Escritoire

“ In making up the volume I have drawn less on documents,—charters, messages, resolutions, declarations, instructions, statutes, and treaties,—than on those kinds of material in which the personality of the writer plays a greater part,—journals, letters, reports, discussions, and reminiscences. Whenever a piece could be found which is both characteristic and well written, it has been chosen over a piece which is equally accurate but has less literary merit. ”

“ Almost any topic will serve to arouse the argumentative zeal of the average reader, who rushes to the fray with that joyous alacrity which is so exhilarating to the peaceful looker-on. The disputed pronunciation or spelling of a word, if ventilated with spirit in a literary journal, will call forth dozens of letters, all written in the most serious and urgent manner, and all apparently emanating from people of rigorous views and limitless leisure. ”

“ And the Art of Letters is the method by which a speaker or writer brings out in words, worthy of his subject, and sufficient for his audience or readers, the thoughts which impress him. Literature, then, is of a personal character; it consists in the enunciations and teachings of those who have a right to speak as representatives of their kind, and in whose words their brethren find an interpretation of their own sentiments, a record of their own experience, and a suggestion for their own judgments. ”

“ For ‘to prose’, as we all now know too well, is to talk or write heavily and tediously, without spirit and without animation; but once it was simply the antithesis of to versify, and a ‘proser’ the antithesis of a versifier or a poet. It will follow that the most rapid and liveliest writer who ever wrote, if he did not write in verse would have ‘prosed’ and been a ‘proser’, in the language of our ancestors. ”

“ The inherited habit of composition in the form of oral verse and prose is vastly older than our modern practice of secluding ourselves and scratching down rows of little black symbols on a white expanse of paper, or still more incongruously tapping celluloid keys with the tips of our fingers. ”

“ All the modern editions have, the law of wit, and the liberty; but both my old copies have, the law of writ, I believe rightly. Writ, for writing, composition. Wit was not, in our author's time, taken either for imagination, or acuteness, or both together, but for understanding, for the faculty by which we apprehend and judge. Those who wrote of the human mind distinguished its primary powers into wit and will. ”

“ But the writer of a letter, if he wish his words to prevail with the reader, should send them out as written by himself, by his own hand, with his own marks, his own punctuation, correct or incorrect, with the evidence upon them that they have come out from his own mind. ”

“ What scholarship has agreed upon as the meaning of a word, that must be its meaning for us. Words come and words go, and change with the passing of time. We must seek, then, the sense of the word as used at the time of the work or writer studied. We must, further, determine the classification of the document concerned, whether technical, scientific, or literature for art's sake. ”

“ Body of the Story.—In writing the body of the story, the first thing to strive for is proper coherence with the lead. This caution is worth particular heed when the lead contains a single-sentence quotation, an indirect question, or a paragraph of direct statement from somewhere in the body of the speech. Few things are more incongruous in a story than a clever epigrammatic lead and a succession of quoted statements following, none of which exhibits a definite bearing on the lead. ”

“ It involves a careful recognition of what psychology calls the 'prose attitude' and the 'verse attitude,' and also (as has been suggested above) the peculiar union of prose with the spatial rhythm of verse. We read with ear and eye together, though with varying proportions of emphasis on the one or the other; for some 'vocalize' whatever they read, others read almost entirely with the eye. Since it is the eye that takes the earlier and quicker perception of printed language, we tend to judge by the appearance of a page whether it contains prose or verse. ”

“ If we consider others, who have delivered any Rules of Writing, we shall find, the Examples they produce, are in minuter Matters to explain the Terms and Signification of the lower Rules, which relate to Grammar and Rhetoric, to the Art and Mechanism of Writing. ”

“ But there may be times when you find that you can say what you mean better in a few words of verse than in many of ordinary prose, that you can express some aspect of out of doors, or some sensation, more vividly in verse than in any other way. You will notice that words seem often to have a greater force and life in poetry than in prose, and if you make use of this quality, you will be writing real poetry. ”

“ As for my prose—anybody’s prose is mistaken for mine; and what is far more strange, anybody’s opinions! The guessing at anonymous writings is almost as much a matter of haphazard, as the attempt to discover any person, by his walk and figure, at a masquerade. ”

“ We may take it, therefore, that the letter was composed by an educated man who wished to pose as an uneducated one, and his effort to conceal his own writing suggests that that writing might be known, or come to be known, by you. Again, you will observe that the words are not gummed on in an accurate line, but that some are much higher than others. ‘Life,’ for example, is quite out of its proper place. ”

“ They that give entrance to fictions writ in prose, err not so much; but they err; for prose requireth delightfulness, not only of fiction, but of style; in which if prose contend with verse, it is with disadvantage and, as it were, on foot against the strength and wings of Pegasus. ”

“ Phrases, which are not in themselves bad, if they were elevated by something in the syntax or rhythm distinguishing them from prose, become in him prose out-and-out. ‘To Peleus why did we give you, to a mortal’? ‘In the plain there were kindled a thousand fires; by each one there sate fifty men’. ”

“ Granting, however, that prose is susceptible of numbers, it will next be enquired of what kind they are;—whether they are to be selected from those of the poets, or from a different species;—and, if from the former, which of them may claim the preference; for some authors admit only one or two, and some more, while others object to none. We might then proceed to enquire (be the number of them to be admitted, more or less) whether they are equally common to every kind of style; for the narrative, the persuasive, and the didactic have each a manner peculiar to itself ”

“ No; our object is, by indicating thus the number of sorts, to elucidate the importance of letters, and to prove that, if their writing be not, like that of poetry, ranked among the fine arts, it well deserves to be. For what more admirable accomplishment can there be—what is of more importance often than the proper composing of letters? Many a reputation is made or marred by a single epistle. ”

“ It is the distinction of verse to follow a chosen pattern, with due regard to the artistic principles of variety and uniformity; it is the distinction of prose to accomplish its object, whether artistic or utilitarian, without encroaching on the boundaries of its neighbor. Prose may be as 'poetic,' as charged with powerful emotion, as possible, but it remains true prose only when it refuses to borrow aids from the characteristic excellences of verse. ”

“ The author proceeds to illustrate his doctrines by showing in what the harmony of prose consists. He remarks that the words should in some degree be an echo to the sense, in prose as well as verse.
He proceeds—"Every sentence may be conceived as divisible into distinct and separate clauses; every clause, where there is an apparent cessation of the voice, should always end with a generous foot; and all the preceding numbers be so intermixt, that the short ones be duly qualified by the succeeding long ones; reserving the best and most harmonious number for the cadence." ”

“ On the other hand, those who have dwelt most emphatically on the distinction between prose and verse, prose and poetry, may sometimes have been tempted to limit the proper functions of prose too narrowly; and this again is at least false economy, as being, in effect, the renunciation of a certain means or faculty, in a world where after all we must needs make the most of things. ”

“ The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, whose destiny it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating, an almost exclusive attention to the qualities of regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities involves some repression and silencing of poetry. ”

“ The story as told in the letters is real, vivid, convincing. It is a human document that will compel the attention of the reader from beginning to end, and verify again the saying that "truth is stranger than fiction." ”

“ This literature proper was likely to take the form of verse in the eleventh century. A practical matter would be put in prose; but the effervescence of the soul, or the intended literary effort, would fall into rhyme or resort to metre. ”

“ It is not merely that verse by its external appearance notifies the reader, or by its [47] perceptible regularity notifies the listener, that the writer is putting forth his highest efforts, that language is being driven to its highest possibilities; it is not that the use of verse signalizes greater aims and intentions than the use of prose; but rather that the higher efforts, the greater aims, turn by a natural, spontaneous, but partly mysterious instinct to metrical forms for adequate or fit expression. ”

“ We shall find occasion presently to remember that prose is freer than verse, not because prose is formless while verse is formal, but because any given sequence of prose has more forms in it than a sequence of verse. ”

“ If in a poem there should be found a series of lines, or even a single line, in which the language, though naturally arranged, and according to the strict laws of metre, does not differ from that of prose, there is a numerous class of critics, who, when they stumble upon these prosaisms, as they call them, imagine that they have made a notable discovery, and exult over the Poet as over a man ignorant of his own profession. ”

“ It is distinguished from poetry not only by more commonplace thought but also by the absence of regular metrical structure. Prose and poetry together constitute the great body of literature; but at the present time, which is characterized by the predominance of material and commercial interests, prose forms by far the larger part. In our popular magazines, poetry is relegated to a very subordinate place.
The forms of prose are various. They may be approximately classified under history, essays, oratory, fiction, science, philosophy, and epistolary correspondence. ”

“ Fortunately for us, letters have been written in every age, and countless private journals. From these sources come the anecdotes, the jests, the bits of gossip which recall the past more vividly, and make these old rulers seem life-like even yet. ”

“ Thus records of prime truths sometimes remain a dead letter to plain folk; the writers have left so much to the imagination, and imagination is so rare a gift. Here, then, the writer of fiction may be of use to the public—as an interpreter. ”

“ Let us keep in mind value, selection, subordination, proportion, emphasis, as a second group of terms for principles involved in writing. We may also wish to give our subject further elements of appeal through what may be suggested beyond the telling, through the melody and rhythm of the words, or through a quickening of the sense of the beautiful. Suggestion, melody, rhythm, beauty, are to be included, then, in a third group of qualities that may contribute to the effectiveness of what we write. ”

“ One reader abandoned writing these words, for two reasons: the first, that a compositor, when correcting, inserted them in the text, making an astonishing sentence; the second, that the marked passage,—a piece of close, logical reasoning,—after being carefully scanned by the author, was brought to the reader, with a very earnest request that he would {p43} point out what justice there was in that bluff remark. It is enough to draw what beginners in writing call “straight marks” across the matter, and also in the margin. ”

“ One of the most clearly expressed and continually reiterated aims of prose fiction, as of other species of writing from time immemorial, was that of conveying to the reader a moral through the agreeable channel of example. ”

“ Those interested in Literature have ever looked upon the fifteenth century as an arid waste: in language, on the other hand, it is a period of intense importance. For one thing, there is a big increase in the number of people who can write, and therefore in the number of private documents that have come down to us. Freed from the shackles of the professional scribe, writing becomes a listening to actual people speaking, and so we find a great variety of spelling ... ”

“ There is in that no formality, no assumption of function, no awkward propriety or dignity to be sustained. A letter at the opening of a book may be only a footpath, leading the curious to a favorable point of observation, and then leaving them to wander as they will. ”