Cliché

“ A word whose customary feeling-tone is too unquestioningly accepted becomes a plushy bit of furniture, a cliché. Every now and then the artist has to fight the feeling-tone, to get the word to mean what it nakedly and conceptually should mean, depending for the effect of feeling on the creative power of an individual juxtaposition of concepts or images. ”

“ The former write careless, flabby, colourless, undistinguished, lean, commercial English, and pass unnoticed in the vast whirlpool of universal mediocrity, where the cliché is king of the paragraph. The others, victims to a misguided ideal of "fine writing," are more easily detected. ”

“ Nothing, within the picture, occurs; nothing is done or, more acutely than usual, than everywhere, suffered; it is all a mere affair of the rich impression, the complexity of images projected upon the quintessential spirit of the hero, whose own report is what we have—an affair of the quality of observation, sentiment and eloquence brought to bear. It is not too much to say even that the whole thing is in the largest sense but a theme for style, style of substance as well as of form. ”

“ If, now, the pictures which treat this subject were indeed only imitations of the scene, so that the spectator listened for the groans of agony and looked to see the blood drop from the brow crowned with thorns, how hideous and insupportable the sight would be! The mind is conscious as it contemplates the picture that it is a representation, and not a fact. The mere force of actuality is, therefore, destroyed, and thought busies itself with the moral significance of the scene. ”

“ Recognising thus that to carry through the individual pretension is at the best a battle, he adored a hard surface and detested a soft one—much more a muddled; regarded a style without rhythm and harmony as in a work of pretended beauty no style at all. He considered that the failure of complete expression so registered made of the work of pretended beauty a work of achieved barbarity. ”

“ And at moments when he is narrating their exploits, and can forget his elaborate argumentations and refrain from bits of deliberate bombast, the style becomes graphic in the higher sense of a much-abused word, and we confess that we are listening to genuine eloquence. ”

“ Such grumblers, however, do not duly consider that the imaginative faculty invariably depicts the objects it would represent as grand and impressive, with a few striking touches, rather than in fulness of detail, and that thereby it lends to the image more of character, solemnity, and dignity. A thousand times have I heard the complaint that the objects for a knowledge of which we are originally indebted to description, invariably disappoint us when we see them with our own eyes. ”

“ Style Apart, I say, from such faults of taste, which few as they numerically are yet affect my liking and more repel my sympathy than do all the rude shocks of his purely artistic wantonness— apart from these there are definite faults of style which a reader must have courage to face, and must in some measure condone before he can discover the great beauties. ”

“ Speeches, however eloquent and profound they may be, when put into the mouth of dramatic characters, if they be superfluous or unnatural to the position and character, destroy the chief condition of dramatic art—the illusion, owing to which the reader or spectator lives in the feelings of the persons represented. ”

“ You like only what is unreal, and, when you are shown a character which is supposed in some mysterious way to resemble you, you are more than delighted, and you applaud a thing which is either a silly caricature or an utterly foolish libel. ”

“ Our present critic for instance is “down”—very understandingly down as seems to us—on some of the sides of his author’s rich temperamental vulgarity; which is accompanied on those sides by want of taste, want of wit, want of style, want of knowledge of ever so many parts of the general subject, too precipitately proposed, and want of fineness of feeling about ever so many others. ”

“ But has it never occurred to your Correspondent, as a solution of this difficulty, that there is a difference between refinement and imbecility, between general knowledge and personal elegance, between metaphysical subtlety and stage-effect? Does he think all manners, all kinds of folly, and all shades of character equally fit for dramatic representation? Does he not perceive that there is a point where minuteness of distinction becomes laborious foolery, and where the slenderness of the materials must baffle the skill and destroy the exertions of the artist? ”

“ When we forget the singularity of the fable, and the masquerade dresses of the actors, we pronounce them to be real personages, and that the dramatic style distinctly conveys to us incidents which, however veiled, had occurred to the poet’s own observation, as we perceive that the scenes which he has painted with such precision must have been localities. ”

“ We are speaking of the tendency of recent fiction, very much the same everywhere that novels are written, which we have imperfectly sketched. It is probably of no more use to protest against it than it is to protest against the vulgar realism in pictorial art, which holds ugliness and beauty in equal esteem ”

“ In other words, our characters become living people who are endowed with human traits of which their every action is the natural outcome.
Good taste in the selection and treatment of theme brings us back again to the same admonition of exercising the simple quality of being well-bred. Just as we would not think of startling a drawing-room assembly by forcing our personal bias upon it, so we must select our dramatic matter in a serious, humane and delicate manner. ”

“ In the drama the same spirit shows all sorts of paths toward degeneration, but few by which men can rise. Are color schemes, word pictures, frontal architecture, and pathological plays all there is to art? ”

“ Our sight seems designed to supply all these defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of touch, that spreads itself over an infinite multitude of bodies, comprehends the largest figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote parts of the universe."
Every passing mood and every peculiarity of mind or character are reflected in the style. It may be gay, humorous, serious, sad, melancholy, according to the state of the writer's feelings. ”

“ Think of me as a novelist out of work, using up my MS. paper. Down here everything has become unreal. You and I, but especially "us"! I want everything to be unreal, I'm not strong enough for more reality. ”

“ Their plain and affectionate attachment to every thing around them, handed down from their fathers, is by no means to be confounded with the obstreperous conceit of ages of mannerism, who, out of vanity, introduce the fleeting modes and fashion of the day into art, because to them everything like noble simplicity seems boorish and rude. ”

“ An accidental stroke of the thumbnail develops new marvels of expression. (By the bye, it's just as well to forbid deliberate attempts at portraiture.) And I know no more becoming expression for everyone than the look of intent and pleasing effort—a divine touch almost—that comes over the common man modelling. For my own part, I feel a being infinitely my own superior when I get my fingers upon the clay. ”

“ I had always wanted to be a dramatic critic. A taste for sitting back and watching other people work, so essential to the make-up of this sub-species of humanity, has always been one of the leading traits in my character. ”

“ A certain look has been remarked strongly indicative of a certain passion or trait of character, and we attach the same meaning to it or are affected in the same pleasurable or painful manner by it, where it exists in a less degree, though we can define neither the look itself nor the modification of it. Having got the general clue, the exact result may be left to the imagination to vary, to extenuate or aggravate it according to circumstances. ”

“ It will be found much easier for critics to reject the particular image which has commended itself to me as suggestive of the mystery with which we have to deal, than for them to drive out and expel from their own thought the insidious human tendency towards pictorial representation. ”

“ The effect of this is extraordinarily to falsify the total show and to present the particular affair—the intimacy in hand for the moment, though the moment be but brief—as taking place in a strange false perspective, a denuded desert which experience surely fails ever to give us the like of and the action of which on the faculty of observation in the painter is anything but favourable. It strikes at the root, in the impression producible and produced, of discrimination and irony, of humour and pathos. ”

“ We must distinguish from these speaking features which are always an expression of the soul, the features non-speaking or dumb, which are exclusively the work of plastic nature, and which it impresses on the human face when it acts independently of all influence of the soul. I call them dumb, because, like incomprehensible figures put there by nature, they are silent upon the character. They mark only distinctive properties attributed by nature to all the kind; and if at times they are sufficient to distinguish the individual, they at least never express anything of the person. ”

“ The grave incidents of the story are treated with good taste and genuine pathos, but enlivened by very amusing scenes, in which the ridiculous and vicious peculiarities of character, so often met with in real life, are cleverly hit off with a pencil which emulates the witty drollery of caricature without its coarseness."—Spectator. ”

“ To trace the points of likeness and unlikeness, to distinguish the lineaments of either man's genius, to note their various handling of an actual and recent tragedy so fearfully fertile of dramatic possibilities, of dark and splendid studies, for a spirit of strength to support them; to measure by the terrible capacities of the workmen the terrible capabilities of their material; to divide in our minds feature from feature, comparing line with line and tone with tone ”

“ We may not find either mood in its purity, but in mainly tragic art one distinguishes devices to exclude or lessen character, to diminish the power of that daily mood, to cheat or blind its too clear perception. ”

“ Whenever he or she, by way of example, mentioned any well-known work of art, she imitated, as if involuntarily, its pose and action with surprising fidelity, frequently also in admirable caricature, whose effect was extremely comical. ”

“ Now and again a new sensation is made by some eccentric genius, as it were, dragging a weird aesthetic red herring across the fashionable artistic scent, and diverting attention to side tracks in artistic development, often mixed with morbidity, or, as a change from the pursuit of superficial and ephemeral types of beauty, debased and revolting types and loathly subjects are drawn under the pictorial limelight and analysed. ”

“ A certain tendency to superficial cleverness,—the stinging ironies of a yawning professor with a dull class flash out of his pages disagreeably at times, in odd contrast with his true and always delightful humor. Style must proceed from something solider than mere cleverness. ”

“ Suppose we endeavor to isolate four of these mysterious qualities in art and call them poignancy, appeal to the imagination, exquisiteness, and reserve.
Any one who goes frequently to the movies must have felt more than once a certain poignancy, a strange fascination in some pictorial arrangement, in some curiously appealing movement on the screen. ”

“ The first requisite in style is perspicuity. It is a prevalent notion among the vulgar that clearness of expression leads to dryness and dullness in speaking or writing, owing to the plain garb in which ideas are clothed. ”

“ And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the tense illusion which is the aim of the short story—the introduction, for example, of the author’s personality—any comment that seems to admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such things are not necessarily wrong in the novel. ”

“ There are bad novels and good novels, as there are bad pictures and good pictures; but that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning, and I can as little imagine speaking of a novel of character as I can imagine speaking of a picture of character. When one says picture one says of character, when one says novel one says of incident, and the terms may be transposed at will. What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is either a picture or a novel that is not of character? ”

“ Pure landscape-painting into which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism than pure comedy into which no moral enters. ”

“ And indeed this clear perception, in Novels and Plays, of the union of character and action not seen in nature, is the principal defect of such compositions, and what renders them but ill pictures of human life, and wretched guides of conduct. ”

“ Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art. The tendency of the movement is to simplify away all this mess of detail which painters have introduced into pictures in order to state facts. ”

“ But as in most exquisite pictures they use to blaze and portrait not only the dainty lineaments of beauty, but also round about it to shadow the rude thickets and craggy cliffs, that by the baseness of such parts, more excellency may accrue to the principal—for ofttimes, we find ourselves I know not how, singularly delighted with the show of such natural rudeness, and take great pleasure in that disorderly order:—even so do these rough and harsh terms enlumine, and make more clearly to appear, the brightness of brave and glorious words. ”