. It is just the same with 
 
92 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 our recollections. We require to draw back 
 and shade our eyes before the picture dawns 
 upon us in full breadth and outline. Late 
 years are still in limbo to us; but the more dis- 
 tant past is all that we possess in life, the corn 
 already harvested and stored for ever in the 
 grange of memory. The doings of to-day at 
 some future time will gain the required offing; 
 I shall learn to love the things of my adoles- 
 cence, as Hazlitt loved them, and as I love al- 
 ready the recollections of my childhood. They 
 will gather interest with every year. They will 
 ripen in forgotten corners of my memory; and 
 some day I shall waken and find them vested 
 with new glory and new pleasantness. 
 
 — A Retrospect. 
 
 Very much as a painter half closes his eyes 
 so that some salient unity may disengage itself 
 from among the crowd of details, and what he 
 sees may thus form itself into a whole; very 
 much on the same principle, I may say, I al- 
 low a considerable lapse of time to intervene 
 between any of my little journeyings and the 
 attempt to chronicle them. I cannot describe 
 a thing that is before me at the moment, or 
 that has been before me only a very little while 
 before; I must allow my recollections to get 
 thoroughly strained free from all chaff till 
 
OBSERVATIONS 93 
 
 nothing be except the pure gold; allow my mem- 
 ory to choose out what is truly memorable by a 
 process of natural selection; and I piously be- 
 lieve that in this way I ensure the Survival of 
 the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or 
 if I am obliged to write letters during the course 
 of my little excursion, I so interfere with the 
 process that I can never again find out what is 
 worthy of being preserved, or what should be 
 given in full length, what in torso, or what 
 merely in profile. This process of incubation 
 may be unreasonably prolonged. 
 
 — Cockermouth and Keswick. 
 
 Those who try to be artists use, time after 
 time, the matter of their recollections, setting 
 and resetting little coloured memories of men 
 and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some es- 
 pecial friend in the attire of a buccaneer, and 
 decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to 
 be done, on the playground of their youth. 
 But the memories are a fairy gift which can- 
 not be worn out in using. After a dozen ser- 
 vices in various tales, the little sunbright pic- 
 tures of the past still shine in the mind's eye 
 with not a lineament defaced, not a tint im- 
 paired. 
 
 — Memoirs of an Islet. 
 
94 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 XIII 
 
 Building a Character for a Story 
 
 And then I had an idea for John Silver from 
 which I promised myself funds of entertainment: 
 to take an admired friend of mine (whom the 
 reader very likely knows and admires as much 
 as I do), to deprive him of all his finer quali- 
 ties and higher graces of temperament, to leave 
 him with nothing but his strength, his courage, 
 his quickness, and his magnificent geniality, 
 and to try to express these in terms of the cul- 
 ture of a raw tarpaulin. Such psychical sur- 
 gery is, I think, a common way of "making char- 
 acter"; perhaps it is, indeed, the only way. 
 We can put in the quaint figure that spoke a 
 hundred words with us yesterday by the way- 
 side; but do we know him? Our friend, with 
 his infinite variety and flexibility, we know — 
 but can we put him in ? Upon the first we must 
 engraft secondary and imaginary qualities, 
 possibly all wrong; from the second, knife in 
 hand, we must cut away and deduct the need- 
 less arborescence of his nature; but the trunk 
 and the few branches that remain we may at 
 least be fairly sure of. 
 
 — My First Book — "Treasure Island" 
 
OBSERVATIONS 95 
 
 XIV 
 
 How We Understand Other People 
 
 We can only know others by ourselves. The 
 artistic temperament (a plague on the expres- 
 sion !) does not make us different from our fel- 
 low-men, or it would make us incapable of 
 writing novels; and the average man (a murrain 
 on the word!) is just like you and me, or he 
 would not be average. It was Whitman who 
 stamped a kind of Birmingham sacredness upon 
 the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very 
 well, and showed very nobly, that the average 
 man was full of joys and full of a poetry of his 
 own. And this harping on life's dulness and 
 man's meanness is a loud profession of incom- 
 petence; it is one of two things: the cry of the 
 blind eye, / cannot see, or the complaint of the 
 dumb tongue, / cannot utter. To draw a life 
 without delights is to prove I have not realised 
 it. To picture a man without some sort of 
 poetry — well, it goes near to prove my case, for 
 it shows an author may have little enough. 
 — The Lantern Bearers. 
 
q6 learning to write 
 
 XV 
 
 Writing Character Studies 
 
 To write with authority about another man, 
 we must have fellow-feeling and some common 
 ground of experience with our subject. We 
 may praise or blame according as we find him 
 related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; 
 but it is only in virtue of some relationship that 
 we can be his judges, even to condemn. Feel- 
 ings which we share and understand enter for 
 us into the tissue of the man's character; those 
 to which we are strangers in our own experience 
 we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, 
 inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; 
 we conceive them with repugnance, explain 
 them with difficulty, and raise our hands to 
 heaven in wonder when we find them in con- 
 junction with talents that we respect or virtues 
 that we admire. David, king of Israel, would 
 pass a sounder judgment on a man than either 
 Nathaniel or David Hume. To take a man's 
 work piecemeal, except with the design of ele- 
 gant extracts, is the way to avoid, and not to 
 perform, the critic's duty. If you are so sensibly 
 pained by the misconduct of your subject, and 
 so paternally delighted with his virtues, you 
 
OBSERVATIONS 97 
 
 will always be an excellent gentleman, but a 
 somewhat questionable biographer. 
 
 — Some Aspects of Robert Burns. 
 
 The writer of short studies, having to con- 
 dense in a few pages the events of a whole life- 
 time, and the effect on his own mind of many 
 various volumes, is bound, above all things, to 
 make that condensation logical and striking. 
 For the only justification of his writing at all is 
 that he shall present a brief, reasoned, and 
 memorable view. By the necessity of the case, 
 all the more neutral circumstances are omitted 
 from his narrative; and that of itself, by the 
 negative exaggeration of which I have spoken 
 in the text, lends to the matter in hand a cer- 
 tain false and specious glitter. By the neces- 
 sity of the case, again, he is forced to view his 
 subject throughout in a particular illumination, 
 like a studio artifice. Like Hales with Pepys, 
 he must nearly break his sitter's neck to get 
 the proper shadows on the portrait. It is from 
 one side only that he has time to represent his 
 subject. The side selected will either be the 
 one most striking to himself, or the one most 
 obscured by controversy; and in both cases 
 that will be the one most liable to strained and 
 sophisticated reading. In a biography, this and 
 
98 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 that is displayed; the hero is seen at home, play- 
 ing the flute; the different tendencies of his 
 work come, one after another, into notice; and 
 thus something like a true, general impression 
 of the subject may at last be struck. But in 
 the short study, the writer, having seized his 
 " point of view," must keep his eye steadily to 
 that. He seeks, perhaps, rather to differentiate 
 than truly to characterise. The proportions of 
 the sitter must be sacrificed to the proportions 
 of the portrait; the lights are heightened, the 
 shadows overcharged; the chosen expression, 
 continually forced, may degenerate at length 
 into a grimace; and we have at best something 
 of a caricature, at worst a calumny. Hence, if 
 they be readable at all, and hang together by 
 their own ends, the peculiar convincing force of 
 these brief representations. They take so lit- 
 tle a while to read, and yet in that little while 
 the subject is so repeatedly introduced in the 
 same light and with the same expression, that, 
 by sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed 
 upon the reader. The two English masters of 
 the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exem- 
 plify its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much 
 more depth and knowledge of the heart, his 
 portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with 
 so much more poetic comprehension, and he, 
 
OBSERVATIONS 99 
 
 like his favourite Ram Dass, had a fire in his 
 belly so much more hotly burning than the 
 patent reading lamp by which Macaulay studied, 
 that it seems at first sight hardly fair to bracket 
 them together. But the "point of view" was 
 imposed by Carlyle on the men he judged of in 
 his writings with an austerity not only cruel but 
 almost stupid. They are too often broken out- 
 right on the Procrustean bed; they are probably 
 always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of 
 Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to 
 appreciate the moral bias of Carlyle. So with 
 all writers who insist on forcing some significance 
 from all that comes before them; and the writer 
 of short studies is bound, by the necessity of the 
 case, to write entirely in that spirit. What he 
 cannot vivify he should omit. . . . 
 
 Short studies are, or should be, things woven 
 like a carpet, from which it is impossible to de- 
 tach a strand. What is perverted has its place 
 there forever, as a part of the technical means 
 by which what is right has been presented. It 
 is only possible to write another study, and 
 then, with a new "point of view," would follow 
 new perversions and perhaps a fresh caricature. 
 This is a case of a second difficulty which lies 
 continually before the writer of critical studies: 
 that he has to mediate between the author whom 
 
ioo LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 he loves and the public who are certainly in- 
 different and frequently averse. Where you see 
 no good, silence is best. 
 
 — Preface "Familiar Studies" 
 
 XVI 
 
 A Trick of Heroines 
 
 Readers cannot fail to have remarked that 
 what an author tells us of the beauty or the 
 charm of his creatures goes for nought; that we 
 know instantly better; that the heroine cannot 
 open her mouth but what, all in a moment, the 
 fine phrases of preparation fall from round her 
 like the robes from Cinderella, and she stands 
 before us, self-betrayed, as a poor, ugly, sickly 
 wench, or perhaps a strapping market-woman. 
 Authors, at least, know it well; a heroine will 
 too often start the trick of "getting ugly"; and 
 no disease is more difficult to cure. I said au- 
 thors; but indeed I had a side eye to one author 
 in particular, with whose works I am very well 
 acquainted, though I cannot read them, and 
 who has spent many vigils in this cause, sitting 
 beside his ailing puppets and (like a magician) 
 wearying his art to restore them to youth and 
 beauty. 
 
 — "A Gossip on Dumas Novels." 
 
OBSERVATIONS 101 
 
 XVII 
 
 Difficulty and Advantage of 
 Collaboration 
 
 The great difficulty of collaboration is that 
 you can't explain what you mean. I know what 
 kind of effect I mean a character to give — what 
 kind of tache he is to make; but how am I to 
 tell my collaborator in words? Hence it was 
 necessary to say, "Make him So-and-so"; and 
 this was all right for Nares and Pinkerton and 
 Loudon Dodd, whom we both knew, but for 
 Bellairs, for instance — a man with whom I 
 passed ten minutes fifteen years ago — what 
 was I to say? and what could Lloyd do? I, 
 as a personal artist, can begin a character with 
 only a haze in my head, but how if I have to 
 translate the haze into words before I begin? 
 In our manner of collaboration (which I think 
 the only possible — I mean that of one person 
 being responsible, and giving the coup de pouce 
 to every part of the work) I was spared the 
 obviously hopeless business of trying to explain 
 to my collaborator what style I wished a pass- 
 age to be treated in. These are the times that 
 illustrate to a man the inadequacy of spoken 
 language. Now — to be just to written Ian- 
 
102 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 guage-^-I can (or could) find a language for my 
 every mood, but how could I tell any one be- 
 forehand what this effect was to be, which it 
 would take every art that I possessed, and 
 hours and hours of deliberate, labour and selec- 
 tion and rejection, to produce? These are the 
 impossibilities of collaboration. Its immedi- 
 ate advantage is to focus two minds together 
 on the stuff, and to produce in consequence an 
 extraordinary greater richness of purview, con- 
 sideration, and invention. 
 
 — Letter to R. A. M. Stevenson. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 The Importance of Narrative in 
 Literature 
 
 The true business of literature is with nar- 
 rative; in reasoned narrative, and there alone, 
 that art enjoys all its advantages, and suffers 
 least from its defects. Dry precept and dis- 
 embodied disquisition, as they can only be read 
 with an effort of abstraction, can never convey 
 a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural im- 
 pression. Truth, even in literature, must be 
 clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell 
 its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect 
 of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good 
 biographies and works of high, imaginative art, 
 
OBSERVATIONS 103 
 
 are not only far more entertaining, but far more 
 edifying, than books of theory or precept. 
 
 — Henry David Thoreau. 
 
 XIX 
 
 Subject for Literature 
 
 My theory is that literature must always be 
 most at home in treating movement and change; 
 beneel look for them. 
 
 — Letter to Wm. Archer. 
 
 XX 
 
 Spirit in Literature 
 
 As I live, I feel more and more that literature 
 should be cheerful and brave-spirited, even if it 
 cannot be made beautiful and pious and heroic. 
 We wish it to be a green place; the Waverley 
 Novels are better to re-read than the over-true 
 Life, fine as dear Sir Walter was. The Bible, 
 in most parts, is a cheerful book; it is our lit- 
 tle piping theologies, tracts, and sermons that 
 are dull and dowie; and even the Shorter 
 Catechism, which is scarcely a work of conso- 
 lation, opens with the best and shortest and 
 completest sermon ever written — upon Man's 
 
 chief end. r .. •':* _. . 
 
 — Letter to Mr. Dick. 
 
104 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 XXI 
 
 What Interests Us in Robinson Crusoe 
 
 Emerson mentions having once remarked to 
 Thoreau: "Who would not like to write some- 
 thing which all can read, like Robinson Crusoe? 
 and who does not see with regret that his page 
 is not solid with a right materialistic treatment 
 which delights everybody?" I must say in 
 passing that it is not the right materialistic 
 treatment which delights the world in Robinson, 
 but the romantic and philosophic interest of 
 
 — Henry David Thoreau. 
 
 XXII 
 
 Books We Re-read 
 
 The books that we re-read the oftenest are 
 not always those that we admire the most; we 
 choose and we revisit them for many and vari- 
 ous reasons, as we choose and revisit human 
 friends. 
 
 - A Gossip on Dumas Novels" 
 
OBSERVATIONS 105 
 
 XXIII 
 
 When the Imagination Grows Stale 
 
 He who indulges habitually in the intoxicat- 
 ing pleasures of imagination, for the very rea- 
 son that he reaps a greater pleasure than others, 
 must resign himself to a keener pain, a more 
 intolerable and utter prostration. It is quite 
 possible, and even comparatively easy, so to 
 enfold oneself in pleasant fancies that the real- 
 ities of life may seem but as the white snow- 
 shower in the street, that only gives a relish to 
 the swept hearth and lively fire within. By 
 such means I have forgotten hunger, I have 
 sometimes eased pain, and I have invariably 
 changed into the most pleasant hours of the 
 day those very vacant and idle seasons which 
 would otherwise have hung most heavily upon 
 my hand. But all this is attained by the undue 
 prominence of purely imaginative joys, and 
 consequently the weakening and almost the 
 destruction of reality. This is buying at too 
 great a price. There are seasons when the 
 imagination becomes somehow tranced and sur- 
 feited, as it is with me this morning; and then 
 upon what can we fall back ? The very faculty 
 that we have fostered and trusted has failed 
 us in the hour of trial; and we have so blunted 
 
io6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 and enfeebled our appetite for the others that 
 they are subjectively dead to us. It is just as 
 though a farmer should plant all his fields in 
 potatoes, instead of varying them with grain 
 and pasture; and so, when the disease comes, 
 lose all his harvest, while his neighbours, per- 
 haps, may balance the profit and the loss. Do 
 not suppose that I am exaggerating when I talk 
 about all pleasures seeming stale. To me, at 
 least, the edge of almost everything is put on by 
 imagination; and even nature, in these days 
 when the fancy is drugged and useless, wants 
 half the charm it has in better moments. I can 
 no longer see satyrs in the thicket, or picture a 
 highwayman riding down the lane. The fiat 
 of indifference has gone forth: I am vacant, 
 unprofitable: a leaf on a river with no volition 
 and no aim: a mental drunkard the morning 
 after an intellectual debauch. Yes, I have a 
 more subtle opium in my own mind than any 
 apothecary's drug; but it has a sting of its own, 
 and leaves me as flat and helpless as does the 
 
 — A Retrospect. 
 
 As for my damned literature, God knows 
 what a business it is, grinding along without a 
 scrap of inspiration or a note of style. But it 
 has to be ground, and the mill grinds exceed- 
 
OBSERVATIONS 107 
 
 ing slowly though not particularly small. The 
 last two chapters have taken me considerably 
 over a month, and they are still beneath pity. 
 This I cannot continue, time not sufficing; and 
 the next will just have to be worse. All the 
 good I can express is just this; some day, when 
 style revisits me, they will be excellent matter 
 to rewrite. Of course, my old cure of a change 
 of work would probably answer, but I cannot 
 take it now. The treadmill turns; and with a 
 kind of desperate cheerfulness, I mount the 
 
 — Vailima Letters, 
 
 XXIV 
 
 An Analysis of the Fable Form 
 
 The term Fable is not very easy to define 
 rigorously. In the most typical form some 
 moral precept is set forth by means of a con- 
 ception purely fantastic, and usually somewhat 
 trivial into the bargain; there is something play- 
 ful about it, that will not support a very exact- 
 ing criticism, and the lesson must be appre- 
 hended by the fancy at half a hint. Such is 
 the great mass of the old stories of wise animals 
 or foolish men that have amused our childhood. 
 But we should expect the fable, in company 
 with other and more important literary forms, 
 
108 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 to be more and more loosely, or at least largely, 
 comprehended as time went on, and so to de- 
 generate in conception from this original type. 
 That depended for much of its piquancy on the 
 very fact that it was fantastic: the point of the 
 thing lay in a sort of humorous inappropriate- 
 ness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry 
 of this description should become less common, 
 as men learn to suspect some serious analogy 
 underneath. Thus a comical story of an ape 
 touches us quite differently after the proposition 
 of Mr. Darwin's theory. Moreover there lay, 
 perhaps, at the bottom of this primitive sort of 
 fable, a humanity, a tenderness of rough truths; 
 so that at the end of some story, in which vice 
 or folly had met with its destined punishment, 
 the fabulist might be able to assure his auditors, 
 as we have often to assure tearful children on 
 the like occasions, that they may dry their 
 eyes, for none of it was true. 
 
 But this benefit of fiction becomes lost with 
 more sophisticated hearers and authors: a man 
 is no longer the dupe of his own artifice, and 
 cannot deal playfully with truths that are a 
 matter of bitter concern to him in his life. And 
 hence, in the progressive centralisation of mod- 
 ern thought, we should expect the old form of 
 fable to fall gradually into desuetude, and be 
 gradually succeeded by another, which is a 
 
OBSERVATIONS 109 
 
 fable in all points except that it is not alto- 
 gether fabulous. And this new form, such as 
 we should expect, and such as we do indeed 
 find, still presents the essential character of 
 brevity; as in any other fable also, there is, un- 
 derlying and animating the brief action, a moral 
 idea; and as in any other fable, the object is to 
 bring this home to the reader through the in- 
 tellect rather than through the feelings; so that, 
 without being very deeply moved or interested 
 by the characters of the piece, we should recog- 
 nise vividly the hinges on which the little plot 
 revolves. But the fabulist now seeks analogies 
 where before he merely sought humorous situa- 
 tions. There will be now a logical nexus be- 
 tween the moral expressed and the machinery 
 employed to express it. The machinery, in 
 fact, as this change is developed, becomes less 
 and less fabulous. We find ourselves in pres- 
 ence of quite a serious, if quite a miniature 
 division of creative literature; and sometimes 
 we have the lesson embodied in a sober, every- 
 day narration, as in the parables of the New 
 Testament, and sometimes merely the state- 
 ment or, at most, the collocation of significant 
 facts in life, the reader being left to resolve for 
 himself the vague, troublesome, and not yet 
 definitely moral sentiment which has been thus 
 created. And step by step with the develop- 
 
no LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 ment of this change, yet another is developed: 
 the moral tends to become more indeterminate 
 and large. It ceases to be possible to append 
 it, in a tag, to the bottom of the piece, as one 
 might write the name below a caricature; and 
 the fable begins to take rank with all other 
 forms of creative literature, as something too 
 ambitious, in spite of its miniature dimensions, 
 to be resumed in any succinct formula without 
 the loss of all that is deepest and most sugges- 
 tive in it. ~ . A . . 
 
 — Criticisms. 
 
 XXV 
 
 The Genesis of "The Master of 
 Ballantrae" 
 
 I was walking one night in the verandah of a 
 small house in which I lived, outside the hamlet 
 of Saranac. It was winter; the night was very 
 dark; the air extraordinary clear and cold, and 
 sweet with the purity of forests. From a good 
 way below, the river was to be heard contend- 
 ing with ice and boulders: a few lights appeared, 
 scattered unevenly among the darkness, but so 
 far away as not to lessen the sense of isolation. 
 For the making of a story here were fine con- 
 ditions. I was besides moved with the spirit 
 of emulation, for I had just finished my third 
 
OBSERVATIONS in 
 
 or fourth perusal of The Phantom Ship, " Come," 
 said I to my engine, "let us make a tale, a 
 story of many years and countries, of the sea 
 and the land, savagery and civilisation; a story 
 that shall have the same large features and 
 may be treated in the same summary elliptic 
 method as the book you have been reading 
 and admiring." I was here brought up with a 
 reflection exceedingly just in itself, but which, 
 as the sequel shows, I failed to profit by. I 
 saw that Marryat, not less than Homer, Mil- 
 ton, and Virgil, profited by the choice of a 
 familiar and legendary subject; so that he pre- 
 pared his readers on the very title-page; and 
 this set me cudgelling my brains, if by any 
 chance I could hit upon some similar belief 
 to be the centrepiece of my own meditated fic- 
 tion. In the course of this vain search there 
 cropped up in my memory a singular case of a 
 buried and resuscitated fakir, which I had been 
 often told by an uncle of mine, then lately dead, 
 Inspector-General John Balfour. 
 
 On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and 
 the thermometer below zero, the brain works 
 with much vivacity; and the next moment I 
 had seen the circumstance transplanted from 
 India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilder- 
 ness and the stringent cold of the Canadian 
 border. Here then, almost before I had begun 
 
ii2 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 my story, I had two countries, two of the ends 
 of the earth involved: and thus though the no- 
 tion of the resuscitated man failed entirely on 
 the score of general acceptation, or even (as I 
 have since found) acceptability, it fitted at 
 once with my design of a tale of many lands; 
 and this decided me to consider further of its 
 possibilities. The man who should thus be 
 buried was the first question: a good man, whose 
 return to life would be hailed by the reader 
 and the other characters with gladness? This 
 trenched upon the Christian picture and was 
 dismissed. If the idea, then, was to be of any 
 use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil 
 genius to his friends and family, take him 
 through many disappearances, and make this 
 final restoration from the pit of death, in the 
 icy American wilderness, the last and grim- 
 mest of the series. I need not tell my brothers 
 of the craft that I was now in the most inter- 
 esting moment of an author's life; the hours 
 that followed that night upon the balcony, and 
 the following nights and days, whether walking 
 abroad or lying wakeful in my bed, were hours 
 of unadulterated joy. My mother, who was 
 then living with me alone, perhaps had less en- 
 joyment; for, in the absence of my wife, who is 
 my usual helper in these times of parturition, 
 I must spur her up at all seasons to hear 
 
OBSERVATIONS 113 
 
 me relate and try to clarify my unformed 
 fancies. 
 
 And while I was groping for the fable and the 
 characters required, behold, I found them lying 
 ready and nine years old in my memory. Pease 
 porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease por- 
 ridge in the pot, nine years old. Was there 
 ever a more complete justification of the rule 
 of Horace? Here, thinking of quite other 
 things, I had stumbled on the solution, or per- 
 haps I should rather say (in stagewright phrase) 
 the Curtain or final Tableau of a story con- 
 ceived long before on the moors between Pit- 
 lochry and Strathardle, conceived in the High- 
 land rain, in the blend of the smell of heather 
 and bog-plants, and with a mind full of the 
 Athole correspondence and the memories of the 
 dumlicide Justice. So long ago, so far away it 
 was, that I had first evoked the faces and the 
 mutual tragic situation of the men of Durisdeer. 
 
 My story was now world-wide enough: Scot- 
 land, India, and America being all obligatory 
 scenes. But of these India was strange to me 
 except in books; I had never known any liv- 
 ing Indian save a Parsee, a member of my club 
 in London, equally civilised and (to all seeing) 
 equally occidental with myself. It was plain, 
 thus far, that I should have to get into India 
 and out of it again upon a foot of fairy light- 
 
ii4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 ness; and I believe this first suggested to me the 
 idea of the Chevalier Burke for a narrator. It 
 was at first intended that he should be Scot- 
 tish, and I was then filled with fears that he 
 might prove only the degraded shadow of my 
 own Alan Breck. Presently, however, it began 
 to occur to me it would be like my Master to 
 curry favour with the Prince's Irishmen; and 
 that an Irish refugee would have a particular 
 reason to find himself in India with his country- 
 man, the unfortunate Lally. Irish, therefore, I 
 decided he should be, and then, all of a sudden, 
 I was aware of a tall shadow across my path, 
 the shadow of Barry Lyndon. No man (in 
 Lord Foppington's phrase) of a nice morality 
 could go very deep with my Master: in the 
 original idea of this story conceived in Scot- 
 land, this companion had been besides intended 
 to be worse than the bad elder son with whom 
 (as it was then meant) he was to visit Scotland; 
 if I took an Irishman, and a very bad Irishman, 
 in the midst of the eighteenth century, how was 
 I to evade Barry Lyndon? The wretch be- 
 sieged me, offering his services; he gave me ex- 
 cellent references; he proved that he was 
 highly fitted for the work I had to do; he, or 
 my own evil heart, suggested it was easy to 
 disguise his ancient livery with a little lace and 
 a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray 
 
OBSERVATIONS 115 
 
 himself should hardly recognise him. And then 
 of a sudden there came to me memories of a 
 young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, 
 and had spent long nights walking and talking 
 with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak 
 autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraor- 
 dinary moral simplicity — almost vacancy; plastic 
 to any influence, the creature of his admira- 
 tions: and putting such a youth in fancy into 
 the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to 
 me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. 
 Lyndon, and in place of entering into com- 
 petition with the Master, would afford a slight 
 though a distinct relief. I know not if I have 
 done him well, though his moral dissertations 
 always highly entertained me: but I own I have 
 been surprised to find that he reminded some 
 critics of Barry Lyndon after all. . . . 
 
 How the Romantic Movement Freed the 
 Imagination in Writing 
 
 With Scott the Romantic movement, the 
 movement of an extended curiosity and an en- 
 franchised imagination, has begun. This is a 
 trite thing to say, but trite things are often very 
 indefinitely comprehended: and this enfran- 
 
 \ 
 
n6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 chisement, in as far as it regards the technical 
 change that came over modern prose romance, 
 has never perhaps been explained with any 
 clearness. 
 
 To do so, it will be necessary roughly to com- 
 pare the two sets of conventions upon which 
 plays and romances are respectively based. The 
 purposes of these two arts are so much alike, 
 and they deal so much with the same passions 
 and interests, that we are apt to forget the 
 fundamental opposition of their methods. And 
 yet such a fundamental opposition exists. In 
 the drama the action is developed in great 
 measure by means of things that remain out- 
 side of the art; by means of real things, that is, 
 and not artistic conventions for things. This 
 is a sort of realism that is not to be confounded 
 with that realism in painting of which we 
 hear so much. The realism in painting is a 
 thing of purposes; this, that we have to indi- 
 cate in the drama, is an affair of method. We 
 have heard a story, indeed, of a painter in 
 France who, when he wanted to paint a sea- 
 beach, carried realism from his ends to his 
 means, and plastered real sand upon his canvas; 
 and that is precisely what is done in the drama. 
 The dramatic author has to paint his beaches 
 with real sand: real live men and women move 
 about the stage; we hear real voices; what is 
 
OBSERVATIONS 117 
 
 feigned merely puts a sense upon what is; we 
 do actually see a woman go behind a screen as 
 Lady Teazle, and, after a certain interval, we 
 do actually see her very shamefully produced 
 again. Now all these things, that remain as 
 they were in life, and are not transmuted into 
 any artistic convention, are terribly stubborn 
 and difficult to deal with; and hence there are 
 for the dramatist many resultant limitations in 
 time and space. These limitations in some 
 sort approximate toward those of painting: the 
 dramatic author is tied down, not indeed to a 
 moment, but to the duration of each scene or 
 act; he is confined to the stage, almost as the 
 painter is confined within his frame. But the 
 great restriction is this, that a dramatic author 
 must deal with his actors, and with his actors 
 alone. Certain moments of suspense, certain 
 significant dispositions of personages, a certain 
 logical growth of emotion, these are the only 
 means at the disposal of the playwright. It 
 is true that, with the assistance of the scene- 
 painter, the costumer and the conductor of the 
 orchestra, he may add to this something of 
 pageant, something of sound and fury; but 
 these are, for the dramatic writer, beside the 
 mark, and do not come under the vivifying 
 touch of his genius. When we turn to romance, 
 we find this no longer. Here nothing is repro- 
 
n8 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 duced to our senses directly. Not only the 
 main conception of the work, but the scenery, 
 the appliances, the mechanism by which this 
 conception is brought home to us, have been 
 put through the crucible of another man's 
 mind, and come out again, one and all, in the 
 form of written words. With the loss of every 
 degree of such realism as we have described, 
 there is for art a clear gain of liberty and large- 
 ness of competence. Thus, painting, in which 
 the round outlines of things are thrown on to a 
 flat board, is far more free than sculpture, in 
 which their solidity is preserved. It is by giv- 
 ing up these identities that art gains true 
 strength. And so in the case of novels as com- 
 pared with the stage. Continuous narration is 
 the flat board on to which the novelist throws 
 everything. And from this there results for 
 him a great loss of vividness, but a great com- 
 pensating gain in his power over the subject; 
 so that he can now subordinate one thing to 
 another in importance, and introduce all man- 
 ner of very subtle detail, to a degree that was 
 before impossible. He can render just as easily 
 the flourish of trumpets before a victorious 
 emperor and the gossip of country market 
 women, the gradual decay of forty years of a 
 man's life and the gesture of a passionate mo- 
 ment. He finds himself equally unable, if he 
 
OBSERVATIONS 119 
 
 looks at it from one point of view — equally- 
 able, if he looks at it from another point of 
 view — to reproduce a colour, a sound, an out- 
 line, a logical argument, a physical action. He 
 can show his readers, behind and around the 
 personages that for the moment occupy the 
 foreground of his story, the continual suggestion 
 of the landscape; the turn of the weather that 
 will turn with it men's lives and fortunes, dimly 
 foreshadowed on the horizon; the fatality of 
 distant events, the stream of national tendency, 
 the salient framework of causation. And all 
 this thrown upon the flat board — all this en- 
 tering, naturally and smoothly, into the tex- 
 ture of continuous intelligent narration. 
 
 — Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 
 
vm 
 
 THE MORALITY OF THE PROFESSION 
 OF LETTERS 
 
 The profession of letters has been lately de- 
 bated in the public prints; and it has been de- 
 bated, to put the matter mildly, from a point 
 of view that was calculated to surprise high- 
 minded men, and bring a general contempt on 
 books and reading. Some time ago, in par- 
 ticular, a lively, pleasant, popular writer de- 
 voted an essay, lively and pleasant like himself, 
 to a very encouraging view of the profession. 
 We may be glad that his experience is so cheer- 
 ing, and we may hope that all others, who de- 
 serve it, shall be as handsomely rewarded; but 
 I do not think we need be at all glad to have this 
 question, so important to the public and our- 
 selves, debated solely on the ground of money. 
 The salary in any business under heaven is not 
 the only, nor indeed the first, question. That 
 you should continue to exist is a matter for your 
 own consideration; but that your business 
 should be first honest, and second useful, are 
 points in which honour and morality are con- 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 121 
 
 cerned. If the writer to whom I refer succeeds 
 in persuading a number of young persons to 
 adopt this way of life with an eye set singly on 
 the livelihood, we must expect them in their 
 works to follow profit only, and we must expect 
 in consequence, if he will pardon me the epithets, 
 a slovenly, base, untrue, and empty literature. 
 Of that writer himself I am not speaking: he is 
 diligent, clean, and pleasing; we all owe him 
 periods of entertainment, and he has achieved 
 an amiable popularity which he has adequately 
 deserved. But the truth is, he does not, or did 
 not when he first embraced it, regard his pro- 
 fession from this purely mercenary side. He 
 went into it, I shall venture to say, if not with 
 any noble design, at least in the ardour of a 
 first love; and he enjoyed its practice long be- 
 fore he paused to calculate the wage. The 
 other day an author was complimented on a 
 piece of work, good in itself and exceptionally 
 good for him, and replied, in terms unworthy of 
 a commercial traveller, that as the book was 
 not briskly selling he did not give a copper 
 farthing for its merit. It must not be supposed 
 that the person to whom this answer was ad- 
 dressed received it as a profession of faith; he 
 knew, on the other hand, that it was only a 
 whiff of irritation; just as we know, when a 
 respectable writer talks of literature as a way 
 
122 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 of life, like shoemaking, but not so useful, that 
 he is only debating one aspect of a question, 
 and is still clearly conscious of a dozen others 
 more important in themselves and more central 
 to the matter in hand. But while those who 
 treat literature in this penny-wise and virtue- 
 foolish spirit are themselves truly in possession 
 of a better light, it does not follow that the treat- 
 ment is decent or improving, whether for them- 
 selves or others. To treat all subjects in the 
 highest, the most honourable, and the pluckiest 
 spirit, consistent with the fact, is the first duty 
 of a writer. If he be well paid, as I am glad to 
 hear he is, this duty becomes the more urgent, 
 the neglect of it the more disgraceful. And 
 perhaps there is no subject on which a man 
 should speak so gravely as that industry, what- 
 ever it may be, which is the occupation or de- 
 light of his life; which is his tool to earn or serve 
 with; and which, if it be unworthy, stamps him- 
 self as a mere incubus of dumb and greedy 
 bowels on the shoulders of labouring humanity. 
 On that subject alone even to force the note 
 might lean to virtue's side. It is to be hoped 
 that a numerous and enterprising generation of 
 writers will follow and surpass the present one; 
 but it would be better if the stream were stayed, 
 and the roll of our old, honest English books 
 were closed, than that esurient book-makers 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 123 
 
 should continue and debase a brave tradition, 
 and lower, in their own eyes, a famous race. 
 Better that our serene temples were deserted 
 than filled with trafficking and juggling priests. 
 There are two just reasons for the choice of 
 any way of life: the first is inbred taste in the 
 chooser; the second some high utility in the 
 industry selected. Literature, like any other 
 art, is singularly interesting to the artist; and, 
 in a degree peculiar to itself among the arts, 
 it is useful to mankind. These are the sufficient 
 justifications for any young man or woman who 
 adopts it as the business of his life. I shall not 
 say much about the wages. A writer can live 
 by his writing. If not so luxuriously as by 
 other trades, then less luxuriously. The nature 
 of the work he does all day will more affect his 
 happiness than the quality of his dinner at 
 night. Whatever be your calling, and how- 
 ever much it brings you in the year, you could 
 still, you know, get more by cheating. We all 
 suffer ourselves to be too much concerned about 
 a little poverty; but such considerations should 
 not move us in the choice of that which is to 
 be the business and justification of so great a 
 portion of our lives; and like the missionary, 
 the patriot, or the philosopher, we should all 
 choose that poor and brave career in which we 
 can do the most and best for mankind. Now 
 
124 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 nature, faithfully followed, proves herself a 
 careful mother. A lad, for some liking to the 
 jingle of words, betakes himself to letters for 
 his life; by-and-by, when he learns more grav- 
 ity, he finds that he has chosen better than he 
 knew; that if he earns little, he is earning it 
 amply; that if he receives a small wage, he is 
 in a position to do considerable services; that it 
 is in his power, in some small measure, to pro- 
 tect the oppressed and to defend the truth. 
 So kindly is the world arranged, such great 
 profit may arise from a small degree of human 
 reliance on oneself, and such, in particular, is 
 the happy star of this trade of writing, that it 
 should combine pleasure and profit to both 
 parties, and be at once agreeable, like fiddling, 
 and useful, like good preaching. 
 
 This is to speak of literature at its highest; 
 and with the four great elders who are still 
 spared to our respect and admiration, with 
 Carlyle, Ruskin, Browning, and Tennyson be- 
 fore us, it would be cowardly to consider it at 
 first in any lesser aspect. But while we cannot 
 follow these athletes, while we may none of 
 us, perhaps, be very vigorous, very original, or 
 very wise, I still contend that, in the humblest 
 sort of literary work, we have it in our power 
 either to do great harm or great good. We may 
 seek merely to please; we may seek, having no 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 125 
 
 higher gift, merely to gratify the idle nine days' 
 curiosity of our contemporaries; or we may 
 essay, however feebly, to instruct. In each of 
 these we shall have to deal with that remark- 
 able art of words which, because it is the dialect 
 of life, comes home so easily and powerfully 
 to the minds of men; and since that is so, we 
 contribute, in each of these branches, to build 
 up the sum of sentiments and appreciations 
 which goes by the name of Public Opinion or 
 Public Feeling. The total of a nation's read- 
 ing, in these days of daily papers, greatly modi- 
 fies the total of the nation's speech; and the 
 speech and reading, taken together, form the 
 efficient educational medium of youth. A good 
 man or woman may keep a youth some little 
 while in clearer air; but the contemporary at- 
 mosphere is all-powerful in the end on the aver- 
 age of mediocre characters. The copious 
 Corinthian baseness of the American reporter 
 or the Parisian chroniquer, both so lightly read- 
 able, must exercise an incalculable influence 
 for ill; they touch upon all subjects, and on all 
 with the same ungenerous hand; they begin the 
 consideration of all, in young and unprepared 
 minds, in an unworthy spirit; on all, they sup- 
 ply some pungency for dull people to quote. 
 The mere body of this ugly matter overwhelms 
 the rare utterances of good men; the sneering, 
 
126 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 the selfish, and the cowardly are scattered in 
 broad sheets on every table, while the antidote, 
 in small volumes, lies unread upon the shelf. 
 I have spoken of the American and the French, 
 not because they are so much baser, but so 
 much more readable, than the English; their 
 evil is done more effectively, in America for 
 the masses, in French for the few that care to 
 read; but with us as with them, the duties of 
 literature are daily neglected, truth daily per- 
 verted and suppressed, and grave subjects daily 
 degraded in the treatment. The journalist is 
 not reckoned an important officer; yet judge 
 of the good he might do, the harm he does; 
 judge of it by one instance only: that when we 
 find two journals on the reverse sides of politics 
 each, on the same day, openly garbling a piece 
 of news for the interest of its own party, we 
 smile at the discovery (no discovery now!) as 
 over a good joke and pardonable stratagem. 
 Lying so open is scarce lying, it is true; but one 
 of the things that we profess to teach our young 
 is a respect for truth; and I cannot think this 
 piece of education will be crowned with any 
 great success, so long as some of us practise 
 and the rest openly approve of public falsehood. 
 There are two duties incumbent upon any 
 man who enters on the business of writing: truth 
 to the fact and a good spirit in the treatment. 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 127 
 
 In every department of literature, though so 
 low as hardly to deserve the name, truth to the 
 fact is of importance to the education and com- 
 fort of mankind, and so hard to preserve, that 
 the faithful trying to do so will lend some 
 dignity to the man who tries it. Our judg- 
 ments are based upon two things: first, upon 
 the original preferences of our soul; but, second, 
 upon the mass of testimony to the nature of 
 God, man, and the universe which reaches us, 
 in divers manners, from without. For the most 
 part these divers manners are reducible to one, 
 all that we learn of past times and much that 
 we learn of our own reaching us through the 
 medium of books or papers, and even he who 
 cannot read learning from the same source at 
 second-hand and by the report of him who 
 can. Thus the sum of the contemporary 
 knowledge or ignorance of good and evil is, in 
 large measure, the handiwork of those who 
 write. Those who write have to see that each 
 man's knowledge is, as near as they can make 
 it, answerable to the facts of life; that he shall 
 not suppose himself an angel or a monster; 
 nor take this world for a hell; nor be suffered 
 to imagine that all rights are concentred in 
 his own caste or country, or all veracities in 
 his own parochial creed. Each man should learn 
 what is within him, that he may strive to mend; 
 
128 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 he must be taught what is without him, that 
 he may be kind to others. It can never be 
 wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable 
 state, weaving as he goes his theory of life, 
 steering himself, cheering or reproving others, 
 all facts are of the first importance to his con- 
 duct; and even if a fact shall discourage or 
 corrupt him, it is still best that he should know 
 it; for it is in this world as it is, and not in a 
 world made easy by educational suppressions, 
 that he must win his way to shame or glory. 
 In one word, it must always be foul to tell what 
 is false; and it can never be safe to suppress 
 what is true. The very fact that you omit 
 may be the fact which somebody was wanting, 
 for one man's meat is another man's poison, 
 and I have known a person who was cheered 
 by the perusal of Candide. Every fact is a part 
 of that great puzzle we must set together; and 
 none that comes directly in a writer's path but 
 has some nice relations, unperceivable by him, 
 to the totality and bearing of the subject under 
 hand. Yet there are certain classes of fact 
 eternally more necessary than others, and it is 
 with these that literature must first bestir it- 
 self. They are not hard to distinguish, nature 
 once more easily leading us; for the necessary, 
 because the efficacious, facts are those which 
 are most interesting to the natural mind of 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 129 
 
 man. Those which are coloured, picturesque, 
 human, and rooted in morality, and those, on 
 the other hand, which are clear, indisputable, 
 and a part of science, are alone vital in impor- 
 tance, seizing by their interest, or useful to 
 communicate. So far as the writer merely nar- 
 rates, he should principally tell of these. He 
 should tell of the kind and wholesome and 
 beautiful elements of our life; he should tell 
 unsparingly of the evil and sorrow of the pres- 
 ent, to move us with instances; he should tell 
 of wise and good people in the past, to excite us 
 by example; and of these he should tell soberly 
 and truthfully, not glossing faults, that we may 
 neither grow discouraged with ourselves nor 
 exacting to our neighbours. So the body of 
 contemporary literature, ephemeral and feeble 
 in itself, touches in the minds of men the springs 
 of thought and kindness, and supports them 
 (for those who will go at all are easily sup- 
 ported) on their way to what is true and right. 
 And if, in any degree, it does so now, how much 
 more might it do so if the writers chose ! There 
 is not a life in all the records of the past but, 
 properly studied, might lend a hint and a help 
 to some contemporary. There is not a junc- 
 ture in to-day's affairs but some useful word 
 may yet be said of it. Even the reporter has 
 an office, and, with clear eyes and honest Ian- 
 
i 3 o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 guage, may unveil injustices and point the way 
 to progress. And for a last word: in all narra- 
 tion there is only one way to be clever, and 
 that is to be exact. To be vivid is a secondary 
 quality which must presuppose the first; for 
 vividly to convey a wrong impression is only to 
 make failure conspicuous. 
 
 But a fact may be viewed on many sides; it 
 may be chronicled with rage, tears, laughter, 
 indifference, or admiration, and by each of 
 these the story will be transformed to something 
 else. The newspapers that told of the return 
 of our representatives from Berlin, even if 
 they had not differed as to the facts, would 
 have sufficiently differed by their spirits; so 
 that the one description would have been a 
 second ovation, and the other a prolonged in- 
 sult. The subject makes but a trifling part of 
 any piece of literature, and the view of the 
 writer is itself a fact more important because 
 less disputable than the others. Now this spirit 
 in which a subject is regarded, important in all 
 kinds of literary work, becomes all-important in 
 works of fiction, meditation, or rhapsody; for 
 there it not only colours but itself chooses the 
 facts; not only modifies but shapes the work. 
 And hence, over the far larger proportion of the 
 field of literature, the health or disease of the 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 131 
 
 writers mind or momentary humour forms not 
 only the leading feature of his work, but is, at 
 bottom, the only thing he can communicate to 
 others. In all works of art, widely speaking, 
 it is first of all the author's attitude that is 
 narrated, though in the attitude there be im- 
 plied a whole experience and a theory of life. 
 An author who has begged the question and 
 reposes in some narrow faith cannot, if he would, 
 express the whole or even many of the sides of 
 this various existence; for, his own life being 
 maim, some of them are not admitted in his 
 theory, and were only dimly and unwillingly 
 recognised in his experience. Hence the small- 
 ness, the triteness, and the inhumanity in works 
 of merely sectarian religion; and hence we find 
 equal although unsimilar limitation in works 
 inspired by the spirit of the flesh or the despi- 
 cable taste for high society. So that the first 
 duty of any man who is to write is intellectual. 
 Designedly or not, he has so far set himself up 
 for a leader of the minds of men; and he must 
 see that his own mind is kept supple, charitable, 
 and bright. Everything but prejudice should 
 find a voice through him; he should see the good 
 in all things; where he has even a fear that he 
 does not wholly understand, there he should 
 be wholly silent; and he should recognise from 
 
i 3 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 the first that he has only one tool in his work- 
 shop, and that tool is sympathy.* 
 
 The second duty, far harder to define, is 
 moral. There are a thousand different humours 
 in the mind, and about each of them, when it is 
 uppermost, some literature tends to be depos- 
 ited. Is this to be allowed? Not certainly in 
 every case, and yet perhaps in more than rig- 
 ourists would fancy. It were to be desired that 
 all literary work, and chiefly works of art, 
 issued from sound, human, healthy, and potent 
 impulses, whether grave or laughing, humor- 
 ous, romantic, or religious. Yet it cannot be 
 denied that some valuable books are partially 
 insane; some, mostly religious, partially in- 
 human; and very many tainted with morbidity 
 and impotence. We do not loathe a master- 
 piece although we gird against its blemishes. 
 We are not, above all, to look for faults, but 
 merits. There is no book perfect, even in de- 
 sign; but there are many that will delight, 
 improve, or encourage the reader. On the 
 one hand, the Hebrew psalms are the only re- 
 
 * A footnote, at least, is due to the admirable example set 
 before all young writers in the width of literary sympathy dis- 
 played by Mr. Swinburne. He runs forth to welcome merit, 
 whether in Dickens or Trollope, whether in Villon, Milton, or 
 Pope. This is, in criticism, the attitude we should all seek to 
 preserve, not only in that, but in every branch of literary 
 work. 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 133 
 
 ligious poetry on earth; yet they contain sallies 
 that savour rankly of the man of blood. On 
 the other hand, Alfred de Musset had a poi- 
 soned and a contorted nature; I am only quoting 
 that generous and frivolous giant, old Dumas, 
 when I accuse him of a bad heart; yet, when the 
 impulse under which he wrote was purely crea- 
 tive, he could give us works like Carmosine or 
 Fantasio, in which the last note of the romantic 
 comedy seems to have been found again to 
 touch and please us. When Flaubert wrote 
 Madame Bovary, I believe he thought chiefly of 
 a somewhat morbid realism; and behold! the 
 book turned in his hands into a masterpiece of 
 appalling morality. But the truth is, when 
 books are conceived under a great stress, with 
 a soul of ninefold power, nine times heated 
 and electrified by effort, the conditions of our 
 being are seized with such an ample grasp, that, 
 even should the main design be trivial or base, 
 some truth and beauty cannot fail to be ex- 
 pressed. Out of the strong comes forth sweet- 
 ness; but an ill thing poorly done is an ill thing 
 top and bottom. And so this can be no encour- 
 agement to knock-kneed, feeble-wristed scribes, 
 who must take their business conscientiously or 
 be ashamed to practise it. 
 
 Man is imperfect; yet, in his literature, he 
 must express himself and his own views and 
 
134 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 preferences; for to do anything else is to do a 
 far more perilous thing than to risk being im- 
 moral: it is to be sure of being untrue. To ape 
 a sentiment, even a good one, is to travesty a 
 sentiment; that will not be helpful. To con- 
 ceal a sentiment, if you are sure you hold it, is 
 to take a liberty with truth. There is prob- 
 ably no point of view possible to a sane man but 
 contains some truth and, in the true connec- 
 tion, might be profitable to the race. I am not 
 afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, 
 but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently ut- 
 tered. There is a time to dance and a time to 
 mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; 
 to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; 
 and if a man were to combine all these extremes 
 into his work, each in its place and proportion, 
 that work would be the worlds masterpiece of 
 morality as well as of art. Partiality is im- 
 morality; for any book is wrong that gives a 
 misleading picture of the world and life. The 
 trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the 
 work of one proving dank and depressing; of 
 another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epilep- 
 tically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In 
 literature as in conduct, you can never hope to 
 do exactly right. All you can do is to make as 
 sure as possible; and for that there is but one 
 rule. Nothing should be done in a hurry that 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 135 
 
 can be done slowly. It is no use to write a 
 book and put it by for nine or even ninety 
 years; for in the writing you will have partly 
 convinced yourself; the delay must precede any 
 beginning; and if you meditate a work of art, 
 you should first long roll the subject under the 
 tongue to make sure you like the flavour, be- 
 fore you brew a volume that shall taste of it 
 from end to end; or if you propose to enter on 
 the field of controversy, you should first have 
 thought upon the question under all conditions, 
 in health as well as in sickness, in sorrow as 
 well as in joy. It is this nearness of examina- 
 tion necessary for any true and kind writing, 
 that makes the practice of the art a prolonged 
 and noble education for the writer. 
 
 There is plenty to do, plenty to say, or to say 
 over again, in the meantime. Any literary work 
 which conveys faithful facts or pleasing im- 
 pressions is a service to the public. It is even a 
 service to be thankfully proud of having ren- 
 dered. The slightest novels are a blessing to 
 those in distress, not chloroform itself a greater. 
 Our fine old sea-captain's life was justified when 
 Carlyle soothed his mind with The King's Own 
 or Newton Forster. To please is to serve; and 
 so far from its being difficult to instruct while 
 you amuse, it is difficult to do the one thoroughly 
 without the other. Some part of the writer or 
 
136 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 his life will crop out in even a vapid book; and 
 to read a novel that was conceived with any 
 force is to multiply experience and to exercise 
 the sympathies. Every article, every piece of 
 verse, every essay, every entre-filet, is destined 
 to pass, however swiftly, through the minds of 
 some portion of the public, and to colour, how- 
 ever transiently, their thoughts. When any 
 subject falls to be discussed, some scribbler on a 
 paper has the invaluable opportunity of be- 
 ginning its discussion in a dignified and human 
 spirit; and if there were enough who did so in 
 our public press, neither the public nor the 
 Parliament would find it in their minds to drop 
 to meaner thoughts. The writer has the chance 
 to stumble, by the way, on something pleasing, 
 something interesting, something encouraging, 
 were it only to a single reader. He will be 
 unfortunate, indeed, if he suit no one. He has 
 the chance, besides, to stumble on something 
 that a dull person shall be able to comprehend; 
 and for a dull person to have read anything 
 and, for that once, comprehended it, makes a 
 marking epoch in his education. 
 
 Here, then, is work worth doing and worth 
 trying to do well. And so, if I were minded to 
 welcome any great accession to our trade, it 
 should not be from any reason of a higher 
 wage, but because it was a trade which was 
 
THE PROFESSION OF LETTERS 137 
 
 useful in a very great and in a very high de- 
 gree; which every honest tradesman could make 
 more serviceable to mankind in his single 
 strength; which was difficult to do well and 
 possible to do better every year; which called 
 for scrupulous thought on the part of all who 
 practised it, and hence became a perpetual 
 education to their nobler natures; and which, 
 pay it as you please, in the large majority of 
 the best cases will still be underpaid. For 
 surely, at this time of day in the nineteenth 
 century, there is nothing that an honest man 
 should fear more timorously than getting and 
 spending more than he deserves. 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 
 
 The scene is the deck of an Atlantic liner, 
 close by the doors of the ashpit, where it is 
 warm: the time, night: the persons, an emigrant 
 of an mquiring turn of mind and a deck hand. 
 "Now," says the emigrant, "is there not any 
 book that gives a true picture of a sailor's 
 life?"— "Well," returns the other, with great 
 deliberation and emphasis, "there is one; that 
 is just a sailor's life. You know all about it, if 
 you know that."— "What do you call it?" 
 asks the emigrant. — "They call it Tom HoWs 
 Log," says the sailor. The emigrant entered 
 the fact in his note-book: with a wondering 
 query as to what sort of stuff this Tom Holt 
 would prove to be: and a double-headed proph- 
 ecy that it would prove one of two things: 
 either a solid, dull, admirable piece of truth, 
 or mere ink and banditti. Well, the emigrant 
 was wrong: it was something more curious than 
 either, for it was a work by Stephens Hayward. 
 
 Copyright, 1888, 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 138 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 139 
 
 In this paper I propose to put the authors' 
 names in capital letters; the most of them have 
 not much hope of durable renown; their day is 
 past, the poor dogs — they begin swiftly to be 
 forgotten; and Hayward is of the number. 
 Yet he was a popular writer; and what is really 
 odd, he had a vein of hare-brained merit. There 
 never was a man of less pretension; the intoxi- 
 cating presence of an ink-bottle, which was too 
 much for the strong head of Napoleon, left 
 him sober and light-hearted; he had no shade 
 of literary vanity; he was never at the trouble 
 to be dull. His works fell out of date in the 
 days of printing. They were the unhatched 
 eggs of Arab tales; made for word-of -mouth 
 recitation, certain (if thus told) to captivate an 
 audience of boys or any simple people — cer- 
 tain, on the lips of a generation or two of public 
 story-tellers, to take on new merit and become 
 cherished lore. Such tales as a man, such 
 rather as a boy, tells himself at night, not with- 
 out smiling, as he drops asleep; such, with the 
 same exhilarating range of incident and the 
 same trifling ingenuities, with no more truth 
 to experience and scarcely more cohesion, 
 Hayward told. If we so consider The Diamond 
 
140 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Necklace or the Twenty Captains, which is what 
 I remember best of Haywakd, you will find that 
 staggering narrative grow quite conceivable. 
 
 A gentleman (his name forgotten — Haywakd 
 had no taste in names) puts an advertisement 
 in the papers, inviting nineteen other gentlemen 
 to join him in a likely enterprise. The nine- 
 teen appear promptly, nineteen, no more, no 
 less: see the ease of the recumbent story-teller, 
 half-asleep, hanging on the verge of that coun- 
 try of dreams, where candles come alight and 
 journeys are accomplished at the wishing! 
 These twenty, all total strangers, are to put 
 their money together and form an association 
 of strict equality: hence its name — The Twenty 
 Captains. And it is no doubt very pleasant to 
 be equal to anybody, even in name; and mighty 
 desirable (at least in the eyes of young gentle- 
 men hearing this tale in the school dormitory) 
 to be called captain, even in private. But the 
 deuce of it is, the founder has no enterprise in 
 view, and here you would think, the least wary 
 capitalist would leave his chair, and buy a 
 broom and a crossing with his money, rather 
 than place it in the hands of this total stranger, 
 whose mind by his own confession was a blank, 
 and whose real name was probably Macaire. 
 No such matter in the book. With the ease of 
 dreaming, the association is founded; and again 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 141 
 
 with the ease of dreaming (Hayward being 
 now three parts asleep) the enterprise, in the 
 shape of a persecuted heiress and a truly dam- 
 nable and idiotic aristocrat, appears upon the 
 scene. For some time, our drowsy story-teller 
 dodges along upon the frontiers of incoherence, 
 hardly at the trouble to invent, never at the 
 trouble to write literature; but suddenly his 
 interest brightens up, he sees something in 
 front of him, turns on the pillow, shakes off the 
 tentacles of slumber, and puts his back into his 
 tale. Injured innocence takes a special train 
 to Dover; damnable idiot takes another and 
 pursues; the twenty captains reach the station 
 five minutes after, and demand a third. It is 
 against the rules, they are told; not more than 
 two specials (here is good news for the railway 
 traveller) are allowed at the same time upon 
 the line. Is injured innocence, with her dia- 
 mond necklace, to lie at the mercy of an aris- 
 tocrat? Forbid it, Heaven and the Cheap 
 Press! The twenty captains slip unobserved 
 into the engine-house, steal an engine, and 
 forth upon the Dover line! As well as I can 
 gather, there were no stations and no points- 
 men on this route to Dover, which must in 
 consequence be quick and safe. One thing it 
 had in common with other and less simple rail- 
 ways, it had a line of telegraph wires; and these 
 
i 4 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 the twenty captains decided to destroy. One 
 of them, you will not be surprised to learn, had a 
 coil of rope — in his pocket, I suppose; another — 
 again I shall not surprise you — was an Irish- 
 man and given to blundering. One end of the 
 line was made fast to a telegraph post; one (by 
 the Irishman) to the engine: all aboard — full 
 steam ahead — a double crash, and there was 
 the telegraph post upon the ground, and here — 
 mark my Hayward! was something carried 
 away upon the engine. All eyes turn to see 
 what it is: an integral part of the machinery! 
 There is now no means of reducing speed; on 
 thunders the engine, full steam ahead, down 
 this remarkable route to Dover; on speed the 
 twenty captains, not very easy in their minds. 
 Presently, the driver of the second special (the 
 aristocrats) looks behind him, sees an engine 
 on his track, signals, signals in vain, finds him- 
 self being overhauled, pokes up his fire and — 
 full steam ahead in flight. Presently after, the 
 driver of the first special (injured innocence's) 
 looks behind, sees a special on his track and an 
 engine on the track of the special, signals, sig- 
 nals in vain, and he too — full steam ahead in 
 flight. Such a day on the Dover line! But 
 at last the second special smashes into the first, 
 and the engine into both; and for my part, I 
 think there was an end of that romance. But 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 143 
 
 Hayward was by this time fast asleep: not a 
 life was lost; nor only that, but the various par- 
 ties recovered consciousness and resumed then- 
 wild career (only now, of course, on foot and 
 across country) in the precise original order: 
 injured innocence leading by a length, damna- 
 ble aristocrat with still more damnable valet 
 (like one man) a good second, and the twenty 
 captains (again like one man) a bad third; so 
 that here was the story going on again just as 
 before, and this appalling catastrophe on the 
 Dover line reduced to the proportions of a 
 morning call. The feelings of the company (it 
 is true) are not dwelt upon. 
 
 Now, I do not mean that Tom Holt is quite 
 such high-flying folly as The Twenty Captains; 
 for it is no such thing, nor half so entertaining. 
 Still it flowed from the same irresponsible 
 brain; still it was the mere drowsy divagation 
 of a man in bed, now tedious, now extravagant 
 — always acutely untrue to life as it is, often 
 pleasantly coincident with childish hopes of 
 what life ought to be — as (for instance) in the 
 matter of that little pleasure-boat, rigged, to 
 every block and rope, as a full-rigged ship, in 
 which Tom goes sailing — happy child! And 
 this was the work that an actual tarry seaman 
 recommended for a picture of his own existence ! 
 
144 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 n 
 
 It was once my fortune to have an interview 
 with Mr. Hayward's publisher: a very affable 
 gentleman in a very small office in a shady 
 court off Fleet Street. We had some talk to- 
 gether of the works he issued and the authors 
 who supplied them; and it was strange to hear 
 him talk for all the world as one of our pub- 
 lishers might have talked of one of us, only 
 with a more obliging frankness, so that the 
 private life of these great men was more or 
 less unveiled to me. So and so (he told me, 
 among other things) had demanded an advance 
 upon a novel, had laid out the sum (apparently 
 on spirituous drinks) and refused to finish the 
 work. "We had to put it in the hands of 
 Bracebridge Hemming," said the publisher 
 with a chuckle: "he finished it." And then 
 with conviction: "A most reliable author, 
 Bracebridge Hemming." I have no doubt 
 the name is new to the reader; it was not so to 
 me. Among these great men of the dust, there 
 is a touching ambition which punishes itself; 
 not content with such glory as comes to them, 
 they long for the glory of being bound — long to 
 invade, between six boards, the homes of that 
 aristocracy whose manners they so often find 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 145 
 
 occasion to expose; and sometimes (once in a 
 long lifetime) the gods give them this also, and 
 they appear in the orthodox three volumes, 
 and are fleered at in the critical press, and lie 
 quite unread in circulating libraries. One such 
 work came in my mind: The Bondage of Bran- 
 don, by Bracebridge Hemming. I had not 
 found much pleasure in the volumes; but I was 
 the more glad to think that Mr. Hemming's 
 name was quite a household word, and himself 
 quoted for "a reliable author," in his own liter- 
 ary circles. 
 
 On my way westward from this interview, I 
 was aware of a first floor in Fleet Street rigged 
 up with wire window-blinds, brass straps, and 
 gilt lettering: Office for the sale of the works of 
 Pierce Egan. "Ay, Mr. Egan," thought I, 
 "and have you an office all to yourself !" And 
 then remembered that he too had once revelled 
 in three volumes: The Flower of the Flock the 
 book was called, not without pathos for the 
 considerate mind; but even the flower of Egan's 
 flock was not good enough for the critics or the 
 circulating libraries, so that I purchased my 
 own copy, quite unread, for three shillings at a 
 railway bookstall. Poor dogs, I thought, what 
 ails you, that you should have the desire of 
 this fictitious upper popularity, made by hack 
 journalists and countersigned by yawning girls? 
 
i 4 6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Yours is the more true. Your butcher, the 
 landlady at your seaside lodgings — if you can 
 afford that indulgence, the barmaid whom you 
 doubtless court, even the Rates and Taxes that 
 besiege your door, have actually read your 
 tales and actually know your names. There 
 was a waiter once (or so the story goes) who 
 knew not the name of Tennyson: that of 
 Hemming perhaps had brought the light into 
 his eyes, or Viles perhaps, or Errym, or the 
 great J. F. Smith, or the unutterable Reynolds, 
 to whom even here I must deny his capitals. — 
 Fancy, if you can (thought I), that I languish 
 under the reverse of your complaint; and being 
 an upper-class author, bound and criticised, 
 long for the penny number and the weekly 
 woodcut ! 
 
 Well, I know that glory now. I have tried 
 and on the whole I have failed: just as Egan 
 and Hemming failed in the circulating libraries. 
 It is my consolation that Charles Reade nearly 
 wrecked that valuable property the London 
 Journal, which must instantly fall back on Mr. 
 Egan; and the king of us all, George Meredith, 
 once staggered the circulation of a weekly news- 
 paper. A servant-maid used to come and boast 
 when she had read another chapter of Treasure 
 Island: that any pleasure should attend the 
 exercise never crossed her thoughts. The same 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 147 
 
 tale, in a penny paper of a high class, was 
 mighty coldly looked upon; by the delicate 
 test of the correspondence column, I could see 
 I was far to leeward; and there was one giant 
 on the staff (a man with some talent, when he 
 chose to use it) with whom I very early per- 
 ceived it was in vain to rival. Yet I was thought 
 well of on my penny paper for two reasons: 
 one that the publisher was bent on raising the 
 standard — a difficult enterprise in which he has 
 to a great extent succeeded; the other, because 
 (like Bracebridge Hemming) I was "a reliable 
 author." For our great men of the dust are 
 apt to be behind with copy. 
 
 Ill 
 
 How I came to be such a student of our 
 penny press, demands perhaps some explana- 
 tion. I was brought up on CasselVs Family 
 Paper; but the lady who was kind enough to 
 read the tales aloud to me was subject to sharp 
 attacks of conscience. She took the Family 
 Paper on confidence; the tales it contained being 
 Family Tales, not novels. But every now and 
 then, something would occur to alarm her 
 finer sense; she would express a well-grounded 
 fear that the current fiction was "going to turn 
 out a Regular Novel"; and the family paper, 
 
148 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 with my pious approval, would be dropped. 
 Yet neither she nor I were wholly stoical; and 
 when Saturday came round, we would study 
 the windows of the stationer and try to fish out 
 of subsequent woodcuts and their legends the 
 further adventures of our favourites. Many 
 points are here suggested for the casuist; 
 definitions of the Regular Novel and the Fam- 
 ily Tale are to be desired; and quite a paper 
 might be written on the relative merit of read- 
 ing a fiction outright and lusting after it at the 
 stationer's window. The experience at least 
 had a great effect upon my childhood. This 
 inexpensive pleasure mastered me. Each new 
 Saturday I would go from one newsvender's 
 window to another's, till I was master of the 
 weekly gallery and had thoroughly digested 
 "The Baronet Unmasked," "So and so ap- 
 proaching the Mysterious House," "The Dis- 
 covery of the Dead Body in the Blue Marl 
 Pit," "Dr. Vargas Removing the Senseless Body 
 of Fair Lilias," and whatever other snatch of 
 unknown story and glimpse of unknown char- 
 acters that gallery afforded. I do not know 
 that I ever enjoyed fiction more; those books 
 that we have (in such a way) avoided reading, 
 are all so excellently written! And in early 
 years, we take a book for its material, and act 
 as our own artists, keenly realising that which 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 149 
 
 pleases us, leaving the rest aside. I never sup- 
 posed that a book was to command me until, one 
 disastrous day of storm, the heaven full of tur- 
 bulent vapours, the streets full of the squalling 
 of the gale, the windows resounding under 
 bucketfuls of rain, my mother read aloud to me 
 Macbeth. I cannot say I thought the experi- 
 ence agreeable; I far preferred the ditch-water 
 stories that a child could dip and skip and doze 
 over, stealing at times materials for play; it was 
 something new and shocking to be thus ravished 
 by a giant, and I shrank under the brutal grasp. 
 But the spot in memory is still sensitive; nor do 
 I ever read that tragedy but I hear the gale 
 howling up the valley of the Leith. 
 
 All this while, I would never buy upon my 
 own account; pence were scarce, conscience 
 busy; and I would study the pictures and dip 
 into the exposed columns, but not buy. My 
 fall was brought about by a tpily romantic 
 incident. Perhaps the reader knows Neidpath 
 Castle, where it stands, bosomed in hills, on a 
 green promontory; Tweed at its base running 
 through all the gamut of a busy river, from the 
 pouring shallow to the brown pool. In the 
 days when I was thereabout, and that part of 
 the earth was made a heaven to me by many 
 things now lost, by boats, and bathing, and the 
 fascination of streams, and the delights of 
 
150 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 comradeship, and those (surely the prettiest 
 and simplest) of a boy and a girl romance — in 
 those days of Arcady there dwelt in the upper 
 story of the castle one whom I believe to have 
 been gamekeeper on the estate. The rest of the 
 place stood open to incursive urchins; and 
 there, in a deserted chamber, we found some 
 half-a-dozen numbers of Black Bess, or the 
 Knight of the Road, a work by Edward Viles. 
 So far as we were aware, no one had visited that 
 chamber (which was in a turret) since Lambert 
 blew in the doors of the fortress with con- 
 tumelious English cannon. Yet it could hardly 
 have been Lambert (in whatever hurry of mili- 
 tary operations) who had left these samples of 
 romance; and the idea that the gamekeeper 
 had anything to do with them was one that we 
 discouraged. Well, the offence is now covered 
 by prescription; we took them away; and in 
 the shade of a contiguous fir-wood, lying on 
 blaeberries, I made my first acquaintance with 
 the art of Mr. Viles. From this author, I passed 
 on to Malcolm J. Errym (the name, to my 
 present scrutiny, suggesting an anagram on 
 Merry), author of Edith the Captive, The Trea- 
 sures of St. Mark, A Mystery in Scarlet, George 
 Barrington, Sea-drift, Townsend the Runner, and 
 a variety of other well-named romances. Mem- 
 ory may play me false, but I believe there was 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 151 
 
 a kind of merit about Errym. The Mystery in 
 Scarlet runs in my mind to this day; and if 
 any hunter after autographs (and I think the 
 world is full of such) can lay his hands on a 
 copy even imperfect, and will send it to me in 
 the care of Messrs. Scribner, my gratitude (the 
 muse consenting) will even drop into poetry. 
 For I have a curiosity to know what the Mys- 
 tery in Scarlet was, and to renew acquaintance 
 with King George and his valet Norris, who 
 were the chief figures in the work and may be 
 said to have risen in every page superior to 
 history and the ten commandments. Hence I 
 passed on to Mr. Egan, whom I trust the 
 reader does not confuse with the author of 
 Tom and Jerry; the two are quite distinct, 
 though I have sometimes suspected they were 
 father and son. I never enjoyed Egan as I did 
 Errym; but this was possibly a want of taste, 
 and Egan would do. Thence again I was 
 suddenly brought face to face with Mr. Rey- 
 nolds. A school-fellow, acquainted with my 
 debasing tastes, supplied me with The Mys- 
 teries of London, and I fell back revolted. The 
 same school-fellow (who seems to have been a 
 devil of a fellow) supplied me about the same 
 time with one of those contributions to litera- 
 ture (and even to art) from which the name of 
 the publisher is modestly withheld. It was a 
 
152 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 far more respectable work than The Mysteries 
 of London. J. F. Smith when I was a child, 
 Errym when I was a boy, Hayward when I 
 had attained to man's estate, these I read for 
 pleasure; the others, down to Sylvanus Cobb, 
 I have made it my business to know (as far as 
 my endurance would support me) from a sin- 
 cere interest in human nature and the art of 
 letters. 
 
 IV 
 
 What kind of talent is required to please 
 this mighty public? that was my first question, 
 and was soon amended with the words, "if 
 any." J. F. Smith was a man of undeniable 
 talent, Errym and Hayward have a certain 
 spirit, and even in Egan the very tender might 
 recognise the rudiments of a sort of literary 
 gift; but the cases on the other side are quite 
 conclusive. Take Hemming, or the dull ruffian 
 Reynolds, or Sylvanus Cobb, of whom perhaps 
 I have only seen unfortunate examples — they 
 seem not to have the talents of a rabbit, and 
 why anyone should read them is a thing that 
 passes wonder. A plain-spoken and possibly 
 high- thinking critic might here perhaps return 
 upon me with my own expressions. And he 
 would have missed the point. For I and my 
 fellows have no such popularity to be accounted 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 153 
 
 for. The reputation of an upper-class author 
 is made for him at dinner-tables and nursed in 
 newspaper paragraphs, and when all is done, 
 amounts to no great matter. We call it popu- 
 larity, surely in a pleasant error. A flippant 
 writer in the Saturday Review expressed a doubt 
 if I had ever cherished a "genteel" illusion; in 
 truth I never had many, but this was one — 
 and I have lost it. Once I took the literary au- 
 thor at his own esteem; I behold him now like 
 one of those gentlemen who read their own MS. 
 descriptive poetry aloud to wife and babes 
 around the evening hearth; addressing a mere 
 parlour coterie and quite unknown to the great 
 world outside the villa windows. At such 
 pigmy reputation, Reynolds, or Cobb, or Mrs. 
 Southworih can afford to smile. By spontane- 
 ous public vote, at a cry from the unorganic 
 masses, these great ones of the dust were 
 laurelled. And for what? 
 
 Ay, there is the question: For what? How 
 is this great honour gained ? Many things have 
 been suggested. The people (it has been said) 
 like rapid narrative. If so, the taste is recent, 
 for both Smith and Egan were leisurely writers. 
 It has been said they like incident, not char- 
 acter. I am not so sure. G. P. R. James was 
 an upper-class author, J. F. Smith a penny- 
 pressman; the two are in some ways not unlike; 
 
154 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 but — here is the curiosity — James made far 
 the better story, Smith was far the more suc- 
 cessful with his characters. Each (to bring the 
 parallel home) wrote a novel called The Step- 
 mother; each introduced a pair of old maids; 
 and let anyone study the result! James's 
 Stepmother is a capital tale, but Smith's old 
 maids are like Trollope at his best. It is said 
 again that the people like crime. Certainly 
 they do. But the great ones of the dust have 
 no monopoly of that, and their less fortunate 
 rivals hammer away at murder and abduction 
 unapplauded. 
 
 I return to linger about my seaman on the 
 Atlantic liner. I shall be told he is exceptional. 
 I am tempted to think, on the other hand, that 
 he may be normal. The critical attitude, 
 whether to books or life — how if that were the 
 true exception? How if Tom Holt's Log, sur- 
 reptitiously perused by a harbour-side, had been 
 the means of sending my mariner to sea ? How 
 if he were still unconsciously expecting the 
 Tom Holt part of the business to begin — per- 
 haps to-morrow? How, even, if he had never 
 yet awakened to the discrepancy between that 
 singular picture and the facts? Let us take 
 another instance. The Young Ladies' Journal is 
 an elegant miscellany which I have frequently 
 observed in the possession of the barmaid. In 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 155 
 
 a lone house on a moorland, I was once supplied 
 with quite a considerable file of this production 
 and (the weather being violent) devoutly read it. 
 The tales were not ill done; they were well 
 abreast of the average tale in a circulating li- 
 brary; there was only one difference, only one 
 thing to remind me I was in the land of penny 
 numbers instead of the parish of three volumes: 
 Disguise it as the authors pleased (and they 
 showed ingenuity in doing so) it was always 
 the same tale they must relate: the tale of a 
 poor girl ultimately married to a peer of the 
 realm or (at the worst) a baronet. The circum- 
 stance is not common in life; but how familiar 
 to the musings of the barmaid ! The tales were 
 not true to what men see; they were true to 
 what the readers dreamed. 
 
 Let us try to remember how fancy works in 
 children; with what selective partiality it reads, 
 leaving often the bulk of the book unrealised, 
 but fixing on the rest and living it; and what a 
 passionate impotence it shows — what power of 
 adoption, what weakness to create. It seems 
 to be not much otherwise with uneducated 
 readers. They long, not to enter into the lives 
 of others, but to behold themselves in changed 
 situations, ardently but impotently precon- 
 ceived. The imagination (save the mark!) of 
 the popular author here comes to the rescue, 
 
i 5 6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 supplies some body of circumstance to these 
 phantom aspirations, and conducts the readers 
 where they will. Where they will: that is the 
 point; elsewhere they will not follow. When I 
 was a child, if I came on a book in which the 
 characters wore armour, it fell from my hand; 
 I had no criterion of merit, simply that one 
 decisive taste, that my fancy refused to linger 
 in the middle ages. And the mind of the un- 
 educated reader is mailed with similar restric- 
 tions. So it is that we must account for a thing 
 otherwise unaccountable; the popularity of 
 some of these great ones of the dust. In de- 
 fect of any other gift, they have instinctive 
 sympathy with the popular mind. They can 
 thus supply to the shop-girl and the shoe-black 
 vesture cut to the pattern of their naked fancies, 
 and furnish them with welcome scenery and 
 properties for autobiographical romancing. 
 
 Even in readers of an upper class, we may 
 perceive the traces of a similar hesitation; even 
 for them, a writer may be too exotic. The 
 villain, even the heroine, may be a Feejee isl- 
 ander, but only on condition the hero is one 
 of ourselves. It is pretty to see the thing re- 
 versed in the Arabian tale (Torrens or Burton — 
 the tale is omitted in popular editions) where 
 the Moslem hero carries off the Christian 
 amazon; and in the exogamous romance, there 
 
POPULAR AUTHORS 157 
 
 lies interred a good deal of human history and 
 human nature. But the question of exogamy 
 is foreign to the purpose. Enough that we are 
 not readily pleased without a character of our 
 own race and language; so that, when the scene 
 of a romance is laid on any distant soil, we look 
 with eagerness and confidence for the coming 
 of the English traveller. With the readers of 
 the penny-press, the thing goes further. Burn- 
 ing as they are to penetrate into the homes of 
 the peerage, they must still be conducted there 
 by some character of their own class, into whose 
 person they cheerfully migrate for the time of 
 reading. Hence the poor governesses supplied 
 in the Young Ladies 9 Journal. Hence these 
 dreary virtuous ouvriers and ouvrieres of Xavier 
 de Montepin. He can do nothing with them; 
 and he is far too clever not to be aware of that. 
 When he writes for the Figaro, he discards these 
 venerable puppets and doubtless glories in 
 their absence; but so soon as he must address 
 the great audience of the half-penny journal, 
 out come the puppets, and are furbished up, 
 and take to drink again, and are once more re- 
 claimed, and once more falsely accused. See 
 them for what they are — Montepin's decoys; 
 without these he could not make his public feel 
 at home in the houses of the fraudulent bankers 
 and the wicked dukes. 
 
158 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 The reader, it has been said, migrates into 
 such characters for the time of reading; under 
 their name escapes the narrow prison of the 
 individual career, and sates his avidity for other 
 lives. To what extent he ever emigrates again, 
 and how far the fancied careers react upon 
 the true one, it would fill another paper to de- 
 bate. But the case of my sailor shows their 
 grave importance. "Tom Holt does not apply 
 to me," thinks our dully-imaginative boy by 
 the harbour-side, "for I am not a sailor. But 
 if I go to sea it will apply completely. ,, And 
 he does go to sea. He lives surrounded by the 
 fact, and does not observe it. He cannot real- 
 ise, he cannot make a tale of his own life; which 
 crumbles in discrete impressions even as he 
 lives it, and slips between the fingers of his 
 memory like sand. It is not this that he con- 
 siders in his rare hours of rumination, but that 
 other life, which was all lit up for him by the 
 humble talent of a Hayward — that other life 
 which, God knows, perhaps he still believes 
 that he is leading — the life of Tom Holt. 
 
X 
 
 SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 
 
 To make a character at all — so to select, so 
 to describe a few acts, a few speeches, perhaps 
 (though this is quite superfluous) a few details 
 of physical appearance, as that these shall all 
 cohere and strike in the readers mind a com- 
 mon note of personality — there is no more deli- 
 cate enterprise, success is nowhere less compre- 
 hensible than here. We meet a man, we find 
 his talk to have been racy; and yet if every 
 word were taken down by shorthand, we should 
 stand amazed at its essential insignificance. 
 Physical presence, the speaking eye, the in- 
 imitable commentary of the voice, it was in 
 these the spell resided; and these are all ex- 
 cluded from the pages of the novel. There is 
 one writer of fiction whom I have the advantage 
 of knowing; and he confesses to me that his 
 success in this matter (small though it be) is 
 quite surprising to himself. "In one of my 
 books," he writes, "and in one only, the char- 
 acters took the bit in their mouth; all at once, 
 
 Copyright, 1888, 1895, by Charles Scribner's Sons. 
 i59 
 
i6o LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 they became detached from the flat paper, they 
 turned their backs on me and walked off bodily; 
 and from that time, my task was stenographic — 
 it was they who spoke, it was they who wrote 
 the remainder of the story. When this miracle 
 of genesis occurred, I was thrilled with joyous 
 surprise; I felt a certain awe — shall we call it 
 superstitious? And yet how small a miracle it 
 was; with what a partial life were my char- 
 acters endowed; and when all was said, how 
 little did I know of them! It was a form of 
 words that they supplied me with; it was in a 
 form of words that they consisted; beyond and 
 behind was nothing." The limitation, which 
 this writer felt and which he seems to have 
 deplored, can be remarked in the work of even 
 literary princes. I think it was Hazlitt who 
 declared that, if the names were dropped at 
 press, he could restore any speech in Shakespeare 
 to the proper speaker; and I dare say we could 
 all pick out the words of Nym or Pistol, Caius 
 or Evans; but not even Hazlitt could do the 
 like for the great leading characters, who yet are 
 cast in a more delicate mould, and appear before 
 us far more subtly and far more fully differen- 
 tiated, than these easy-going ventriloquial pup- 
 pets. It is just when the obvious expedients of 
 the barrel-organ vocabulary, the droll mispro- 
 nunciation or the racy dialect, are laid aside, 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 161 
 
 that the true masterpieces are wrought (it 
 would seem) from nothing. Hamlet speaks in 
 character, I potently believe it, and yet see not 
 how. He speaks at least as no man ever spoke 
 in life, and very much as many other heroes do 
 in the same volume; now uttering the noblest 
 verse, now prose of the most cunning workman- 
 ship; clothing his opinions throughout in that 
 amazing dialect, Shakespearese. The opinions 
 themselves, again, though they are true and 
 forcible and reinforced with excellent images, are 
 not peculiar either to Hamlet, or to any man or 
 class or period; in their admirable generality of 
 appeal resides their merit; they might figure, 
 and they would be applauded, in almost any 
 play and in the mouth of almost any noble and 
 considerate character. The only hint that is 
 given as to his physical man — I speak for myself 
 — is merely shocking, seems merely erroneous, 
 and is perhaps best explained away upon the 
 theory that Shakespeare had Burbadge more 
 directly in his eye than Hamlet. As for what 
 the Prince does and what he refrains from do- 
 ing, all acts and passions are strangely imper- 
 sonal. A thousand characters, as different 
 among themselves as night from day, should 
 yet, under the like stress of circumstance, have 
 trodden punctually in the footprints of Hamlet 
 and each other. Have you read Andre Cor- 
 
i62 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 nelis t in which M. Bourget handled over again 
 but yesterday the theme of Hamlet, even as 
 Godwin had already rehandled part of it in 
 Caleb Williams. You can see the character M. 
 Bourget means with quite sufficient clearness; 
 it is not a masterpiece, but it is adequately in- 
 dicated; and the character is proper to the 
 part, these acts and passions fit him like a 
 glove, he carries the tale, not with so good a 
 grace as Hamlet, but with equal nature. Well, 
 the two personalities are fundamentally dis- 
 tinct: they breathe upon us out of different 
 worlds; in face, in touch, in the subtile atmos- 
 phere by which we recognise an individual, in 
 all that goes to build up a character — or at 
 least that shadowy thing, a character in a book 
 — they are even opposed: the same fate involves 
 them, they behave on the same lines, and they 
 have not one hair in common. What, then, 
 remains of Hamlet? and by what magic does 
 he stand forth in our brains, teres atque rotundus, 
 solid to the touch, a man to praise, to blame, to 
 pity, ay, and to love? 
 
 At bottom, what we hate or love is doubtless 
 some projection of the author; the personal at- 
 mosphere is doubtless his; and when we think 
 we know Hamlet, we know but a side of his 
 creator. It is a good old comfortable doctrine, 
 which our fathers have taken for a pillow, which 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 163 
 
 has served as a cradle for ourselves; and yet, in 
 some of its applications, it brings us face to face 
 with difficulties. I said last month that we 
 could tell a gentleman in a novel. Let us con- 
 tinue to take Hamlet. Manners vary, they in- 
 vert themselves, from age to age; Shakespeare's 
 gentlemen are not quite ours, there is no doubt 
 their talk would raise a flutter in a modern tea- 
 party; but in the old pious phrase, they have 
 the root of the matter. All the most beautiful 
 traits of the gentleman adorn this character of 
 Hamlet: it was the side on which Salvini seized, 
 which he so attractively displayed, with which 
 he led theatres captive; it is the side, I think, 
 by which the Prince endears himself to readers. 
 It is true there is one staggering scene, the great 
 scene with his mother. But we must regard 
 this as the author's lost battle; here it was that 
 Shakespeare failed: what to do with the Queen, 
 how to depict her, how to make Hamlet use 
 her, these (as we know) were his miserable 
 problem; it beat him, he faced it with an in- 
 decision worthy of his hero; he shifted, he 
 shuffled with it; in the end, he may be said to 
 have left his paper blank. One reason why we 
 do not more generally recognise this failure of 
 Shakespeare's is because we have most of us 
 seen the play performed; and managers, by 
 what seems a stroke of art, by what is really 
 
164 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 (I dare say) a fortunate necessity, smuggle the 
 problem out of sight — the play, too, for the 
 matter of that; but the glamour of the foot- 
 lights and the charm of that little strip of 
 fiddlers' heads and elbows, conceal the conjur- 
 ing. This stroke of art (let me call it so) con- 
 sists in casting the Queen as an old woman. 
 Thanks to the footlights and the fiddlers' 
 heads, we never pause to inquire why the King 
 should have pawned his soul for this college- 
 bedmaker in masquerade; and thanks to the 
 absurdity of the whole position, and that un- 
 conscious unchivalry of audiences (ay, and of 
 authors also) to old women, Hamlet's mon- 
 strous conduct passes unobserved or unresented. 
 Were the Queen cast as she should be, a woman 
 still young and beautiful, had she been coher- 
 ently written by Shakespeare, and were she 
 played with any spirit, even an audience would 
 rise. 
 
 But the scene is simply false, effective on the 
 stage, untrue of any son or any mother; in 
 judging the character of Hamlet, it must be 
 left upon one side; and in all other relations we 
 recognise the Prince for a gentleman. 
 
 Now, if the personal charm of any verbal 
 puppet be indeed only an emanation from its 
 author, may we conclude, since we feel Hamlet 
 to be a gentleman, that Shakespeare was one 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 165 
 
 too? An instructive parallel occurs. There 
 were in England two writers of fiction, con- 
 temporaries, rivals in fame, opposites in char- 
 acter; one descended from a great house, easy, 
 generous, witty, debauched, a favourite in the 
 tap-room and the hunting field, yet withal a 
 man of a high practical intelligence, a distin- 
 guished public servant, an ornament of the 
 bench: the other, sprung from I know not 
 whence — but not from kings — buzzed about by 
 second-rate women, and their fit companion, a 
 tea-bibber in parlours, a man of painful pro- 
 priety, with all the narrowness and much of 
 the animosity of the backshop and the dissent- 
 ing chapel. Take the pair, they seem like types: 
 Fielding, with all his faults, was undeniably a 
 gentleman; Richardson, with all his genius and 
 his virtues, as undeniably was not. And now 
 turn to their works. In Tom Jones, a novel of 
 which the respectable profess that they could 
 stand the dulness if it were not so blackguardly, 
 and the more honest admit they could forgive 
 the blackguardism if it were not so dull — in 
 Tom Jones, with its voluminous bulk and 
 troops of characters, there is no shadow of a 
 gentleman, for Allworthy is only ink and 
 paper. In Joseph Andrews, I fear I have al- 
 ways confined my reading to the parson; and 
 Mr. Adams, delightful as he is, has no pre- 
 
166 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 tension "to the genteel." In Amelia , things 
 get better; all things get better; it is one of the 
 curiosities of literature that Fielding, who wrote 
 one book that was engaging, truthful, kind, and 
 clean, and another book that was dirty, dull, 
 and false, should be spoken of, the world over, 
 as the author of the second and not the first, as 
 the author of Tom Jones, not of Amelia. And 
 in Amelia, sure enough, we find some gentle- 
 folk; Booth and Dr. Harrison will pass in a 
 crowd, I dare not say they will do more. It is 
 very differently that one must speak of Rich- 
 ardson's creations. With Sir Charles Grandison 
 I am unacquainted — there are many impedi- 
 ments in this brief life of man; I have more than 
 once, indeed, reconnoitred the first volume with 
 a flying party, but always decided not to break 
 ground before the place till my siege guns came 
 up; and it's an odd thing — I have been all 
 these years in the field, and that powerful ar- 
 tillery is still miles in the rear. The day it 
 overtakes me, Baron Gibbon's fortress shall 
 be beat about his ears, and my flag be planted 
 on the formidable ramparts of the second part 
 of Faust. Clarendon, too — But why should I 
 continue this confession? Let the reader take 
 up the wondrous tale himself, and run over the 
 books that he has tried, and failed withal, and 
 vowed to try again, and now beholds, as he 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 167 
 
 goes about a library, with secret compunction. 
 As to Sir Charles at least, I have the report of 
 spies; and by the papers in the office of my In- 
 telligence Department, it would seem he was a 
 most accomplished baronet. I am the more 
 ready to credit these reports, because the spies 
 are persons thoroughly accustomed to the busi- 
 ness; and because my own investigation of a 
 kindred quarter of the globe (Clarissa Earlowe) 
 has led me to set a high value on the Richard- 
 sonians. Lovelace — in spite of his abominable 
 misbehaviour — Colonel Morden and my Lord 
 
 M are all gentlemen of undisputed quality. 
 
 They more than pass muster, they excel; they 
 have a gallant, a conspicuous carriage; they 
 roll into the book, four in hand, in gracious at- 
 titudes. The best of Fielding's gentlemen had 
 
 scarce been at their ease in M Hall; Dr. 
 
 Harrison had seemed a plain, honest man, a 
 trifle below his company; and poor Booth (sup- 
 posing him to have served in Colonel Morden's 
 corps and to have travelled in the post-chaise 
 along with his commandant) had been glad to 
 slink away with Mowbray and crack a bottle in 
 the butler's room. 
 
 So that here, on the terms of our theory, we 
 have an odd inversion, tempting to the cynic. 
 
168 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 n * 
 
 Just the other day, there were again two 
 rival novelists in England: Thackeray and 
 Dickens; and the case of the last is, in this con- 
 nection, full of interest. Here was a man and 
 an artist, the most strenuous, one of the most 
 endowed; and for how many years he laboured 
 in vain to create a gentleman! With all his 
 watchfulness of men and manners, with all his 
 fiery industry, with his exquisite native gift of 
 characterisation, with his clear knowledge of 
 what he meant to do, there was yet something 
 lacking. In part after part, novel after novel, 
 a whole menagerie of characters, the good, the 
 bad, the droll and the tragic, came at his beck 
 like slaves about an oriental despot; there was 
 only one who stayed away: the gentleman. If 
 this ill fortune had persisted it might have 
 shaken man's belief in art and industry. But 
 years were given and courage was continued to 
 the indefatigable artist; and at length, after so 
 many and such lamentable failures, success be- 
 gan to attend upon his arms. David Copper- 
 field scrambled through on hands and knees; it 
 was at least a negative success; and Dickens, 
 keenly alive to all he did, must have heaved a 
 sigh of infinite relief. Then came the evil days, 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 169 
 
 the days of Donibey and Dorrit, from which 
 the lover of Dickens willingly averts his eyes; 
 and when that temporary blight had passed 
 away, and the artist began with a more reso- 
 lute arm to reap the aftermath of his genius, we 
 find him able to create a Carton, a Wrayburn, 
 a Twemlow. No mistake about these three; 
 they are all gentlemen: the sottish Carton, the 
 effete Twemlow, the insolent Wrayburn, all 
 have doubled the cape. 
 
 There were never in any book three perfect 
 sentences on end; there was never a character 
 in any volume but it somewhere tripped. We 
 are like dancing dogs and preaching women: 
 the wonder is not that we should do it well, 
 but that we should do it at all. And Wray- 
 burn, I am free to admit, comes on one oc- 
 casion to the dust. I mean, of course, the 
 scene with the old Jew. I will make you a pres- 
 ent of the Jew for a card-board figure; but that 
 is neither here nor there: the ineffectuality of 
 the one presentment does not mitigate the 
 grossness, the baseness, the inhumanity of the 
 other. In this scene, and in one other (if I re- 
 member aright) where it is echoed, Wrayburn 
 combines the wit of the omnibus-cad with the 
 good feeling of the Andaman Islander: in all 
 the remainder of the book, throughout a thou- 
 sand perils, playing (you would say) with diffi- 
 
iyo LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 culty, the author swimmingly steers his hero 
 on the true course. The error stands by itself, 
 and it is striking to observe the moment of its 
 introduction. It follows immediately upon one 
 of the most dramatic passages in fiction, that 
 in which Bradley Headstone barks his knuckles 
 on the church-yard wall. To handle Bradley 
 (one of Dickens's superlative achievements) were 
 a thing impossible to almost any man but his 
 creator; and even to him, we may be sure, the 
 effort was exhausting. Dickens was a weary 
 man when he had barked the school-master's 
 knuckles, a weary man and an excited; but the 
 tale of bricks had to be finished, the monthly 
 number waited; and under the false inspiration 
 of irritated nerves, the scene of Wrayburn and 
 the Jew was written and sent forth; and there 
 it is, a blot upon the book and a buffet to the 
 reader. 
 
 I make no more account of this passage than 
 of that other in Hamlet: a scene that has broken 
 down, the judicious reader cancels for himself. 
 And the general tenor of Wrayburn, and the 
 whole of Carton and Twemlow, are beyond ex- 
 ception. Here, then, we have a man who found 
 it for years an enterprise beyond his art to 
 draw a gentleman, and who in the end suc- 
 ceeded. Is it because Dickens was not a gentle- 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 171 
 
 man himself that he so often failed? and if 
 so, then how did he succeed at last? Is it be- 
 cause he was a gentleman that he succeeded? 
 and if so, what made him fail? I feel inclined 
 to stop this paper here, after the manner of 
 conundrums, and offer a moderate reward for a 
 solution. But the true answer lies probably 
 deeper than did ever plummet sound. And 
 mine (such as it is) will hardly appear to the 
 reader to disturb the surface. 
 
 These verbal puppets (so to call them once 
 again) are things of a divided parentage: the 
 breath of life may be an emanation from their 
 maker, but they themselves are only strings of 
 words and parts of books; they dwell in, they 
 belong to, literature; convention, technical ar- 
 tifice, technical gusto, the mechanical neces- 
 sities of the art, these are the flesh and blood 
 with which they are invested. If we look only at 
 Carton and Wrayburn, both leading parts, it 
 must strike us at once that both are most am- 
 bitiously attempted; that Dickens was not con- 
 tent to draw a hero and a gentleman plainly 
 and quietly; that, after all his ill-success, he 
 must still handicap himself upon these fresh 
 adventures, and make Carton a sot, and some- 
 times a cantankerous sot, and Wrayburn in- 
 solent to the verge, and sometimes beyond the 
 
172 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 verge, of what is pardonable. A moment's 
 thought will show us this was in the nature of 
 his genius, and a part of his literary method. 
 His fierce intensity of design was not to be 
 slaked with any academic portraiture; not all 
 the arts of individualisation could perfectly 
 content him; he must still seek something more 
 definite and more express than nature. All 
 artists, it may be properly argued, do the like; 
 it is their method to discard the middling and 
 the insignificant, to disengage the charactered 
 and the precise. But it is only a class of artists 
 that pursue so singly the note of personality; 
 and is it not possible that such a preoccupation 
 may disable men from representing gentlefolk? 
 The gentleman passes in the stream of the 
 day's manners, inconspicuous. The lover of the 
 individual may find him scarce worth drawing. 
 And even if he draw him, on what will his at- 
 tention centre but just upon those points in 
 which his model exceeds or falls short of his 
 subdued ideal — but just upon those points in 
 which the gentleman is not genteel? Dickens, 
 in an hour of irritated nerves, and under the 
 pressure of the monthly number, defaced his 
 Wrayburn. Observe what he sacrifices. The 
 ruling passion strong in his hour of weakness, 
 he sacrifices dignity, decency, the essential 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 173 
 
 human beauties of his hero; he still preserves 
 the dialect, the shrill note of personality, the 
 mark of identification. Thackeray, under the 
 strain of the same villainous system, would 
 have fallen upon the other side; his gentleman 
 would still have been a gentleman, he would 
 have only ceased to be an individual figure. 
 
 There are incompatible ambitions. You can- 
 not paint a Vandyke and keep it a Franz Hals. 
 
 Ill 
 
 I have preferred to conclude my inconclu- 
 sive argument before I touched on Thackeray. 
 Personally, he scarce appeals to us as the ideal 
 gentleman; if there were nothing else, per- 
 petual nosing after snobbery at least suggests 
 the snob; but about the men he made, there 
 can be no such question of reserve. And whether 
 because he was himself a gentleman in a very 
 high degree, or because his methods were in a 
 very high degree suited to this class of work, or 
 from the common operation of both causes, a 
 gentleman came from his pen by the gift of 
 nature. He could draw him as a character 
 part, full of pettiness, tainted with vulgarity, 
 and yet still a gentleman, in the inimitable 
 Major Pendennis. He could draw him as the 
 
i 7 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 full-blown hero in Colonel Esmond. He could 
 draw him — the next thing to the work of God 
 — human and true and noble and frail, in Col- 
 onel Newcome. If the art of being a gentle- 
 man were forgotten, like the art of staining 
 glass, it might be learned anew from that one 
 character. It is learned there, I dare to say, 
 daily. Mr. Andrew Lang, in a graceful attitude 
 of melancholy, denies the influence of books. I 
 think he forgets his philosophy; for surely there 
 go two elements to the determination of con- 
 duct: heredity, and experience — that which is 
 given to us at birth, that which is added and 
 cancelled in the course of life; and what experi- 
 ence is more formative, what step of life is more 
 efficient, than to know and weep for Colonel 
 Newcome? And surely he forgets himself; for 
 I call to mind other pages, beautiful pages, from 
 which it may be gathered that the language of 
 the Newcomes sings still in his memory, and its 
 gospel is sometimes not forgotten. I call it a 
 gospel: it is the best I know. Error and suffer- 
 ing and failure and death, those calamities that 
 our contemporaries paint upon so vast a scale 
 — they are all depicted here, but in a more true 
 proportion. We may return, before this pic- 
 ture, to the simple and ancient faith. We may 
 be sure (although we know not why) that we 
 
SOME GENTLEMEN IN FICTION 175 
 
 give our lives, like coral insects, to build up in- 
 sensibly, in the twilight of the seas of time, the 
 reef of righteousness. And we may be sure 
 (although we see not how) it is a thing worth 
 doing. 
 
XI 
 
 A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 
 
 The past is all of one texture — whether 
 feigned or suffered — whether acted out in three 
 dimensions, or only witnessed in that small 
 theatre of the brain which we keep brightly 
 lighted all night long, after the jets are down, 
 and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the 
 remainder of the body. There is no distinction 
 on the face of our experiences; one is vivid in- 
 deed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another 
 agonising to remember; but which of them is 
 what we call true, and which a dream, there is 
 not one hair to prove. The past stands on a 
 precarious footing; another straw split in the 
 field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it. 
 There is scarce a family that can count four 
 generations but lays a claim to some dormant 
 title or some castle and estate: a claim not 
 prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering 
 to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle 
 hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet 
 less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper 
 story-book fashion) in the secret drawer of an 
 176 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 177 
 
 old ebony secretary, and restore your family to 
 its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a 
 certain West Indian islet (not far from St. 
 Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my 
 young ears) which was once ours, and is now 
 unjustly someone else's, and for that matter 
 (in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth 
 anything to anybody. I do not say that these 
 revolutions are likely; only no man can deny 
 that they are possible; and the past, on the 
 other hand, is lost forever: our old days and 
 deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in 
 which these scenes were acted, all brought down 
 to the same faint residuum as a last night's 
 dream, to some incontinuous images, and an 
 echo in the chambers of the brain. Not an 
 hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye, can 
 we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And 
 yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little 
 thread of memory that we trail behind us broken 
 at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity 
 should we be left ! for we only guide ourselves, 
 and only know ourselves, by these air-painted 
 pictures of the past. 
 
 Upon these grounds, there are some among us 
 who claimed to have lived longer and more 
 richly than their neighbours; when they lay 
 asleep they claim they were still active; and 
 among the treasures of memory that all men 
 
178 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 review for their amusement, these count in no 
 second place the harvests of their dreams. 
 There is one of this kind whom I have in my 
 eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough 
 to be described. He was from a child an ardent 
 and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a 
 touch of fever at night, and the room swelled 
 and shrank, and his clothes, hanging on a nail, 
 now loomed up instant to the bigness of a 
 church, and now drew away into a horror of 
 infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor 
 soul was very well aware of what must follow, 
 and struggled hard against the approaches of 
 that slumber which was the beginning of sor- 
 rows. But his struggles were in vain; sooner or 
 later the night-hag would have him by the 
 throat, and pluck him, strangling and scream- 
 ing, from his sleep. His dreams were at times 
 commonplace enough, at times very strange: at 
 times they were almost formless, he would be 
 haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite 
 than a certain hue of brown, which he did not 
 mind in the least while he was awake, but 
 feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at 
 times, again, they took on every detail of cir- 
 cumstance, as when once he supposed he must 
 swallow the populous world, and awoke scream- 
 ing with the horror of the thought. The two 
 chief troubles of his very narrow existence — the 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 179 
 
 practical and everyday trouble of school tasks 
 and the ultimate and airy one of hell and judg- 
 ment — were often confounded together into one 
 appalling nightmare. He seemed to himself to 
 stand before the Great White Throne; he was 
 called on, poor little devil, to recite some form 
 of words, on which his destiny depended; his 
 tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell gaped 
 for him; and he would awake, clinging to the 
 curtain-rod with his knees to his chin. 
 
 These were extremely poor experiences, on the 
 whole; and at that time of life my dreamer 
 would have very willingly parted with his 
 power of dreams. But presently, in the course 
 of his growth, the cries and physical contortions 
 passed away, seemingly forever; his visions 
 were still for the most part miserable, but they 
 were more constantly supported; and he would 
 awake with no more extreme symptom than a 
 flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and 
 the speechless midnight fear. His dreams, too, 
 as befitted a mind better stocked with par- 
 ticulars, became more circumstantial, and had 
 more the air and continuity of life. The look 
 of the world beginning to take hold on his at- 
 tention, scenery came to play a part in his 
 sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts, so 
 that he would take long, uneventful journeys 
 and see strange towns and beautiful places as 
 
180 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, 
 an odd taste that he had for the Georgian cos- 
 tume and for stories laid in that period of Eng- 
 lish history, began to rule the features of his 
 dreams; so that he masqueraded there in a 
 three-cornered hat, and was much engaged 
 with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for 
 bed and that for breakfast. About the same 
 time, he began to read in his dreams — tales, for 
 the most part, and for the most part after the 
 manner of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly 
 more vivid and moving than any printed book, 
 that he has ever since been malcontent with 
 literature. 
 
 And then, while he was yet a student, there 
 came to him a dream-adventure which he has 
 no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to say, 
 to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double 
 life — one of the day, one of the night — one that 
 he had every reason to believe was the true 
 one, another that he had no means of proving 
 to be false. I should have said he studied, or 
 was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College, 
 which (it may be supposed) was how I came to 
 know him. Well, in his dream life, he passed a 
 long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in his 
 mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous 
 malformations and the abhorred dexterity of 
 surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 181 
 
 came forth into the South Bridge, turned up the 
 High Street, and entered the door of a tall land, 
 at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge. 
 All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the 
 stairs, stair after stair in endless series, and at 
 every second flight a flaring lamp with a re- 
 flector. All night long, he brushed by single 
 persons passing downward — beggarly women of 
 the street, great, weary, muddy labourers, poor 
 scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women — 
 but all drowsy and weary like himself, and all 
 single, and all brushing against him as they 
 passed. In the end, out of a northern window, 
 he would see day beginning to whiten over the 
 Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and 
 in a breath be back again upon the streets, in 
 his wet clothes, in the wet, haggard dawn, 
 trudging to another day of monstrosities and 
 operations. Time went quicker in the life of 
 dreams, some seven hours (as near as he can 
 guess) to one; and it went, besides, more in- 
 tensely, so that the gloom of these fancied ex- 
 periences clouded the day, and he had not 
 shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie 
 down and to renew them. I cannot tell how 
 long it was that he endured this discipline; but 
 it was long enough to leave a great black blot 
 upon his memory, long enough to send him, 
 trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain 
 
182 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 doctor; whereupon with a simple draught he was 
 restored to the common lot of man. 
 
 The poor gentleman has since been troubled 
 by nothing of the sort; indeed, his nights were 
 for some while like other men's, now blank, now 
 chequered with dreams, and these sometimes 
 charming, sometimes appalling, but except for 
 an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary 
 kind. I will just note one of these occasions, 
 ere I pass on to what makes my dreamer truly 
 interesting. It seemed to him that he was in 
 the first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room 
 showed some poor efforts at gentility, a carpet 
 on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall; 
 but, for all these refinements, there was no mis- 
 taking he was in a moorland place, among 
 hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He 
 looked down from the window upon a bare 
 farmyard, that seemed to have been long dis- 
 used. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the 
 world. There was no sign of the farm-folk or 
 of any live stock, save for an old, brown, curly 
 dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in 
 against the wall of the house and seemed to be 
 dozing. Something about this dog disquieted 
 the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for 
 the beast looked right enough — indeed, he was 
 so old and dull and dusty and broken-down, 
 that he should rather have awakened pity; and 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 183 
 
 yet the conviction came and grew upon the 
 dreamer that this was no proper dog at all, but 
 something hellish. A great many dozing sum- 
 mer flies hummed about the yard; and presently 
 the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly in his 
 open palm, carried it to his mouth like an ape, 
 and looking suddenly up at the dreamer in the 
 window, winked to him with one eye. The 
 dream went on, it matters not how it went; it 
 was a good dream as dreams go; but there was 
 nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish 
 brown dog. And the point of interest for me 
 lies partly in that very fact: that having found 
 so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer 
 should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit 
 end and fall back on indescribable noises and 
 indiscriminate horrors. It would be different 
 now; he knows his business better ! 
 
 For, to approach at last the point: This hon- 
 est fellow had long been in the custom of set- 
 ting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his 
 father before him; but these were irresponsible 
 inventions, told for the teller's pleasure, with 
 no eye to the crass public or the thwart reviewer: 
 tales where a thread might be dropped, or one 
 adventure quitted for another, on fancy's least 
 suggestion. So that the little people who man- 
 age man's internal theatre had not as yet re- 
 ceived a very rigorous training; and played 
 
184 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 upon their stage like children who should have 
 slipped into the house and found it empty, 
 rather than like drilled actors performing a set 
 piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my 
 dreamer began to turn his former amusement 
 of story- telling to (what is called) account; by 
 which I mean that he began to write and sell 
 his tales. Here was he, and here were the little 
 people who did that part of his business, in 
 quite new conditions. The stories must now 
 be trimmed and pared and set upon all fours, 
 they must run from a beginning to an end and 
 fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the 
 pleasure, in one word, had become a business; 
 and that not only for the dreamer, but for the 
 little people of his theatre. These understood 
 the change as well as he. When he lay down to 
 prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought 
 amusement, but printable and profitable tales; 
 and after he had dozed off in his box-seat, his 
 little people continued their evolutions with the 
 same mercantile designs. All other forms of 
 dream deserted him but two: he still occasion- 
 ally reads the most delightful books, he still 
 visits at times the most delightful places; and 
 it is perhaps worthy of note that to these same 
 places, and to one in particular, he returns at 
 intervals of months and years, finding new 
 field-paths, visiting new neighbours, beholding 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 185 
 
 that happy valley under new effects of noon and 
 dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family 
 of visions is quite lost to him: the common, 
 mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the raw- 
 head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to 
 be the child of toasted cheese — these and their 
 like are gone; and, for the most part, whether 
 awake or asleep, he is simply occupied — he or 
 his little people — in consciously making stories 
 for the market. This dreamer (like many other 
 persons) has encountered some trifling vicissi- 
 tudes of fortune. When the bank begins to send 
 letters and the butcher to linger at the back 
 gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a 
 story, for that is his readiest money- winner; and, 
 behold ! at once the little people begin to bestir 
 themselves in the same quest, and labour all 
 night long, and all night long set before him 
 truncheons of tales upon their lighted theatre. 
 No fear of his being frightened now; the flying 
 heart and the frozen scalp are things bygone; 
 applause, growing applause, growing interest, 
 growing exultation in his own cleverness (for 
 he takes all the credit), and at last a jubilant 
 leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I have it, 
 that'll do !" upon his lips: with such and similar 
 emotions he sits at these nocturnal dramas, 
 with such outbreaks, like Claudius in the play, 
 he scatters the performance in the midst. Often 
 
186 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 enough the waking is a disappointment: he has 
 been too deep asleep, as I explain the thing; 
 drowsiness has gained his little people, they 
 have gone stumbling and maundering through 
 their parts; and the play, to the awakened mind, 
 is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet 
 how often have these sleepless Brownies done 
 him honest service, and given him, as he sat 
 idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better 
 tales than he could fashion for himself. 
 
 Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It 
 seemed he was the son of a very rich and 
 wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a 
 most damnable temper. The dreamer (and 
 that was the son) had lived much abroad, on 
 purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length 
 he returned to England, it was to find him 
 married again to a young wife, who was sup- 
 posed to suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. 
 Because of this marriage (as the dreamer in- 
 distinctly understood) it was desirable for 
 father and son to have a meeting; and yet both 
 being proud and both angry, neither would con- 
 descend upon a visit. Meet they did accord- 
 ingly, in a desolate, sandy country by the sea; 
 and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by 
 some intolerable insult, struck down the father 
 dead. No suspicion was aroused; the dead 
 man was found and buried, and the dreamer 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 187 
 
 succeeded to the broad estates, and found him- 
 self installed under the same roof with his 
 father's widow, for whom no provision had been 
 made. These two lived very much alone, as 
 people may after a bereavement, sat down to 
 table together, shared the long evenings, and 
 grew daily better friends; until it seemed to 
 him of a sudden that she was prying about 
 dangerous matters, that she had conceived a 
 notion of his guilt, that she watched him and 
 tried him with questions. He drew back from 
 her company as men draw back from a precipice 
 suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was the 
 attraction that he would drift again and again 
 into the old intimacy, and again and again be 
 startled back by some suggestive question or 
 some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they 
 lived at cross purposes, a life full of broken 
 dialogue, challenging glances, and suppressed 
 passion; until, one day, he saw the woman 
 slipping from the house in a veil, followed her 
 to the station, followed her in the train to the 
 seaside country, and out over the sandhills to 
 the very place where the murder was done. 
 There she began to grope among the bents, he 
 watching her, flat upon his face; and presently 
 she had something in her hand — I cannot re- 
 member what it was, but it was deadly evidence 
 against the dreamer — and as she held it up to 
 
188 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 look at it, perhaps from the shock of the dis- 
 covery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some 
 peril on the brink of the tall sand- wreaths. He 
 had no thought but to spring up and rescue 
 her; and there they stood face to face, she with 
 that deadly matter openly in her hand — his 
 very presence on the spot another link of 
 proof. It was plain she was about to speak, 
 but this was more than he could bear — he could 
 bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his 
 destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial 
 conversation. Arm in arm, they returned to- 
 gether to the train, talking he knew not what, 
 made the journey back in the same carriage, 
 sat down to dinner, and passed the evening in 
 the drawing-room as in the past. But suspense 
 and fear drummed in the dreamer's bosom. 
 "She has not denounced me yet" — so his 
 thoughts ran — "when will she denounce me? 
 Will it be to-morrow?" And it was not to- 
 morrow, nor the next day, nor the next; and 
 their life settled back on the old terms, only 
 that she seemed kinder than before, and that, 
 as for him, the burthen of his suspense and 
 wonder grew daily more unbearable, so that he 
 wasted away like a man with a disease. Once, 
 indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized 
 an occasion when she was abroad, ransacked 
 her room, and at last, hidden away among her 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 189 
 
 jewels, found the damning evidence. There he 
 stood, holding this thing, which was his life, 
 in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at 
 her inconsequent behaviour, that she should 
 seek, and keep, and yet not use it; and then the 
 door opened, and behold herself. So, once 
 more, they stood, eye to eye, with the evidence 
 between them; and once more she raised to 
 him a face brimming with some communication; 
 and once more he shied away from speech and 
 cut her off. But before he left the room, which 
 he had turned upside down, he laid back his 
 death-warrant where he had found it; and at 
 that, her face lighted up. The next thing he 
 heard, she was explaining to her maid, with 
 some ingenious falsehood, the disorder of her 
 things. Flesh and blood could bear the strain 
 no longer; and I think it was the next morning 
 (though chronology is always hazy in the thea- 
 tre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve. 
 They had been breakfasting together in one 
 corner of a great, parqueted, sparely-furnished 
 room of many windows; all the time of the meal 
 she had tortured him with sly allusions; and no 
 sooner were the servants gone, and these two 
 protagonists alone together, than he leaped to 
 his feet. She too sprang up, with a pale face; 
 with a pale face, she heard him as he raved out 
 his complaint: Why did she torture him so? 
 
190 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 she knew all, she knew he was no enemy to her; 
 why did she not denounce him at once? what 
 signified her whole behaviour ? why did she tor- 
 ture him? and yet again, why did she torture 
 him? And when he had done, she fell upon her 
 knees, and with outstretched hands: "Do you 
 not understand ?" she cried. "I love you!" 
 
 Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mer- 
 cantile delight, the dreamer awoke. His mer- 
 cantile delight was not of long endurance; for 
 it soon became plain that in this spirited tale 
 there were unmarketable elements; which is 
 just the reason why you have it here so briefly 
 told. But his wonder has still kept growing; 
 and I think the reader's will also, if he con- 
 sider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak 
 of the little people as of substantive inventors 
 and performers. To the end they had kept 
 their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer 
 (having excellent grounds for valuing his can- 
 dour) that he had no guess whatever at the 
 motive of the woman — the hinge of the whole 
 well-invented plot — until the instant of that 
 highly dramatic declaration. It was not his 
 tale; it was the little people's! And observe: 
 not only was the secret kept, the story was told 
 with really guileful craftsmanship. The con- 
 duct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) 
 psychologically correct, and the emotion aptly 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 191 
 
 graduated up to the surprising climax. I am 
 awake now, and I know this trade; and yet I 
 cannot better it. I am awake, and I live by this 
 business; and yet I could not outdo — could not 
 perhaps equal — that crafty artifice (as of some 
 old, experienced carpenter of plays, some Den- 
 nery or Sardou) by which the same situation is 
 twice presented and the two actors twice 
 brought face to face over the evidence, only 
 once it is in her hand, once in his — and these 
 in their due order, the least dramatic first. 
 The more I think of it, the more I am moved 
 to press upon the world my question: Who are 
 the Little People? They are near connections 
 of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in 
 his financial worries and have an eye to the 
 bank-book; they share plainly in his training; 
 they have plainly learned like him to build the 
 scheme of a considerate story and to arrange 
 emotion in progressive order; only I think they 
 have more talent; and one thing is beyond 
 doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, 
 like a serial, and keep him all the while in igno- 
 rance of where they aim. Who are they, then? 
 and who is the dreamer? 
 
 Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer 
 that, for he is no less a person than myself; — 
 as I might have told you from the beginning, 
 only that the critics murmur over my consis- 
 
i 9 2 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 tent egotism; — and as I am positively forced 
 to tell you now, or I could advance but little 
 farther with my story. s And for the Little Peo- 
 ple, what shall I say they are but just my 
 Brownies, God bless them ! who do one-half 
 my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in 
 all human likelihood, do the rest for me as 
 well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose 
 I do it for myself.* That part which is done 
 while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part be- 
 yond contention; but that which is done when 
 I am up and about is by no means necessarily 
 mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have 
 a hand in it even then. Here is a doubt that 
 much concerns my conscience. For myself — 
 what I call I, my conscience ego, the denizen 
 of the pineal gland unless he has changed his 
 residence since Descartes, the man with the con- 
 science and the variable bank-account, the man 
 with the hat and the boots, and the privilege of 
 voting and not carrying his candidate at the 
 general elections — I am sometimes tempted to 
 suppose he is no story-teller at all, but a crea- 
 ture as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or 
 any cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears 
 in actuality; so that, by that account, the whole 
 of my published fiction should be the single- 
 handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, 
 some unseen collaborator, whom I keep locked 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 193 
 
 in a back garret, while I get all the praise and 
 he but a share (which I cannot prevent him 
 getting) of the pudding. I am an excellent 
 adviser, something like Moliere's servant; I pull 
 back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in 
 the best words and sentences that I can find 
 and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the 
 sitting at the table, which is about the worst of 
 it; and when all is done, I make up the manu- 
 script and pay for the registration; so that, on 
 the whole, I have some claim to share, though 
 not so largely as I do, in the profits of our com- 
 mon enterprise. 
 
 I can but give an instance or so of what part 
 is done sleeping and what part awake, and 
 leave the reader to share what laurels there 
 are, at his own nod, between myself and my 
 collaborators; and to do this I will first take a 
 book that a number of persons have been polite 
 enough to read, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll 
 and Mr. Hyde. I had long been trying to write 
 a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, 
 for that strong sense of man's double being 
 which must at times come in upon and over- 
 whelm the mind of every thinking creature. I 
 had even written one, The Travelling Compan- 
 ion, which was returned by an editor on the 
 plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, 
 and which I burned the other day on the ground 
 
i 9 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 that it was not a work of genius, and that Jekyll 
 had supplanted it. Then came one of those 
 financial fluctuations to which (with an elegant 
 modesty) I have hitherto referred in the third 
 person. For two days I went about racking my 
 brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second 
 night I dreamed the scene at the window, and 
 a scene afterwards split in two, in which Hyde, 
 pursued for some crime, took the powder and 
 underwent the change in the presence of his 
 pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and 
 consciously, although I think I can trace in 
 much of it the manner of my Brownies. The 
 meaning of the tale is therefore mine, and had 
 long pre-existed in my garden of Adonis, and 
 tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I 
 do most of the morality, worse luck ! and my 
 Brownies have not a rudiment of what we call 
 a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine 
 the characters. All that was given me was the 
 matter of three scenes, and the central idea of a 
 ; voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will 
 it be thought ungenerous, after I have been so 
 liberally ladling out praise to my unseen col- 
 laborators, if I here toss them over, bound 
 hand and foot, into the arena of the critics ? For 
 the business of the powders, which so many 
 have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not 
 mine at all but the Brownies'. Of another tale, 
 
A CHAPTER ON DREAMS 195 
 
 in case the reader should have glanced at it, 
 I may say a word : the not very defensible story 
 of Olalla. Here the court, the mother, the 
 mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the 
 meetings on the stair, the broken window, the 
 ugly scene of the bite, were all given me in bulk 
 and detail as I have tried to write them; to 
 this I added only the external scenery (for in 
 my dream I never was beyond the court), the 
 portrait, the characters of Felipe and the 
 priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last 
 pages, such as, alas ! they are. And I may even 
 say that in this case the moral itself was given 
 me; for it arose immediately on a comparison 
 of the mother and the daughter, and from the 
 hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes 
 a parabolic sense is still more undeniably pres- 
 ent in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose 
 my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet 
 in no case with what would possibly be called a 
 moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrow- 
 ness; conveying hints instead of life's larger 
 limitations and that sort of sense which we 
 seem to perceive in the arabesque of time and 
 space. 
 
 For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies 
 are somewhat fantastic, like their stories hot 
 and hot, full of passion and the picturesque, 
 alive with animating incident; and they have 
 
196 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 no prejudice against the supernatural. But the 
 other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining 
 me with a love-story, a little April comedy, 
 which I ought certainly to hand over to the au- 
 thor of A Chance Acquaintance, for he could 
 write it as it should be written, and I am sure 
 (although I mean to try) that I cannot.— But 
 who would have supposed that a Brownie of 
 mine should invent a tale for Mr. Howells? 
 
xn 
 
 ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF 
 STYLE IN LITERATURE * 
 
 There is nothing more disenchanting to man 
 than to be shown the springs and mechanism of 
 any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly 
 on the surface; it is on the surface that we per- 
 ceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; 
 and to pry below is to be appalled by their 
 emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of 
 the strings and pulleys. In a similar way, 
 psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, 
 discovers an abhorrent baldness, but rather 
 from the fault of our analysis than from any 
 poverty native to the mind. And perhaps in 
 aesthetics the reason is the same: those dis- 
 closures which seem fatal to the dignity of art 
 seem so perhaps only in the proportion of our 
 ignorance; and those conscious and uncon- 
 scious artifices which it seems unworthy of the 
 serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the 
 power to trace them to their springs, indications 
 
 * First published in the Contemporary Review, April, 
 1885. 
 
 107 
 
198 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 of a delicacy of the sense finer than we conceive, 
 and hints of ancient harmonies in nature. This 
 ignorance at least is largely irremediable. We 
 shall never learn the affinities of beauty, for 
 they lie too deep in nature and too far back in 
 the mysterious history of man. The amateur, 
 in consequence, will always grudgingly receive 
 details of method, which can be stated but 
 never can wholly be explained; nay, on the 
 principle laid down in "Hudibras," that 
 
 "Still the less they understand, 
 The more they admire the sleight-of-hand," 
 
 many are conscious at each new disclosure of a 
 diminution in the ardour of their pleasure. I 
 must therefore warn that well-known character, 
 the general reader, that I am here embarked 
 upon a most distasteful business: taking down 
 the picture from the wall and looking on the 
 back; and, like the inquiring child, pulling the 
 musical cart to pieces. 
 
 i. Choice of Words. — The art of literature 
 stands apart from among its sisters, because the 
 material in which the literary artist works is the 
 dialect of life; hence, on the one hand, a strange 
 freshness and immediacy of address to the public 
 mind, which is ready prepared to understand 
 it; but hence, on the other, a singular limitation. 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 199 
 
 The sister arts enjoy the use of a plastic and 
 ductile material, like the modeller's clay; litera- 
 ture alone is condemned to work in mosaic with 
 finite and quite rigid words. You have seen 
 these blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a 
 pillar, that a pediment, a third a window or a 
 vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary 
 size and figure that the literary architect is con- 
 demned to design the palace of his art. Nor 
 is this all; for since these blocks, or words, are 
 the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, 
 there are here possible none of those suppres- 
 sions by which other arts obtain relief, con- 
 tinuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no 
 smoothed impasto, no inscrutable shadow, as 
 in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; 
 but every word, phrase, sentence, and para- 
 graph must move in a logical progression, and 
 convey a definite conventional import. 
 
 Now the first merit which attracts in the 
 pages of a good writer, or the talk of a brilliant 
 conversationalist, is the apt choice and contrast 
 of the words employed. It is, indeed, a strange 
 art to take these blocks, rudely conceived for 
 the purpose of the market or the bar, and by 
 tact of application touch them to the finest 
 meanings and distinctions, restore to them 
 their primal energy, wittily shift them to an- 
 other issue, or make of them a drum to rouse 
 
2oo LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 the passions. But though this form of merit is 
 without doubt the most sensible and seizing, 
 it is far from being equally present in all writers. 
 The effect of words in Shakespeare, their singular 
 justice, significance, and poetic charm, is dif- 
 ferent, indeed, from the effect of words in Ad- 
 dison or Fielding. Or, to take an example 
 nearer home, the words in Carlyle seem elec- 
 trified into an energy of lineament, like the 
 faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words 
 in Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, 
 harmonious enough in sound, yet glide from the 
 memory like undistinguished elements in a 
 general effect. But the first class of writers 
 have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a 
 sense in which Addison is superior to Carlyle; 
 a sense in which Cicero is better than Tacitus, 
 in which Voltaire excels Montaigne: it certainly 
 lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in the 
 interest or value of the matter; it lies not in 
 force of intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The 
 three first are but infants to the three second; 
 and yet each, in a particular point of literary 
 art, excels his superior in the whole. What is 
 that point? 
 
 2. The Web. — Literature, although it stands 
 apart by reason of the great destiny and gen- 
 eral use of its medium in the affairs of men, is 
 yet an art like other arts. Of these we may dis- 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 201 
 
 tinguish two great classes: those arts, like sculp- 
 ture, painting, acting, which are representa- 
 tive, or, as used to be said very clumsily, 
 imitative; and those, like architecture, music, 
 and the dance, which are self-sufficient, and 
 merely presentative. Each class, in right of this 
 distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both 
 may claim a common ground of existence, and 
 it may be said with sufficient justice that the 
 motive and end of any art whatever is to make 
 a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of colours, of 
 sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical fig- 
 ures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. 
 That is the plane on which these sisters meet; 
 it is by this that they are arts; and if it be well 
 they should at times forget their childish origin, 
 addressing their intelligence to virile tasks, and 
 performing unconsciously that necessary func- 
 tion of their life, to make a pattern, it is still 
 imperative that the pattern shall be made. 
 
 Music and literature, the two temporal arts, 
 contrive their pattern of sounds in time; or, in 
 other words, of sounds and pauses. Communica- 
 tion may be made in broken words, the business 
 of life be carried on with substantives alone; 
 but that is not what we call literature; and the 
 true business of the literary artist is to plait or 
 weave his meaning, involving it around itself; 
 so that each sentence, by successive phrases, 
 
202 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 shall first come into a kind of knot, and then, 
 after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and 
 clear itself. In every properly constructed sen- 
 tence there should be observed this knot or 
 hitch; so that (however delicately) we are led 
 to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the 
 successive phrases. The pleasure may be 
 heightened by an element of surprise, as, very 
 grossly, in the common figure of the antithesis, 
 or, with much greater subtlety, where an antith- 
 esis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. 
 Each phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; 
 and between the implication and the evolution 
 of the sentence there should be a satisfying 
 equipoise of sound; for nothing more often dis- 
 appoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and 
 sonorously prepared, and hastily and weakly 
 finished. Nor should the balance be too strik- 
 ing and exact, for the one rule is to be infinitely 
 various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, 
 and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as 
 it were, the stitch, and yet still to give the effect 
 of an ingenious neatness. 
 
 The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and 
 our pleasure in beholding him springs from 
 this, that neither is for an instant overlooked 
 or sacrificed. So with the writer. His pattern, 
 which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet 
 addressed, throughout and first of all, to the 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 203 
 
 demands of logic. Whatever be the obscur- 
 ities, whatever the intricacies of the argument, 
 the neatness of the fabric must not suffer, or the 
 artist has been proved unequal to his design. 
 And, on the other hand, no form of words must 
 be selected, no knot must be tied among the 
 phrases, unless knot and word be precisely what 
 is wanted to forward and illuminate the argu- 
 ment; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. 
 The genius of prose rejects. the cheville no less 
 emphatically than the laws of verse; and the 
 cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my 
 readers, is any meaningless or very watered 
 phrase employed to strike a balance in the 
 sound. Pattern and argument live in each 
 other; and it is by the brevity, clearness, charm, 
 or emphasis of the second, that we judge the 
 strength and fitness of the first. 
 
 Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so 
 to speak, a peg to plait about, takes up at once 
 two or more elements or two or more views of 
 the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and 
 contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he was 
 merely seeking an occasion for the necessary 
 knot, he will be found, in the other, to have 
 greatly enriched the meaning, or to have trans- 
 acted the work of two sentences in the space 
 of one. In the change from the successive shal- 
 low statements of the old chronicler to the 
 
204 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic 
 narrative, there is implied a vast amount of 
 both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we 
 clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a 
 far more deep and stimulating view of life, and 
 a far keener sense of the generation and affin- 
 ity of events. The wit we might imagine to be 
 lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these 
 perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties 
 overcome, this double purpose attained, these 
 two oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the 
 air, that, consciously or not, afford the reader 
 his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recog- 
 nised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy 
 which we so much admire. That style is there- 
 fore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which 
 is the most natural, for the most natural is the 
 disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which 
 attains the highest degree of elegant and preg- 
 nant implication unobtrusively; or if obtru- 
 sively, then with the greatest gain to sense and 
 vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases 
 from their (so-called) natural order is luminous 
 for the mind; and it is by the means of such de- 
 signed reversal that the elements of a judgment 
 may be most pertinently marshalled, or the 
 stages of a complicated action most perspicu- 
 ously bound into one. 
 The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 205 
 
 sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant 
 texture: that is style, that is the foundation of 
 the art of literature. Books indeed continue to 
 be read, for the interest of the fact or fable, in 
 which this quality is poorly represented, but 
 still it will be there. And, on the other hand, 
 how many do we continue to peruse and re- 
 peruse with pleasure whose only merit is the 
 elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention 
 Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, 
 I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very 
 colourless and toothless "criticism of life"; but 
 we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate and 
 dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once 
 of elegance and of good sense; and the two 
 oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept 
 dancing with inimitable grace. 
 
 Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly 
 upon prose; for though in verse also the implica- 
 tion of the logical texture is a crowning beauty, 
 yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You 
 would think that here was a death-blow to all 
 I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a 
 new illustration of the principle involved. For 
 if the versifier is not bound to weave a pattern 
 of his own, it is because another pattern has 
 been formally imposed upon him by the laws 
 of verse. For that is the essence of a prosody. 
 Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely 
 
206 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 alliterative; it may, like the French, depend 
 wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the 
 rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in 
 the strangely fanciful device of repeating the 
 same idea. It does not matter on what principle 
 the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure 
 convention; it may have no inherent beauty; 
 all that we have a right to ask of any prosody 
 is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the 
 writer, and that what it lays down shall be 
 neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes 
 that it is much easier for men of equal facility 
 to write fairly pleasing verse than reasonably 
 interesting prose; for in prose the pattern it- 
 self has to be invented, and the difficulties first 
 created before they can be solved. Hence, 
 again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the 
 true versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton, and 
 Victor Hugo, whom I place beside them as 
 versifier merely, not as poet. These not only 
 knit and knot the logical texture of the style 
 with all the dexterity and strength of prose; 
 they not only fill up the pattern of the verse 
 with infinite variety and sober wit; but they 
 give us, besides, a rare and special pleasure, by 
 the art, comparable to that of counterpoint, 
 with which they follow at the same time, and 
 now contrast, and now combine, the double 
 pattern of the texture and the verse. Here the 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 207 
 
 sounding line concludes; a little further on, the 
 well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and 
 both will reach their solution on the same ring- 
 ing syllable. The best that can be offered by the 
 best writer of prose is to show us the develop- 
 ment of the idea and the stylistic pattern pro- 
 ceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and 
 triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air 
 of ease and nature. The writer of verse, by 
 virtue of conquering another difficulty, delights 
 us with a new series of triumphs. He follows 
 three purposes where his rival followed only 
 two; and the change is of precisely the same na- 
 ture as that from melody to harmony. Or if 
 you prefer to return to the juggler, behold him 
 now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm of the 
 spectators, juggling with three oranges instead 
 of two. Thus it is: added difficulty, added 
 beauty; and the pattern, with every fresh ele- 
 ment, becoming more interesting in itself. 
 
 Yet it must not be thought that verse is 
 simply an addition; something is lost as well as 
 something gained; and there remains plainly 
 traceable, in comparing the best prose with the 
 best verse, a certain broad distinction of method 
 in the web. Tight as the versifier may draw 
 the knot of logic, yet for the ear he still leaves 
 the tissue of the sentence floating somewhat 
 loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a pivot, 
 
208 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an 
 obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear re- 
 marks and is singly gratified by this return and 
 balance; while in verse it is all diverted to the 
 measure. To find comparable passages is hard; 
 for either the versifier is hugely the superior of 
 the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in his 
 more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely 
 his inferior. But let us select them from the 
 pages of the same writer, one who was am- 
 bidexter; let us take, for instance, Rumour's 
 Prologue to the Second Part of Henry IV., a 
 fine flourish of eloquence in Shakespeare's sec- 
 ond manner, and set it side by side with Fal- 
 staff's praise of sherris, act iv. scene i.; or let 
 us compare the beautiful prose spoken through- 
 out by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for ex- 
 ample, the first speech of all, Orlando's speech 
 to Adam, with what passage it shall please you 
 to select — the Seven Ages from the same play, 
 or even such a stave of nobility as Othello's 
 farewell to war; and still you will be able to per- 
 ceive, if you have an ear for that class of music, 
 a certain superior degree of organisation in the 
 prose; a compacter fitting of the parts; a bal- 
 ance in the swing and the return as of a throb- 
 bing pendulum. We must not, in things tem- 
 poral, take from those who have little, the little 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 209 
 
 that they have; the merits of prose are inferior, 
 but they are not the same; it is a little kingdom, 
 but an independent. 
 
 3. Rhythm of the Phrase. — Some way back, I 
 used a word which still awaits an application. 
 Each phrase, I said, was to be comely; but what 
 is a comely phrase? In all ideal and material 
 points, literature, being a representative art, 
 must look for analogies to painting and the like; 
 but in what is technical and executive, being a 
 temporal art, it must seek for them in music. 
 Each phrase of each sentence, like an air or a 
 recitative in music, should be so artfully com- 
 pounded out of long and short, out of accented 
 and unaccented, as to gratify the sensual ear. 
 And of this the ear is the sole judge. It is im- 
 possible to lay down laws. Even in our ac- 
 centual and rhythmic language no analysis can 
 find the secret of the beauty of a verse; how 
 much less, then, of those phrases, such as prose 
 is built of, which obey no law but to be lawless 
 and yet to please? The little that we know of 
 verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend 
 Professor Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, par- 
 ticularly interesting in the present connection. 
 We have been accustomed to describe the heroic 
 line as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain 
 and confusion whenever, as by the conscien- 
 
210 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 tious schoolboy, we have heard our own descrip- 
 tion put in practice. 
 
 "All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pur- 
 sued," * 
 
 goes the schoolboy; but though we close our 
 ears, we cling to our definition, in spite of its 
 proved and naked insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin 
 was not so easily pleased, and readily discov- 
 ered that the heroic line consists of four groups, 
 or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four 
 pauses: 
 
 "All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued." 
 
 Four groups, each practically uttered as one 
 word: the first, in this case, an iamb; the second, 
 an amphibrachys; the third, a trochee; and the 
 fourth, an amphimacer; and yet our schoolboy, 
 with no other liberty but that of inflicting pain, 
 had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. 
 Perceive, now, this fresh richness of intricacy 
 in the web; this fourth orange, hitherto unre- 
 marked, but still kept flying with the others. 
 What had seemed to be one thing it now ap- 
 pears is two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, 
 the verse is made at the same time to read in 
 fives and to read in fours. 
 
 * Milton. 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 211 
 
 But again, four is not necessary. We do not, 
 indeed, find verses in six groups, because there 
 is not room for six in the ten syllables; and we 
 do not find verses of two, because one of the 
 main distinctions of verse from prose resides 
 in the comparative shortness of the group; but 
 it is even common to find verses of three. 
 Five is the one forbidden number; because five 
 is the number of the feet; and if five were 
 chosen, the two patterns would coincide, and 
 that opposition which is the life of verse would 
 instantly be lost. We have here a clue to the 
 effect of polysyllables, above all in Latin, where 
 they are so common and make so brave an 
 architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is 
 a group of Nature's making. If but some 
 Roman would return from Hades (Martial, for 
 choice), and tell me by what conduct of the 
 voice these thundering verses should be uttered 
 — "Aut Lacedcemonium Tarentum" for a case in 
 point — I feel as if I should enter at last into the 
 full enjoyment of the best of human verses. 
 
 But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or 
 supposed to be; by the mere count of syllables 
 the four groups cannot be all iambic; as a ques- 
 tion of elegance, I doubt if any one of them re- 
 quires to be so; and I am certain that for choice 
 no two of them should scan the same. The 
 singular beauty of the verse analysed above is 
 
212 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 due, so far as analysis can carry us, part, in- 
 deed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, 
 but part to this variety of scansion in the 
 groups. The groups which, like the bar in 
 music, break up the verse for utterance, fall 
 uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called 
 iambic verse, it may so happen that we never 
 utter one iambic foot. And yet to this neglect 
 of the original beat there is a limit. 
 
 "Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, 
 
 » * 
 
 is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; 
 for though it scarcely can be said to indicate 
 the beat of the iamb, it certainly suggests no 
 other measure to the ear. But begin 
 
 "Mother Athens, eye of Greece, ,, 
 
 or merely "Mother Athens," and the game is 
 up, for the trochaic beat has been suggested. 
 The eccentric scansion of the groups is an 
 adornment; but as soon as the original beat has 
 been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be ec- 
 centric. Variety is what is sought; but if we 
 destroy the original mould, one of the terms of 
 this variety is lost, and we fall back on same- 
 ness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical meas- 
 ure of the verse, and the degree of regularity in 
 
 * Milton. 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 213 
 
 scansion, we see the laws of prosody to have one 
 common purpose: to keep alive the opposition 
 of two schemes simultaneously followed; to 
 keep them notably apart, though still coinci- 
 dent; and to balance them with such judicial 
 nicety before the reader, that neither shall be 
 unperceived and neither signally prevail. 
 
 The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. 
 Here, too, we write in groups, or phrases, as I 
 prefer to call them, for the prose phrase is 
 greatly longer and is much more nonchalantly 
 uttered than the group in verse; so that not 
 only is there a greater interval of continuous 
 sound between the pauses, but, for that very 
 reason, word is linked more readily to word by 
 a more summary enunciation. Still, the phrase 
 is the strict analogue of the group, and successive 
 phrases, like successive groups, must differ 
 openly in length and rhythm. The rule of 
 scansion in verse is to suggest no measure but 
 the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure 
 at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be 
 as much so as you will; but it must not be 
 metrical. It may be anything, but it must not 
 be verse. A single heroic line may very well 
 pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride 
 of the prose style; but one following another 
 will produce an instant impression of poverty, 
 flatness, and disenchantment. The same lines 
 
2i 4 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 delivered with the measured utterance of verse 
 would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the 
 more summary enunciation proper to prose, as 
 to a more distant vision, these niceties of dif- 
 ference are lost. A whole verse is uttered as 
 one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a 
 succession of groups identical in length. The 
 prose writer, in fact, since he is allowed to be so 
 much less harmonious, is condemned to a per- 
 petually fresh variety of movement on a larger 
 scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the 
 trot of an accepted metre. And this obligation 
 is the third orange with which he has to juggle, 
 the third quality which the prose writer must 
 work into his pattern of words. It may be 
 thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease 
 rather than a fresh difficulty; but such is the 
 inherently rhythmical strain of the English 
 language, that the bad writer — and must I take 
 for example that admired friend of my boyhood, 
 Captain Reid? — the inexperienced writer, as 
 Dickens in his earlier attempts to be impressive, 
 and the jaded writer, as any one may see for 
 himself, all tend to fall at once into the produc- 
 tion of bad blank verse. And here it may be 
 pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose 
 it might be enough to answer that no man 
 ever made good verse by accident, and that no 
 verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 215 
 
 when uttered with the delivery of prose. But 
 we can go beyond such answers. The weak 
 side of verse is the regularity of the beat, which 
 in itself is decidedly less impressive than the 
 movement of the nobler prose; and it is just 
 into this weak side, and this alone, that our 
 careless writer falls. A peculiar density and 
 mass, consequent on the nearness of the pauses, 
 is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but 
 this our accidental versifier, still following after 
 the swift gait and large gestures of prose, does 
 not so much as aspire to imitate. Lastly, since 
 he remains unconscious that he is making verse 
 at all, it can never occur to him to extract those 
 effects of counterpoint and opposition which I 
 have referred to as the final grace and justifica- 
 tion of verse, and, I may add, of blank verse in 
 particular. 
 
 4. Contents of the Phrase. — Here is a great 
 deal of talk about rhythm — and naturally; for 
 in our canorous language rhythm is always at 
 the door. But it must not be forgotten that in 
 some languages this element is almost, if not 
 quite, extinct, and that in our own it is probably 
 decaying. The even speech of many educated 
 Americans sounds the note of danger. I should 
 see it go with something as bitter as despair, but 
 I should not be desperate. As in verse no ele 
 ment, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in 
 
2i6 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 prose also, other sorts of beauty will arise and 
 take the place and play the part of those that 
 we outlive. The beauty of the expected beat in 
 verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and more 
 lawless melody, patent as they are to English 
 hearing, are already silent in the ears of our 
 next neighbours; for in France the oratorical 
 accent and the pattern of the web have almost 
 or altogether succeeded to their places; and the 
 French prose writer would be astounded at the 
 labours of his brother across the Channel, and 
 how a good quarter of his toil, above all irwita 
 Minerva, is to avoid writing verse. So wonder- 
 fully far apart have races wandered in spirit, 
 and so hard it is to understand the literature 
 next door ! 
 
 Yet French prose is distinctly better than 
 English; and French verse, above all while Hugo 
 lives, it will not do to place upon one side. 
 What is more to our purpose, a phrase or a 
 verse in French is easily distinguishable as 
 comely or uncomely. There is then another 
 element of comeliness hitherto overlooked in 
 this analysis: the contents of the phrase. Each 
 phrase in literature is built of sounds, as each 
 phrase in music consists of notes. One sound 
 suggests, echoes, demands, and harmonises with 
 another; and the art of rightly using these con- 
 cordances is the final art in literature. It used 
 to be a piece of good advice to all young writers 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 217 
 
 to avoid alliteration; and the advice was sound, 
 in so far as it prevented daubing. None the 
 less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and 
 the mere raving of those blindest of the blind 
 who will not see. The beauty of the contents of 
 a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly 
 upon alliteration and upon assonance. The 
 vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant 
 demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud 
 to be perpetually varied. You may follow the 
 adventures of a letter through any passage that 
 has particularly pleased you; rind it, perhaps, 
 denied awhile, to tantalise the ear; find it fired 
 again at you in a whole broadside; or find it 
 pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or 
 labial melting away into another. And you 
 will find another and much stranger circum- 
 stance. Literature is written by and for two 
 senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to per- 
 ceive "unheard melodies"; and the eye, which 
 directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. 
 Well, even as there are rhymes for the eye, so 
 you will find that there are assonances and 
 alliterations; that where an author is running 
 the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange 
 English spelling, he will often show a tender- 
 ness for the flat A; and that where he is running 
 a particular consonant, he will not improbably 
 rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or 
 bears a different value. 
 
2i8 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 Here, then, we have a fresh pattern — a pat- 
 tern, to speak grossly, of letters — which makes 
 the fourth preoccupation of the prose writer, 
 and the fifth of the versifier. At times it is very 
 delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps 
 most excellent and winning (I say perhaps); 
 but at times again the elements of this literal 
 melody stand more boldly forward and usurp 
 the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a 
 matter of conscience to select examples; and as 
 I cannot very well ask the reader to help me, I 
 shall do the next best by giving him the reason 
 or the history of each selection. The two first, 
 one in prose, one in verse, I chose without 
 previous analysis, simply as engaging passages 
 that had long re-echoed in my ear. 
 
 "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered vir- 
 tue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never 
 sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks 
 out of the race where that immortal garland is 
 to be run for, not without dust and heat."* 
 Down to "virtue," the current S and R are 
 both announced and repeated unobtrusively, 
 and by way of a grace-note that almost insepa- 
 rable group PVF is given entire, t The next 
 
 * Milton. 
 
 t As PVF will continue to haunt us through our English 
 examples, take, by way of comparison, this Latin verse, of 
 which it forms a chief adornment, and do not hold me an- 
 swerable for the all too Roman freedom of the sense: "Hanc 
 volo, quae facilis, quae palliolata vagatur." 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 219 
 
 phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in it- 
 self, both S and R still audible, and B given as 
 the last fulfilment of PVF. In the next four 
 phrases, from "that never" down to "run for," 
 the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight 
 repetition of the F and V, the whole matter 
 turns, almost too obtrusively, on S and R; 
 first S coming to the front, and then R. In 
 the concluding phrase all these favourite let- 
 ters, and even the flat A, a timid preference for 
 which is just perceptible, are discarded at a 
 blow and in a bundle; and to make the break 
 more obvious, every word ends with a dental, 
 and all but one with T, for which we have been 
 cautiously prepared since the beginning. The 
 singular dignity of the first clause, and this 
 hammer-stroke of the last, go far to make the 
 charm of this exquisite sentence. But it is fair 
 to own that S and R are used a little coarsely. 
 
 "In Xanadv did Kubla Khan (KANDL) 
 
 A stately pleasure dome decree, (KDLSR) 
 
 Where Alph the sacred river ran, (KANDLSR) 
 
 Through caverns measureless to 
 
 man, (KANLSR) 
 
 Down to a sunless sea." * (NDLS) 
 
 Here I have put the analysis of the main 
 group alongside the lines; and the more it is 
 looked at, the more interesting it will seem. 
 But there are further niceties. In lines two 
 
 * Coleridge. 
 
220 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 and four, the current S is most delicately varied 
 with Z. In line three, the current flat A is 
 twice varied with the open A, already suggested 
 in line two, and both times ("where" and 
 "sacred") in conjunction with the current R. 
 In the same line F and V (a harmony in them- 
 selves, even when shorn of their comrade P) 
 are admirably contrasted. And in line four 
 there is a marked subsidiary M, which again 
 was announced in line two. I stop from weari- 
 ness, for more might yet be said. 
 
 My next example was recently quoted from 
 Shakespeare as an example of the poet's colour 
 sense. Now, I do not think literature has any- 
 thing to do with colour, or poets anyway the 
 better of such a sense; and I instantly attacked 
 this passage, since "purple" was the word that 
 had so pleased the writer of the article, to see 
 if there might not be some literary reason for 
 its use. It will be seen that I succeeded amply; 
 and I am bound to say I think the passage ex- 
 ceptional in Shakespeare — exceptional, indeed, 
 in literature; but it was not I who chose it. 
 
 "The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished 
 
 throNe 
 BURNt oN the water: the POOP was BeateN 
 
 gold, 
 PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that 
 The wiNds were love-sick with them." 1 
 
 * per * Antony and Cleopatra. 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 221 
 
 It may be asked why I have put the F of "per- 
 fumed " in capitals; and I reply, because this 
 change from P to F is the completion of that 
 from B to P, already so adroitly carried out. 
 Indeed, the whole passage is a monument of 
 curious ingenuity; and it seems scarce worth 
 while to indicate the subsidiary S, L, and W. 
 In the same article, a second passage from 
 Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an ex- 
 ample of his colour sense: 
 
 "A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops 
 P the bottom of a cowslip." * 
 
 It is very curious, very artificial, and not 
 worth while to analyse at length: I leave it to 
 the reader. But before I turn my back on 
 Shakespeare, I should like to quote a passage, 
 for my own pleasure, and for a very model of 
 every technical art: 
 
 "But in the wind and tempest of her frown, 
 
 W.P.V.fF. (st)(ow) 
 Distinction with a loud and powerful fan, 
 
 W.P.F. (st)(ow)L 
 Puffing at all, winnows the light away; 
 
 W. P. F. L 
 And what hath mass and matter by itself 
 
 W.F.L.M.A. 
 Lies rich in virtue and unmingled."$ 
 
 V. L. M. 
 
 * Cymbeline. f The V is in "of." % Troilus and Cressida. 
 
222 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 From these delicate and choice writers I 
 turned with some curiosity to a player of the 
 big drum — Macaulay. I had in hand the two- 
 volume edition, and I opened at the beginning 
 of the second volume. Here was what I read: 
 
 "The violence of revolutions is generally pro- 
 portioned to the degree of the maladministration 
 which has produced them. It is therefore not 
 strange that the government of Scotland, having 
 been during many years greatly more corrupt 
 than the government of England, should have 
 fallen with a far heavier ruin. The movement 
 against the last king of the house of Stuart was 
 in England conservative, in Scotland destruc- 
 tive. The English complained not of the law, 
 but of the violation of the law." 
 
 This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old 
 friend PVF, floated by the liquids in a body; 
 but as I read on, and turned the page, and still 
 found PVF with his attendant liquids, I confess 
 my mind misgave me utterly. This could be 
 no trick of Macaulay's; it must be the nature 
 of the English tongue. In a kind of despair, I 
 turned half-way through the volume; and com- 
 ing upon his lordship dealing with General 
 Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse and Kil- 
 liecrankie, here, with elucidative spelling, was 
 my reward: 
 
 "Meanwhile the disorders of Kannon's Kamp 
 went on inKreasing. He Kalled a Kouncil of 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 223 
 
 war to Konsider what Kourse it would be advis- 
 able to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had 
 met, a preliminary Kuestion was raised. The 
 army was almost eKsKlusively a Highland 
 army. The recent viKtory had been won 
 eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great 
 chie/s who had brought siKs or Sez;en hundred 
 /ighting men into the field did not think it /air 
 that they should be outvoted by gentlemen /rom 
 Ireland, and /rom the Low Kountries, who bore 
 indeed King James's Kommission, and were 
 Kalled Kolonels and Kaptains, but who were 
 Kolonels without regiments and Kaptains with- 
 out Kompanies." 
 
 A moment of FV in all this world of K's ! It 
 was not the English language, then, that was 
 an instrument of one string, but Macaulay that 
 was an incomparable dauber. 
 
 It was probably from this barbaric love of 
 repeating the same sound, rather than from any 
 design of clearness, that he acquired his irritat- 
 ing habit of repeating words; I say the one 
 rather than the other, because such a trick of 
 the ear is deeper-seated and more original in 
 man than any logical consideration. Few 
 writers, indeed, are probably conscious of the 
 length to which they push this melody of let- 
 ters. One, writing very diligently, and only 
 concerned about the meaning of his words and 
 the rhythm of his phrases, was struck into 
 amazement by the eager triumph with which he 
 
224 LEARNING TO WRITE 
 
 cancelled one expression to substitute another. 
 Neither changed the sense; both being mono- 
 syllables, neither could affect the scansion; and 
 it was only by looking back on what he had al- 
 ready written that the mystery was solved: 
 the second word contained an open A, and for 
 nearly half a page he had been riding that vowel 
 to the death. 
 
 In practice, I should add, the ear is not always 
 so exacting; and ordinary writers, in ordinary 
 moments, content themselves with avoiding 
 what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare 
 occasion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two 
 together, with a £atch of assonance or a mo- 
 mentary jingle of alliteration. To understand 
 how constant is this preoccupation of good 
 writers, even where its results are least obtru- 
 sive, it is only necessary to turn to the bad. 
 There, indeed, you will find cacophony supreme, 
 the rattle of incongruous consonants only re- 
 lieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole 
 phrases not to be articulated by the powers of 
 man. 
 
 Conclusion. — We may now briefly enumerate 
 the elements of style. We have, peculiar to the 
 prose writer, the task of keeping his phrases 
 large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the ear, 
 without ever allowing them to fall into the 
 strictly metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the 
 task of combining and contrasting his double, 
 
ON STYLE IN LITERATURE 225 
 
 treble, and quadruple pattern, feet and groups, 
 logic and metre — harmonious in diversity: com- 
 mon to both, the task of artfully combining the 
 prime elements of language into phrases that 
 shall be musical in the mouth; the task of 
 weaving their argument into a texture of com- 
 mitted phrases and of rounded periods — but 
 this particularly binding in the case of prose: 
 and, again common to both, the task of choos- 
 ing apt, explicit, and communicative words. 
 We begin to see now what an intricate affair 
 is any perfect passage; how many faculties, 
 whether of taste or pure reason, must be held 
 upon the stretch to make it; and why, when it 
 is made, it should afford us so complete a pleas- 
 ure. From the arrangement of according let- 
 ters, which is altogether arabesque and sensual, 
 up to the architecture of the elegant and preg- 
 nant sentence, which is a vigorous act of the 
 pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man 
 but has been exercised. We need not wonder, 
 then, if perfect sentences are rare, and perfect 
 pages rarer. 
 

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