Talks on Writing English. Bates Arlo

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СКАЧАТЬ Use the language of those addressed. There is somewhere a story of a lady who always spoke to her maid in French, because in taking the situation the girl had wrongfully claimed to know that tongue. The mistress held stubbornly to the position that the maid should understand, and she endured the discomforts of never being well served rather than abandon it. Much writing and not a little talking is all but as absurd. Constantly authors address themselves to the general public in language which they know or might know the general public will not understand. Whatever else the human race may be, it is not logical; there are few of us free from the fault of sometimes acting upon assumptions which we know to be false; and nowhere is this fact more strikingly illustrated than in composition.

      This question of using the language of those addressed is one which meets every teacher at the very threshold of the class-room. The best instructor is not he who knows most, but he who imparts most; and he imparts most who most perfectly speaks the language of his pupils. It is of no use daily to fire over the heads of children all the wisdom of Solomon if it be embodied in a language which is not theirs. The teacher who really teaches does not take the attitude of the lady whose maid should have known French; he does not assume that pupils should understand what he says; he simply considers whether as a matter of fact they do understand. If they do not, he sets himself with patience to re-phrase it, and, if need be, re-phrase again, until he has put it into language which the children cannot fail to comprehend. It is not a question of what might be understood but of what must be. It is true that this calls for a patience which is almost divine, and there are teachers in the common schools to-day who are only preserved to us because the age of translation to heaven is past. There are unhappily others who do not understand that this patient and laborious seeking after the intellectual dialect of the pupil is the only possible means of imparting instruction; and thus it happens that some schools are taught in a language which, while it is English, is yet hardly more intelligible to the students than would be Choctaw or the speech of Borrioboola-Gha.

      In writing, the safest guide in this respect is sound, homely common sense. Write without nonsense in the way of self-consciousness or affectation. Make it always a rule in general composition to aim at the simple, average man; to write so that the traditionally foolish wayfaring man need not err therein. Remember that the aim is not to write so that one may be understood, but to write so that one cannot be misunderstood.

      Absurdly enough, human vanity comes in here. Untrained writers are apt to feel that they lower themselves if they condescend to write for the intellectual bourgeoisie. Many a clever young author has come to grief because he could not bring himself to use simple language lest it should seem that he had not command of a more elaborate diction. He has failed because he could not be willing to address the ordinary reader lest he thereby might appear to show that he had not the gift of speaking to the learned. The great writers are men who are free from this weakness; who are intent upon making their message understood, and not upon preserving a foolish appearance of superiority. Shakespeare did not disdain to write for the London apprentices brawling in the pit, or Homer to sing for semi-barbarians half-drunken at the feast. The masterpieces of literature which have been addressed to the educated few are revered; those which have been confessedly for the many have been read and lived upon. To take as instances two works written at about the same time: “Paradise Lost” has been commended by critics and admired by scholars; “Pilgrim’s Progress” has been and is the favorite book with thousands. The one has always been profoundly admired and the other has been loved. I do not mean that this is all that might be said of these classics, or that there are no other considerations in determining their worth, but they do serve to make more clear the fact that to reach the general reader it is necessary to write for the general reader.

      Speaking the language of the average man includes also the confining of allusions to the range of his probable knowledge, the taking for granted nothing which he may not reasonably be supposed to know. The temptation to show erudition is at the elbow of every writer. When, near the beginning of this lecture, I referred in an easy manner to the Taj Mahal, I was instantly conscious that I had used the comparison with a pleasant sense of the air of superior knowledge which it might give. However it may be with you, the probabilities are that the ordinary reader would not be sufficiently familiar with the elaborate ornamentation of that wonder of the East to make my comparison to its jewelled walls effective, and I left it only because I wanted to use it here as an illustration.

      It is no less needful to appeal to the average emotional experiences of mankind in order to be clear to the general reader. It must be remembered that all art is based on the assumption of a community of human feelings; in other words, upon the theory that the fundamental emotions are shared by all mankind. The more closely a writer holds to common humanity, to common human experience, the more wide will be the range of his work, and the more clear will he be in those very matters where clearness is most difficult of attainment. The more subtile and remote from ordinary human life are the emotions and the passions to be portrayed, the more absolute is the necessity of conveying them in terms of simple and common experience. Analyze one of the tragedies of Shakespeare or of the old Greek dramatists, and you will find that its tremendous effects are produced by means essentially simple. By keeping always within the range of the sympathies and feelings common to humanity, the masters are able to make every stroke tell; and this method is in the nature of things the only possible one. Common humanity can comprehend only what it has felt.

      To gain Clearness it is necessary first to avoid all vagueness of thought and all vagueness of expression. It is needful to shun ambiguity of word or of phrase, and that more subtle ambiguity which may arise from ill-considered paragraphing, from misproportion, or from bad arrangement of the parts of a composition. It is no less important to write with a constant remembrance of the audience addressed; to use their language, and to appeal to the emotions and experiences which are likely to be common to the average individual of the class for which one writes. Inexperienced writers may make the mistake of supposing that this is the rule by which mediocrity is to be reached; but as a matter of fact these are the principles upon which have been written the masterpieces of the world.

      VI

      PRINCIPLES OF QUALITY CONTINUED

      Force has been defined as the quality which appeals to the emotions. Obviously, what we read interests us or it does not. Persons who are conscious that they are not qualified to judge of the value of work, yet who are secretly convinced that their judgment must be of value despite this fact, are rather apt to take refuge in the annoying phrase, “I am no judge, but I can tell what I like.” Even this qualified statement is often conspicuously untrue, but in so far as they really can tell what they like, they are judges of the force of what they read, their own emotions being the standard; and in so far as they can tell why they like or fail to like, they are judges also of the means by which force has been secured, or for want of which it has been lost.

      We are accustomed to associate with the term which is here used a signification more narrow and more intense than that which is given to it in this connection. Generally, when we speak of a piece of literature as having force, we mean that it has the power to move us to an unusual degree. We think at once of the cyclone-swept pages of Carlyle, of the penetrating mysteriousness of Kipling, or of the fate-pervaded realism of Hardy; at least, of something moving and intense. In discussing force as a quality of style, we must make the term wide enough to cover whatever power a literary composition has of arousing interest by what it is. An accidental circumstance – the antiquity of a book, the fact that it was written by a particular person, the part which it has played in an important event, and so on – might arouse a certain sort of interest in it, but this would have nothing to do with the force of the composition. Those things which certain magazines bring out, written by the notoriety of the hour, – the prize-fighter, the woman who has made herself most conspicuous in ways decent or indecent, – have not in themselves anything that can be called Force in the proper sense of the term. They may attract much attention, but it is by accidental circumstances, and not by their quality.

      “The secret of Force,” Mr. Wendell writes, “is connotation;” and he goes on to exemplify this thus: —

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