On the Art of Writing

Then let us take Webster for the comparison; Webster, a man of genius or of something very like it, and commonly praised by the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, and what I may call solidified sensation. Let us take this admired passage from his Duchess of Malfi:⁠—

Ferdinand	How doth our sister Duchess bear herself In her imprisonment?
Basola	Nobly: I’ll describe her. She’s sad as one long used to ’t, and she seems Rather to welcome the end of misery Than shun it: a behaviour so noble As gives a majesty to adversity3 You may discern the shape of loveliness More perfect in her tears than in her smiles; She will muse for hours together;4 and her silence Methinks expresseth more than if she spake.

Now set against this the well-known passage from Twelfth Night where the Duke asks and Viola answers a question about someone unknown to him and invented by her⁠—a mere phantasm, in short: yet note how much more definite is the language:⁠—

Viola	My father had a daughter lov’d a man; As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, I should your lordship.
Duke	And what’s her history?
Viola	A blank, my lord. She never told her love, But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud, Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in thought, And with a green and yellow melancholy She sat like Patience on a monument Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) how, when Shakespeare has to use the abstract noun “concealment,” on an instant it turns into a visible worm “feeding” on the visible rose; how, having to use a second abstract word “patience,” at once he solidifies it in tangible stone.

Turning to prose, you may easily assure yourselves that men who have written learnedly on the art agree in treating our maxim⁠—to prefer the concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the general, the definite to the vague⁠—as a canon of rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The late Mr. E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable prefaces to Burke (prefaces too little known and valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden away in a schoolbook), illustrated the maxim by setting a passage from Burke’s speech “On Conciliation with America” alongside a passage of like purport from Lord Brougham’s Inquiry Into the Policy of the European Powers. Here is the deadly parallel:⁠—

Burke

In large bodies the circulation of power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Nature has said it. The Turk cannot govern Ægypt and Arabia and Curdistan as he governs Thrace; nor has he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he has at Brusa and Smyrna. Despotism itself is obliged to truck and huckster. The Sultan gets such obedience as he can. He governs with a loose rein, that he may govern at all; and the whole of the force and vigour of his authority in his centre is derived from a prudent relaxation in all his borders.

Brougham

In all the despotisms of the East, it has been observed that the further any part of the empire is removed from the capital, the more do its inhabitants enjoy some sort of rights and privileges: the more inefficacious is the power of the monarch; and the more feeble and easily decayed is the organisation of the government.

You perceive that Brougham has transferred Burke’s thought to his own page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke’s vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold on the mind?

“This particularising style,” comments Mr. Payne, “is the essence of Poetry; and in Prose it is impossible not to be struck with the energy it produces. Brougham’s passage is excellent in its way: but it pales before the flashing lights of Burke’s sentences.” The best instances of this energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the classical writers of the seventeenth century. “When South says, ‘An Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments of Paradise,’ he communicates more effectually the notion of the difference between the intellect of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the philosophy of his sermons put together.”

You may agree with me, or you may not, that South in this passage is expounding trash; but you will agree with Mr. Payne and me that he uttered it vividly.

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this vivid style of writing, a passage from Dr. John Donne far beyond and above anything that ever lay within South’s compass:⁠—

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust of great persons’ graves is speechless, too; it says nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a whirle-wind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard into the Church, and the man sweeps out the dust of the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran? So is the death of Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall not say “This is Iesabel”; not only not wonder that it is, nor pity that it should be; but they shall not say, they shall not know, “This is Iesabel.”

Carlyle noted of Goethe, “his emblematic intellect, his never-failing tendency to transform into shape, into life, the feeling that may dwell in him. Everything has form, has visual excellence: the poet’s imagination bodies forth the forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them into shape.”

Perpend this,