Authorship [From a College Window]

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Title:     Authorship [From a College Window]
Author: Arthur C. Benson [More Titles by Benson]

I have been sometimes consulted by young aspirants in literature as to the best mode of embarking upon the profession of letters; and if my inquirer has confessed that he will be obliged to earn his living, I have always replied, dully but faithfully, that the best way to realize his ambition is to enter some other profession without delay. Writing is indeed the most delightful thing in the world, if one has not to depend upon it for a livelihood; and the truth is that, if a man has the real literary gift, there are very few professions which do not afford a margin of time sufficient for him to indulge what is the happiest and simplest of hobbies. Sometimes the early impulse has no root, and withers; but if, after a time, a man finds that his heart is entirely in his writing, and if he feels that he may without imprudence give himself to the practice of the beloved art, then he may formally adopt it as a profession. But he must not hope for much monetary reward. A successful writer of plays may make a fortune, a novelist or a journalist of the first rank may earn a handsome income; but to achieve conspicuous mundane success in literature, a certain degree of good fortune is almost more important than genius, or even than talent. Ability by itself, even literary ability of a high order, is not sufficient; it is necessary to have a vogue, to create or satisfy a special demand, to hit the taste of the age. But the writer of belles-lettres, the literary writer pure and simple, can hardly hope to earn a living wage, unless he is content to do, and indeed fortunate enough to obtain, a good deal of hackwork as well. He must be ready to write reviews and introductions; to pour out occasional articles, to compile, to edit, to select; and the chances are that if his livelihood depends upon his labour, he will have little of the tranquillity, the serenity, the leisure, upon the enjoyment of which the quality of the best work depends. John Addington Symonds makes a calculation, in one of his published letters, to the effect that his entire earnings for the years in which he had been employed in writing his history of the Italian Renaissance, had been at the rate of about L100 a year, from which probably nearly half had to be subtracted for inevitable incidental expenses, such as books and travelling. The conclusion is that unless a man has private resources, or a sufficiently robust constitution to be able to carry on his literary work side by side with his professional work, he can hardly afford to turn his attention to belles-lettres.

Nowadays literature has become a rather fashionable pursuit than otherwise. Times have changed since Gray refused to accept money for his publications, and gave it to be understood that he was an eccentric gentleman who wrote solely for his own amusement; since the inheritor of Rokeby found among the family portraits of the magnates that adorned his walls a picture of the novelist Richardson, and was at the pains of adding a ribbon and a star, in order to turn it into a portrait of Sir Robert Walpole, that he might free his gallery from such degrading associations.

But now a social personage is hardly ashamed of writing a book, of travels, perhaps, or even of literary appreciations, so long as it is untainted by erudition; he is not averse to publishing a volume of mild lyrics, or a piece of simple fiction, just to show how easy it is, and what he could do, if only, as Charles Lamb said, he had the mind. It adds a pleasant touch of charming originality to a great lady if she can bring out a little book. Such compositions are indubitably books; they generally have a title-page, an emotional dedication, an ultra-modest preface, followed by a certain number of pages of undeniable print. It is common enough too, at a big dinner-party, to meet three or four people, without the least professional dinginess, who have written books. Mr. Winston Churchill said the other day, with much humour, that he could not reckon himself a professional author because he had only written five books--the same number as Moses.* And I am far from decrying the pleasant labours of these amateurs. The writing of such books as I have described has been a real amusement to the author, not entailing any particular strain; the sweet pride of authorship enlarges one's sympathies, and gives an agreeable glow to life. No inconvenient rivalry results. The little volumes just flutter into the sunshine, like gauzy flies from some tiny cocoon, and spread their slender wings very gracefully in the sun.

* This sentence was, of course, written before the publication by Mr. Churchill of the Life of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill.

I would not, then, like some austere critics, forbid such leisurely writers as I have described to indulge in the pleasant diversion of writing books. There are reviewers who think it a sacred duty to hunt and chase these amiable and well-meaning amateurs out of the field, as though they had trespassed upon some sacred enclosure. I do not think that it is necessary or even kind to do this. I would rather regard literature as a kind of Tom Tiddler's ground, where there is gold as well as silver to be picked up. Amateurs tend, it is true, rather to scatter gold and silver in the field of literature than to acquire it; and I had just as soon, after all, that they should lavish their superfluous wealth there, to be picked up by honest publishers, as that they should lavish it in other regions of unnecessary expenditure. It is not a crime, when all is said, to write or even to print an inferior book; I would indeed go further, and say that writing in any shape is at worst a harmless diversion; and I see no reason why people should be discouraged from such diversion, any more than that they should be discouraged from practising music, or making sketches in water- colour, because they only attain a low standard of execution in such pursuits. Indeed, I think that hours devoted to the production of inferior literature, by persons of leisure, are quite as well bestowed as hours spent in golfing and motoring; to engage in the task of writing a book implies a certain sympathy with intellectual things; and I am disposed to applaud and encourage anything which increases intellectual appreciation in our country at the present time. There is not too much of it abroad; and I care very little how it is acquired, if only it is acquired. The only way in which these amateurs can be tiresome is if they insist upon reading their compositions aloud in a domestic circle, or if they request one to read a published book and give them a candid opinion. I once stayed with a worthy country gentleman who, evening after evening, after we had returned from shooting, insisted on reading aloud in the smoking-room, with solemn zest, the novel on which he was engaged. It was heavy work! The shooting was good, but I am not sure that it was not dearly purchased at the price. The plot of the book was intricate, the characters numerous; and I found it almost impossible to keep the dramatis personae apart. But I did not grudge my friend the pleasure he took in his composition; I only grudged the time I was obliged to spend in listening to it. The novel was not worth writing from the point of view of its intrinsic merits; but it gave my old friend an occupation; he was never bored; he flew back to his book whenever he had an hour to spare. It saved him from dulness and ennui; it gave him, I doubt not, many a glowing hour of secret joy; it was an unmixed benefit to himself and his family that he had this indoors resource; it entailed no expense; it was simply the cheapest and most harmless hobby that it is possible to conceive.

It is characteristic of our nation to feel an imperative need for occupation. I suppose that there is no nation in the world which has so little capacity for doing nothing gracefully, and enjoying it, as the English. This characteristic is part of our strength, because it testifies to a certain childlike vitality. We are impatient, restless, unsatisfied. We cannot be happy unless we have a definite end in view. The result of this temperament is to be seen at the present time in the enormous and consuming passion for athletic exercise in the open air. We are not an intellectual nation, and we must do something; we are wealthy and secure, and, in default of regular work, we have got to organize our hours of leisure on the supposition that we have something to do. I have little doubt that if we became a more intellectual nation the change would be signalized by an immense output of inferior books, because we have not the student temperament, the gift of absorbing literature. We have a deep instinct for publicity. If we are athletically gifted, we must display our athletic prowess in public. If we have thoughts of our own, we must have a hearing; we look upon meditation, contemplation, conversation, the arts of leisurely living, as a waste of time; we are above all things practical.

But I would pass on to consider the case of more serious writers; and I would begin by making a personal confession. My own occupations are mainly literary; and I would say frankly that there seems to me to be no pleasure comparable to the pleasure of writing. To find a congenial subject, and to express that subject as lucidly, as sincerely, as frankly as possible, appears to me to be the most delightful occupation in the world. Nature is full of exquisite sights and sounds, day by day; the stage of the world is crowded with interesting and fascinating personalities, rich in contrasts, in characteristics, in humour, in pathos. We are surrounded, the moment we pass outside of the complex material phenomena which surround us, by all kinds of wonderful secrets and incomprehensible mysteries. What is this strange pageant that unrolls itself before us from hour to hour? this panorama of night and day, sun and moon, summer and winter, joy and sorrow, life and death? We have all of us, like Jack Horner, our slice of pie to eat. Which of us does not know the delighted complacency with which we pull out the plums? The poet is silent of the moment when the plate is empty, when nothing is left but the stones; but that is no less impressive an experience.

The wonderful thing to me is, not that there is so much desire in the world to express our little portion of the joy, the grief, the mystery of it all, but that there is so little. I wish with all my heart that there was more instinct for personal expression; Edward FitzGerald said that he wished we had more lives of obscure persons; one wants to know what other people are thinking and feeling about it all; what joys they anticipate, what fears they sustain, how they regard the end and cessation of life and perception, which waits for us all. The worst of it is that people are often so modest; they think that their own experience is so dull, so unromantic, so uninteresting. It is an entire mistake. If the dullest person in the world would only put down sincerely what he or she thought about his or her life, about work and love, religion and emotion, it would be a fascinating document. My only sorrow is that the amateurs of whom I have spoken above will not do this; they rather turn to external and impersonal impressions, relate definite things, what they see on their travels, for instance, describing just the things which any one can see. They tend to indulge in the melancholy labour of translation, or employ customary, familiar forms, such as the novel or the play. If only they would write diaries and publish them; compose imaginary letters; let one inside the house of self instead of keeping one wandering in the park! The real interest of literature is the apprehending of other points of view; one spends an immense time in what is called society, in the pursuit of other people's views; but what a very little grain results from an intolerable deal of chaff! And all because people are conventional and not simple-minded; because they will not say what they think; indeed they will not as a rule try to find out what they do think, but prefer to traffic with the conventional counters. Yet what a refreshment it is to meet with a perfectly sincere person, who makes you feel that you are in real contact with a human being! This is what we ought to aim at in writing: at a perfectly sincere presentment of our thoughts. We cannot, of course, all of us hope to have views upon art, upon theology, upon politics, upon education, because we may not have any experience in these subjects; but we have all of us experience in life, in nature, in emotion, in religion; and to express what we feel, as sincerely as we can, is certainly useful to ourselves, because it clears our view, leads us not to confuse hopes with certainties, enables us to disentangle what we really believe from what we conventionally adopt.

Of course this cannot be done all at once; when we first begin to write, we find how difficult it is to keep the thread of our thoughts; we keep turning out of the main road to explore attractive by-paths; we cannot arrange our ideas. All writers who produce original work pass through a stage in which they are conscious of a throng of kindred notions, all more or less bearing on the central thought, but the movements of which they cannot wholly control. Their thoughts are like a turbulent crowd, and one's business is to drill them into an ordered regiment. A writer has to pass through a certain apprenticeship; and the cure for this natural vagueness is to choose small precise subjects, to say all that we have in our minds about them, and to stop when we have finished; not to aim at fine writing, but at definiteness and clearness.

I suppose people arrive at their end in different ways; but my own belief is that, in writing, one cannot do much by correction. I believe that the best way to arrive at lucidity is by incessant practice; we must be content to abandon and sacrifice faulty manuscripts altogether; we ought not to fret over them and rewrite them. The two things that I have found to be of infinite service to myself, in learning to write prose, have been keeping a full diary, and writing poetry. The habit of diarizing is easily acquired, and as soon as it becomes habitual, the day is no more complete without it than it is complete without a cold bath and regular meals. People say that they have not time to keep a diary; but they would never say that they had not time to take a bath or to have their meals. A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving a salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation. It is a practice which brings its own reward in many ways; it is a singularly delightful thing to look at old diaries, to see how one was occupied, say, ten years ago; what one was reading, the people one was meeting, one's earlier point of view. And then, further, as I have said, it has the immense advantage of developing style; the subjects are ready to hand; and one may learn, by diarizing, the art of sincere and frank expression.

And then there is the practice of writing poetry; there are certain years in the life of most people with a literary temperament, when poetry seems the most natural and desirable mode of self- expression. This impulse should be freely yielded to. The poetry need not be very good; I have no illusions, for instance, as to the merits of my own; but it gives one a copious vocabulary, it teaches the art of poise, of cadence, of choice in words, of picturesqueness. There comes a time when one abandons poetry, or is abandoned by it; and, after all, prose is the most real and natural form of expression. There arrives, in the case of one who has practised poetical expression diligently, a wonderful sense of freedom, of expansiveness, of delight, when he begins to use what has been material for poetry for the purposes of prose. Poetical expression is strictly conditioned by length of stanzas, dignity of vocabulary, and the painful exigencies of rhyme. How good are the days when one has escaped from all that tyranny, when one can say the things that stir the emotion, freely and liberally, in flowing phrases, without being brought to a stop by the severe fences of poetical form! The melody, the cadence, the rise and fall of the sentence, antithesis, contrast, mellifluous energy--these are the joys of prose; but there is nothing like the writing of verse to make them easy and instinctive.

A word may be said about style. Stevenson said that he arrived at flexibility of style by frank and unashamed imitation of other writers; he played, as he said, "the sedulous ape" to great authors. This system has its merits, but it also has its dangers. A sensitive literary temperament is apt to catch, to repeat, to perpetuate the charming mannerisms of great writers. I have sometimes had to write critical monographs on the work of great stylists. It is a perilous business! If for several months one studies the work of a contagious and delicate writer, critically and appreciatively, one is apt to shape one's sentences with a dangerous resemblance to the cadences of the author whom one is supposed to be criticising. More than once, when my monograph has been completed, I have felt that it might almost have been written by the author under examination; and there is no merit in that. I am sure that one should not aim at practising a particular style. The one aim should be to present the matter as clearly, as vigorously, as forcibly as one can; if one does this sincerely, one's own personality will make the style; and thus I feel that people whose aim is to write vigorously should abstain from even reading authors whose style affects them strongly. Stevenson himself dared not read Livy; Pater confessed that he could not afford to read Stevenson; he added, that he did not consider his own style better than the style of Stevenson--rather the reverse-- but he had his own theory, his own method of expression, deliberately adopted and diligently pursued. He therefore carefully refrained from reading an author whom he felt unconsciously compelled to imitate. The question of style, then, is one which a writer who desires originality should leave altogether alone. It must emerge of itself, or it is sure to lack distinctiveness. I saw once a curious instance of this. I knew a diligent writer, whose hasty and unconsidered writings were forcible, lively, and lucid, penetrated by his own poetical and incisive personality; but he set no store by these writings, and if they were ever praised in his presence, he said that he was ashamed of them for being so rough. This man devoted many years to the composition of a great literary work. He took infinite pains with it; he concentrated whole sentences into epithets; he hammered and chiselled his phrases; he was for ever retouching and rewriting. But when the book at last appeared it was a complete disappointment. The thing was really unintelligible; it had no motion, no space about it; the reader had to devote heart-breaking thought to the exploration of a paragraph, and was as a rule only rewarded by finding that it was a simple thought, expressed with profound obscurity; whereas the object of the writer ought to be to express a profound and difficult thought clearly and lucidly. The only piece of literary advice that I have ever found to be of real and abiding use, is the advice I once heard given by Professor Seeley to a youthful essayist, who had involved a simple subject in mazes of irrelevant intricacy. "Don't be afraid," said the Professor, "of letting the bones show." That is the secret: a piece of literary art must not be merely dry bones; the skeleton must be overlaid with delicate flesh and appropriate muscle; but the structure must be there, and it must be visible.

The perfection of lucid writing, which one sees in books such as Newman's Apologia or Ruskin's Praeterita, seems to resemble a crystal stream, which flows limpidly and deliciously over its pebbly bed; the very shape of the channel is revealed; there are transparent glassy water-breaks over the pale gravel; but though the very stream has a beauty of its own, a beauty of liquid curve and delicate murmur, its chief beauty is in the exquisite transfiguring effect which it has over the shingle, the vegetation that glimmers and sways beneath the surface. How dry, how commonplace the pebbles on the edge look! How stiff and ruinous the plants from which the water has receded! But seen through the hyaline medium, what coolness, what romance, what secret and remote mystery, lingers over the tiny pebbles, the little reefs of rock, the ribbons of weed, that poise so delicately in the gliding stream! What a vision of unimagined peace, of cool refreshment, of gentle tranquillity, it all gives!

Thus it is with the transfiguring power of art, of style. The objects by themselves, in the commonplace light, in the dreary air, are trivial and unromantic enough; one can hold them in one's hand, one seems to have seen them a hundred times before; but, plunged beneath that clear and fresh medium, they have a unity, a softness, a sweetness which seem the result of a magical spell, an incommunicable influence; they bring all heaven before the eyes; they whisper the secrets of a region which is veritably there, which we can discern and enjoy, but the charm of which we can neither analyse nor explain; we can only confess its existence with a grateful heart. One who devotes himself to writing should find, then, his chief joy in the practice of his art, not in the rewards of it; publication has its merits, because it entails upon one the labour of perfecting the book as far as possible; if one wrote without publication in view, one would be tempted to shirk the final labour of the file; one would leave sentences incomplete, paragraphs unfinished; and then, too, imperfect as reviews often are, it is wholesome as well as interesting to see the impression that one's work makes on others. If one's work is generally contemned, it is bracing to know that one fails in one's appeal, that one cannot amuse and interest readers. High literature has often met at first with unmerited neglect and even obloquy; but to incur neglect and obloquy is not in itself a proof that one's standard is high and one's taste fastidious. Moreover, if one has done one's best, and expressed sincerely what one feels and believes, one sometimes has the true and rare pleasure of eliciting a grateful letter from an unknown person, who has derived pleasure, perhaps even encouragement, from a book. These are some of the pleasant rewards of writing, and though one should not write with one's eye on the rewards, yet they may be accepted with a sober gratitude.

Of course there will come moods of discouragement to all authors, when they will ask themselves, as even Tennyson confesses that he was tempted to do, what, after all, it amounts to? The author must beware of rating his own possibilities too high. In looking back at one's own life, in trying to trace what are the things that have had a deep and permanent influence on one's character, how rarely is it possible to point to a particular book, and say, "That book gave me the message I most needed, made me take the right turn, gave me the requisite bias, the momentous impulse"? We tend to want to do things on too large a scale, to affect great masses of people, to influence numerous hearts. An author should be more than content if he finds he has made a difference to a handful of people, or given innocent pleasure to a small company. Only to those whose heart is high, whose patience is inexhaustible, whose vigour is great, whose emotion is passionate, is it given to make a deep mark upon the age; and there is needed too the magical charm of personality, overflowing in "thoughts that breathe and words that burn." But we can all take a hand in the great game; and if the leading parts are denied us, if we are told off to sit among a row of supers, drinking and whispering on a bench, while the great characters soliloquize, let us be sure that we drain our empty cup with zest, and do our whispering with intentness; not striving to divert attention to ourselves, but contributing with all our might to the naturalness, the effectiveness of the scene.

[The end]
Arthur C. Benson's essay: Authorship [From a College Window]

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