How to Fail in Literature | Page 6

of famous authors
of every age. He who aims at failure must never think of style, and
should sedulously abstain from reading Shakespeare, Bacon, Hooker,
Walton, Gibbon, and other English and foreign classics. He can hardly
be too reckless of grammar, and should always place adverbs and other
words between "to" and the infinitive, thus: "Hubert was determined to
energetically and on all possible occasions, oppose any attempt to
entangle him with such." Here, it will be noticed, "such" is used as a
pronoun, a delightful flower of speech not to be disregarded by authors
who would fail. But some one may reply that several of our most
popular novelists revel in the kind of grammar which I am
recommending. This is undeniable, but certain people manage to

succeed in spite of their own earnest endeavours and startling demerits.
There is no royal road to failure. There is no rule without its exception,
and it may be urged that the works of the gentlemen and ladies who
"break Priscian's head"--as they would say themselves--may be
successful, but are not literature. Now it is about literature that we are
speaking.
In the matter of style, there is another excellent way. You need not
neglect it, but you may study it wrongly. You may be affectedly
self-conscious, you may imitate the ingenious persons who carefully
avoid the natural word, the spontaneous phrase, and employ some other
set of terms which can hardly be construed. You may use, like a young
essayist whom I have lovingly observed, a proportion of eighty
adjectives to every sixty-five other words of all denominations. You
may hunt for odd words, and thrust them into the wrong places, as
where you say that a
man's nose is "beetling," that the sun sank in "a cauldron of daffodil
chaos," and the like. {2} You may use common words in an unwonted
sense, keeping some private interpretation clearly before you. Thus you
may speak, if you like to write partly in the tongue of Hellas, about
"assimilating the ethos" of a work of art, and so write that people shall
think of the processes of digestion. You may speak of "exhausting the
beauty" of a landscape, and, somehow, convey the notion of sucking an
orange dry. Or you may wildly mix your metaphors, as when a critic
accuses Mr. Browning of "giving the irridescence of the poetic
afflatus," as if the poetic afflatus were blown through a pipe, into soap,
and produced soap bubbles. This is a more troublesome method than
the mere picking up of every newspaper commonplace that floats into
your mind, but it is equally certain to lead--where you want to go. By
combining the two fashions a great deal may be done. Thus you want to
describe a fire at sea, and you say, "the devouring element lapped the
quivering spars, the mast, and the sea-shouldering keel of the doomed
Mary Jane in one coruscating catastrophe. The sea deeps were
incarnadined to an alarming extent by the flames, and to escape from
such many plunged headlong in their watery bier."

As a rule, authors who would fail stick to one bad sort of writing; either
to the newspaper commonplace, or to the out of the way and
inappropriate epithets, or to the common word with a twist on it. But
there are examples of the combined method, as when we call the trees
round a man's house his "domestic boscage." This combination is
difficult, but perfect for its purpose. You cannot write worse than
"such." To attain perfection the young aspirant should confine his
reading to the newspapers (carefully selecting his newspapers, for
many of them will not help him to write ill) and to those modern
authors who are most praised for their style by the people who know
least about the matter. Words like "fictional" and "fictive" are distinctly
to be recommended, and there are epithets such as "weird," "strange,"
"wild," "intimate," and the rest, which blend pleasantly with "all the
time" for "always"; "back of" for "behind"; "belong with" for "belong
to"; "live like I do" for "as I do." The authors who combine those
charms are rare, but we can strive to be among them.
In short, he who would fail must avoid simplicity like a sunken reef,
and must earnestly seek either the commonplace or the bizarre, the
slipshod or the affected, the newfangled or the obsolete, the flippant or
the sepulchral. I need not specially recommend you to write in
"Wardour-street English," the sham archaic, a lingo never spoken by
mortal man, and composed of patches borrowed from authors between
Piers Plowman and Gabriel Harvey. A few literal translations of
Icelandic phrases may be thrown in; the result, as furniture- dealers say,
is a "made-up article."
On the subject of style another