21. Labour Of Authorship

________________________________________________
_ XXI. LABOUR OF AUTHORSHIP

Literature maintains an endless quarrel with idle sentences. Twenty years ago this would have seemed too obvious to bear saying. But in the meantime there has been a good deal of dipping of pens in chaos, and authors have found excuses for themselves in a theory of literature which is impatient of difficult writing. It would not matter if it were only the paunched and flat-footed authors who were proclaiming the importance of writing without style. Unhappily, many excellent writers as well have used their gift of style to publish the praise of stylelessness. Within the last few weeks I have seen it suggested by two different critics that the hasty writing which has left its mark on so much of the work of Scott and Balzac was a good thing and almost a necessity of genius. It is no longer taken for granted, as it was in the days of Stevenson, that the starry word is worth the pains of discovery. Stevenson, indeed, is commonly dismissed as a pretty-pretty writer, a word-taster without intellect or passion, a juggler rather than an artist. Pater's bust also is mutilated by irreverent schoolboys: it is hinted that he may have done well enough for the days of Victoria, but that he will not do at all for the world of George. It is all part of the reaction against style which took place when everybody found out the aesthetes. It was, one may admit, an excellent thing to get rid of the aesthetes, but it was by no means an excellent thing to get rid of the virtue which they tried to bring into English art and literature. The aesthetes were wrong in almost everything they said about art and literature, but they were right in impressing upon the children of men the duty of good drawing and good words. With the condemnation of Oscar Wilde, however, good words became suspected of kinship with evil deeds. Style was looked on as the sign of minor poets and major vices. Possibly, on the other hand, the reaction against style had nothing to do with the Wilde condemnation. The heresy of the stylelessness is considerably older than that. Perhaps it is not quite fair to call it the heresy of stylelessness: it would be more accurate to describe it as the heresy of style without pains. It springs from the idea that great literature is all a matter of first fine careless raptures, and it is supported by the fact that apparently much of the greatest literature is so. If lines like

Hark, hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings,

or

When daffodils begin to peer,

or

His golden locks time hath to silver turned,

shape themselves in the poet's first thoughts, he would be a manifest fool to trouble himself further. Genius is the recognition of the perfect line, the perfect phrase, the perfect word, when it appears, and this perfect line or phrase or word is quite as likely to appear in the twinkling of an eye as after a week of vigils. But the point is that it does not invariably so appear. It sometimes cost Flaubert three days' labour to write one perfect sentence. Greater writers have written more hurriedly. But this does not justify lesser writers in writing hurriedly too.

Of all the authors who have exalted the part played in literature by inspiration as compared with labour, none has written more nobly or with better warrant than Shelley. "The mind," he wrote in the _Defence of Poetry_--

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible
influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory
brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a
flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the
conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its
approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its
original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the
greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration
is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry
that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble
shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the
greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to
assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour
and study.

He then goes on to interpret literally Milton's reference to _Paradise Lost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the Muse, and to reply scornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_." Who is there who would not agree with Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts advocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds? Literature without inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without style. But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an artist without taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled down industriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not grow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto "Nulle dies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. On the other hand, Trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and Zola without pains might as well have been a waiter. Nor is it only the little or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pity we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin recently published an early draft of Keats's sonnet, "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art," which showed that in the case of Keats at least the mind in creation was not "as a fading coal," but as a coal blown to increasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study." And the poetry of Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second and later thoughts. Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with him for time, declared that an early draft of _Endymion_ opened with the line:

A thing of beauty is a constant joy

--a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was "a fine line, but wanting something." Keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, "I have it," and wrote in its place:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of Keats. The most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the most beautiful of all his phrases--

magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn--

did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. He originally wrote "the wide casements" and "keelless seas":

the wide casements, opening on the foam
Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not spoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to prove that Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" does not hold good for all poets? On the contrary, it is often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. Or rather it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that "the poet must be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind," took care to add the warning that no one must think he "can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus." Poe has uttered a comparable warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets in his _Marginalia_, where he declares that "this untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and _art_" must be "kick[ed] out of the world's way." Wordsworth's saying that poetry has its origin in "emotion recollected in tranquillity" also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by contemplation and labour. How eagerly one would study a Shakespeare manuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shaping imagination of the poet at work upon his lines! Many people have the theory--it is supported by an assertion of Jonson's--that Shakespeare wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it is evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ or Hamlet's address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But one seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revision as Robert Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a great stylist to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be a great stylist in more than one poem, such as _Childe Roland_--which he wrote almost at a sitting. His inspiration, however, seldom raised his work to the same beauty of perfection. He is, as regards mere style, the most imperfect of the great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! If only Browning had had Tennyson's desire for golden words!

It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before a single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the case with Menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before he had written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but of expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the aesthetes. We who do not know Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic struggle for perfection in writing:

When _Anna Karenina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyestnik_ [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures.

My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh.

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when "Lyovotchka" came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post.

My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more.

"Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work again; I promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow without fail." But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together.

"There's just one bit I want to look through again," my father would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh. There were even occasions when, after posting the Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and correct them by telegraph. There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the artistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like solicitors, must live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure. Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to write his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs. But he at least laboured all that he could. Novel-writing has since his time become as painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as merchandise. _

Read next: 22. The Theory Of Poetry

Read previous: 20. Georgians

Table of content of Art of Letters


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book