XV

XV

SUGGESTIVENESS

THERE is a quality that adheres to one man’s writing or speaking, and not to another’s, that we call suggestiveness,—something that warms and stimulates the mind of the reader or hearer, quite apart from the amount of truth or information directly conveyed.

It is a precious literary quality, not easy of definition or description. It involves quality of mind, mental and moral atmosphere, points of view, and maybe, racial elements. Not every page or every book carries latent meaning; rarely does any sentence of a writer float deeper than it shows.

Thus, of the great writers of English literature, Dr. Johnson is, to me, the least suggestive, while Bacon is one of the most suggestive. Hawthorne is undoubtedly the most suggestive of our romancers; he has the most atmosphere and the widest and most alluring horizon. Emerson is the most suggestive of our essayists, because he has the deepest ethical and prophetic background. His page is full of moral electricity, so to speak, which begets a state of electric excitement in his reader’s mind. Whitman is the most suggestive of our poets; he elaborates the least and gives us in profusion the buds and germs ofpoetry. A musical composer once said to me that Whitman stimulated him more than Tennyson, because he left more for him to do,—he abounded in hints and possibilities that the musician’s mind eagerly seized.

This quality is not related to ambiguity of phrase or to cryptic language or to vagueness and obscurity. It goes, or may go, with perfect lucidity, as in Matthew Arnold at his best, while it is rarely present in the pages of Herbert Spencer. Spencer has great clearness and compass, but there is nothing resonant in his style,—nothing that stimulates the imagination. He is a great workman, but the metal he works in is not of the kind called precious.

The late roundabout and enigmatical style of Henry James is far less fruitful in his readers’ minds than his earlier and more direct one, or than the limpid style of his compeer, Mr. Howells. The indirect and elliptical method may undoubtedly be so used as to stimulate the mind; at the same time there may be a kind of inconclusiveness and beating around the bush that is barren and wearisome. Upon the page of the great novelist there fall, more or less distinct, all the colors of the spectrum of human life; but Mr. James in his later works seems intent only upon the invisible rays of the spectrum, and his readers grope in the darkness accordingly.

In the world of experience and observation the suggestiveness of things is enhanced by veils, concealments, half lights, flowing lines. The twilight is more suggestive than the glare of noonday, arolling field than a lawn, a winding road than a straight one. In literature perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer, sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun vague generalities,—with these go the power of suggestiveness.

Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the perfected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has another. All beginnings in nature afford us a peculiar pleasure. The early spring with its hints and dim prophecies, the first earth odors, the first robin or song sparrow, the first furrow, the first tender skies, the first rainbow, the first wild flower, the dropping bud scales, the awakening voices in the marshes,—all these things touch and move us in a way that later developments in the season do not. What meaning, too, in the sunrise and the sunset, in the night with its stars, the sea with its tides and currents, the morning with its dews, autumn with its bounty, winter with its snows, the desert with its sands,—in everything in the germ and in the bud,—in parasites, suckers, blights, in floods, tempests, droughts! The winged seeds carry thoughts, the falling leaves make us pause, the clinging burrs have a tongue, the pollen dust, not less than meteoric dust, conveys a hint of the method of nature.

Some things and events in our daily experience are more typical, and therefore more suggestive, than others. Thus the sower striding across the ploughed field is a walking allegory, or parable. Indeed the whole life of the husbandman,—his first-hand relation to things, his ploughing, his planting, his fertilizing, his draining, his pruning, his grafting, his uprootings, his harvestings, his separating of the wheat from the chaff, and the tares from the wheat, his fencing his field with the stones and boulders that hindered his plough or cumbered his sward, his making the wilderness blossom as the rose,—all these things are pleasant to contemplate because in them there is a story within a story, we translate the facts into higher truths.

In like manner, the shepherd with his flocks, the seaman with his compass and rudder, the potter with his clay, the weaver with his warp and woof, the sculptor with his marble, the painter with his canvas and pigments, the builder with his plans and scaffoldings, the chemist with his solvents and precipitants, the surgeon with his scalpel and antiseptics, the lawyer with his briefs, the preacher with his text, the fisherman with his nets,—all are more or less symbolical and appeal to the imagination.

In both prose and poetry, there is the suggestiveness of language used in a vivid, imaginative way, and the suggestiveness of words redolent of human association, words of deep import, as friend, home, love, marriage.

To me Shakespeare’s sonnets are the most suggestivesonnets in the language, because they so abound in words, images, allusions drawn from real life; they are the product of a mind vividly acted upon by near-by things, that uses language steeped in the common experience of mankind. The poet drew his material not from the strange and the remote, but, as it were, from the gardens and thoroughfares of life. Does not that poetry or prose work touch us the most nearly that deals with that with which we are most familiar? One thing that separates the minor poet from the major is that the thoughts and words of the minor poet are more of the nature of asides, or of the exceptional; he does not take in the common and universal; we are not familiar with the points of view that so agitate him; and he has not the power to make them real to us. I read poems every day that provoke the thought, “Well, that is all news to me. I do not know that heaven or that earth, those men or those women,”—all is so shadowy, fantastic, and unreal. But when you enter the world of the great poets you find yourself upon solid ground; the sky and the earth, and the things in them and upon them, are what you have always known, and not for a moment are you called upon to breathe in a vacuum, or to reverse your upright position to see the landscape. Dante even makes hell as tangible and real as the objects of our senses, if not more so.

Then there is the suggestiveness or kindling power of pregnant, compact sentences,—type thoughts, compendious phrases,—vital distinctions or generalizations,such as we find scattered through literature, as when De Quincey says of the Roman that he was great in the presence of man, never in the presence of nature; or his distinction between the literature of power and the literature of knowledge, or similar illuminating distinctions in the prose of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, Arnold, Goethe, Lessing. Arnold’s dictum that poetry is a criticism of life, is suggestive, because it sets you thinking to verify or to disprove it. John Stuart Mill was not what one would call a suggestive writer, yet the following sentence, which Mr. Augustine Birrell has lately made use of, makes a decided ripple in one’s mind: “I have learnt from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result.” In a new home writer whose first books are but a year or two old, I find deeply suggestive sentences on nearly every page. Here are two or three of them: “In your inmost soul you are as well suited to the whole cosmical order and every part of it as to your own body. You belong here. Did you suppose that you belonged to some other world than this, or that you belonged nowhere at all, just a waif on the bosom of the eternities?... Conceivably He might have flung you into a world that was unrelated to you, and might have left you to be acclimated at your own risk; but you happen to know that this is not the case. You have lived here always; this is the ancestral demesne; forages and ages you have looked out of these same windows upon the celestial landscape and the star-deeps. You are at home.” “How perverse and pathetic the desires of the animals! But they all get what they ask for,—long necks and trunks, flapping ears and branching horns and corrugated hides, anything, if only they will believe in life and try.”[1]

[1]The Religion of Democracy.By Charles Ferguson.

[1]The Religion of Democracy.By Charles Ferguson.

The intuitional and affirmative writers, to which class our new author belongs, and the most notable example of which, in this country, was Emerson, are, as a rule, more suggestive than the clearly demonstrating and logical writers. A challenge to the soul seems to mean more than an appeal to the reason; an audacious affirmation often irradiates the mind in a way that a logical sequence of thought does not. Science rarely suggests more than it says; but in the hands of an imaginative man like Maeterlinck a certain order of facts in natural history becomes fraught with deepest meaning, as may be witnessed in his wonderful “Life of the Bee,”—one of the most enchanting and poetic contributions to natural history ever made. Darwin’s work upon the earthworm, and upon the cross fertilization of flowers, in the same way seems to convey more truth to the reader than is warranted by the subject.

The writer who can touch the imagination has the key, at least one key, to suggestiveness. This power often goes with a certain vagueness and indefiniteness, as in the oft-quoted lines from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets:—

“the prophetic soulOf the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

“the prophetic soulOf the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

“the prophetic soulOf the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

“the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come,”

a very suggestive, but not a clearly intelligible passage.

Truth at the centre, straightly put, excites the mind in one way, and truth at the surface, or at the periphery of the circle, indirectly put, excites it in another way and for other reasons; just as a light in a dark place, which illuminates, appeals to the eye in a different way from the light of day falling through vapors or colored glass, wherein objects become softened and illusory.

A common word may be so used as to have an unexpected richness of meaning, as when Coleridge speaks of those books that “find” us; or Shakespeare of the “marriage of true minds,” or Whitman of the autumn apple hanging “indolent-ripe” on the tree. Probably that language is the most suggestive that is the most concrete, that is drawn most largely from the experience of life, that savors of real things. The Saxon English of Walton or Barrow is more suggestive than the latinized English of Johnson or Gibbon.

Indeed, the quality I am speaking of is quite exceptional in the eighteenth-century writers. It is much more abundant in the writers of the seventeenth century. It goes much more with the vernacular style, the homely style, than with the polished academic style.

With the stream of English literature of the nineteenth century has mingled a current of Germanthought and mysticism, and this has greatly heightened its power of suggestiveness both in poetry and in prose. It is not in Byron or Scott or Campbell or Moore or Macaulay or Irving, but it is in Wordsworth and Coleridge and Landor and Carlyle and Ruskin and Blake and Tennyson and Browning and Emerson and Whitman,—a depth and richness of spiritual and emotional background that the wits of Pope’s and Johnson’s times knew not of. It seems as if the subconscious self played a much greater part in the literature of the nineteenth century than of the eighteenth, probably because this term has been recently added to our psychology.

As a rule it may be said that the more a writer condenses, the more suggestive his work will be. There is a sort of mechanical equivalent between the force expended in compacting a sentence and the force or stimulus it imparts again to the reader’s mind. A diffuse writer is rarely or never a suggestive one. Poetry is, or should be, more suggestive than prose, because it is the result of a more compendious and sublimating process. The mind of the poet is more tense, he uses language under greater pressure of emotion than the prose writer, whose medium of expression gives his mind more playroom. The poet often succeeds in focusing his meaning or emotion in a single epithet, and he alone gives us the resounding, unforgettable line. There are pregnant sentences in all the great prose writers; there are immortal lines only in the poets.

Whitman said the word he would himself use asmost truly descriptive of his “Leaves of Grass” was the word suggestiveness. “I round and finish little, if anything; and could not consistently with my scheme. The reader will always have his or her part to do, just as much as I have had mine. I seek less to state or display my theme or thought, and more to bring you, reader, into the atmosphere of the theme or thought—there to pursue your own flight.” These sentences themselves are suggestive, because they bring before the mind a variety of definite actions, as finishing a thing, displaying a thing, doing your part, pursuing your own flight, and yet the idea conveyed has a certain subtlety and elusiveness. The suggestiveness of his work as a whole probably lies in its blending of realism and mysticism, and in the art of it running parallel to or in some way tallying with the laws and processes of nature. It stimulates thought and criticism as few modern works do.

Of course the suggestiveness of any work—poem, picture, novel, essay—depends largely upon what we bring to it; whether we bring a kindred spirit or an alien one, a full mind or an empty one, an alert sense or a dull one. If you have been there, so to speak, if you have passed through the experience described, if you have known the people portrayed, if you have thought, or tried to think, the thoughts the author exploits, the work will have a deeper meaning to you than to one who is a stranger to these things. The best books make us acquainted with our own,—they help us to find ourselves. Nobook calls forth the same responses from two different types of mind. The wind does not awaken æolian-harp tones from cornstalks. No man is a hero to his valet. It is the deep hollows and passes of the mountains that give back your voice in prolonged reverberations. The tides are in the sea, not in the lakes and ponds. Words of deep import do not mean much to a child. The world of books is under the same law as these things. What any given work yields us depends largely upon what we bring to it.

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