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Page 10
Burke kept his vast accumulations of knowledge perfectly fresh; and I
notice in him that, instead of growing more staid and commonplace in
his style as he increased in years, he grew more vigorous, until he
actually slid into the excess of gaudy redundancy. I am sorry that his
prose ever became Asiatic in its splendour; but even that fact shows
how steadfast effort may prevent a man from writing away his
originality and his freshness of manner. Observe the sad results of an
antagonistic proceeding for even the mightiest of brains. Sir Walter
Scott was building up his brain until he was forty years old; then we
had the Homeric strength of "Marmion," the perfect art of the
"Antiquary," the unequalled romantic interest of "Guy Mannering," "Rob
Roy," "Ivanhoe," "Quentin Durward." The long years of steady
production drained that most noble flood of knowledge and skill until
we reached the obvious fatuity of "Count Robert" and the imbecilities
of "Castle Dangerous." Any half-dozen of such books as "Redgauntlet,"
"The Pirate," and "Kenilworth" were sufficient to give a man the
reputation of being great--and yet even that overwhelming opulence was
at last worn down into mental poverty. Poor Scott never gave himself
time to recover when once his descent of the last perilous slope had
begun, and he suffered for his folly in not resting.
In Lord Tennyson's case we see how wisdom may preserve a man's power.
The poet who gave us "Ulysses" so long ago, the poet who brought forth
such a magnificent work as "Maud," retained his power so fully that
thirty years after "Maud" he gave us "Rizpah." This continued
freshness, lasting nearly threescore years, is simply due to economy
of physical and mental resource, which is far more important than any
economy of money. Charles Dickens cannot be said to have been fairly
written out at any time; but he was often perilously near that
condition; only his power of throwing himself with eagerness into any
scheme of relaxation saved him; and, but for the readings and the
unhappy Sittingbourne railway accident, he might be with us now full
of years and honours. When he did suffer himself to be worked to a low
ebb for a time, his writing was very bad. Even in the flush of his
youth, when he was persuaded to write "Oliver Twist" in a hurry, he
fell far below his own standard. I have lately read the book after
many years, and while I find nearly all the comic parts admirable,
some of the serious portions strike me as being so curiously stilted
and bad that I can hardly bring myself to believe that Dickens touched
them. An affectionate student of his books can almost always account
for the bad patches in Dickens by collating the novels with the
letters and diary. Much of the totally nauseating gush of the Brothers
Cheeryble must have been turned out only by way of stop-gap; and there
are passages in "Little Dorrit" which may have been done speedily
enough by the author, but which no one of my acquaintance can reckon
as bearable. Dickens saw the danger of exhausting himself before he
reached fifty-four years of age, and tried to repair damages inflicted
by past excesses; but he was too late, and though "Edwin Drood" was
quite in his best manner, he could not keep up the effort--and we lost
him.
As for the dismal hacks who sometimes call themselves journalists, I
cannot grow angry with them; but they do test the patience of the most
stolid of men. To call them writers--_�crivains_--would be worse than
flattery; they are paper-stainers, and every fresh dribble of their
incompetence shows how utterly written out they are. Let them have a
noble action to describe, or let them have a world-shaking event given
them as subject for comment, the same deadly mechanical dulness marks
the description and the article. Look at an article by Forbes or
McGahan or Burleigh--an article wherein the words seem alive--and then
run over a doleful production of some complacent hack, and the
astounding range that divides the zenith of journalism from the nadir
may at once be seen. The poor hack has all his little bundle of
phrases tied up ready to his hand; but he has no brain left, and he
cannot rearrange his verbal stock-in-trade in fresh and vivid
combinations. The old, old sentences trickle out in the old, old way.
Our friends, "the breach than the observance," "the cynosure of all
eyes," "the light fantastic toe," "beauty when unadorned," "the poor
Indian," and all the venerable army come out on parade. The weariful
writer fills up his allotted space; but he does not give one single
new idea, and we forget within a few minutes what the article
pretended to say--in an hour we have forgotten even the name of the
subject treated.
As one looks around on the corps of writers now living, one feels
inclined to ask the old stale question, "And pray what time do you
give yourself for thinking?" The hurrying reporter or special
correspondent needs only to describe in good prose the pictures that
pass before his eye; but what is required of the man who stays at home
and spins out his thoughts as the spider spins his thread? He must
take means to preserve his own freshness, or he grows more and more
unreadable with a rapidity which lands him at last among the helpless,
hopeless dullards; if he persists in expending the last remnants of
his ideas, he may at last be reduced to such extremities that he will
be forced to fill up his allotted space by describing the interesting
vagaries of his own liver. Scores of written-out men pretend to
instruct the public daily or weekly; the supply of rank commonplace is
pumped up, but the public rush away to buy some cheap story which has
signs of life in it. My impression is that it is not good for writers
to consort too much with men of their own class; the slang of
literature is detestable, and a man soon begins to use it at all
seasons if he lives in the literary atmosphere. The actor who works in
the theatre at night, and lives only among his peers during the day,
ends by becoming a mummer even in private life; a teacher who does not
systematically shake off the taint of the school is among the most
tiresome of creatures; the man who hurries from race-meeting to
race-meeting seems to lose the power of talking about anything save
horses and bets; and the literary man cannot hope to escape the usual
fate of those who narrow their horizon. When a man once settles down
as "literary" and nothing else, he does not take long in reaching
complete nullity. His power of emitting strings of grammatical
sentences remains; but the sentences are only exudations from an awful
blankness--he is written out. The rush after money has latterly
brought some of our most exquisite writers of fiction into a condition
which is truly lamentable; the very beauties which marked their early
work have become garish and vulgarised, and, in running through the
early chapters of a new novel, a reader of fair intelligence discovers
that he could close the book and tell the story for himself. One
artist cannot get away from sentimental merchant-seamen and lovely
lady-passengers; another must always bring in an infant that is cast
on shore near a primitive village; another must have for characters a
roguish trainer of race-horses, an honest jockey, a dark villain who
tampers with race-horses, and a dashing young man who is saved from
ruin by betting on a race; another drags in a surprisingly
lofty-minded damsel who grows up pure and noble amid the most
repulsive surroundings; another can never forget the lost will;
another depends on a mock-modest braggart who kills scores of people
in a humorous way. The mould remains the same in each case, although
there may be casual variations in the hue of the material poured out
and moulded. All these forlorn folk are either verging toward the
written-out condition or have reached the last level of flatness. Like
the great painters who work for Manchester or New York millionaires,
these novelists produce stuff which is only shoddy; they lower their
high calling, and they prepare themselves to pass away into the ranks
of the nameless millions whose works are ranged along miles of
untouched shelves in the great public libraries. Fame may not be
greatly worth trying for; but at least a man may try to turn out the
very best work of which he is capable. Some of our brightest refuse to
aim at the highest, and they land in the dim masses of the
written-out.
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