Concerning Style or Writing
I
Et ideo confiteatur eorum stultitia, qui arte scientiaque immunes, de solo ingenio confidentes, ad summa summe canenda prorumpunt; a tanta praesuntuositate desistant, et si anseres naturali desidia sunt, nolint astripetam aquilam imitari.
Dante: De vulgari eloquio.
Depreciation of “writing”—that is, writing as an art—is a precaution taken from time to time by worthless writers. They believe it sound, but it is the sign of their mediocrity and the avowal of a secret regret. It is not without chagrin that the impotent man gives up the pretty woman whose limpid eyes invite him, and there must be bitterness in the disdain publicly proclaimed by one who confesses utter ignorance of his trade, or absence of the gift without which exercise of that trade is an imposture. Yet some of these poor creatures actually pride themselves upon their poverty. They declare that their ideas are rare enough not to need fine clothing; that the newest, richest imagery is merely the veil thrown by vanity over the emptiness of the thought; that what matters, after all, is the substance and not the form, the spirit and not the letter, the thing and not the word; and they can continue like this a long time, for they have at their command a whole flock of facile commonplaces which, however, fool nobody. We should pity the first group and despise the second, replying to neither, unless it be to say this: that there are two literatures, and that they belong to each other.
Two literatures. This is a prudent and provisional form of expression intended to divert the mob by according it a share in the landscape, a view of the garden which it may not enter. If there were not two literatures and two provinces, it would be necessary to cut at once the throats of nearly all French writers—a dirty job and one in which, for my part, I should blush to have a hand. Enough, then. The boundary is established. There are two sorts of writers: the writers who write and the writers who do not write—just as there are voiceless singers and singers with voices.
The disdain for style would seem to be one of the conquests of 1789. At least, prior to the democratic era, it had been taken for granted that the one way to treat writers who did not write was to ridicule them. From Pisistratus to Louis XVI, the civilized world was unanimous on this point—a writer must know how to write. This was the Greek view, and the Romans loved fine style to such a degree that they came to write very badly through wishing to write too well. Saint Ambrose esteemed eloquence so highly that he regarded it as one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit—vox donum Spiritus—and Saint Hilary of Poitiers, in chapter thirteen of his Treatise on the Psalms, does not hesitate to call bad style a sin. It cannot, then, be from Roman Christianity that we have derived our present indulgence for uncouth literature. Still, inasmuch as Christianity is necessarily responsible for all modern aggressions against external beauty, it might be supposed that the taste for bad style was one of those Protestant importations that befouled France in the eighteenth century—contempt for style and moral hypocrisy being Anglican vices.1
However, if the eighteenth century wrote badly, it did so unconsciously. It thought that Voltaire wrote well, especially in verse, and reproached Ducis only with the barbarousness of his models. It had an ideal. It did not admit that philosophy might be an excuse for bad literature. It rhymed everything, from the treatises of Isaac Newton to garden manuals and ‘cook-books. This lust for putting art and fine language where they did not belong, led to the adoption of a medium style calculated to elevate all vulgar subjects and to degrade all the others. With the best of intentions, the eighteenth century ended by writing as if it were the most refractory to art in the world’s history. England and France signed, at that time, a literary pact destined to endure till the arrival of Chateaubriand, whose Génie du Christianisme2 sounded its solemn dissolution. From the appearance of this book, which opens the century, there has been but one way for a writer to have talent, namely, to know how to write—no longer in the manner of La Harpe, but in accordance with the examples of an unconquered tradition as old as the first awakening of beauty in human intelligence.3
But the eighteenth century manner corresponded only too well to the natural tendencies of a democratic civilization. Neither Chateaubriand nor Victor Hugo was able to abrogate the organic law which sends the herd plunging down to the green plain where there is grass, and where there will be nothing but dust, once it has passed. It was soon deemed useless to cultivate a landscape destined to popular devastations, so there sprang up a literature without style, just as there are highroads without grass, without shade, and without wayside springs.
II
Writing is a trade, and I should rather see it catalogued between cobbling and carpentry, than separated from the other manifestations of human activity. Thus set apart, it can be virtually denied existence under colour of according it special honour, and so far removed from every vital interest that it will die of its isolation. Given, however, its place in one of the symbolic niches along the great gallery, it suggests apprenticeship and the handling of tools. It repels impromptu vocations. It is severe and uninviting.
Writing is a trade, but style is not a science. “Style is the man,” and that other formula, “Style is inviolable,” offered by Hello, mean exactly the same thing, namely, that style is as personal as the colour of the eyes or the sound of the voice. One can learn to write; one cannot learn to have a style. A writer can dye his style, as he does his hair, but he must begin over again every morning, and have no distractions. It is so little possible to acquire a style, that one is often lost in the course of a lifetime. When the vital force diminishes, writing suffers. Practice, which improves other gifts, often spoils this one.
Writing is very different from painting or modelling. To write or to speak is to make use of a faculty necessarily common to all men—a primordial and unconscious faculty which cannot be analyzed without the complete anatomy of the intelligence. That is why all treatises on the art of writing, whether they number ten pages or ten thousand, are but vain sketches. The question is so complex that it is hard to know where to attack’ it. It has so many sharp points, and is such a thicket of thorns and thistles that, instead of plunging straight into it, one goes around, and that is wiser.
To write, as Flaubert and Goncourt understood it, is to exist, to be one’s self. To have a style is to speak, in the midst of the common language, a peculiar dialect, unique and inimitable, yet so constituted as to be at once the language of all and the language of an individual. Style is self-evident. To study its mechanism is useless to the point where uselessness becomes a positive menace. That which can be recomposed from the products of stylistic distillation bears the same resemblance to the style distilled, that a perfumed paper rose bears to a real rose.
Whatever be the fundamental importance of a “written” work, possession of style enhances its value. It was Buffon’s opinion that all the beauties found in a well-written book, “all the relations which constitute style, are so many truths quite as useful for the mind as those forming the substance of the subject, and perhaps even more precious.” And, despite the common disdain, this is also the common opinion, since the books of the past which still live, live only by virtue of their style. Were the contrary possible, such a contemporary of Buffon as Boulanger, author of L’Antiquité dévoilée, would not be unknown to-day, for there was nothing mediocre about the man but his way of writing. And is it not because he almost always lacked style, that another contemporary, Diderot, has never enjoyed more than a few hours of reputation at a time, and that as soon as people stop talking about him, he is forgotten?
It is because of this incontestable preponderance of style that the invention of plots is of no great importance in literature. To write a good novel or a lasting drama, one must either select a subject so banal that it is absolutely nil, or invent one so new that genius alone can get anything out of it—Romeo and Juliet, or Don Quixote. Most of Shakespeare’s tragedies are merely a succession of metaphors embroidered on the canvas of the first story that came to his hand. Shakespeare invented nothing but his lines and his phrases. His images being new, their novelty necessarily communicated life to the characters. If Hamlet, idea for idea, had been written by Christopher Marlowe, it would be merely an obscure, clumsy tragedy, cited as an interesting sketch. M. de Maupassant, who invented the majority of his themes, is a lesser story-teller than Boccaccio, who invented none of his. Besides, the invention of subjects is limited, though infinitely flexible. But, change the age, and you change the story. If M. Aicard had genius, he would not have translated Othello; he would have remade it, just as the youthful Racine remade the tragedies of Euripides’. If man did not have style as a means of achieving variety, everything would be said in the first hundred years of a literature. I am quite willing to admit that there are thirty-six situations for novels and dramas, but a more general theory can, as a matter of fact, recognize four only. Man, taken as the centre, may have relations with himself, with other men, with the other sex, with the infinite—God or Nature. A piece of literature falls necessarily into one of these four categories; but were there in the world one theme only, and that Daphnis and Chloe, it would suffice.
One of the excuses made by writers who do not know how to write, is the diversity of genres. They believe that one genre calls for style, and that another does not. A novel, they say, should not be written in the same tone as a poem. True; but absence of style means absence of tone also, and when a book lacks “writing,” it lacks everything. It is invisible or, as we say, it passes unnoticed. And that is as it should be. After all, there is but one genre, poetry, and but one medium, verse; for beautiful prose must have a rhythm which will make us doubt whether it be merely prose. Buffon wrote nothing but poems, as did Bossuet and Chateaubriand and Flaubert. If the Époques de la Nature stirs the admiration of scientists and philosophers, it is none the less a sumptuous epic. M. Brunetière spoke with ingenious boldness of the evolution of the genres. He showed that Bossuet’s prose is but one of the cuts in the great lyric forest where Victor Hugo later was a woodsman. But I prefer the idea that there are no genres, or that there is but one only. This, moreover, is in closer accord with the latest theories of science and philosophy. The idea of evolution is about to disappear before that of permanence, perpetuity.
Can one learn to write? Regarded as a question of style, this amounts to asking if, with application, M. Zola could have become Chateaubriand, or if M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, had he taken pains, could have become Rabelais: if the man who imitates precious marbles by spraying pine panels with a sharp shake of his brush, could, properly guided, have painted the Pauvre Pêcheur, or if the stone-cutter, who chisels the depressing fronts of Parisian houses in the Corinthian manner, might not, perhaps, after twenty lessons, execute the Porte d’Enfer or the tomb of Philippe Pot?
Can one learn to write? If, on the other hand, the question be one of the elements of a trade, of what painters are taught in the academies, all that can indeed be learned. One can learn to write correctly, in the neutral manner, just as engravers used to work in the “black manner.” One can learn to write badly—that is to say, properly, and so as to merit a prize for literary excellence. One may learn to write very well, which is another way of writing very ill. How melancholy they are, those books which are well-written—and nothing more!
III
M. Albalat has, then, published a manual entitled The Art of Writing Taught in Twenty Lessons. Had this work appeared at an earlier date, it would certainly have found a place in the library of M. Dumouchel, professor of literature, and he would have recommended it to his friends Bouvard and Pécuchet: “Then,” as Flaubert tells us, “they sought to determine the precise constitution of style, and, thanks to the authors recommended by Dumouchel, they learned the secret of all the genres.” However, the two old boys would have found M. Albalat’s remarks somewhat subtle. They would have been shocked to learn that Télémaque is badly written and that Mérimée would gain by condensation. They would have rejected M. Albalat and set to work on their biography of the Duc d’Angoulême without him.
Such resistance does not surprise me. It springs, perhaps, from an obscure feeling that the unconscious writer laughs at principles, at the art of epithets, and at the artifice of the three graduated impulses. Had M. Albalat known that intellectual effort, and especially literary effort, is, in very large measure, independent of consciousness, he would have been less imprudent and hesitated to divide a writer’s qualities into two classes: natural qualities and qualities that can be acquired. As if a quality—that is to say a manner of being and of feeling—were something external to be added like a colour or an odour. One becomes what he is—without wishing to even, and despite every effort to oppose it. The most enduring patience cannot turn a blind imagination into a visual imagination, and the work of a writer who sees the landscape, whose aspect he transposes into terms of literary art, is better, however awkward, than after it has been retouched by someone whose vision is void, or profoundly different. “But the master alone can give the salient stroke.” I can see Pécuchet’s discouragement at this. The master’s stroke in artistic literature—even the salient stroke—is necessarily the very one on which stress should not have been laid. Otherwise the stroke emphasizes the detail to which it is customary to give prominence, and not that which had struck the unskilled but sincere inner eye of the apprentice. M. Albalat makes an abstraction of this almost always unconscious vision, and defines style as “the art of grasping the value of words and their interrelations.” Talent, in his opinion, consists “not in making a dull, lifeless use of words, but in discovering the nuances, the images, the sensations, which result from their combinations.”
Here we are, then, in the realm of pure verbalism—in the ideal region of signs. It is a question of manipulating these signs and arranging them in patterns that will give the illusion of representing the world of sensations. Thus reversed, the problem is insoluble. It may well happen, since all things are possible, that such combinations of words will evoke life—even a determinate life—but more often they will remain inert. The forest becomes petrified. A critique of style should begin with a critique of the inner vision, by an essay on the formation of images. There are, to be sure, two chapters on images in Albalat’s book, but they come quite at the end. Thus the mechanism of language is there demonstrated in inverse order, since the first step is the image, the last the abstraction. A proper analysis of the natural stylistic process would begin with the sensation and end with the pure idea— so pure that it corresponded not only to nothing real, but to nothing imaginative either.
If there were an art of writing, it would be nothing more or less than the art of feeling, the art of seeing, the art of hearing, the art of using all the senses, whether directly or through the imagination; and the new, serious method of a theory of style would be an attempt to show how these two separate worlds—the world of sensations and the world of words—penetrate each other. There is a great mystery in this, since they lie infinitely far apart—that is to say, they are parallel. Perhaps we should see here the operation of a sort of wireless telegraphy. We note that the needles on the two dials act in unison, and that is all. But this mutual dependence is, in reality, far from being as complete and as clear as in a mechanical device. When all is said, the accords between words and sensations are very few and very imperfect. We have no sure means of expressing our thoughts, unless perhaps it be silence. How many circumstances there are in life, when the eyes, the hands, the mute mouth, are more eloquent than any words.4
IV
M. Albalat’s analysis is, then, bad, because unscientific. Yet from it he has derived a practical method of which it may be said that, while incapable of forming an original writer—he is well aware of this himself—it might possibly attenuate, not the mediocrity, but the incoherence, of speeches and publications to which custom obliges us to lend some attention. Besides, even were this manual still more useless than I believe it to be, certain of its chapters would nevertheless retain their expository and documentary interest. The detail is excellent, as, for example, the pages where it is shown that the idea is bound up in the form, and that to change the form is to modify the idea. “It means nothing to say of a piece of writing that the substance is good, but the form is bad.” These are sound principles, though the idea may subsist as a residue of sensation, independently of the words and, above all, of a choice of words. But ideas stripped bare, in the state of wandering larvae, have no interest whatever. It may even be true that such ideas belong to everybody. Perhaps all ideas are common property. But how differently one of them, wandering through the world, awaiting its evocator, will be revealed according to the word that summons it from the Shades. What would Bossuet’s ideas be worth, despoiled of their purple? They are the ideas of any ordinary student of theology, and, uttered by him, such a farrago of stupid nonsense would shock and shame those who had listened to it intoxicated in the Sermons and Oraisons. And the impression will be similar if, having lent a charmed ear to Michelet’s lyric paradoxes, we come across them again in the miserable mouthings of some senator, or in the depressing commentaries of the partisan press. This is the reason why the Latin poets, including the greatest of them all, Virgil, cease to exist when translated, all looking exactly alike in the painful and pompous uniformity of a normal student’s rhetoric. If Virgil had written in the style of M. Pessonneaux, or of M. Benoist, he would be Benoist, he would be Pessonneaux, and the monks would have scrapped his parchments to substitute for his verses some good lease of a sure and lasting interest.
Apropos of these evident truths, M. Albalat refutes Zola’s opinion that “it is the form which changes and passes the most quickly,” and that “immortality is gained by presenting living creatures.” So far as this second sentence can be interpreted at all, it would seem to mean that what is called life, in art, is independent of form. But perhaps this is even less clear? Perhaps it will seem to have no sense whatever. Hippolytus, too, at the gates of Troezen, was “without form and without colour” only he was dead. All that can be conceded to this theory is that, if a beautiful and original work of art survives its century and, what is more, the language in which it was written, it is no longer admired except as a matter of imitation, in obedience to the traditional injunction of the educators. Were the Iliad to be discovered to-day, beneath the ruins of Herculaneum, it would give us merely archaeological sensations. It would interest us in precisely the same degree as the Chanson de Roland; but a comparison of the two poems would then reveal more clearly than at present their correspondence to extremely different moments of civilization, since one is written entirely in images (somewhat stiff, it is true) while the other contains so few that they have been counted.
There is, moreover, no necessary relation between the merit of a work and its duration. Yet, when a book has survived, the authors of “analyses and extracts conforming to the requirements of the academic programme” know very well how to prove its “inimitable” perfection, and to resuscitate (for the brief time of a lecture) the mummy which will return once more to its linen bands. The idea of glory must not be confused with that of beauty. The former is entirely dependent upon the revolutions of fashion and of taste. The second is absolute to the extent of human sensations. The one is a matter of manners and customs; the other is firmly rooted in the law.
The form passes, it is true, but it is hard to see just how it could survive the matter which is its substance. If the beauty of a style becomes effaced or falls to dust, it is because the language has modified the aggregate of its molecules—words—as well as these molecules themselves, and because this internal activity has not taken place without swellings and disturbances. If Angelico’s frescos have “passed,” it is not that time has rendered them less beautiful, but that the humidity has swollen the cement where the painting has become caked and coated. Languages swell and flake like cement; or rather, they are like plane-trees, which can live only by constantly changing their bark, and which, early each spring, shed on the moss at their feet the names of lovers graven in their very flesh.
But what matters the future? What matters the approval of men who will not be what we should make them, were we demiurges? What is this glory enjoyed by man the moment he quits the realm of consciousness? It is time we learned to live in the present moment, to make the best of the passing hour, bad though it may be, and to leave to children this concern for the future, which is an intellectual weakness—though the naïveté of a man of genius. It is highly illogical to desire the immortality of works, when affirming and desiring the mortality of the soul. Dante’s Virgil lived beyond life, his glory grown eternal. Of this dazzling conception there is left us but a little vain illusion, which we shall do well to extinguish entirely.
This does not mean, however, that we should not write for men as if we were writing for angels, and thus realize, according to our calling and our nature, the utmost of beauty, even though passing and perishable.
V
M. Albalat shows excellent judgment in suppressing the very amusing distinctions made by the old manuals between the florid style and the simple style, the sublime and the moderate. He deems justly that there are but two sorts of style: the commonplace and the original. Were it permitted to count the degrees from the mediocre to the bad, as well as from the passable to the perfect, the scale of shades and of colours would be long. It is so far from the Légende de Saint-Julien l’Hospitalier to a parliamentary discourse, that we really wonder if it is the same language in both cases—if there are not two French languages, and below them an infinite number of dialects almost entirely independent of one another. Speaking of the political style, M. Marty-Laveaux5 thinks that the people, having remained faithful in its speech to the traditional diction, grasps this very imperfectly and in a general way only, as if it were a foreign language. He wrote this twenty-seven years ago, but the newspapers, more widely circulated at present, have scarcely modified popular habits. It is always safe to estimate in France that, out of every three persons, there is one who reads a bit of a paper now and then by chance, and another who never reads at all. At Paris the people have certain notions concerning style. They have a special predilection for violence and wit. This explains the popularity, rather literary than political, of a journalist like Rochefort, in whom the Parisians have for a long time found once more their ancient ideal of a witty and wordy cleaver of mountains.
Rochefort is, moreover, an original writer—one of those who should be cited among the first to show that the substance is nothing without the form. To be convinced of this, one has only to read a little further than his own article in the paper which he edits. Yet we are perhaps fooled by him. We have been, it appears, for fully half a century, by Mérimée, from whom M. Albalat quotes a page as a specimen of the hackneyed style. Going farther, he indulges in his favourite pastime; he corrects Mérimée and juxtaposes the two texts for our inspection. Here is a sample:
Bien qu’elle ne fût pas insensible au plaisir ou
à la vanité d’inspirer un sentiment sérieux
à un homme aussi léger que l’était Max dans
son opinion, elle n’avait jamais pensé que cette
affection pût devenir un jour dangeureuse pour
son repos.6 Sensible au plaisir d’attirer
sérieusement un homme aussi
léger, elle n’avait jamais pensé
que cette affection pût devenir
dangeureuse.
It cannot, at least, be denied that the severe professor’s style is economical, since it reduces the number of lines by nearly one-half. Subjected to this treatment, poor Mérimée, already far from fertile, would find himself the father of a few thin opuscules, symbolic thenceforth of his legendary dryness. Having become the Justin of all the Pompeius Troguses, Albalat places Lamartine himself upon the easel to tone down, for example, la finesse de sa peau rougissante comme à quinze ans sous les regards, to sa fine peau de jeune fille rougissante. What butchery! The words stricken out by M. Albalat are so far from being hackneyed that they would, on the contrary, correct and counteract the commonplaceness of the improved sentence. This surplusage conveys the exceedingly subtle observation of a man who has made a close study of women’s faces—a man more tender than sensual, and touched by modesty rather than by carnal prestige. Good or bad, style cannot be corrected. Style is inviolable.
M. Albalat gives some very amusing lists of clichés, or hackneyed phrases; but this criticism, at times, lacks measure. I cannot accept as clichés “kindly warmth,” “precocious perversity,” “restrained emotion,” “retreating forehead,” “abundant hair,” or even “bitter tears,” for tears can be “bitter” and can be “sweet.” It should be understood, also, that the expression which exists as a cliché in one style, can occur as a renewed image in another. “Restrained emotion” is no more ridiculous than “simulated emotion,” while, as for “retreating forehead,” this is a scientific and quite accurate expression, which one has only to be careful about employing in the proper place. It is the same with the others. If such locutions were banished, literature would become a kind of algebra and could no longer be understood without the aid of long analytical operations. If the objection to them is that they have been overworked, it would be necessary to forego all words in common use as well as those devoid of mystery. But that would be a delusion. The commonest words and most current expressions can surprise us. Finally, the true cliché, as I have previously explained, may be recognized by this, that, whereas the image which it conveys, already faded, is halfway on the road to abstraction, it is not yet sufficiently insignificant to pass unperceived and to take its place among the signs which owe whatever life they may possess to the will of the intelligence.7 Very often, in the cliché, one of the words has kept a concrete sense, and what makes us smile is less its triteness than the coupling of a living word with one from which the life has vanished. This can be seen clearly in such formulas as: “in the bosom of the Academy,” “devouring activity,” “open his heart,” “sadness was painted on his face,” “break the monotony,” “embrace principles.” However, there are clichés in which all the words seem alive—une rougeur colora ses joues; others in which all seem dead—il était au comble des ses vœux. But this last was formed at a time when the word comble was thoroughly alive and quite concrete. It is because it still contains the residue of a sensible image that its union with vœux displeases us. In the preceding example the word colorer has become abstract, since the concrete verb expressing this idea is colorier, and goes badly with rougeur and joues. I do not know just where a minute work on this part of the language, in which the fermentation is still unfinished, would lead us; but no doubt in the end it would be quite easy to demonstrate that, in the true notion of the cliché, incoherence has its place by the side of triteness. There would be matter in such a study for reasoned opinions that M. Albalat might render fruitful for the practice of style.
VI
It is to be regretted that he has dismissed the subject of periphrasis in a few lines. We expected an analysis of this curious tendency to replace by a description the word which is the sign of the thing in question. This malady, which is very ancient, since enigmas have been found on Babylonian cylinders (that of the wind very nearly in the terms employed by our children), is perhaps the very origin of all poetry. If the secret of being a bore consists of saying everything, the secret of pleasing lies in saying just enough to be, not understood even, but divined. Periphrasis, as handled by the didactic poets, is perhaps ridiculous only because of the lack of poetic power which it indicates; for there are many agreeable ways of not naming what it is desired to suggest. The true poet, master of his speech, employs only periphrases at once so new and so clear in their shadowy half-light, that any slightly sensual intelligence prefers them to the too absolute word. He wishes neither to describe, to pique the curiosity, nor to show off his learning; but, whatever he does, he employs periphrases, and it is by no means certain that all those he creates will remain fresh long. The periphrasis is a metaphor, and thus has the same life-span as a metaphor. It is far indeed from the vague and purely musical periphrases of Verlaine:
Parfois aussi le dard d’un insecte jaloux
Inquiétait le col des belles sous les branches,
to the mythological enigmas of a Lebrun, who calls the silkworm
“L’amant des feuilles de Thisbé.”
Here M. Albalat appropriately quotes Buffon to the effect that nothing does more to degrade a writer than the pains he takes to “express common or ordinary things in an eccentric or pompous manner. We pity him for having spent so much time making new combinations of syllables only to say what is said by everybody.” Delille won fame by his fondness for the didactic periphrasis, but I think he has been misjudged. It is not fear of the right word that makes him describe what he should have named, but rather his rigid system of poetics, and his mediocre talent. He lacks precision because he lacks power, and he is very bad only when he is not precise. But whether as a result of method or emasculation, we are indebted to him for some amusing enigmas:
Ces monstres qui de loin semblent un vaste écueil.
L’animal recouvert de son épaisse croûte,
Celui dont la coquille est arrondie en voûte.
L’équivoque habitant de la terre et des ondes.
Et cet oiseau parleur que sa triste beauté
Ne dédommage pas de sa stérilité.
It should not, however, be thought that the Homme des Champs, from which these charades are taken, is a poem entirely to be despised. The Abbé Delille had his merits and, once our ears, deprived of the pleasures of rhythm and of number, have become exhausted by the new versification, we may recover a certain charm in full and sonorous verses which are by no means tiresome, and in landscapes which, while somewhat severe, are broad and full of air.
... Soit qu’une fraîche aurore
Donne la vie aux fleurs qui s’empressent d’éclore,
Soit que l’astre du monde, en achevant son tour,
Jette languissamment les restes d’un beau jour.
VII
Yet M. Albalat asks how it is possible to be personal and original. His answer is not very clear. He counsels hard work and concludes that originality implies an incessant effort. This is a very regrettable illusion. Secondary qualities would, doubtless, be easier to acquire, but is concision, for example, an absolute quality? Are Rabelais and Victor Hugo, who were great accumulators of words, to be blamed because M. de Pontmartin was also in the habit of stringing together all the words that came into his head, and of heaping up as many as a dozen or fifteen epithets in a single sentence? The examples given by Albalat are very amusing; but if Gargantua had not played as many as two hundred and sixteen different and agreeable games under the eye of Ponocrates, we should feel very sorry, though “the great rules of the game are eternal.”
Concision is sometimes the merit of dull imaginations. Harmony is a rarer and more decisive quality. There is no comment to be made on what Albalat says in this connection, unless it be that he believes a trifle too much in the necessary relations between the lightness or heaviness of a word, for example, and the idea which it expresses. This is an illusion which springs from our habits of thought, and an analysis of the sounds destroys it completely. It is not merely, says Villemain, imitation of the Greek or the Latin fremere that has given us the word frémir; it is also the relation of its sound to the emotion expressed. Horreur, terreur, doux, suave, rugir, soupirer, pesant, léger, come to us not only from Latin, but from an intimate sense which has recognized and adopted them as analogous to the impression produced by the object.8 If Villemain, whose opinion M. Albalat accepted, had been better versed in linguistics, he would doubtless have invoked the theory of roots, which at one time gave to his nonsense an appearance of scientific force. As it stands, the celebrated orator’s brief paragraph would afford very agreeable matter for discussion. It is quite evident that if suave and suaire invoke impressions generally remote from each other, this is not because of the quality of their sound. In English, sweet and sweat are words which resemble each other. Doux is not more doux than toux and the other monosyllables of the same tone. Is rugir more violent than rougir or vagir? Léger is the contraction of a Latin word of five syllables, leviarium. If légère carries with it its own meaning, does mégère likewise? Pesant is neither more nor less heavy than pensant, the two forms being, moreover, doublets of a single Latin original, pensare. As for lourd, this is luridus, which meant many things: yellow, wild, savage, strange, peasant, heavy—such, doubtless, is its genealogy. Lourd is no more heavy than fauve is cruel. Think also of mauve and velours. If the English thin means the same as the French mince, how does it happen that the idea of its opposite, épais, is expressed by thick? Words are negative sounds which the mind charges with whatever sense it pleases. There are coincidences, chance agreements, between certain sounds and certain ideas. There are frémir, frayeur, froid, frileux, frisson. Yes; but there are also: frein, frère, frêle, frêne, fret, frime, and twenty other analogous sonorities, each of which is provided with a very different meaning.
M. Albalat is more successful in the balance of the two chapters where he treats successively word harmony and sentence harmony. He is right in calling the Goncourts’ style un style désécrit. This is still more strikingly true applied to Loti, in whose work there are no longer any sentences. His pages are thickets of phrases. The tree has been felled, its branches have been lopped; there is nothing left but to make faggots of them.
Beginning with the ninth lesson, L’Art d’écrire becomes still more didactic, and we encounter Invention, Disposition and Elocution. I should find it hard to explain just how M. Albalat succeeds in separating these three phases of composition, which are really one. The art of developing a subject has been refused me by Providence. I leave all that to the unconscious, nor do I know anything more of the art of invention. I believe that an author invents by reversing the method of Newton—that is, without ever thinking about it, while, as for elocution, I should hesitate to trust myself to the method of recasting. One does not recast, one remakes, and it is so tedious to do the same thing twice, that I approve of those who throw the stone at the first turn of the sling. But here is what proves the inanity of literary counsels: Théophile Gautier wrote the complicated pages of Capitaine Fracasse at odd moments on a printer’s table, among half-opened bundles of papers, in the stench of oil and ink, and it is said that Buffon recopied eighteen times the Époques de la Nature.9 This divergence is of no importance, since, as M. Albalat should have said, there are writers who make their corrections mentally, putting on paper only the swift or sluggish product of the unconscious, while there are others who need to see exteriorized what they have written, and to see it more than once, in order to correct it—that is, to understand it. Yet, even in the case of mental corrections, exterior revision is often profitable, provided, as Condillac puts it, the writer knows how to stop, to bring to a conclusion.10 But too often the demon of Betterment has tormented and sterilized intelligence. It is also true that it is a great misfortune to lack self-criticism. Who will dare to choose between the writer who does not know what he is doing, and the one who, endowed with a double nature, can watch himself as he works? There is Verlaine and there is Mallarmé. One must follow the bent of one’s own genius.
M. Albalat excels in definitions. “Description is the animated depiction of objects.” He means that, in order to describe, a writer must, like a painter, place himself before the landscape, whether this be real or imaginary. Judging by the analysis that he makes of a page of Télémaque, it seems clear that Fénelon was only moderately endowed with visual imagination, and more moderately still with the gift of words. In the first twenty lines of the description of Calypso’s grotto, the word doux occurs three times, and the verb former four. This has, indeed, become for us the very type of the inexpressive style, but I persist in believing that it once had its freshness and grace, and that the appeal which it made when it appeared was not unjustified. We smile at this opulence of gilt paper and painted flowers—the ideal of an archbishop who had remained a theological student—and forget that no one had described nature since Astrée. Those sweet oranges, those syrups diluted with spring-water, were refreshments fit for Paradise. It would be cruel to compare Fénelon, not with Homer, but even with the Homer of Leconte de Lisle. Translations too well done—those that may be said to possess literary literalness—have in fact the inevitable result of transforming into concrete, living images everything which had become abstract in the original. Did λευκοβραχίων mean one who had white arms, or was it merely a worn-out epithet? Did λευκάκανθα suggest an image such as blanche épine, or a neutral idea like aubépine, which has lost its representative value? We cannot tell; but, judging dead languages by the living, we must suppose that most of the Homeric epithets had already reached the stage of abstraction in Homer’s own time.11 It is possible that foreigners may find in a work as outworn for us as Télémaque, the same pleasure which we derive from the Iliad done in bas-relief by Leconte de Lisle. Mille fleurs naissantes émaillaient les tapis verts is a cliché only when read for the hundredth time. New, the image would be ingenious and pictorial. Poe’s poems, translated by Mallarmé, acquired a life at once mysterious and precise which they do not possess to the same degree in the original, and, from Tennyson’s Mariana, agreeable verse full of commonplaces and padding, grey in tone, the same poet, by substituting the concrete for the abstract, made a fresco of lovely autumnal colouring. I offer these remarks merely as a preface to a theory of translation. They will suffice here to indicate that, where it is a question of style, comparison should be made only between texts in the same language and belonging to the same period.
It is very difficult, after fifty years, to appreciate the real originality of a style. To do so, one should have read all the notable books in the order of their publication. It is at least possible to judge of the present, and also to accord some weight to the contemporary opinions of a work. Barbey d’Aurevilly found in Georges Sand a profusion of anges de la destinée, of lampes de la foi, and of coupes de miel, which certainly were not invented by her any more than the rest of her washed-out style; but “these decrepit tropes” would have been none the better if she had invented them. I feel sure that the cup, whose brim has been rubbed with honey, goes back to the obscure ages of pre-Hippocratic medicine. Hackneyed expressions enjoy a long life. M. Albalat notes justly “that there are images which can be renewed and rejuvenated.” There are many such, and among them some of the commonest; but I cannot see that, in calling the moon the morne lampe, Leconte de Lisle has been very successful in freshening up Lamartine’s lampe d’or. M. Albalat, who gives evidence of wide reading, should attempt a catalogue of metaphors by subject: the moon, the stars, the rose, the dawn, and all the “poetic” words. We should thus obtain a collection of a certain utility for the study of words and psychology of elementary emotions. Perhaps we should learn at last why the moon is so dear to poets. Meanwhile he announces his next book, La Formation du style par l’assimilation des auteurs; and I suppose that, once the series is complete, everyone will write well—that there will henceforth be a good medium style in literature, as there is in painting and in the other fine arts, which the State protects so successfully. Why not an Académie Albalat, as well as an Académie Julian?
Here, then, is a book which lacks almost nothing except not having a purpose, except being a work of pure and disinterested analysis; but, were it to have an influence, were it to multiply the number of honourable writers, it would deserve our maledictions. Instead of putting the manual of literature and all the arts within the reach of all, it would be wiser to transport their secrets to the top of some Himalaya. Yet there are no secrets. To be a writer, it is enough to have natural talent for the calling, to practise with perseverance, to learn a little more every morning, and to experience all human sensations. As for the art of “creating images,” we are obliged to believe that this is absolutely independent of all literary culture, since the loveliest, truest and boldest images are enclosed in the words we use every day—age-old products of instinct, spontaneous flowering of the intellectual garden.
1899.
Notes
1 On the importance and influence of Protestantism at this time, see the work of E. Hugues, pilfered by Protestant writers for the last twenty-five years: Histoire de la Restauration du Protestantisme en France au XVIIIe siècle (1872).
2 A book so little known and disfigured in its pious editions. Nothing could be less pious, however, or less edifying, after the first volume, than this curious and confused encyclopedia, where we find René and statistical tables, Atala and a catalogue of Greek painters. It is a universal history of civilization and a plan of social reconstruction.
3 In speaking of the eighteenth century, exception must always be made of the grandiose and solitary Buffon, in his tower at Montbard, who was, in the modern sense of these words, a scientist, a philosopher, and a poet.
4 An attempt will be made some day in a study in the World of Words, to determine whether words have really a meaning—that is to say, a constant value.
5 De l’Enseignement de notre langue.
6 M. Albalat has italicized everything he deems “banal or useless.”
7 See the chapter on the cliché, in my book, L’Esthétique de la Langue française.
8 L’Art d’écrire, p. 138.
9 Or rather, had them copied by his secretaries. He afterwards reworked the clean copy. There is a whole volume on this subject: Les Manuscrits de Buffon, by P. Flourens, Paris, Garnier, 1860.
10 There is, on this point, a pretty passage from Quintilian, quoted by M. Albalat, p. 213.
11 I take it for granted that the reader no longer believes that the Homeric poems were composed at haphazard by a multitude of rhapsodists of genius, and that it was enough to string these improvisations together to get the Iliad and the Odyssey.