BY RULE OF THREE.
Some years ago at College I read, on compulsion, a book on Rhetoric. Reasons were to me then as plenty as blackberries, and I recollect that on examination my answers given to this, that, and the other were so glib and trite, and my thesis so amusing, that I carried off a Prize.
But during the struggle for prizes that have a value as collateral, the Prize and the Rhetoric were forgotten. Yet Fate decreed it so, and one day last week I met a Harvard youth, whose ambition was Literature, and he was in the grinding turmoil of a Volume. He was studying on compulsion, with intent to work off a Condition, and the book he was reading with such violence was the Rhetoric of my College days.With a flush of pride it came to me that I was a Prizeman, and I offered, out of the goodness of my heart, to tutor the youth, so that after five lessons of an hour each he could grind the Condition to powder.
To prove my fitness, the young man put me through a slight quiz, and alas! all of the beautiful truths and facts of the Rhetoric had slipped me, save this alone: “The three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.”
Every address that Professor Adams Sherman Hill, who wrote the Rhetoric, ever gave began with this formula. Mr. Barrett Wendell, Heir-Apparent to his ideas and Chair, does the same; and the Shock-headed Youth, who occupies the same relation to the professorship that the infant Duke of York does to the throne of England, always settles himself in his seat with his elbows on the table, coughs gently, and prefaces his lecture by saying to the admiring Freshmen: “Gentlemen, the three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.” Professor Hill has in one book, by actual count, twenty-seven different propositions that he divides into three parts. I have forgotten them all save the one just named. This statement I never can forget. I hold it with a deathless grasp that defies the seasons and sorrows of time: for there are things burned so deep into one’s soul that the brand can never be removed;and should reason abdicate, I’ll gibber through the grates of my padded cell at each pitying passer-by, “The three requisites in correct writing are Clearness, Force, and Elegance.”
For years I have repeated this fetching formula on every possible occasion; and up to this date I have managed to drown the rising voice of conscience by the specious plea that a double standard of truth is justifiable in the present condition of society. In morals I have been a bimetalist.
But after readingOn Compromise, by John Morley, I am convinced that this juggling with the Eternal Verities is what has kept the race in darkness these many cycles; and I now admit the truth which I have long withheld, that Professor Hill’s three Requisites are gross humbuggery. I boldly state that Professor Hill does not know what the “Requisites” are; and I am sure that I do not. In fact I am looking for them anxiously; and should I ever find them, I’ll do as Shakespeare did—keep them to myself. I say further that inasmuch as Professor Hill does not know them, the Heir-Apparent and the Shock-headed Youth in the rush-line for the Chair cannot possibly be expected to know: so none of us know.
Not only is Professor Hill’s formula rank error, but it is in direct opposition to truth. I bundle his crass creed with Dr. Hall’s Universal Self-Treatment,Professor Loisette’s Scheme of Mnemonics, and the Brown-Sequard Recipe for Perpetual Youth.
Professor Hill, with the help of his students, has compiled three books on Rhetoric; Mr. Barrett Wendell has published two. Students at Harvard are expected to buy these books. There are three thousand students at Harvard. These various books are practically one, for they all teach that “a parenthetical remark must be enclosed in parentheses, dashes or commas,” and that “every sentence should have at least one verb.” These things are explained to men who have had ten years of solid schooling in order to fit them for College. Professor Hill recommends Harvard students to buy “that well written work on Composition by Mr. Barrett Wendell,” and Mr. Wendell modestly says, on page 8, line 18, of his biggest well written work: “Professor Hill’s books are the most sensible treatment of the art of composition that I have yet found in print.” The last three chapters in Mr. Wendell’s well written work bear the following startling titles, respectively:Clearness,Force, andElegance. Harvard Freshmen know Trigonometry, Physics and “one language beside English,” and various other things, but it is left for Professor Hill to sell them a book which explains that “a sentence may end either with a period, interrogation point or an exclamation mark!” Doyou say that the public school system is to blame for such a condition? My answer is that if Harvard required her students to know the simple rules of Rhetoric before being admitted to the University, it would be done.
Mr. Hill fills the Boylston Professorship of Literature and Oratory at Harvard University, but with all the many thousand students who have been under his care he has probably never given impulse to a single orator, nor materially assisted one man with literary ambition. The reason is that he is teaching things that should have been known to his pupils years before. There is a time to teach things as well as a way. Instead of arousing animation Professor Hill reduces it. So sympathy is made a weakling and imagination rendered wingless. I have examined many compositions written by Harvard students, and they average up about like the epistles of little girls who write letters to Santa Claus. The students are all right—fine intelligent young fellows—but the conditions under which they work are such that they are robbed of all spontaneity when they attempt to express themselves. Of course I know that a few Harvard men have succeeded in Oratory and Literature, for there are those so strong that even Cambridge cannot kill their personality, nor a Professor reduce to neutral salts their native vim.
The rules of Rhetoric should be taught to adolescence; then when the boy goes to college he has tools with which to work. “When did you learn your letters?” I asked a six-year-old youngster yesterday. “I allus know’d ’em,” was the reply. And the answer was wise, for the kindergarten methods teach the child to read, and he never knows when or how he acquired the knowledge. As a healthy man does not know he has a stomach, so he should write without knowing a single so-called rule. And as the Froebel methods are fast making their way in all departments of learning, I expect this will soon be so. But the colleges lag behind, and Harvard (very busy fighting “Co-Ed—”) still tries to make statues by clapping the material on the outside.
Professor Hill knows the futility of his methods, for in his last work he puts in several disclaimers to the effect that he “does not undertake to supply men with ideas.” That confession of weakness is pitiful. Professor Hill should surround his students with an atmosphere that makes thought possible. By liberating the imagination of his pupils ideas would come to them. But as fire will not burn without oxygen, so thought cannot exist in the presence of Mr. Barrett Wendell. Both he and his Superior are strong in way of supplying cold storage—that’s all.
In lecturing on Literature and Oratory these mensit at a desk. And often, becoming weary, they sprawl over the table like a devil-fish seeking its prey. This, I believe, is the usual Cambridge method. But there is one exception to this rule at Harvard, and that is Professor Kittredge, who being nervous and cannot sit still, paces the platform and shoots the lecture over his shoulder. When a student is called on to recite, Professor Kittredge often opens a box of withering sarcasm that acts like chlorine gas on the poor fellow who is trying to recite. But it makes the rest of the class grin like deaths-heads. Harvard knows no general plan for cultivating the imagination, inciting animation, or furthering ambition. All is suppression, fear; and this repression often finds vent in rowdyism outside of Harvard Yard. The seven youths who under Professor Hill mark the themes hunt only for errors and lapses. The tendency of this negation is intellectual torpor and spiritual death.
If any one should ask Mr. Barrett Wendell what he thought of the Herbartian idea of developing the God within, the Assistant Professor would first calmly light a cigarette, and after blowing the smoke through his nose, would fix on his presumptious interlocutor an Antarctic stare that would freeze him stiff.
And let me say right here that toward Harvard’s teachers I bear no malice. In showing ProfessorHill’s books to be puerile and profitless, and in depositing the Heir-Apparent in the ragbag of oblivion, I have no sinister motive. And if from this time forward their names are a byword and a hissing, it is only because the Institution which they serve has stood in the way of Eternal Truth. These professors of rhetoric prospecting on the mountain side, thinking they had found the Final Word, builded tabernacles and rested—all forgetful of the avalanche.
“Clearness” is never found in literature of the first class. Clearness, according to the Professor, means a simplicity that makes the meaning plain to all others. But this is only pabulum for the sophomore intellect; and outside of Bryant & Stratton’s it has no legitimate place. The great writer is only clear to himself or those as great as he.
The masterpieces of Art are all cloud-capped. Few men indeed ever reach the summit: we watch them as they ascend and we lose them in the mists as they climb: sometimes they never come back to us, and even if they do, having been on the Mount of Transfiguration, they are no longer ours.
In all great literature there is this large, airy impersonal independence. The Mountain does not go to you: you may famish out there on the arid plain and your bones whiten amid the alkali in theglistening sun, but the majestic Mountain looks on imperturbable. The valleys are there, with the rich verdure, and the running brooks where the trout frolic, and the cool springs where wild game gathers, but what cares the Mountain for you! Ecclesiastes offers no premiums to readers, Shakespeare makes no appeal to club raisers, Emerson puts forth no hot endeavor for a million subscribers: all these can do without you.
Rich lodes run through this Mountain, and we continually delve and toil for treasure. And in spite of the pain and isolation and the privation that is incident, and the dangerous crevices that lie in wait, we secure a reward for our labor. Still we do not find the fabled “pockets” that we seek—it is always something else. From Columbus searching for a Northwest Passage to the rustic swain who follows with such fidelity the wake of a petticoat, all are the sport of Fate. We achieve, but die in ignorance of the extent to which we have benefitted the Race. And like the man who rode the hobby all his life, and whose friends discovered after he was dead that it was a real horse and had carried the man many long miles, so are we carried on steeds that are guided by an Unseen Hand.
All sublime Art is symbolistic. What is the message the great violinist brings you? Ah, you cannotimpart it! Each must hear it for himself. The note that is “clear” to all is not Art. When Charles Lamb pointed to the row of ledgers in the office of the East India Company and said, “These are my works,” he was only joking; for he afterward explained that ledgers, indices, catalogues, directories, almanacs, reports, and briefs are not literature at all. These things inspire no poems; they give no glow.
The province of Art is not to present a specific message, but to impart a feeling. If we go home from the Lyceum hushed, treading on air, we have heard Oratory, even though we cannot recall a single sentence; and if we read a poem that brings the unbidden tears and makes the room seem a sacred chancel, we have read Literature. The Master has imparted to our spirits a tithe of his own sublimity of soul.
For the good old ladies who prick the Bible for a message I have a profound sympathy: the Sacred Page fits man’s every mood, and this is why it is immortal. That which is clear is ephemeral. Symbolism requires interpreters, and lo! colleges spring up with no other intent than to train men to explain a Book; for the Saviours of the world all speak in parables. They see the significance of Things and voice a various language. The interpreter makes the symbolist immortal, and the symbolist makes the fame of theinterpreter. If Turner had been “clear,” Ruskin might still be Assistant Professor. All Holy Writ from Moses to Whitman is mystical. The writer has breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, that impalpable, elusive Something which we forever seek and which forever escapes us.
Of course, I would not have a writer endeavor to be mystical—this would be positively base; but I would have each man who feels that he has something to say express himself in his own way, without let, hindrance, or injunction from writers on rhetoric, who having never produced anything to speak of themselves, yet are willing for jingling coin to show others how.
“What do you do when you are preaching and can’t think of anything to say?” asked a Fledgeling of his pastor.
“I just holler,” was the answer of the experienced Exhorter.
With half a million preachers in the United States, with families to keep on an average salary of five hundred dollars, I do not blame them for “hollerin’;” neither do I censure editors who have to fill three columns each day if they often “holler;” as an economist I might advise a man to “holler,” but as a lover of literature I cannot conscientiously do so.
I have a clerical friend who, being much before the public, is often called upon unexpectedly to reduce moral calculi. Being a man of force, and not a man of power, he never says, “I do not know,” but always boldly faces the problem after this manner: “My friends, this subject naturally divides itself under three heads: firstly,”... Here he states some general commonplace for the first head, and casts about in his mind for the other two; having secured them, he launches forth with much emphasis on some other theme and carries all before him. His swashing and marshal manner makes him everywhere a great success; he is considered one of the most powerful men in his denomination.
And I am fully convinced that a painstaking show of system is one of the first essentials in making a favorable impression. We are like the Hebrew salesman who called on a firm who occupied a sixth floor and who, on starting to show his samples, was promptly kicked down stairs; having arrived at the first landing a second man took him in hand and kicked him one flight further; this was continued until his battered form reached the sidewalk, when he picked himself up and admiringly exclaimed, “Mein Gott! vot a system!” So when a rhetorician flashes his “heads” and “divisions” and syllogisms and analyses and figures (that do not lie)upon us, we are so lost in bedazzled admiration that we can only lift up our hands and say, “My God! what a system!”
Good work never comes from the effort to be “clear” or “forceful” or “elegant.” Clear to whom, forsooth? and as for force, it has no more place in letters than has speed.
Power in Art there surely is, but power is quite a different thing from force. Power is that quality by which change is wrought; it means potentiality, potency. The artist uses only a fraction of his power, and works his changes by the powder that he never explodes; while force means movement, action, exertion, violence, compulsion.
Literature is largely the result of feeling. The “hustler” is a man of force; very, very seldom is he a man of power; still rarer is it that he is a man of feeling. The very idea of force precludes tender sensibility and delicate emotion. If I should write on a scrap of paper, “Hate is death, but love is life,” and drop the slip into the street, there might be power in the words, but surely there is no force.
And as for elegance, let him who attempts it leave all hope behind; he is already damned. The elegance of an act must spring unconsciously from the gracious soul within. There is no formula.
In letters, “clearness” should be left to the makerof directories, “force” to the auctioneer, and “elegance” to the young man who presides at the button counter. Were I an instructor in a Commercial College, I might advise that in business correspondence there should be clearness and force and elegance; but if I were a Professor of Literature and Oratory, I would not smother inspiration in a formula. I would say, Cultivate the heart and intellect, and allow nature to do the rest. For while it is still a mooted question whether a man’s offspring after the flesh are heirs to his mental and spiritual qualities, it is very sure that the children of his brain are partakers in whatsoever virtue that his soul possesses.
The teacher who teaches best is not he who insists on our memorizing rules, but he who produces in the pupil a pleasurable animation. We learn only in times of joy and in times of grief. The teacher who can give his pupils pleasure in their work shall be crowned with laurel, but grief—grief is the unwelcome gift of the gods alone!
Let the writer have a clear conception and then express it so it is at the moment clear to his Other-Self—that Self that looks on over the shoulder of every man, endorsing or censuring his every act and thought and deed. The highest reward of good work consists in the approbation of this Other-Self, and in that alone; even though the world flouts itall, you have not failed. “I know what pleasure is,” said Stevenson, “for I have done good work.”
Elbert Hubbard.