The greater force of the objective treatment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets, whose ambition has led them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or the play.There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the saying of it;a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack.In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought up short by the question, "Why must you still be talking?"Even the passionate lyric feels the need of external authorisation, and some of the finest of lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth's SOLITARY REAPER, are cast in a dramatic mould, that beauty of diction may be vitalised by an imagined situation.More than others the dramatic art is an enemy to the desultory and the superfluous, sooner than others it will cast away all formal grace of expression that it may come home more directly to the business and bosoms of men.Its great power and scope are shown well in this, that it can find high uses for the commonest stuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of daily intercourse.
Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary facts of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama, and in its modern fellow and rival, the novel.The dramatist and novelist create their own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate.
Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects.They work at two removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response.
Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their reach; the matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is to employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the meaning of their words is not obvious, and they must go aside to define it.The strength of their writing has limits set for it by the nature of the chosen task, and any transgression of these limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence.All writing partakes of the quality of the drama, there is always a situation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker and the hearer.
A gentleman in black, expounding his views, or narrating his autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he too may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display sympathy and tact, and avoid the faults of senility.The only character that can lend strength to his words is his own, and he sketches it while he states his opinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied in the very arguments he uses.
Who does not know the curious blank effect of eloquence overstrained or out of place? The phrasing may be exquisite, the thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it were, dumb-show where no community of feeling exists between the speaker and his audience.A similar false note is struck by any speaker or writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his disqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.
"How many things are there," exclaims the wise Verulam, "which a man cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself! Aman's person hath many proper relations which he cannot put off.Aman cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband; to his enemy but upon terms; whereas a friend may speak as the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person." The like "proper relations" govern writers, even where their audience is unknown to them.It has often been remarked how few are the story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so much as by a passing reflection or sentiment, without a discordant effect.The friend who saves the situation is found in one and another of the creatures of their art.
For those who must play their own part the effort to conceal themselves is of no avail.The implicit attitude of a writer makes itself felt; an undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions, an unwarrantable assumption of sympathy, a tendency to truck with friends or with enemies by the way, are all possible indications of weakness, which move even the least skilled of readers to discount what is said, as they catch here and there a glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young dandy, behind the imposing literary mask.Strong writers are those who, with every reserve of power, seek no exhibition of strength.It is as if language could not come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an evil necessity.Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant witness.They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways have failed.The bane of a literary education is that it induces talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words.But those whose words are stark and terrible seem almost to despise words.
With words literature begins, and to words it must return.
