The Art of Speaking and Writing.
A musician is not accounted an artist who, although thoroughly versed in the science of music, knows nothing practically of the art. It matters very little to the listening world how much he knows, if he can neither play nor sing. A man may talk or write very intelligently of picture and sculpture without the slightest practical skill in either branch of performance. So there are multitudes of men with well-stored minds, who live without access to the public, simply because they are not accomplished in the arts of expression by pen and tongue. These men have been trained for public life. They have expected to obtain a livelihood by public service. All their education has been shaped to this end; yet they lack just that one thing which will enable them to do it. That mode of approach and expression which is essential to their acceptableness as writers and speakers is lacking; and so their lives are failures. The professorship of rhetoric and elocution has been regarded in most colleges as rather ornamental than useful; and only here and there has its incumbent manifested the disposition and the power to magnify his office, and perform the great duty that is placed in his hands. Slovenly writers and awkward and unattractive speakers are turned out of our colleges every year, almost by thousands, whose failure in public life is assured from the first, because they have acquired no mastery of the arts of expression. Men of inferior knowledge and inferior mental culture surpass them in the strife for public favor and influence, by address and skill. They are disgusted with the public, and charge their failure upon the popular stupidity. “Our honest toil has been in vain,” they say; “for the people cannot appreciate what we are, or what we have done. They like the shallow man best.” This is not a just judgment. The brighter and stronger the man, the better the people like him, always provided that he understand the arts of writing and speech. Mr. Beecher, Mr. Phillips, Mr. George W. Curtis, and Mr. Collyer, are not shallow men, but they are accepted everywhere, and in all assemblies, as the masters of oratory. Mr. Webster, Mr. Clay, and Mr. S. S. Prentiss, in the old days, were not shallow men, but they were orators, and their power over multitudes was the power of giants. Not one of these men would now be heard of as men of national reputation had they not won the mastery of expression. There is a quality in all good writing—writing thoroughly adapted to its purpose—which we call “readableness.” It is hard to define it, because in different productions it depends on different elements. Wit and humor impart this quality, if they are spontaneous and unobtrusive. Eminent lucidity, gracefulness of structure, epigrammatic terseness and strength, downright moral earnestness, gracefulness and facility of illustration, apposite antithesis, forms of expression and uses of words that are characteristic of individual thought and feeling—each and all of these have their function in imparting readableness to the productions of the pen. We find Carlyle readable through a quality which is Carlyle’s own—which he neither borrowed nor has the ability to lend. Emerson and Lowell and Holmes are readable, because of their individual flavor. There are ten thousand educated men in America who are fairly capable of comprehending these writers, yet who would render them all unreadable by undertaking to clothe their thoughts and fancies in their own forms of language. When this strong individual flavor is lacking—an element that belongs mainly to genius—art must be more thoroughly cultivated. No man of moderate ability and education can possibly make himself acceptable as a writer without a skill in the arts of expression, which can be won alone through patient study and long practice. We have but few men in the country who designedly write for the few. We all seek to write for the million, and to find the largest audience. Readableness, then, must depend very largely upon still another element, which is, perhaps, more important than all—direct, intelligent ministry to the public need. People will not be interested in the discussion of subjects that have no practical relation to their life. Any production, in order to be readable, must be based on a knowledge of the wants of the people and the age. What will amuse, instruct, enlighten, or morally and intellectually interest the people? The writer who is not sufficiently in sympathy with the people and the age to answer this question intelligently to himself, cannot be readable, except by accident. The man who shuts himself up in his library, away from his kind, and refuses to make himself conversant with their wants, and with the questions that concern them, has no one to blame but himself if they refuse to read what he writes. The clergyman, conscious of Christian purpose and of thorough culture, and earnestly believing that he understands the message of his Master, finds with grief that he is not an accepted teacher. Let him learn, if it be not too late, that it is his mode of presenting truth that makes him impotent. Water tastes better from cut-glass than from pewter, and people will go where they are served from crystal. Salt is salt, but what if it have lost its savor? There are very few preachers who fail in knowledge of their message, but there are multitudes who know nothing of the people to whom they deliver it, or of the art of so proclaiming it that men will pause to hear and heed. The art of writing and speaking is both shamefully and fatally neglected. Without it, cultivated to its highest practicable point, the learning of the schools is comparatively useless. Without it, the preacher is utterly unprepared for his work; for the grand, essential thing which will make his knowledge and culture practically available is wanting. The man who cannot say well that which he has to say may safely conclude that he has no call to the pulpit. There is no editor of a newspaper or a magazine who is not constantly returning manuscripts full of useful and good material, which he cannot publish because it is not readable. The style is turgid, or involved, or affected, or slovenly, or diffuse. If the style happens to be good, the subject is uninteresting, or it is treated for scholars, and lumbered with redundant learning. Of course the editor would not hurt the pride of the writers, and in his politeness he simply says that their productions are not “available.” They think the editor stupid, and he is content, so long as they do not accuse him of ill-nature. It is only when they charge him with the purpose of refusing all writing that is better than his own that he loses patience, and regrets that he had not been frank and definite in the statement of his reasons for declining their offerings.—“Topics of the Time,” by Dr. J. G. Holland; Scribner’s for October.