The Common Reader
public; the best-seller public and the worst-seller public; the
high-brow public and the red-blood public; all now organised
self-conscious entities capable through their various mouthpieces of
making their needs known and their approval or displeasure felt. Thus
the writer who has been moved by the sight of the first crocus in
Kensington Gardens has, before he sets pen to paper, to choose from a
crowd of competitors the particular patron who suits him best. It is
futile to say, “Dismiss them all; think only of your crocus”, because
writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect
crocus until it has been shared. The first man or the last may write for
himself alone, but he is an exception and an unenviable one at that, and
the gulls are welcome to his works if the gulls can read them.
Granted, then, that every writer has some public or other at the end of
his pen, the high-minded will say that it should be a submissive public,
accepting obediently whatever he likes to give it. Plausible as the
theory sounds, great risks are attached to it. For in that case the
writer remains conscious of his public, yet is superior to it—an
uncomfortable and unfortunate combination, as the works of Samuel
Butler, George Meredith, and Henry James may be taken to prove. Each
despised the public; each desired a public; each failed to attain a
public; and each wreaked his failure upon the public by a succession,
gradually increasing in intensity, of angularities, obscurities, and
affectations which no writer whose patron was his equal and friend would
have thought it necessary to inflict. Their crocuses in consequence are
tortured plants, beautiful and bright, but with something wry-necked
about them, malformed, shrivelled on the one side, overblown on the
other. A touch of the sun would have done them a world of good. Shall we
then rush to the opposite extreme and accept (if in fancy alone) the
flattering proposals which the editors of the _Times_ and the _Daily
News_ may be supposed to make us—“Twenty pounds down for your crocus in
precisely fifteen hundred words, which shall blossom upon every
breakfast table from John o’ Groats to the Land’s End before nine
o’clock to-morrow morning with the writer’s name attached”?
But will one crocus be enough, and must it not be a very brilliant
yellow to shine so far, to cost so much, and to have one’s name attached
to it? The Press is undoubtedly a great multiplier of crocuses. But if
we look at some of these plants, we shall find that they are only very
distantly related to the original little yellow or purple flower which
pokes up through the grass in Kensington Gardens about this time of
year. The newspaper crocus is amazing but still a very different plant.
It fills precisely the space allotted to it. It radiates a golden glow.
It is genial, affable, warm-hearted. It is beautifully finished, too,
for let nobody think that the art of “our dramatic critic” of the
_Times_ or of Mr. Lynd of the _Daily News_ is an easy one. It is no
despicable feat to start a million brains running at nine o’clock in the
morning, to give two million eyes something bright and brisk and amusing
to look at. But the night comes and these flowers fade. So little bits
of glass lose their lustre if you take them out of the sea; great prima
donnas howl like hyenas if you shut them up in telephone boxes; and the
most brilliant of articles when removed from its element is dust and
sand and the husks of straw. Journalism embalmed in a book is
unreadable.
The patron we want, then, is one who will help us to preserve our
flowers from decay. But as his qualities change from age to age, and it
needs considerable integrity and conviction not to be dazzled by the
pretensions or bamboozled by the persuasions of the competing crowd,
this business of patron-finding is one of the tests and trials of
authorship. To know whom to write for is to know how to write. Some of
the modern patron’s qualities are, however, fairly plain. The writer
will require at this moment, it is obvious, a patron with the
book-reading habit rather than the play-going habit. Nowadays, too, he
must be instructed in the literature of other times and races. But there
are other qualities which our special weaknesses and tendencies demand
in him. There is the question of indecency, for instance, which plagues
us and puzzles us much more than it did the Elizabethans. The
twentieth-century patron must be immune from shock. He must distinguish
infallibly between the little clod of manure which sticks to the crocus
of necessity, and that which is plastered to it out of bravado. He must
be a judge, too, of those social influences which inevitably play so
large a part in modern literature, and able to say which matures and
fortifies, which inhibits and makes sterile. Further, there is emotion
for him to pronounce on, and in no department can he do more useful work
than in bracing a writer against sentimentality on the one hand and a
craven fear of expressing his feeling on the other. It is worse, he will
say, and perhaps more common, to be afraid of feeling than to feel too
much. He will add, perhaps, something about language, and point out how
many words Shakespeare used and how much grammar Shakespeare violated,
while we, though we keep our fingers so demurely to the black notes on
the piano, have not appreciably improved upon _Antony and Cleopatra_.
And if you can forget your sex altogether, he will say, so much the
better; a writer has none. But all this is by the way—elementary and
disputable. The patron’s prime quality is something different, only to
be expressed perhaps by the use of that convenient word which cloaks so
much—atmosphere. It is necessary that the patron should shed and
envelop the crocus in an atmosphere which makes it appear a plant of the
very highest importance, so that to misrepresent it is the one outrage
not to be forgiven this side of the grave. He must make us feel that a
single crocus, if it be a real crocus, is enough for him; that he does
not want to be lectured, elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is
sorry that he bullied Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics,
and Ruskin into insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or
assert himself as his writers require; that he is bound to them by a
more than maternal tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the
other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes; that the fate of
literature depends upon their happy alliance—all of which proves, as we
began by saying, that the choice of a patron is of the highest
importance. But how to choose rightly? How to write well? Those are the
questions.
_The Modern Essay_
As Mr. Rhys truly says, it is unnecessary to go profoundly into the
history and origin of the essay—whether it derives from Socrates or
Siranney the Persian—since, like all living things, its present is more
important than its past. Moreover, the family is widely spread; and
while some of its representatives have risen in the world and wear their
coronets with the best, others pick up a precarious living in the gutter
near Fleet Street. The form, too, admits variety. The essay can be short
or long, serious or trifling, about God and Spinoza, or about turtles
and Cheapside. But as we turn over the pages of these five little
volumes,[13] containing essays written between 1870 and 1920, certain
principles appear to control the chaos, and we detect in the short
period under review something like the progress of history.
Of all forms of literature, however, the essay is the one which least
calls for the use of long words. The principle which controls it is
simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we
take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an
essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with
its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. In
the interval we may pass through the most various experiences of
amusement, surprise, interest, indignation; we may soar to the heights
of fantasy with Lamb or plunge to the depths of wisdom with Bacon, but
we must never be roused. The essay must lap us about and draw its
curtain across the world.
So great a feat is seldom accomplished, though the fault may well be as
much on the reader’s side as on the writer’s. Habit and lethargy have
dulled his palate. A novel has a story, a poem rhyme; but what art can
the essayist use in these short lengths of prose to sting us wide awake
and fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification
of life—a basking, with every faculty alert, in the sun of pleasure? He
must know—that is the first essential—how to write. His learning may
be as profound as Mark Pattison’s, but in an essay it must be so fused
by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the
surface of the texture. Macaulay in one way, Froude in another, did this
superbly over and over again. They have blown more knowledge into us in
the course of one essay than the innumerable chapters of a hundred
text-books. But when Mark Pattison has to tell us, in the space of
thirty-five little pages, about Montaigne, we feel that he had not
previously assimilated M. Grün. M. Grün was a gentleman who once wrote
a bad book. M. Grün and his book should have been embalmed for our
perpetual delight in amber. But the process is fatiguing; it requires
more time and perhaps more temper than Pattison had at his command. He
served M. Grün up raw, and he remains a crude berry among the cook
meats, upon which our teeth must grate for ever. Something of the sort
applies to Matthew Arnold and a certain translator of Spinoza. Literal
truth-telling and finding fault with a culprit for his good are out of
place in an essay, where everything should be for our good and rather
for eternity than for the March number of the _Fortnightly Review_. But
if the voice of the scold should never be heard in this narrow plot,
there is another voice which is as a plague of locusts—the voice of a
man stumbling drowsily among loose words, clutching aimlessly at vague
ideas, the voice, for example, of Mr. Hutton in the following passage:
Add to this that his married life was very brief, only seven years and a
half, being unexpectedly cut short, and that his passionate reverence
for his wife’s memory and genius—in his own words, “a religion”—was
one which, as he must have been perfectly sensible, he could not make to
appear otherwise than extravagant, not to say an hallucination, in the
eyes of the rest of mankind, and yet that he was possessed by an
irresistible yearning to attempt to embody it in all the tender and
enthusiastic hyperbole of which it is so pathetic to find a man who
gained his fame by his “dry-light” a master, and it is impossible not to
feel that the human incidents in Mr. Mill’s career are very sad.
A book could take that blow, but it sinks an essay. A biography in two
volumes is indeed the proper depositary; for there, where the licence is
so much wider, and hints and glimpses of outside things make part of the
feast (we refer to the old type of Victorian volume), these yawns and
stretches hardly matter, and have indeed some positive value of their
own. But that value, which is contributed by the reader, perhaps
illicitly, in his desire to get as much into the book from all possible
sources as he can, must be ruled out here.
There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow
or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the
essay must be pure—pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from
dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. Of all writers in