Frederic Taber Cooper

“ It would be a great comfort to believe, with Emerson, that "There is no choice of words for him who clearly sees the truth; that provides him with the best word"; but to most of us such clearness of vision is denied. If a writer could really know down to the ultimate shade of thought exactly what he wanted to say and exactly the tone in which he wanted to say it, and if his brain was so equipped that it had at command the entire contents of the unabridged dictionary then, theoretically, the one inevitable word-sequence ought forthwith to present itself to him. ”

“ Style is the aroma of literature, comparable to the bouquet of old wine. You cannot age a new vintage over night by any artificial process. No writer, by taking thought, can add a cubit to his height as a stylist. It is a matter of growth, and slow ripening. We have seen that what every young writer should first strive to acquire is a clear-cut idea of what he is trying to accomplish ”

“ In practice, however, there are a hundred different ways that occur to us for saying even some quite simple thing, each of them not precisely what we want to say, but representing a compromise, a sacrifice, on the side of meaning, or of euphony, or of rhythm. The one perfect way is the dream of a visionary, a forever unattainable ideal. We may come more or less near to it in proportion to our ten talents or our two talents or our one, but it always eludes us. And the finer the artist, the more he is apt to suffer because he sees so clearly how far short he has fallen. ”

“ But, whatever form a young writer uses, it is his first duty to master the technique of that form, to familiarise himself with its entire history, to learn not only how the best authors have used that form in the past, but also how the modern generation is modifying it to-day. I am continually amazed at being asked by beginners, "Isn't it better for me to read as little as possible of contemporary books? Am I not in danger of losing my originality if I fill my mind with the ideas of others? ”

“ It is very much as though he were to say to the contemporary translator of Flaubert or Maupassant: "Do not trouble yourself about what the modern Frenchman thinks of these authors; do not trouble yourself about what the modern Englishman is likely to think; put no faith in what you yourself think,—but try to imagine that you are translating for the benefit of a small audience of people who know French as well as English, who by long residence have absorbed the customs of the country and who by nature and training have rather more interest in literature than they have in life." ”

“ It may teach nothing more than the unwisdom of submitting a certain type of story or article to one particular magazine; or again, it may bring a salutary awakening to the fact that what the author fondly believed to be a masterpiece is, after all, a rather tawdry and banal performance. But in any case, a setback is wholesome discipline if it makes a writer ask himself seriously what is the matter with his work—for it is better to tear up half a dozen good manuscripts than to let a single bad one find its way into print. ”

“ A painter does not need to distress himself about the beauty and harmony of all the colours that he may sooner or later be called upon to mix,—the important thing is to do the best he can to obtain the particular colour that he needs for the moment. "Colour is a gift," says Dick Heldar to Maisie, in The Light that Failed, "Put it aside and think no more about it." Similarly, although the parallel is not wholly true, a beginner will certainly do himself no great harm by assuming that in the craft of writing, style is a gift that may for the time be put aside and forgotten. ”

“ A sound mind in a sound body is too busy in performing the numerous activities belonging to each day's work to stop to count the heart-beats or the rate of respiration. Any young writer, possessed of something really worth saying, and a certain driving energy that makes him bent upon saying it in the clearest and most forceful way that he possibly can, ought to be too intent upon the task at hand to be worrying about whether he is forming a style,—whether, in other words, his brave beginnings of to-day are cornerstones in the arch of future fame. ”

“ Mark Pattison, of Oxford, used to say to a pupil who happens now to be both a brilliant writer and a leading statesman: "My good friend, you are not the stuff of which men of letters are made. You want to make people do something or you want to teach something. That is fatal to pure literature." Once or twice in my life I have taken up the pen in a vein of literary exercise, as a man turns to a game of billiards or to gardening after his day's work. ”

“ It does not by any means follow that an author is not free to invent new literary forms or varieties, if he has the inventive power. There is no rule in art forbidding the unusual, the new or even the grotesque. There is no reason why we should not have, from time to time, something undreamed of in the philosophy of literary form, any more than there is a reason why the sculptor should not carve a griffin out of stone, although he never saw a griffin in the flesh. ”

“ The technique of writing is constantly in a state of transition; and however much we may delight in the methods of a generation or a century ago, we do not tolerate them at the hands of modern writers. Take for instance the modern novel; its form and structure—one might almost say its spirit, too—have been radically changed from that of Thackeray and Dickens. And it does not help us nearly so much, as writers, to know which of the two is the greater novelist, as to understand in what respects Henry James and Maupassant are better craftsmen than either of them. ”

“ And many another teacher of rhetoric has similarly invented his own special classification and definition. But according to the ordinary and common sense understanding of the terms, clearness is not so much an element of style as it is a condition precedent to it, just as health is not beauty, but a condition precedent to beauty. Clearness may be that crystal transparency of word and phrase that belongs to finished art, or it may be the mere dry bones of fact picked clean of the last shred and fragment of adornment. ”

“ It is hard for the critic to understand that it is really his business to classify and analyse the fruits of the human mind very much as the naturalist classifies the objects of his study, rather than to praise or blame them; that there is a measure of the same absurdity in his trampling on a poem, a novel or an essay that does not please him as in a botanist grinding a plant underfoot because he does not find it pretty. ”

“ Now, there is no virtue in one way more than in another—but whatever method of work you follow remember always that there is no such thing as a royal road to literary achievement, that it always means sooner or later work, work of the hardest, most earnest sort, and often the hardest of all work where it shows the least. For the greatest triumph of writing, as of other arts, is to conceal most carefully those spots upon which you have most conscientiously practised the Gospel of Infinite Pains. ”

“ Yet it cannot be too strongly insisted that, in writing far more than in painting, there is a great deal that cannot be taught and that you must think out for yourself. One reason, undoubtedly, is that the craftsmanship of letters is more elastic than that of the other arts—there is scope for a greater freedom and originality. Henry James, in The Art of Fiction, shrewdly says: "The painter is able to teach the rudiments of his practice, and it is possible, from the study of good work (granted the aptitude) both to learn how to paint and to learn how to write. ”

“ A certain proportion of people, on the other hand, think of style in dress as a sort of self-advertisement, a matter of force and emphasis, a question of flamboyance and the dernier cri. And there are still others who, with a finer conservatism, understand style to be that rare art in dress which effects a perfect compromise between the prevailing fashion and the personality, and which unerringly chooses, in color and in form, the garment best designed to suit, most completely and at the same time most unobtrusively the individual need. ”

“ The greatest mistake that a young writer can make is that of thinking of ideas as being in any sense a lot of square pegs that must not be placed in round holes, or vice versa. An idea is not foreordained to any exclusive appropriation by any one artistic form; it is not inevitably the beginning of a sonnet or of a four-act drama, any more than a ball of yarn is necessarily destined, as it comes from the spinning-wheel, either for an afghan or a pair of stockings. Ideas are the raw material of literature ”

“ Try to think of style in literature somewhat as you think of the copper-plate line of Spencerian penmanship at the top of the page in a copy-book,—as the model towards which the pupil is faithfully striving, but which it would be undesirable for him to attain with complete fidelity. Without some such model to follow, no one ever acquires a good handwriting; but, on the other hand, no one with any sort of individuality wants to write like a copy-book. ”

“ No translation will seem to them of much worth compared with the original; they alone can say whether the translation produces more or less the same effect upon them as the original. They are the only competent tribunals in this matter; the Greeks are dead; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. ”

“ In a great writer the style is the man,—the man as made by his ancestors, his education, his career, his circumstances, and his genius.
It is idle, then, to attempt to secure a good style by imitating this or that writer; for the best part of a good style is incommunicable. An imitator may, if he applies himself closely to the task, catch mannerisms and reproduce defects, and perhaps superficial merits; but most valuable qualities, those that have their root in character, he will miss altogether, except in so far as his own personality resembles that of his model. ”

“ One writer, for instance, assumes that style is a combination of clearness, force and elegance; another looks upon style as a blending of a certain abstract perfection of writing with the personal element, which at best is manner and at worst is mannerism, while still a third considers style as something apart from the personal equation,—a sort of ideal goal towards which we press, but which we never attain. ”

“ He paints and paints, picture after picture, with only his instinct to tell him whether they are good or bad—and every now and then someone having authority comes along and blots them out with turpentine or a palette knife, and with no word of explanation. The young artist tries again, and still again—and if he has the Inborn Talent, it is conceivable that he may grow slowly through his own efforts, helped only by this purely destructive criticism, until he achieves real greatness. ”

“ Don't shirk your plot construction—and here I am using the phrase in an all-embracing sense—an essay or a sermon deserves careful plotting as much as a novel—plot construction is a wholesome discipline ; and while there is not one chance in a hundred that you will overdo it, there is every chance that you will all the time be teaching yourself some new and useful trick, some clever short-cut, some way of knitting your whole structure more firmly together. It would be well if every young writer were to reduce to a ten-word limit his central idea before even starting to plot his story ”

“ In other words, one of the most fatal mistakes a young writer can make is in thinking that writing is just a matter of inspiration; that you either have the inborn talent, or you have not; that if you have it, you need only to plunge into a sort of vortex of creative energy, a fine sibylline frenzy—and your inborn talent will do the rest. ”

“ Does your real apprenticeship begin now with its toll of disappointments and delays; manuscripts that grow soiled and shabby and one by one are consigned to the waste-basket? Or have you been unconsciously apprenticed to literature from early childhood, surrounded by an atmosphere of books, absorbing, because you could not help it, correct ideas of form and technique from the daily conversation around you? Are you still in the first enthusiasm of youth with your views of life still mainly rose-coloured dreams? ”

“ And to a far greater extent do we feel the difference between the writer who has style and individuality, and him who has individuality without style.
My advice, then, to the beginner in writing is: do not worry too much about your style: do not be all the time counting your literary pulse. Try to write as simply and as clearly as you can and without self-consciousness. In learning the rudiments of your art you are like the novice in archery learning to hit a target. Concentrate yourself upon the task of making your verbal shafts reach their mark. ”

“ That, of course, is arrant nonsense, and very disastrous nonsense, as well—because, if you once get the idea firmly fixed in your mind that a masterpiece can spring, like Pallas Athene, perfected from its author's brain, then good-bye to all hope for that honest drudgery, that loving patience over infinite detail, which is such an essential accompaniment of the creative gift that it almost justifies that threadbare paradox that genius is the art of taking infinite pains. ”

“ But, supposing that a young writer says quite frankly, "I recognise the truth of all you say; I believe in the importance of the Technique of Form, and I want to learn and obey the rules of the best construction. If I try to write a novel, I want it to be a novel in the best sense, and not a string of short stories. If I write a short story, I want to feel sure that it is truly a short story in spirit and inherent purpose, as well as in outward form. ”

“ Any writer who has read even a little will know what is meant by the word intelligible. It is not sufficient that there be a meaning that may be hammered out of the sentence, but that the language should be so pellucid that the meaning should be rendered without an effort of the reader;—and not only some proposition of meaning, but the very sense, no more and no less, which the writer has intended to put into his words. ”

“ But whatever a writer's purpose may be, and whatever type of literature he has chosen in which to express it, he has got to do something more than idly say to himself one fine day, "I think I will write (let us say) a sonnet about a pearl, or a novel about the beef trust,"—and then on another fine day formulates his first line or his opening sentence without the slightest idea what is coming next or where he eventually proposes to arrive. He must take the time and trouble to sit down and work out in detail just precisely what he is trying to do and what is the best way of doing it. ”

“ Style, then, practically means the ability to choose the words that will give us just the right meaning, just the right harmony, just the right cadence. And if this is to be done worthily we must attain our results so far as possible without straying afield for queer, exotic words and phrases. It is, says Lowell, "the secondary intellect which asks for excitement in expression, and stimulates itself into mannerism, which is the wilful obtrusion of self, as style is its unconscious abnegation." ”