5 an motive, or member of the whole matter, indicating, as Flaubert was aware, original structure in thought not organically complete. With ically complete. With such foresight, the actual conclusion will most often get itself written out of hand, before, in the more obvious sense, the work is finished. With some strong and leading sense of the world, the tight hold of which se10 cures true composition and not mere loose accretion, the literary artist, I suppose. goes on considerably, setting joint to joint, sustained by yet restraining the productive ardor, retracing the negligences of his first sketch, repeating his steps only that he may give the reader a sense of secure and restful progress, readjusting mere assonances even, that they may soothe the reader, or at least not interrupt him on his way; and then, somewhere before the end comes, is burdened, inspired, with his conclusion, and betimes delivered of it, leaving off, not in weariness and because he finds himself at an end, but in all the freshness of volition. His work now structurally complete, with all the accumulating effect of secondary shades of meaning, he finishes the whole up to the just proportion of that ante-penultimate conclusion, and all becomes expressive. The house he has built is rather a body he has informed. And so it happens, to its greater credit, that the better interest even of a narrative to be recounted, a story to be told, will often be in its second reading. And though there are instances of great writers who have been no artists, an unconscious tact sometimes 40 directing work in which we may detect, very pleasurably, many of the effects of conscious art, yet one of the greatest pleasures of really good prose literature is in the critical tracing out of that conscious artistic structure, and the pervading sense of it as we read. Yet of poetic literature too; for, in truth, the kind of constructive intelligence here supposed is one of the forms of the imagination. similar unity or identity of the mind in or unconscious repetition of word, phrase, 3c That is the special function of mind. in style. Mind and soul,- hard to ascertain philosophically, the distinction is real enough practically, for they often interfere, are sometimes in conflict, with each other. Blake, in the last century, is an instance of preponderating soul, embarrassed, at a loss, in an era of pre of choosing and rejecting what is congruous or otherwise, with a drift towards unity unity of atmosphere here, as there of design-soul securing color (or perfume, might we say?) as mind secures form, the latter being essentially finite, the former vague or infinite, as the influence of a living person is practically infinite. There are some to whom nothing has any real interest, or real meaning, except as operative in a given person; and it is they who best appreciate the quality of soul in literary art. They seem to know a person, in a book, and make way by intuition: yet, although they thus enjoy the completeness of a personal information, it is still a characteristic of soul, in this sense of the word, that it does but suggest what can never be uttered, not as being different from, or more obscure than, what actually gets said, but as containing that plenary substance of which there is only one phase or facet in what is there expressed. ponderating mind. As a quality of style, at all events, soul is a fact, in certain writers the way they have of absorbing language, of attracting it into the peculiar spirit they are of, with a sub- 5 tlety which makes the actual result seem like some inexplicable inspiration. By mind, the literary artist reaches us, through static and objective indications of design in his work, legible to all. By 10 soul, he reaches us, somewhat capriciously perhaps, one and not another, through vagrant sympathy and a kind of immediate contact. Mind we cannot choose but approve where we recognize 15 it; soul may repel us, not because we misunderstand it. The way in which theological interests sometimes avail themselves of language is perhaps the best illustration of the force I mean to 20 indicate generally in literature, by the word soul. Ardent religious persuasion may exist, may make its way, without finding any equivalent heat in language: or, again, it may enkindle words to va- 25 rious degrees, and when it really takes If all high things have their martyrs, hold of them doubles its force. Reli- Gustave Flaubert might perhaps rank as gious history presents many remarkable. the martyr of literary style. In his instances in which, through no mere printed correspondence, a curious series phrase-worship, an unconscious liter- 30 of letters, written in his twenty-fifth ary tact has, for the sensitive, laid open year, records what seems to have been a privileged pathway from one to an- his one other passion - a series of letother. The altar-fire,' people say, 'has ters which, with its fine casuistries, its touched those lips!' The Vulgate, the firmly repressed anguish, its tone of harEnglish Bible, the English Prayer-Book, 35 monious gray, and the sense of disillusion the writings of Swedenborg, the Tracts in which the whole matter ends, might for the Times: there, we have in- have been, a few slight changes supstances of widely different and largely posed, one of his own fictions. Writing diffused phases of religious feeling in to Madame X. certainly he does display, operation as soul in style. But some- 40 by taking thought' mainly, by constant thing of the same kind acts with similar and delicate pondering, as in his love power in certain writers of quite other for literature, a heart really moved, but than theological literature, on behalf of still more, and as the pledge of that emosome wholly personal and peculiar sense tion, a loyalty to his work. Madame X., of theirs. Most easily illustrated by 45 too, is a literary artist, and the best gifts theological literature, this quality lends he can send her are precepts of perfecto profane writers a kind of religious tion in art, counsels for the effectual influence. At their best, these writers pursuit of that better love. In his become, as we say sometimes, 'proph- love-letters it is the pains and pleasures ets'; such character depending on the 50 of art he insists on, its solaces: he comeffect not merely of their matter, but of their matter as allied to, in 'electric affinity' with, peculiar form, and working in all cases by an immediate sympathetic contact, on which account it is 55 that it may be called soul, as opposed to mind, in style. And this too is a faculty municates secrets, reproves, encourages, with a view to that. Whether the lady was dissatisfied with such divided or indirect service, the reader is not enabled to see; but sees that, on Flaubert's part at least, a living person could be no rival of what was, from first to last, his rectness or purism of the mere scholar, but a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion of what does not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and 5 vigor in the portraiture of one's sense. License again, the making free with rule, if it be indeed, as people fancy, a habit of genius, flinging aside or transforming all that opposes the liberty of beautiful meaning. The seeming baldness of Le Rouge et Le Noir is nothing in itself; the wild ornament of Les Misérables is nothing in itself; and the restraint of Flaubert, felicity, incapable of strict analysis: effect of an intuitive condition of mind, it must be recognized by like intuition on the part of the reader, and a sort of immediate sense. In every one of those masterly sentences of Flaubert there was, below all mere contrivance, shaping and afterthought, by some happy instantaneous concourse of the various faculties of the mind with each other, the exact appre- 10 production, will be but faith to one's own hension of what was needed to carry the meaning. And that it fits with absolute justice will be a judgment of immediate sense in the appreciative reader. We all feel this in what may be called inspired 15 amid a real natural opulence, only retranslation. Well! all language involves translation from inward to outward. In literature, as in all forms of art, there are the absolute and the merely relative or accessory beauties; and precisely in that 20 exact proportion of the term to its purpose is the absolute beauty of style, prose or verse. All the good qualities, the beauties, of verse also, are such, only as precise expression. doubled beauty- the phrase so large and so precise at the same time, hard as bronze, in service to the more perfect adaptation of words to their matter. Afterthoughts, retouchings, finish, will be of profit only so far as they too really serve to bring out the original, initiative, generative, sense in them. In this way, according to the well25 known saying, 'The style is the man,' complex for simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he really has to say, his sense of the world; all cautions regarding style arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there which might give conveyance to any matter save that. Style in all its varieties, reserved or opulent, terse, abundant, musical, stimulant, academic, so long as each is really characteristic or expressive, finds thus its justification, the sumptuous good taste of Cicero being as truly the man himself, and not another, justified, yet insured inalienably to him, thereby, as would have been his portrait by Raphael, in full consular splendor, on his ivory chair. In the highest as in the lowliest literature, then, the one indispensable beauty is, after all, truth: truth to bare fact in the latter, as to some personal sense of fact, diverted somewhat from men's 30 ordinary sense of it, in the former; truth there as accuracy, truth here as expression, that finest and most intimate form of truth, the vraie vérité. And what an eclectic principle this really is! employ- 35 ing for its one sole purpose - that absolute accordance of expression to idea – all other literary beauties and excellences whatever how many kinds of style it covers, explains, justifies, and at the same 40 time safeguards! Scott's facility, Flaubert's deeply pondered evocation of the phrase,' are equally good art. Say what you have to say, what you have a will to say, in the simplest, the most direct and exact manner possible, with no surplusage: there, is the justification of the sentence so fortunately born, entire, smooth, and round,' that it needs no punctuation, and also (that is the point!) 50 of the most elaborate period, if it be right in its elaboration. Here is the office of ornament: here also the purpose of restraint in ornament. As the exponent of As the exponent of truth, that austerity (the beauty, the func- 55 tion, of which in literature Flaubert understood so well) becomes not the cor 45 A relegation, you may say perhaps a relegation of style to the subjectivity, the mere caprice, of the individual, which must soon transform it into mannerism. Not so! since there is, under the conditions supposed, for those elements of the man, for every lineament of the vision within, the one word, the one acceptable word, recognizable by the sensitive, by others who have intelligence' in the matter, as absolutely as ever anything can be in the evanescent and delicate region of human language. The style, the manner, would be the man, not in his unreasoned and really uncharacteristic caprices, involuntary or affected, but in absolutely sincere apprehension of what is most real to him. But let us hear our French guide again. 5 Styles,' says Flaubert's commentator, 'Styles, as so many peculiar molds, each of which bears the mark of a particular 10 writer, who is to pour into it the whole content of his ideas, were no part of his theory. What he believed in was Style: that is to say, a certain absolute and unique manner of expressing a thing, in 15 all its intensity and color. For him the form was the work itself. As in living creatures, the blood, nourishing the body, determines its very contour and external aspect, just so, to his mind, the matter, the basis, in a work of art, imposed necessarily, the unique, the just expression, the measure, the rhythm- the form in all its characteristics.' 20 If the style be the man, in all the color 25 and intensity of a veritable apprehension, it will be in a real sense impersonal.' takes rank as the typically perfect art. If music be the ideal of all art whatever, precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then, literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good art. Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all events, not on its form, but on the matter. Thackeray's Esmond, surely, is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its interests. It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls, its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les Misérables, The English Bible, are great art. Given the conditions I have tried to explain as constituting good art; then, if it be devoted further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the oppressed, or the enlarge30 ment of our sympathies with each other, or to such presentment of new or old truth about ourselves and our relation to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and soul – that color and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its architectural place, in the great structure of human life. I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, that prose literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned that place to music. Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature 35 presenting to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and various as those which music presents to it through sense. And certainly the tendency of what has been here 40 said is to bring literature too under those conditions, by conformity to which music. (1888) ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894). Stevenson's great-grandfather, grandfather, and father were engineers to the Board of Northern Lighthouses, and he was educated for the family profession. At twenty-one he asked to be allowed to give up engineering for literature, and his father consented on condition that he qualified for the Scottish Bar. Stevenson fulfilled the condition, but took as little interest in his legal as in his engineering studies, setting far more store by certain other odds and ends that he came by in the open street while he was playing truant.' At his chosen pursuit of literature, however, he toiled incessantly. He says: 'I imagine nobody had ever such pains to learn a trade as I had; but I slogged at it day in and day out; and I frankly believe (thanks to my dire industry) I have done more with smaller gifts than almost any man of letters in the world.' As a schoolboy he edited magazines and wrote essays, stories and plays; his first novel was turned into a historical essay and privately printed when he was sixteen. As an undergraduate at Edinburgh he established the University Magazine which ran four months in undisturbed obscurity and died without a gasp.' In 1873-4 he had half-a-dozen articles in various magazines, and his first book, An Inland Voyage, was published in 1878. It is an account of a canoe trip in Belgium and France made two years earlier. About this time Stevenson met and fell in love with Mrs. Fanny Osbourne, an American lady who came to study art in France. In 1878 she returned to California, and thither in 1879 Stevenson followed her. Some of his experiences in crossing the Atlantic and the American continent (though by no means all the sufferings he endured) are told in The Amateur Emigrant and Across the Plains. He arrived at San Francisco in desperate straits of health and pocket, and only Mrs. Osbourne's devoted nursing saved his life. After his recovery, they were married, and spent their honeymoon in the neighboring mountains, described in The Silverado Squatters. His first volume of essays, Virginibus Puerisque, was highly appreciated, but only by a few: it was a book for boys, Treasure Island, which made him suddenly famous. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Kidnapped were equally successful. During these years he was living in various health resorts in Europe and America; in 1888 he went for a long voyage in the Pacific, at the end of which he bought an estate and settled in Samoa. He endeared himself to the natives, and in spite of continued illness, did some of his best literary work. The year before his death he wrote: For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my hand swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove. I am better now, have been, rightly speaking, since first I came to the Pacific; and still, few are the days when I am not in some physical distress. And the battle goes on-ill or well, is a trifle: so as it goes. I was made for a contest, and the Powers have so willed that my battlefield should be this dingy, inglorious one of the bed and the physic bottle.' He was buried at the top of the mountain overlooking his Samoan home in a tomb inscribed with his own Requiem : Under the wide and starry sky, Dig the grave and let me lie. And I laid me down with a will. |