"Singing! That wasn't singing; that was the wailing, screeching of third-rate obscurities, palmed off on us in the interest of economy."Well, I ought to have recognized the sign--the old, sure sign that has never failed me in matters of art.Whenever Ienjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor.The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo.However, my base instinct does bring me profit sometimes; I was the only man out of thirty-two hundred who got his money back on those two operas.
----------------
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
Is it true that the sun of a man's mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with saying so.Maybe he said it, maybe he didn't; Idon't know which it is.But if he said it, I can point him to a case which proves his rule.Proves it by being an exception to it.To this place I nominate Mr.Howells.
I read his VENETIAN DAYS about forty years ago.I compare it with his paper on Machiavelli in a late number of HARPER, and I cannot find that his English has suffered any impairment.For forty years his English has been to me a continual delight and astonishment.In the sustained exhibition of certain great qualities--clearness, compression, verbal exactness, and unforced and seemingly unconscious felicity of phrasing--he is, in my belief, without his peer in the English-writing world.SUSTAINED.
I entrench myself behind that protecting word.There are others who exhibit those great qualities as greatly as he does, but only by intervaled distributions of rich moonlight, with stretches of veiled and dimmer landscape between; whereas Howells's moon sails cloudless skies all night and all the nights.
In the matter of verbal exactness Mr.Howells has no superior, I suppose.He seems to be almost always able to find that elusive and shifty grain of gold, the RIGHT WORD.Others have to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he has better luck.To me, the others are miners working with the gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle--no grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him.A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THEright one blazes out on us.Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt:
it tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn-butter that creams the sumac-berry.One has no time to examine the word and vote upon its rank and standing, the automatic recognition of its supremacy is so immediate.There is a plenty of acceptable literature which deals largely in approximations, but it may be likened to a fine landscape seen through the rain; the right word would dismiss the rain, then you would see it better.It doesn't rain when Howells is at work.
And where does he get the easy and effortless flow of his speech? and its cadenced and undulating rhythm? and its architectural felicities of construction, its graces of expression, its pemmican quality of compression, and all that?
Born to him, no doubt.All in shining good order in the beginning, all extraordinary; and all just as shining, just as extraordinary today, after forty years of diligent wear and tear and use.He passed his fortieth year long and long ago; but Ithink his English of today--his perfect English, I wish to say --can throw down the glove before his English of that antique time and not be afraid.
I will got back to the paper on Machiavelli now, and ask the reader to examine this passage from it which I append.I do not mean examine it in a bird's-eye way; I mean search it, study it.
And, of course, read it aloud.I may be wrong, still it is my conviction that one cannot get out of finely wrought literature all that is in it by reading it mutely:
Mr.Dyer is rather of the opinion, first luminously suggested by Macaulay, that Machiavelli was in earnest, but must not be judged as a political moralist of our time and race would be judged.He thinks that Machiavelli was in earnest, as none but an idealist can be, and he is the first to imagine him an idealist immersed in realities, who involuntarily transmutes the events under his eye into something like the visionary issues of reverie.The Machiavelli whom he depicts does not cease to be politically a republican and socially a just man because he holds up an atrocious despot like Caesar Borgia as a mirror for rulers.
What Machiavelli beheld round him in Italy was a civic disorder in which there was oppression without statecraft, and revolt without patriotism.When a miscreant like Borgia appeared upon the scene and reduced both tyrants and rebels to an apparent quiescence, he might very well seem to such a dreamer the savior of society whom a certain sort of dreamers are always looking for.Machiavelli was no less honest when he honored the diabolical force than Carlyle was when at different times he extolled the strong man who destroys liberty in creating order.
But Carlyle has only just ceased to be mistaken for a reformer, while it is still Machiavelli's hard fate to be so trammeled in his material that his name stands for whatever is most malevolent and perfidious in human nature.
