"Good gracious!" cried Moore. "You surely didn't think you could write better than Balzac straight off, did you?"
"Certainly I did," I replied, "or I'd never have begun."
A little later Moore wrote to me, asking for permission to turn the Modern Idyll into a play, and I believe he did it with Arthur Symons, under the title of The Curate's Call or something of that sort. It had little interest for me.
I wanted to know whether I could do a long novel. Above all, I wanted to know how I was to render the portrait of Shakespeare and his life that was in my mind. But the joy in me already was rampant. I knew that, like Saul, I had gone out to find my father's asses and had found a kingdom. I was drunk with the hope that I might really be a great writer, as Carlyle said, "One of that strange race called Immortal."
Immediately I took the matter seriously to heart. I returned to London and sought counsel from the wisest, but got little or nothing for my pains, till it suddenly came to me that I ought to increase my vocabulary as much as possible; and when I told this to my friend, Verschoyle, he agreed with me and sent me an early edition of Johnson's great dictionary. I put in two years' work at it, as I have already related in detail.
The worst of it was that at first I had no guide as to how I should use the larger vocabulary which I had acquired, till one day I came across the words of Julius Caesar, who, according to Aulus Gellius, advised all writers "to avoid, as the seaman avoids a rock, any word that isn't well known and commonly used" (ut tamquam scopolum sic vitas inauditum et insolens verbum).
The simplest speech is the best in prose. It was Joubert, I think, who called simplicity "the varnish of the great masters."
Meredith advised me to read English prose exclusively for some tune, till I got free of the obsession of German, and accordingly I read Gulliver's Travels, Donne's Sermons, and Dryden's Prefaces, and soaked myself in their rhythms and cadences. I read, too, Froude's Short Stories on Great Subjects, and learnt pages of Pater and of the Bible. Above all, while writing a good deal of journalism, I forced myself every day to write one or two sentences as carefully as possible: now I chopped them up into short sentences and then wrote them all as one long phrase, studying the different effects; now I began with the logical beginning and afterwards began at the end; in short, I studied day by day for some years the structure of our English speech.
I don't think I got much from it all; still, reading the masters taught me their peculiarities, and was in itself good discipline; and thus in time I learned that the half is greater than the whole. As Goethe said: "In der Beschrankung zeigt sich erst der Meister."
I am not inclined to lay much stress on style or mere verbal excellence: a conception may be as great in sandstone as in marble, in putty as in bronze.
Of course, I prefer the marble and bronze to sand and putty, but the conception is, after all, the chief thing.
I came to love English words, too, for their bold, naked exposures, for the pulsing, painting heat in them, and their shrill shrieks of pain; for the hot rhetoric, too, drawn from the childhood of the race, and the high poetry embalming man's dreams of the future and the ultimate triumph of beauty and goodness and truth.
Words to me often possess individual life and the evocative magic of personality:
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy is to me a revelation of Shakespeare's soul; and when I read All the soft luxury That nestled in his arms, I see Fanny Brawne atoning to Keats for her brainlessness by her soft, luxuriant nestling.
What a beautiful word "mouth" is! and what a dreadful, ill-sounding brute is "logic"; how stiff is "right," and how stupid "honest"; one word always amuses me-the word "wanton"; English lexicographers can find no derivation for it, and so they have suggested that it means "want one," as if any loose woman ever would want only one! The idiocy of the professors could scarcely find a more perfect illustration. I could go on forever; think of the beauty of Keats's:
There is a budding morrow in midnight, or of Shakespeare's supreme verse:
Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
One should remember, too, that Hamlet exclaims: "Oh my prophetic soul!"
I think I was the first to point out that even Shakespeare had favorite words, such as "gild," that he used in and out of season; even the greatest of men have a peculiar vocabulary, and the limitations of speech mark limitations of memory and of mind. The style changes with the growth of the man.
Shakespeare sloughs off his early euphemism, becomes in middle life very fluid, intensely articulate, reaching even to simplicity, and then in age packed sentences into words, deep thoughts into an epithet-a most remarkable growth.
I am not likely to underrate the magic of words, and English writers are apt to be more articulate than Americans of the same mental caliber. Lowell noticed this, but found no explanation for it, whereas I believe the reason is that all English writers love poetry more than Americans do and start their literary career by trying to write verse. This practice soon gives a large vocabulary and a keen sense of the value of the painting epithet and of rhythm.
Some of my correspondents have asked me to tell them what in my judgment are the best pages in English prose: I think Swift perhaps the best model of all; but there is hardly a finer passage in English literature than Pater's page on the Mona Lisa:
The presence that thus so strangely rose beside the waters is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the world are come,' and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how they would be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.
And Ruskin's page on Calais Church is almost as fine. I thrill when he speaks of the large neglect, the noble unsightliness of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom eaten away by the Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses… as some old fisherman beaten grey by storm, yet drawing his daily nets.
The last chapter of Ecclesiastes and Paul's words on Faith, Hope, and Charity are even higher.
There are prose writers like Carlyle and Heine of an incomparable splendor of achievement. No one surely has ever read the first page or the last volume of Carlyle's French Revolution and come away without being deeply affected by the experience. Yet Carlyle was not as great as Cervantes.
The greatest page in Cervantes, however, as I often say, I have never seen quoted: it is near the end of the second part of Don Quixote, written shortly before his death, when he was well over three score years of age.
There comes a cloud upon the plain, and the Don immediately takes it for the paynim host who have come out to fight him. Sancho Panza, the squire, says it smells badly and may well be the pagans, so skins up a tree to be safe. Don Quixote lays his lance in rest and spurs out to combat. A little while later he is flung to the ground and trampled on; and when the wild mob has passed, Sancho comes down the tree, goes over to the knight and is rejoiced to find that he is not killed, not even wounded seriously; only bruised and cut and dirtied.