Writer's cramp

“ And of this fact he himself was aware, for he said, 'The poet in me—shall I confess it?—has sometimes suffered from all the indulgences even accorded to the prose writer.' Poet, critic, and romance writen, it is difficult for any man to be all three with impunity, and to succeed equally well in all. ”

“ And thus the story continued until the narrator's powers of invention or endurance were exhausted. We close the reading with no sense of satisfied unity—no oneness of impression. At the beginning of the story, the writer of these Romances and Tales apparently had no definitely preconceived plan, he allowed no foreshadowing of catastrophe, he was careless alike of both beginning and end, he made no conscious use of suspense, setting, character-contrast, reverting narrative, climax, or any of the numerous devices that make up the technique of modern short-story writing. ”

“ There must, however, have been always some modes of gaiety preferable to others, and a writer ought to chuse the best.
In tragedy his performance seems constantly to be worse, as his labour is more. The effusions of passion, which exigence forces out, are for the most part striking and energetick ”

“ Isn’t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn’t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? ”

“ Such a loss may not be thought a serious one by the sordid man who decries poetry as the useless product of an art already in its decay. Should this ever be the case, it would be a monstrous symptom, a symptom that the noblest impulses of the human heart are decaying also. ”

“ You can’t expect a writer for the penny press to have something new to say in every sentence! How the plague is a dramatic critic who has nothing to say to fill a column, if he is never to be allowed to repeat himself? ”

“ What then was this irresolution but the vacillations of a mind broken and confounded? He had exercised too constantly the highest faculties of fiction, and he had precipitated himself into the dreariness of real life. None but a poet can conceive, for none but a poet can experience, the secret wounds inflicted on a mind of romantic fancy and tenderness of emotion, which has staked its happiness on its imagination; for such neglect is felt as ordinary men would feel the sensation of being let down into a sepulchre, and buried alive. ”

“ But I do feel more and more that you do not understand some things,—the immense injury that introductions do to a struggling writer,—the jealousies aroused by attentions paid to him,—the loss to him of creative power that follows upon invitations of any kind. ”

“ All talking, thinking, writing is useless; a corpse pulled from the water, lying dead in front of you, ruins everything written with its terrible distortion. See how the face and the hands are rigid as though clamped in iron! ”

“ In the poetry of the time there appear, side by side with much exquisite melody and much priceless thought, the strangest blotches, already more than once noticed, of doggerel, of conceits pushed to the verge of nonsense and over the verge of grotesque, of bad rhyme and bad rhythm which are evidently not the result of mere haste and creative enthusiasm but of absolutely defective ear, of a waning sense of harmony. In the drama things are much worse. ”

“ Either the writer is content coldly to survey this rage of passion, or he would have us believe he is so; and in either case he misses the mark of the artist, which is, after all, to show such things as he deals with as they truly are, and to seize upon their inwardness. We do not ask for a slavering flux of sentiment, or an acrobat’s display in gesticulation. But, from a gentleman whose corns when trodden on are probably as painful as his neighbours’, we are content with something less than a godlike indifference to the emotions of humanity. ”

“ Does a writer startle you with his insight into your nature, be sure that he has mourned; such lore is the alchemy of tears. Hence the insensible and almost universal confusion of idea which confounds melancholy with depth, and finds but hollow inanity in the symbol of a laugh. ”

“ And, though the crux is an old one, where the high purpose of the writer is so much insisted on, perhaps it may not be unfair to enquire how far exactly she can be held to succeed in her aims, when even the regenerate reader is ill at ease in the company of her good characters and enjoys himself among her awful examples. The artificiality of some of its dialogues and the triteness of some of its reflections are further symptoms of the enervation which has begun to invade the book. ”

“ The nervous weariness of writing, the physical weariness of writing, the mental incubus of a great conception that must be carried unformed in the heavy mind month after weary month, for ever growing and swelling and bursting to be born, yet not able to be born, because this labour of writing is so long, the hideous labour of writing and rewriting and correcting, of futile erasions and vacillations and doubt, of endless worryings over little words and tragic sacrifices and fresh starts and rearrangements—these are terrible things. ”

“ The poetical opposition, puffing for popularity, cry cheerily against them, his faults are balanced by his beauties; when, in reality, all the faults that ever were committed in poetry would be but as air to earth, if we could weigh them against one single thought or image, such as almost every scene exhibits in every drama of this unrivalled genius. ”

“ In these terrible times of revolution, excitable natures catch madness from each other. A writer in the heat of his passion says much that he does not mean to be literally taken, which in cooler moments he repents and retracts. Consider, too, the pressure of want, of hunger. It is the opinions that you so condemn which alone at this moment supply bread to the writer. ”

“ We see, then, why it is that the highest forms of literature are necessarily concerned with pain. It is not merely that art requires intensity of feeling, and that the emotion of pain is the most intense we know. ”

“ Think of the fate of the professional writer whose hosts of "characters," the bodiless papery creatures of his brain, will rise up in judgment to accuse their petty creator, to gibber at him, to make his dreams a nightmare. ”

“ That’s what any writer has to discover about the persons of his drama—not what they do before the footlights, but what they were thinking before the curtain went up. Otherwise he can’t make them live. ”

“ Add to all these defects, an amount of disquisition and mental dissection which impedes the story till it drags on as slowly as a heavily laden wain—add the fatal blunder of making long scenes which do not help on the action nor elucidate the plot, and the yet more fatal blunder of causeless pedantry, and we have to confess that our great master's last novel is also her [Pg 110] worst. ”

“ But on the other hand, how much one loses! Never a fine inspiration, a deep emotion, a profound joy or a profound pain—never a thrill, or, as the French say so much better than we, a frisson. So literary work is dry, bony, hard, dead work. ”

“ And I thought with some sadness that all these revolts and indignations, all these protests, revulsions of feeling, pangs of suffering and of rage, expressed but the uneasiness of sensual beings trying for their share in the joys of form, colour, sensations—the only riches of our world of senses. A poet may be a simple being but he is bound to be various and full of wiles, ingenious and irritable. ”

“ But when the writer sets down his hero's words, a reader cannot choose but hear. Even if the words be unnatural and stilted, they will be heard. That is why badly managed dialogue is so potent to ruin a story. ”

“ At the best of times the average lyric author has a difficult and somewhat heart-breaking task to dispose of his wares, and we need not further harrow his artistic soul by suggestions of literary impotence. ”

“ In all parts of the book is manifest the agony it cost the writers to find two words that would rhyme—more or less; and so often as this arduous feat is achieved, the poetic athlete appears to pause awhile from sheer exhaustion, panting heavily for breath. ”

“ Very different is the conduct of many novel-writers, who, by plunging us into scenes of distress without end or limit, exhaust the powers, [Pg 210] and before the conclusion either render us insensible to every thing, or fix a real sadness upon the mind. The uniform stile of tragedies is one reason why they affect so little. ”

“ And, in keeping with this premonition of social death, the literature of the time is, in a sense, an orchid growth. It is melancholy and dispirited. For the writers, the glory of life has departed, and the spirit of their works is one of sad heroism. They write beautifully, earnestly, sincerely, but their mood is that of hopelessness and gentle resignation. ”

“ The fault is largely the result of an incongruous mixture of genuine realism and whimsicality—the author is unable to control his imagination, and when pressed for a solution drops into unseemly mannerisms—short sentences, illegitimate surprises, and childish personifications. ”

“ When almost exhausted with the thrilling nature of the narrative, the end of this matchless story is reached, and it is then with a sigh of regret the reader bids adieu to characters that have woven themselves around his heart, and have become part and parcel of his very life. ”

“ Generally the books, when they had been carefully read till the thoughts were remembered, even if the words were forgotten, were burned—with the same pain with which a woman who is not free burns a letter from the man she loves. ”

“ K.’s performance of that part, the painful anxiety about the act, the natural longing to prevent it while it yet seems unperpetrated, the too close pressing semblance of reality, give a pain and an uneasiness which totally destroy all the delight which the words in the book convey, where the deed doing never presses upon us with the painful sense of presence: it rather seems to belong to history,—to something past and inevitable, if it has anything to do with time at all. The sublime images, the poetry alone, is that which is present to our minds in the reading. ”

“ So with the art of poetry: how imperatively, when it deals with the great emotions of tragedy, it must remove the actors from us, in proportion as the emotions are to elevate, and the tragedy is to please us by the tears it draws! Imagine our shock if a poet were to place on the stage some wise gentleman with whom we dined yesterday, and who was discovered to have killed his father and married his mother. ”

“ But when the expression of intense feeling is confined to few words, to broken sentences, and sudden transitions of thought, which let you, indeed, into the inmost recesses of the soul of the sufferer, but do not lay it open before you, it is permitted for the genius of the actor to co-operate with that of the poet in producing an effect, for which neither was singly competent. ”

“ The work, by its own force and fortune, sometimes outstrips the workman. And then, in [101] defiance of the proprieties, whereas poets sometimes "flag, and languish in a prosaic manner," prose will shine with the lustre, vigour and boldness, with "the fury" of poetry.
And as to "affairs,"—how spasmodic the mixture, collision or coincidence, of the mechanic succession of things with men's volition! Mere rumour, so large a factor in events,—who could trace out its ways? ”

“ Novelists and lawyers understand the art of “cramming” better than any other persons in the world. Why should not this young man be working up the picturesque in this romantic region to serve as a background for some story with magic, perhaps, and mysticism, and hints borrowed from science, and all sorts of out-of-the-way knowledge which his odd and miscellaneous selection of books furnished him? ”

“ The ugliest trick it plays at any rate is its effect on that side of the novelist’s effort—the side of most difficulty and thereby of most dignity—which consists in giving the sense of duration, of the lapse and accumulation of time. This is altogether to my view the stiffest problem that the artist in fiction has to tackle, and nothing is more striking at present than the blankness, for the most part, of his indifference to it. The mere multiplication of quoted remarks is the last thing to strengthen his hand. ”

“ As a matter of fact, in writing of such subjects a writer finds that words will be emotional, whether he will have them so or not, that they take sides, are charged with tendency and fly toward or away from an emotional quality with all the power of electricity. Now, this emotional quality, when it is uncontrolled, is dangerous. Words that show tendency must be guided with the firm hand lest they lead the reader into wrong impressions and into the confusion that comes from counter emotions, the strong impression of disunion. ”

“ To be sure, the graphologists cite a tendency to elevate progressively the line of writing as an evidence of mental exaltation, of joy or ambition, while a fall in the alignment is indicative of the depressive emotions, self-distrust, sadness, melancholy. ”

“ So the creative writer laughs at his comedy before he creates it, and he has tears for his tragedy before he knows what it is. When the symbols and the fulfilling facts do come to him, they come generally in a manner very fragmentary and inverted, mostly in irrational glimpses of crisis or consummation. ”

“ And as this process of degeneration continued, so he evolved substitutes—paid actors, poets, painters—to do for him what he had lost the power to do for himself. Thus the verbal poet is simply a projection of man’s lost capacity to poetize himself and for himself. That is, the power to obliterate himself physically. ”