Sometimes the cry for simplicity is the reverse of what it seems, and is uttered by those who had rather hear words used in their habitual vague acceptations than submit to the cutting directness of a good writer.Habit makes obscurity grateful, and the simple style, in this view, is the style that allows thought to run automatically into its old grooves and burrows.The original writers who have combined real literary power with the heresy of ease and nature are of another kind.A brutal personality, excellently muscular, snatching at words as the handiest weapons wherewith to inflict itself, and the whole body of its thoughts and preferences, on suffering humanity, is likely enough to deride the daintiness of conscious art.Such a writer is William Cobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised into a kind of creed.His power is undeniable; his diction, though he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page after page of his writing suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal waste of good English.He bludgeons all he touches, and spends the same monotonous emphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of the Government.His is the simplicity of a crude and violent mind, concerned only with giving forcible expression to its unquestioned prejudices.Irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated, he glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the semblance of strength, and helps to wield the hammer.
It is not to be denied that there is a native force of temperament which can make itself felt even through illiterate carelessness.
"Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics," says Thoreau, himself by no means a careless writer, "think that they know how to write, because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken.The ART of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind them." This true saying introduces us to the hardest problem of criticism, the paradox of literature, the stumbling-block of rhetoricians.To analyse the precise method whereby a great personality can make itself felt in words, even while it neglects and contemns the study of words, would be to lay bare the secrets of religion and life - it is beyond human competence.Nevertheless a brief and diffident consideration of the matter may bring thus much comfort, that the seeming contradiction is no discredit cast on letters, but takes its origin rather from too narrow and pedantic a view of the scope of letters.
Words are things: it is useless to try to set them in a world apart.They exist in books only by accident, and for one written there are a thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken.They are deeds: the man who brings word of a lost battle can work no comparable effect with the muscles of his arm; Iago's breath is as truly laden with poison and murder as the fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin.Hence the sternest education in the use of words is least of all to be gained in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of seclusion.Asoldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise of power that he loves, and he is accustomed to do more with his words than give pleasure.To keep language in immediate touch with reality, to lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot from the heart of determination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of power.All this may be achieved without the smallest study of literary models, and is consistent with a perfect neglect of literary canons.It is not the logical content of the word, but the whole mesh of its conditions, including the character, circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that is its true strength."Damn" is often the feeblest of expletives, and "as you please" may be the dirge of an empire.Hence it is useless to look to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style; the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only in his own abstract world.A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing, a thing three times said, and each time said badly, may be of more effect than that terse, full, and final expression which the doctors rightly commend.The art of language, regarded as a question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing.The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence:
whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea.Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds, a framework for those silences that are more telling than any speech.Here lies an escape from the poverty of content and method to which self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore are epic and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry.
