Sherwin Cody

“ CHAPTER XV. CONTRAST. In all effective writing contrast is far more than a figure of speech: it is an essential element in making strength. A work of literary art without contrast may have all the elements of construction, style, and originality of idea, but it will be weak, narrow, limp. The truth is, contrast is the measure of the breadth of one's observation. We often think of it as a figure of speech, a method of language which we use for effect. A better view of it is as a measure of breadth. You have a dark, wicked man on one side, and a fair, sunny, sweet woman on the other. ”

“ Life is a maze of endless continuity, to which, nevertheless, we desire to find some key. Literature offers us a picture of life to which there is a key, and by some analogy it suggests explanations of real life. It is of far more value to be true to the principles of life than to the outer facts. The outer facts are fragmentary and uncertain, mere passing suggestions, signs in the darkness. The principles of life are a clew of thread which may guide the human judgment through many dark and difficult places. It is to these that the artistic writer must be true. ”

“ On the first writing verbal perfection should be sacrificed without a moment's hesitation. But when a story or essay has once been written, the writer will turn his attention to those small details of style. He must harmonize his language. He must polish. It is one of the most tedious processes in literature, and to the novice the most difficult on which to make a beginning. Yet there is nothing more surely a matter of labor and not of genius. It is for this that one masters grammar and rhetoric, and studies the individual uses of words. Carried to an extreme it is fatal to vitality of style. ”

“ There is no thought that we shall become geniuses, or anything of the kind. For us, why should there be any difference between plumbing and writing? If all men were born plumbers, still some would be much better than others, and no doubt the poor ones could improve their work in a great measure, simply by getting hints and trying. However, we all know that the trying will not do very much good without the hints. Now, where are the master-plumber's hints―or rather, the master-writer's hints, for the apprentice writer? ”

“ It would seem at first that language could go no higher; but it does mount a little higher simply by trying to do less, and we have loftiness in its plain simplicity, as when man stands bareheaded and humble in the presence of God alone.
Macaulay's style is highly artificial, but its rotundity, its movement, its impressive sweep have made it popular. Almost any one can acquire some of its features; but the ease with which it is acquired makes it dangerous in a high degree, for the writer becomes fascinated with it and uses it far too often. ”

“ So common words carry with them a world of suggested thought. The word drunk calls up a picture horrid and disgusting; violet suggests blueness, sweetness, and innocence; oak suggests sturdy courage and strength; love suggests all that is dear in the histories of our own lives. Just what will be suggested depends largely on the person who hears the word, and in thinking of suggestion we must reflect also on the minds of the persons to whom we speak. ”

“ To know human life, to know what people really need, is work for a genius. It resembles the building up of a daily paper, with its patronage and its study of the public pulse. But the reporter has little or nothing to do with that. Likewise the ordinary writer should not trouble himself about so large a problem, at least until he has mastered the simpler ones. Writing for an audience if one wants to get printed in a certain magazine is writing those things which one finds by experience the readers of that magazine, as represented in the editor, want to read. ”

“ A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity. An episode of humor or kindness touches and amuses him here and there,―a pretty child looking at a gingerbread stall; a pretty girl blushing whilst her lover talks to her and chooses her fairing; poor Tom Fool, yonder behind the wagon mumbling his bone with the honest family which lives by his tumbling; but the general impression is one more melancholy than mirthful. ”

“ A clouded diamond is no more ruined by its cloudiness than a clouded metaphor.
As in Ruskin's description of the mountain, we see in this the value of the sounds of words, and how they seem to make music in themselves. A Word lacking in dignity in the very least would have ruined the whole picture, and so would a word whose rotund sound did not correspond to the loftiness of the passage. Perhaps the only word that jars is “English three-decker”―but the language apparently afforded De Quincey no substitute which would make his meaning clear. ”

“ Force is the appeal which words make to the feeling, as clearness is the appeal they make to the understanding.
Elegance is required only in writing which purports to be good literature. It is useful but not required in business letters, or in newspaper writing; but it is absolutely essential to higher literary art. It is the appeal which the words chosen and the arrangement selected make to our sense of beauty. That which is not beautiful has no right to be called “literature,” and a style which does not possess the subtle elements of beauty is not a strictly “literary” style. ”

“ Newspaper articles are more descriptive than any other sort of writing. You have a description of a new invention, of a great fire, of a prisoner at the bar of justice. It is not quite so spontaneous as narrative. Children seldom describe, and the newspaper man finds difficulty in making what seems a very brief tale into a column article until he can weave description as readily as he breathes.
Dialogue in a story is by no means the same as the dialogue of a play: it ought rather to be a description of a conversation, and very seldom is it a full report of what is said on each side. ”

“ It is true that in many of these books we may find prefaces which say, “All other books err in clinging too closely to mere system, to names; but we will break away and give you the real thing.” But they don't do it; they can't afford to be too radical, and so they merely modify in a few details the same old system, the system of names. Yet it is a great point gained when the necessity for a change is realized.
How, then, shall we go about our mastery of the English language?
Modern science has provided us a universal method by which we may study and master any subject. ”

“ While language as the medium of thought may be compared to air as the medium of the sun's influence, in other respects it is like the skin of the body; a scurvy skin shows bad blood within, and a scurvy language shows inaccurate thought and a confused mind. And as a disease once fixed on the skin reacts and poisons the blood in turn as it has first been poisoned by the blood, so careless use of language if indulged reacts on the mind to make it permanently and increasingly careless, illogical, and inaccurate in its thinking. ”

“ We have only to reflect a moment to see that rhetoric as it is commonly taught can by no possibility give actual skill. Rhetoric is a system of scientific analysis. Aristotle was a scientist, not an artist. Analysis tears to pieces, divides into parts, and so destroys. The practical art of writing is wholly synthesis,―building up, putting together, creating, ―and so, of course, a matter of instinct. All the dissection, or vivisection, in the world, would never teach a man how to bring a human being into the world, or any other living thing ”

“ Languages grow like mushrooms, or lilies, or bears, or human bodies. Like these they have occult and profound laws which we can never hope to penetrate,―which are known only to the creator of all things existent. But as in botany and zoölogy and physiology we may observe and classify our observations, so we may observe a language, classify our observations, and create an empirical science of word-formation. ”

“ It is an acknowledged fact that our business circulars and letters are far inferior in correctness to those of Great Britain; yet they are more effective in getting business. As far as spelling is concerned, we know that some of the masters of literature have been atrocious spellers and many suppose that when one can sin in such company, sinning is, as we might say, a “beauty spot”, a defect in which we can even take pride.
Let us examine the facts in the case more closely. First of all, language is no more than a medium; it is like air to the creatures of the land or water to fishes. ”

“ The writer creates only in the sense that the wood carver creates his vase. He does not create ideas cut of nothing, any more than the carver creates the separate blocks of wood. The writer may coin his own soul into substance for his stories, but creating out of one's mind and creating out of nothing are two very different things. The writer observes himself, notices how his mind works, how it behaves under given circumstances, and that gives him material exactly the same in kind as that which he gains from observing the working of other people's mind. ”

“ Language which expresses the thought with strict logical accuracy is correct language, and language which is sufficiently rich in its resources to express thought fully, in all its lights and bearings, is effective language. If the writer or speaker has a sufficient stock of words and forms at his disposal, he has only to use them in a strictly logical way and with sufficient fulness to be both correct and effective. If his mind can always be trusted to work accurately, he need not know a word of grammar except what he has imbibed unconsciously in getting his stock of words and expressions. ”

“ But in writing the novelist should have his eye on his model just as steadily and persistently as the painter, for so alone can he catch the spirit and inner truth of nature; and art. If it is anything, is the interpretation of nature. The ideal character must be made the interpretation of the real one, not a photographic copy, not idealization or glorification or caricature, unless the idealization or glorification or caricature has a definite value in the interpretation. ”

“ The truth is, we must regard the bad spelling nuisance, the bad grammar nuisance, the inártistic and rambling language nuisance, precisely as we would the smoke nuisance, the sewer-gas nuisance, the stock-yards' smell nuisance. Some dainty people prefer pure air and correct language; but we now recognize that purity is something more than an esthetic fad, that it is essential to our health and well-being, and therefore it becomes a matter of universal public interest, in language as well as in air. ”