Sometimes one hears that a great demand for a book, or for a set of newspaper articles, is due to something touching a common feeling in a particular fashion, something which great bodies of men necessarily feel together. There is a sense, of course, in which that is a mere truism, for it is clear that obscure stuff, or stuff dealing with matters that could not interest great numbers, will never sell. Why should it? But if the statement is intended to mean (as it usually is) that whatever sells in great numbers does so through this quality of a common appeal, that anything having this quality will always sell in great numbers, and that this quality is in some way a rare thing discoverable only in ‘best-sellers,’ then the statement is manifestly false. A great deal of matter which possesses this appeal—enormously the greater part of such matter—remains unknown, and that which is best known is often rather weak in such an appeal. There are a great many factors entering into the result of a great popular demand which people forget because they are irrational: fashion is one, routine is another, inertia is a third. I know one man whose name, for the honour I bear it (he is now dead), I would not publish, since what I am about to say of his work is not flattering. He wrote a great number of stories, all of them with exactly the same plot and exactly the same characters. There was a beautiful chocolate-box girl, there was a villain, there was a hero who became rich after being poor, there were parents who objected to the match, and there was a racehorse. Had he departed from the formula, he would not have sold. As it was, he sold by the million. He was not only as modest a man as you could find, but exceedingly generous. He put on no airs; he made no error as to the nature of his success; he is already forgotten. Nothing shall persuade me that any one of many thousand men could not have written exactly the same; but a certain vast public got used to that particular insipid food, and wanted it unchanged, just as you and I get used to a particular kind of breakfast, and eat it every day of our lives.
Of course, there is a different set of factors operating in different phases of society. The popular best-seller of to-day depends upon the existence of our great towns with their machine-made citizens, all working blindly in little grooves, lacking any common direction—a dust of individuals. He depends also on that new-fangled, mechanical, and, let us hope, ephemeral, institution called ‘popular education.’ If you tell millions of boys and girls (nearly all the citizens of the state), at the age when they receive unquestioning any dogmatic teaching, that their ancestors were repulsive savages, first actually bestial, later exceedingly vile, and that these ancestors passed through certain stages, and were ‘Cavemen,’ and men of the ‘Stone Age,’ and of the ‘Bronze Age,’ and so forth; then, obviously, writers using such terms, and taking for granted such a mythology, will fit in with the popular market. The demand for books, or for writing in any form, is created by minds already moulded, and any kind of writing which tends to break the mould is resented and left on one side. In older phases of society, judgment upon writing was passed by a few well-trained and leisured people, who handed down their judgments to a larger class, but still a small class compared with the whole state; and it is clear that in such a condition of society—which was that of England from the last third of the eighteenth century to the last third of the nineteenth—there would be no best-sellers in our modern sense, and that there would be a nearer approach between the demand for a book and its excellence. But there also the mould had to be considered. Macaulay’s false rhetoric sold well, because it agreed with the religion of his day. No historical work telling the truth about James II would have sold in his day, nor for that matter would any such matter sell in ours.
For religion is here, as elsewhere, at the root of effect. Robert Louis Stevenson was an excellent writer, but his popularity reposed not upon his excellence alone, but also upon the consonance of his religion with that of his readers. A man who was perpetually telling you that it was your duty to be cheerful, that you must take pleasure in God’s creation, that you had a ‘task of happiness’ would cut no ice with the Irish, or with the Italians, or, in general, with the Catholic culture of Europe, but he rings true in the ears of the Protestant culture. Conversely, what the French powerfully call the ‘bitter taste of reality’ has very little chance with the crowd of the North. It is a spur and a relish to the crowd of the South. You could not sell Barrie in Arles nor Baudelaire in Pudsey.
The truth remains that the relation, or the lack of relation, between the economic result of a literary effort and its success as a piece of craft is of very much less importance than the consideration of the canon, the attempt to achieve a standard. To get a canon is the first requirement of letters. For though it is said that time will test literature for us in any case, this is not universally true; and, even in so far as it is true, it is better to have the good things to our hand than to wait for time to establish them. Such a canon requires not only intelligent analysis, but a common philosophy into which our rules must fit. It is, therefore, with great difficulty arrived at, or perhaps not to be arrived at at all, in a period of confusion like ours. But the attempt to arrive at it never loses interest—no, not even to-day.
One of the things which always seem to me best worth saying in connection with letters is that prose should be distinguished, not only from verse, but also from rhetoric; and that prose in itself, mere lucid, economic, unornamented prose, is the foundation of good letters.
If the national prose is sound, the rest of national expression will come of itself. But this matter of prose has to-day been nearly forgotten. For most of us perhaps the phrase ‘good prose,’ or ‘fine prose,’ really means rhetoric. It means a passage in which the soul is stirred by a choice of rhythm and sound, and a mystical connotation of words in some passage not definitely reduced to versification. Thus, all the great passages from the Jacobean translation of the Hebrew Scriptures which are familiar as examples to our generation are essentially rhetoric; so are the excerpts quoted from Bunyan, such as the fine closing passage of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’; so is every single passage quoted from Carlyle; so are even those quoted from Newman and (I am sorry to say) those quoted from the greatest of our modern prose writers, Huxley.
But prose is rightly to be distinguished from anything of that kind. The excellence of prose lies in its adaptation to the function of intelligent expression or of narration. It is a statement; the end of it is not the exciting of emotion but the clear presentation, whether of a record (in fiction or fact) or of an idea, which the writer desires to communicate to his fellows.
He that succeeds in presenting the idea lucidly, so that no modification or subsidiary idea confuses the process; he that succeeds in presenting vividly to the reader an image of particular fact, or of imagined fiction, vividly arisen in his own mind, is a writer of good prose; and the better he succeeds in this faculty of mere exposition, the more he excels in the supreme character of lucidity, the better his prose. Prose which is redundant is worse than prose which is economic in the use of words, simply because economic prose is the better statement. Exactitude of word and idea makes better prose than the use of many synonyms and of vague terms, simply because it ministers to lucidity. A mass of adjectives or adverbs is usually (not always) ill in prose, because usually (not always) the idea which the writer has to express does not involve all these modifications; they only slip from his pen through laziness or through his having heard them before. It is obviously better prose to say, ‘I was tired out,’ than to say, ‘I was wholly tired out,’ unless for any particular reason you wish to express complete exhaustion. It is obviously better prose to say ‘the sky’ than ‘the blue sky,’ unless for any particular reason you are concerned in your description with the colour of the sky.
But the worst enemy of prose to-day is the snobbishness of rules and forms, the Mumbo-Jumbo of hieratic prescription. The influence of these is a very good example of that excellent rule laid down by Saint Thomas Aquinas that all evil exists in mistaking, or misusing, the means for the end. This plague of pedantry does not rage quite as severely as it did when I was young, but it is still pretty severe. You are told that it is good prose, for instance, to have as few adjectives as possible. That is nonsense. It is good prose to have as many adjectives as you need, and _no more_. You are told, as a sort of eleventh commandment, never to split an infinitive; the rule is that of an excellent master of English, the late Professor Ker, who adds, ‘except when euphony demands it.’ I would go further; I would say that when the spoken language has arrived, as ours has to-day, at the universal use of the split infinitive, the written language may follow at some little distance behind. We are told that prose must never be emphatic, or excited, or this, or that, or the other. All that is nonsense. Prose must be emphatic when special emphasis is to be expressed, excited when excitement is to be expressed, and so forth. But certainly the character of good prose is the subordination of everything in it to the end, which is expression of what you have to say; and that is the distinction between good prose and rhetoric and verse. For in rhetoric and in verse the end is the emotion you desire, non-rationally, to excite; but in prose the end is rational presentation, narration, or statement of thesis: nothing more.