Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 | Page 4

mission to be abstruse, fight to
render your statement clear and attractive, as if your life depended on it:
your literary life does depend on it, and, if you fail, relapses into a dead
language, and becomes, like that of Coleridge, only a Biographia
Literaria. Labor, therefore, not in thought alone, but in utterance;
clothe and reclothe your grand conception twenty times, until you find
some phrase that with its grandeur shall be lucid also. It is this
unwearied literary patience that has enabled Emerson not merely to
introduce, but even to popularize, thoughts of such a quality as never
reached the popular mind before. And when such a writer, thus
laborious to do his utmost for his disciples, becomes after all
incomprehensible, we can try to believe that it is only that inevitable
obscurity of vast thought which Coleridge said was a compliment to the
reader.
In learning to write availably, a newspaper-office is a capital
preparatory school. Nothing is so good to teach the use of materials,
and to compel to pungency of style. Being always at close quarters with
his readers, a journalist must shorten and sharpen his sentences, or he is
doomed. Yet this mental alertness is bought at a severe price; such
living from hand to mouth cheapens the whole mode of intellectual
existence, and it would seem that no successful journalist could ever
get the newspaper out of his blood, or achieve any high literary success.
For purposes of illustration and elucidation, and even for amplitude of
vocabulary, wealth of accumulated materials is essential; and whether
this wealth be won by reading or by experience makes no great
difference. Coleridge attended Davy's chemical lectures to acquire new
metaphors, and it is of no consequence whether one comes to literature
from a library, a machine-shop, or a forecastle, provided he has learned
to work with thoroughness the soil he knows. After all is said and done,

however, books remain the chief quarries. Johnson declared, putting the
thing perhaps too mechanically, "The greater part of an author's time is
spent in reading in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to
make one book." Addison collected three folios of materials before
publishing the first number of the "Spectator." Remember, however,
that copious preparation has its perils also, in the crude display to
which it tempts. The object of high culture is not to exhibit culture, but
its results. You do not put guano on your garden that your garden may
blossom guano. Indeed, even for the proper subordination of one's own
thoughts the same self-control is needed; and there is no severer test of
literary training than in the power to prune out one's most cherished
sentence, when it grows obvious that the sacrifice will help the
symmetry or vigor of the whole.
Be noble both in the affluence and the economy of your diction; spare
no wealth that you can put in, and tolerate no superfluity that can be
struck out. Remember the Lacedemonian who was fined for saying that
in three words which might as well have been expressed in two. Do not
throw a dozen vague epithets at a thing, in the hope that some one of
them will fit; but study each phrase so carefully that the most ingenious
critic cannot alter it without spoiling the whole passage for everybody
but himself. For the same reason do not take refuge, as was the practice
a few years since, in German combinations, heart-utterances,
soul-sentiments, and hyphenized phrases generally; but roll your
thought into one good English word. There is no fault which seems so
hopeless as commonplaceness, but it is really easier to elevate the
commonplace than to reduce the turgid. How few men in all the pride
of culture can emulate the easy grace of a bright woman's letter!
Have faith enough in your own individuality to keep it resolutely down
for a year or two. A man has not much intellectual capital who cannot
treat himself to a brief interval of modesty. Premature individualism
commonly ends either in a reaction against the original whims, or in a
mannerism which perpetuates them. For mannerism no one is great
enough, because, though in the hands of a strong man it imprisons us in
novel fascination, yet we soon grow weary, and then hate our prison
forever. How sparkling was Reade's crisp brilliancy in "Peg
Woffington"!--but into what disagreeable affectations it has since
degenerated! Carlyle was a boon to the human race, amid the lameness

into which English style was declining; but who is not tired of him and
his catchwords now? He was the Jenner of our modern style,
inoculating and saving us all by his quaint frank Germanism, then
dying of his own disease. Now the age has outgrown him,