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<h1> APPRECIATIONS, WITH AN ESSAY ON STYLE </h1>
<h2> By WALTER HORATIO PATER </h2>
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<h2> APPRECIATIONS </h2>
<br/>
<h3> STYLE </h3>
<p>[5] SINCE all progress of mind consists for the most part in
differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex object
into its component aspects, it is surely the stupidest of losses to
confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose the sense of
achieved distinctions, the distinction between poetry and prose, for
instance, or, to speak more exactly, between the laws and
characteristic excellences of verse and prose composition. On the
other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction
between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been
tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this
again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation
of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs
make the most of things. Critical efforts to limit art a priori, by
anticipations regarding the natural incapacity of the material with
which this or that artist works, as the sculptor with solid form, or
the prose-writer with the ordinary [6] language of men, are always
liable to be discredited by the facts of artistic production; and while
prose is actually found to be a coloured thing with Bacon, picturesque
with Livy and Carlyle, musical with Cicero and Newman, mystical and
intimate with Plato and Michelet and Sir Thomas Browne, exalted or
florid, it may be, with Milton and Taylor, it will be useless to
protest that it can be nothing at all, except something very tamely and
narrowly confined to mainly practical ends—a kind of "good
round-hand;" as useless as the protest that poetry might not touch
prosaic subjects as with Wordsworth, or an abstruse matter as with
Browning, or treat contemporary life nobly as with Tennyson. In
subordination to one essential beauty in all good literary style, in
all literature as a fine art, as there are many beauties of poetry so
the beauties of prose are many, and it is the business of criticism to
estimate them as such; as it is good in the criticism of verse to look
for those hard, logical, and quasi-prosaic excellences which that too
has, or needs. To find in the poem, amid the flowers, the allusions,
the mixed perspectives, of Lycidas for instance, the thought, the
logical structure:—how wholesome! how delightful! as to identify in
prose what we call the poetry, the imaginative power, not treating it
as out of place and a kind of vagrant intruder, but by way of an
estimate of its rights, that is, of its achieved powers, there.</p>
<p>[7] Dryden, with the characteristic instinct of his age, loved to
emphasise the distinction between poetry and prose, the protest against
their confusion with each other, coming with somewhat diminished effect
from one whose poetry was so prosaic. In truth, his sense of prosaic
excellence affected his verse rather than his prose, which is not only
fervid, richly figured, poetic, as we say, but vitiated, all
unconsciously, by many a scanning line. Setting up correctness, that
humble merit of prose, as the central literary excellence, he is really
a less correct writer than he may seem, still with an imperfect mastery
of the relative pronoun. It might have been foreseen that, in the
rotations of mind, the province of poetry in prose would find its
assertor; and, a century after Dryden, amid very different intellectual
needs, and with the need therefore of great modifications in literary
form, the range of the poetic force in literature was effectively
enlarged by Wordsworth. The true distinction between prose and poetry
he regarded as the almost technical or accidental one of the absence or
presence of metrical beauty, or, say! metrical restraint; and for him
the opposition came to be between verse and prose of course; but, as
the essential dichotomy in this matter, between imaginative and
unimaginative writing, parallel to De Quincey's distinction between
"the literature of power and the literature of knowledge," in the
former of which the composer gives us [8] not fact, but his peculiar
sense of fact, whether past or present.</p>
<p>Dismissing then, under sanction of Wordsworth, that harsher opposition
of poetry to prose, as savouring in fact of the arbitrary psychology of
the last century, and with it the prejudice that there can be but one
only beauty of prose style, I propose here to point out certain
qualities of all literature as a fine art, which, if they apply to the
literature of fact, apply still more to the literature of the
imaginative sense of fact, while they apply indifferently to verse and
prose, so far as either is really imaginative—certain conditions of
true art in both alike, which conditions may also contain in them the
secret of the proper discrimination and guardianship of the peculiar
excellences of either.</p>
<p>The line between fact and something quite different from external fact
is, indeed, hard to draw. In Pascal, for instance, in the persuasive
writers generally, how difficult to define the point where, from time
to time, argument which, if it is to be worth anything at all, must
consist of facts or groups of facts, becomes a pleading—a theorem no
longer, but essentially an appeal to the reader to catch the writer's
spirit, to think with him, if one can or will—an expression no longer
of fact but of his sense of it, his peculiar intuition of a world,
prospective, or discerned below the faulty conditions of the present,
in either case changed somewhat from the actual [9] world. In science,
on the other hand, in history so far as it conforms to scientific rule,
we have a literary domain where the imagination may be thought to be
always an intruder. And as, in all science, the functions of
literature reduce themselves eventually to the transcribing of fact, so
all the excellences of literary form in regard to science are reducible
to various kinds of pains-taking; this good quality being involved in
all "skilled work" whatever, in the drafting of an act of parliament,
as in sewing. Yet here again, the writer's sense of fact, in history
especially, and in all those complex subjects which do but lie on the
borders of science, will still take the place of fact, in various
degrees. Your historian, for instance, with absolutely truthful
intention, amid the multitude of facts presented to him must needs
select, and in selecting assert something of his own humour, something
that comes not of the world without but of a vision within. So Gibbon
moulds his unwieldy material to a preconceived view. Livy, Tacitus,
Michelet, moving full of poignant sensibility amid the records of the
past, each, after his own sense, modifies—who can tell where and to
what degree?—and becomes something else than a transcriber; each, as
he thus modifies, passing into the domain of art proper. For just in
proportion as the writer's aim, consciously or unconsciously, comes to
be the transcribing, not of the world, not of mere fact, but of his
sense [10] of it, he becomes an artist, his work fine art; and good art
(as I hope ultimately to show) in proportion to the truth of his
presentment of that sense; as in those humbler or plainer functions of
literature also, truth—truth to bare fact, there—is the essence of
such artistic quality as they may have. Truth! there can be no merit,
no craft at all, without that. And further, all beauty is in the long
run only fineness of truth, or what we call expression, the finer
accommodation of speech to that vision within.</p>
<p>—The transcript of his sense of fact rather than the fact, as being
preferable, pleasanter, more beautiful to the writer himself. In
literature, as in every other product of human skill, in the moulding
of a bell or a platter for instance, wherever this sense asserts
itself, wherever the producer so modifies his work as, over and above
its primary use or intention, to make it pleasing (to himself, of
course, in the first instance) there, "fine" as opposed to merely
serviceable art, exists. Literary art, that is, like all art which is
in any way imitative or reproductive of fact—form, or colour, or
incident—is the representation of such fact as connected with soul, of
a specific personality, in its preferences, its volition and power.</p>
<p>Such is the matter of imaginative or artistic literature—this
transcript, not of mere fact, but of fact in its infinite variety, as
modified by human preference in all its infinitely varied [11] forms.
It will be good literary art not because it is brilliant or sober, or
rich, or impulsive, or severe, but just in proportion as its
representation of that sense, that soul-fact, is true, verse being only
one department of such literature, and imaginative prose, it may be
thought, being the special art of the modern world. That imaginative
prose should be the special and opportune art of the modern world
results from two important facts about the latter: first, the chaotic
variety and complexity of its interests, making the intellectual issue,
the really master currents of the present time incalculable—a
condition of mind little susceptible of the restraint proper to verse
form, so that the most characteristic verse of the nineteenth century
has been lawless verse; and secondly, an all-pervading naturalism, a
curiosity about everything whatever as it really is, involving a
certain humility of attitude, cognate to what must, after all, be the
less ambitious form of literature. And prose thus asserting itself as
the special and privileged artistic faculty of the present day, will
be, however critics may try to narrow its scope, as varied in its
excellence as humanity itself reflecting on the facts of its latest
experience—an instrument of many stops, meditative, observant,
descriptive, eloquent, analytic, plaintive, fervid. Its beauties will
be not exclusively "pedestrian": it will exert, in due measure, all the
varied charms of poetry, down to the rhythm which, as in Cicero, [12]
or Michelet, or Newman, at their best, gives its musical value to every
syllable.*</p>
<p>The literary artist is of necessity a scholar, and in what he .
proposes to do will have in mind, first of all, the scholar and the
scholarly conscience—the male conscience in this matter, as we must
think it, under a system of education which still to so large an extent
limits real scholarship to men. In his self-criticism, he supposes
always that sort of reader who will go (full of eyes) warily,
considerately, though without consideration for him, over the ground
which the female conscience traverses so lightly, so amiably. For the
material in which he works is no more a creation of his own than the
sculptor's marble. Product of a myriad various minds and contending
tongues, compact of obscure and minute association, a language has its
own abundant and often recondite laws, in the habitual and summary
recognition of which scholarship consists. A writer, full of a matter
he is before all things anxious to express, may think of those laws,
the limitations of vocabulary, structure, and the like, as a
restriction, but if a [13] real artist will find in them an
opportunity. His punctilious observance of the proprieties of his
medium will diffuse through all he writes a general air of sensibility,
of refined usage. Exclusiones debitae—the exclusions, or rejections,
which nature demands—we know how large a part these play, according to
Bacon, in the science of nature. In a somewhat changed sense, we might
say that the art of the scholar is summed up in the observance of those
rejections demanded by the nature of his medium, the material he must
use. Alive to the value of an atmosphere in which every term finds its
utmost degree of expression, and with all the jealousy of a lover of
words, he will resist a constant tendency on the part of the majority
of those who use them to efface the distinctions of language, the
facility of writers often reinforcing in this respect the work of the
vulgar. He will feel the obligation not of the laws only, but of those
affinities, avoidances, those mere preferences, of his language, which
through the associations of literary history have become a part of its
nature, prescribing the rejection of many a neology, many a license,
many a gipsy phrase which might present itself as actually expressive.
His appeal, again, is to the scholar, who has great experience in
literature, and will show no favour to short-cuts, or hackneyed
illustration, or an affectation of learning designed for the unlearned.
Hence a contention, a sense [14] of self-restraint and renunciation,
having for the susceptible reader the effect of a challenge for minute
consideration; the attention of the writer, in every minutest detail,
being a pledge that it is worth the reader's while to be attentive too,
that the writer is dealing scrupulously with his instrument, and
therefore, indirectly, with the reader himself also, that he has the
science of the instrument he plays on, perhaps, after all, with a
freedom which in such case will be the freedom of a master.</p>
<p>For meanwhile, braced only by those restraints, he is really
vindicating his liberty in the making of a vocabulary, an entire system
of composition, for himself, his own true manner; and when we speak of
the manner of a true master we mean what is essential in his art.
Pedantry being only the scholarship of le cuistre (we have no English
equivalent) he is no pedant, and does but show his intelligence of the
rules of language in his freedoms with it, addition or expansion, which
like the spontaneities of manner in a well-bred person will still
further illustrate good taste.—The right vocabulary! Translators have
not invariably seen how all-important that is in the work of
translation, driving for the most part at idiom or construction;
whereas, if the original be first-rate, one's first care should be with
its elementary particles, Plato, for instance, being often reproducible
by an exact following, with no variation in structure, of word after
word, as [15] the pencil follows a drawing under tracing-paper, so only
each word or syllable be not of false colour, to change my illustration
a little.</p>
<p>Well! that is because any writer worth translating at all has winnowed
and searched through his vocabulary, is conscious of the words he would
select in systematic reading of a dictionary, and still more of the
words he would reject were the dictionary other than Johnson's; and
doing this with his peculiar sense of the world ever in view, in search
of an instrument for the adequate expression of that, he begets a
vocabulary faithful to the colouring of his own spirit, and in the
strictest sense original. That living authority which language needs
lies, in truth, in its scholars, who recognising always that every
language possesses a genius, a very fastidious genius, of its own,
expand at once and purify its very elements, which must needs change
along with the changing thoughts of living people. Ninety years ago,
for instance, great mental force, certainly, was needed by Wordsworth,
to break through the consecrated poetic associations of a century, and
speak the language that was his, that was to become in a measure the
language of the next generation. But he did it with the tact of a
scholar also. English, for a quarter of a century past, has been
assimilating the phraseology of pictorial art; for half a century, the
phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement of eighty years
ago; in part also the [16] language of mystical theology: and none but
pedants will regret a great consequent increase of its resources. For
many years to come its enterprise may well lie in the naturalisation of
the vocabulary of science, so only it be under the eye of a sensitive
scholarship—in a liberal naturalisation of the ideas of science too,
for after all the chief stimulus of good style is to possess a full,
rich, complex matter to grapple with. The literary artist, therefore,
will be well aware of physical science; science also attaining, in its
turn, its true literary ideal. And then, as the scholar is nothing
without the historic sense, he will be apt to restore not really
obsolete or really worn-out words, but the finer edge of words still in
use: ascertain, communicate, discover—words like these it has been
part of our "business" to misuse. And still, as language was made for
man, he will be no authority for correctnesses which, limiting freedom
of utterance, were yet but accidents in their origin; as if one vowed
not to say "its," which ought to have been in Shakespeare; "his"
"hers," for inanimate objects, being but a barbarous and really
inexpressive survival. Yet we have known many things like this. Racy
Saxon monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix
readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second
intention." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be
conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism we
have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How
illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the
phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the
writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship
throughout!</p>
<p>A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something
to the willing intelligence of his reader. "To go preach to the first
passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the
first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, naturally
distressing to the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering
uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To really strenuous
minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous
effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp
of the author's sense. Self-restraint, a skilful economy of means,
asc�sis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed
there will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of
style which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every
sentence of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to
thought, in the logically filled space connected always with the
delightful sense of difficulty overcome.</p>
<p>Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very
various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not
[18] only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always
look to it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral
refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem
like Lycidas, a perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a
theory like Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of
the uses of a religious "retreat." Here, then, with a view to the
central need of a select few, those "men of a finer thread" who have
formed and maintain the literary ideal, everything, every component
element, will have undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will be
no uncharacteristic or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible
ornament being for the most part structural, or necessary. As the
painter in his picture, so the artist in his book, aims at the
production by honourable artifice of a peculiar atmosphere. "The
artist," says Schiller, "may be known rather by what he omits"; and in
literature, too, the true artist may be best recognised by his tact of
omission. For to the grave reader words too are grave; and the
ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or colour or reference,
is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the right moment, but
will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long "brain-wave" behind it
of perhaps quite alien associations.</p>
<p>Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of
scholarly attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true
artist allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornament
indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all
literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and
verse alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its
fullest lustre, as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in
Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned,
with hardly a single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel,
allusion, the allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:—he
knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to
which any diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder,
because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate subject.
Jealous, if he have a really quickening motive within, of all that does
not hold directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never
depart from the strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a
ponderable something thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will
still question its serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford,
to attend to just that, to just that figure or literary reference, just
then?—Surplusage! he will dread that, as the runner on his muscles.
For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of surplusage,
from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the last particle
of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of [20] the finished
work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the
rough-hewn block of stone.</p>
<p>And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other
accidental or removable ornaments of writing whatever; and not of
specific ornament only, but of all that latent colour and imagery which
language as such carries in it. A lover of words for their own sake,
to whom nothing about them is unimportant, a minute and constant
observer of their physiognomy, he will be on the alert not only for
obviously mixed metaphors of course, but for the metaphor that is mixed
in all our speech, though a rapid use may involve no cognition of it.
Currently recognising the incident, the colour, the physical elements
or particles in words like absorb, consider, extract, to take the first
that occur, he will avail himself of them, as further adding to the
resources of expression. The elementary particles of language will be
realised as colour and light and shade through his scholarly living in
the full sense of them. Still opposing the constant degradation of
language by those who use it carelessly, he will not treat coloured
glass as if it were clear; and while half the world is using figure
unconsciously, will be fully aware not only of all that latent
figurative texture in speech, but of the vague, lazy, half-formed
personification—a rhetoric, depressing, and worse than nothing, [21]
because it has no really rhetorical motive—which plays so large a part
there, and, as in the case of more ostentatious ornament, scrupulously
exact of it, from syllable to syllable, its precise value.</p>
<p>So far I have been speaking of certain conditions of the literary art
arising out of the medium or material in or upon which it works, the
essential qualities of language and its aptitudes for contingent
ornamentation, matters which define scholarship as science and good
taste respectively. They are both subservient to a more intimate
quality of good style: more intimate, as coming nearer to the artist
himself. The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent
to the true literary artist, except because, in literary as in all
other art, structure is all-important, felt, or painfully missed,
everywhere?—that architectural conception of work, which foresees the
end in the beginning and never loses sight of it, and in every part is
conscious of all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with
undiminished vigour, unfold and justify the first—a condition of
literary art, which, in contradistinction to another quality of the
artist himself, to be spoken of later, I shall call the necessity of
mind in style.</p>
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