How to Fail in Literature

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HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE: A LECTURE BY ANDREW LANG


PREFACE


_This Lecture was delivered at the South Kensington Museum, in aid of the
College for Working Men and Women. As the Publishers, perhaps
erroneously, believe that some of the few authors who were not present
may be glad to study the advice here proffered, the Lecture is now
printed. It has been practically re-written, and, like the kiss which
the Lady returned to Rodolphe_, is revu, corrige, et considerablement
augmente.

A. L.




HOW TO FAIL IN LITERATURE


What should be a man's or a woman's reason for taking literature as a
vocation, what sort of success ought they to desire, what sort of
ambition should possess them? These are natural questions, now that so
many readers exist in the world, all asking for something new, now that
so many writers are making their pens "in running to devour the way" over
so many acres of foolscap. The legitimate reasons for enlisting (too
often without receiving the shilling) in this army of writers are not far
to seek. A man may be convinced that he has useful, or beautiful, or
entertaining ideas within him, he may hold that he can express them in
fresh and charming language. He may, in short, have a "vocation," or
feel conscious of a vocation, which is not exactly the same thing. There
are "many thyrsus bearers, few mystics," many are called, few chosen.
Still, to be sensible of a vocation is something, nay, is much, for most
of us drift without any particular aim or predominant purpose. Nobody
can justly censure people whose chief interest is in letters, whose chief
pleasure is in study or composition, who rejoice in a fine sentence as
others do in a well modelled limb, or a delicately touched landscape,
nobody can censure them for trying their fortunes in literature. Most of
them will fail, for, as the bookseller's young man told an author once,
they have the poetic temperament, without the poetic power. Still among
these whom _Pendennis_ has tempted, in boyhood, to run away from school
to literature as Marryat has tempted others to run away to sea, there
must be some who will succeed. But an early and intense ambition is not
everything, any more than a capacity for taking pains is everything in
literature or in any art.

Some have the gift, the natural incommunicable power, without the
ambition, others have the ambition but no other gift from any Muse. This
class is the more numerous, but the smallest class of all has both the
power and the will to excel in letters. The desire to write, the love of
letters may shew itself in childhood, in boyhood, or youth, and mean
nothing at all, a mere harvest of barren blossom without fragrance or
fruit. Or, again, the concern about letters may come suddenly, when a
youth that cared for none of those things is waning, it may come when a
man suddenly finds that he has something which he really must tell. Then
he probably fumbles about for a style, and his first fresh impulses are
more or less marred by his inexperience of an art which beguiles and
fascinates others even in their school-days.

It is impossible to prophesy the success of a man of letters from his
early promise, his early tastes; as impossible as it is to predict, from
her childish grace, the beauty of a woman.

But the following remarks on How to fail in Literature are certainly
meant to discourage nobody who loves books, and has an impulse to tell a
story, or to try a song or a sermon. Discouragements enough exist in the
pursuit of this, as of all arts, crafts, and professions, without my
adding to them. Famine and Fear crouch by the portals of literature as
they crouch at the gates of the Virgilian Hades. There is no more
frequent cause of failure than doubt and dread; a beginner can scarcely
put his heart and strength into a work when he knows how long are the
odds against his victory, how difficult it is for a new man to win a
hearing, even though all editors and publishers are ever pining for a new
man. The young fellow, unknown and unwelcomed, who can sit down and give
all his best of knowledge, observation, humour, care, and fancy to a
considerable work has got courage in no common portion; he deserves to
triumph, and certainly should not be disheartened by our old experience.
But there be few beginners of this mark, most begin so feebly because
they begin so fearfully. They are already too discouraged, and can
scarce do themselves justice. It is easier to write more or less well
and agreeably when you are certain of being published and paid, at least,
than to write well when a dozen rejected manuscripts are cowering (as
Theocritus says) in your chest, bowing their pale faces over their chilly
knees, outcast, hungry, repulsed from many a door. To write excellently,
brightly, powerfully, with these poor unwelcomed wanderers, returned
MSS., in your possession, is difficult indeed. It might be wiser to do
as M. Guy de Maupassant is rumoured to have done, to write for seven
years, and shew your essays to none but a mentor as friendly severe as M.
Flaubert. But all men cannot have such mentors, nor can all afford so
long an unremunerative apprenticeship. For some the better plan is _not_
to linger on the bank, and take tea and good advice, as Keats said, but
to plunge at once in mid-stream, and learn swimming of necessity.

One thing, perhaps, most people who succeed in letters so far as to keep
themselves alive and clothed by their pens will admit, namely, that their
early rejected MSS. _deserved to be rejected_. A few days ago there came
to the writer an old forgotten beginner's attempt by himself. Whence it
came, who sent it, he knows not; he had forgotten its very existence. He
read it with curiosity; it was written in a very much better hand than
his present scrawl, and was perfectly legible. But _readable_ it was
not. There was a great deal of work in it, on an out of the way topic,
and the ideas were, perhaps, not quite without novelty at the time of its
composition. But it was cramped and thin, and hesitating between several
manners; above all it was uncommonly dull. If it ever was sent to an
editor, as I presume it must have been, that editor was trebly justified
in declining it. On the other hand, to be egotistic, I have known
editors reject the attempts of those old days, and afterwards express
lively delight in them when they struggled into print, somehow,
somewhere. These worthy men did not even know that they had despised and
refused what they came afterwards rather to enjoy.

Editors and publishers, these keepers of the gates of success, are not
infallible, but their opinion of a beginner's work is far more correct
than his own can ever be. They should not depress him quite, but if they
are long unanimous in holding him cheap, he is warned, and had better
withdraw from the struggle. He is either incompetent, or he has the
makings of a Browning. He is a genius born too soon. He may readily
calculate the chances in favour of either alternative.

So much by way of not damping all neophytes equally: so much we may say
about success before talking of the easy ways that lead to failure. And
by success here is meant no glorious triumph; the laurels are not in our
thoughts, nor the enormous opulence (about a fourth of a fortunate
barrister's gains) which falls in the lap of a Dickens or a Trollope.
Faint and fleeting praise, a crown with as many prickles as roses, a
modest hardly-gained competence, a good deal of envy, a great deal of
gossip--these are the rewards of genius which constitute a modern
literary success. Not to reach the moderate competence in literature is,
for a professional man of letters of all work, something like failure.
But in poetry to-day a man may succeed, as far as his art goes, and yet
may be unread, and may publish at his own expense, or not publish at all.
He pleases himself, and a very tiny audience: I do not call that failure.
I regard failure as the goal of ignorance, incompetence, lack of common
sense, conceited dulness, and certain practical blunders now to be
explained and defined.

The most ambitious may accept, without distrust, the following advice as
to How to fail in Literature. The advice is offered by a mere critic,
and it is an axiom of the Arts that the critics "are the fellows who have
failed," or have not succeeded. The persons who really can paint, or
play, or compose seldom tell us how it is done, still less do they review
the performances of their contemporaries. That invidious task they leave
to the unsuccessful novelists. The instruction, the advice are offered
by the persons who cannot achieve performance. It is thus that all
things work together in favour of failure, which, indeed, may well appear
so easy that special instruction, however competent, is a luxury rather
than a necessary. But when we look round on the vast multitude of
writers who, to all seeming, deliberately aim at failure, who take every
precaution in favour of failure that untutored inexperience can suggest,
it becomes plain that education in ill-success, is really a popular want.
In the following remarks some broad general principles, making disaster
almost inevitable, will first be offered, and then special methods of
failing in all special departments of letters will be ungrudgingly
communicated. It is not enough to attain failure, we should deserve it.
The writer, by way of insuring complete confidence, would modestly
mention that he has had ample opportunities of study in this branch of
knowledge. While sifting for five or six years the volunteered
contributions to a popular periodical, he has received and considered
some hundredweights of manuscript. In all these myriad contributions he
has not found thirty pieces which rose even to the ordinary dead level of
magazine work. He has thus enjoyed unrivalled chances of examining such
modes of missing success as spontaneously occur to the human intellect,
to the unaided ingenuity of men, women, and children. {1}

He who would fail in literature cannot begin too early to neglect his
education, and to adopt every opportunity of not observing life and
character. None of us is so young but that he may make himself perfect
in writing an illegible hand. This method, I am bound to say, is too
frequently overlooked. Most manuscripts by ardent literary volunteers
are fairly legible. On the other hand there are novelists, especially
ladies, who not only write a hand wholly declining to let itself be
deciphered, but who fill up the margins with interpolations, who write
between the lines, and who cover the page with scratches running this way
and that, intended to direct the attention to after-thoughts inserted
here and there in corners and on the backs of sheets. To pin in scraps
of closely written paper and backs of envelopes adds to the security for
failure, and produces a rich anger in the publisher's reader or the
editor.

The cultivation of a bad handwriting is an elementary precaution, often
overlooked. Few need to be warned against having their MSS. typewritten,
this gives them a chance of being read with ease and interest, and this
must be neglected by all who have really set their hearts on failure. In
the higher matters of education it is well to be as ignorant as possible.
No knowledge comes amiss to the true man of letters, so they who court
disaster should know as little as may be.

Mr. Stevenson has told the attentive world how, in boyhood, he practised
himself in studying and imitating the styles 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 hint may be offered. Style may be good
in itself, but inappropriate to the subject. For example, style which
may be excellently adapted to a theological essay, may be but ill-suited
for a dialogue in a novel. There are subjects of which the poet says

_Ornari res ipsa vetat, contenta doceri_.

The matter declines to be adorned, and is content with being clearly
stated. I do not know what would occur if the writer of the Money
Article in the _Times_ treated his topic with reckless gaiety. Probably
that number of the journal in which the essay appeared would have a large
sale, but the author might achieve professional failure; in the office.
On the whole it may not be the wiser plan to write about the Origins of
Religion in the style which might suit a study of the life of ballet
dancers; the two MM. Halevy, the learned and the popular, would make a
blunder if they exchanged styles. Yet Gibbon never denies himself a
jest, and Montesquieu's _Esprit des Lois_ was called _L'Esprit sur les
Lois_. M. Renan's _Histoire d'Israel_ may almost be called skittish. The
French are more tolerant of those excesses than the English. It is a
digression, but he who would fail can reach his end by not taking himself
seriously. If he gives himself no important airs, whether out of a
freakish humour, or real humility, depend upon it the public and the
critics will take him at something under his own estimate. On the other
hand, by copying the gravity of demeanour admired by Mr. Shandy in a
celebrated parochial animal, even a very dull person may succeed in
winning no inconsiderable reputation.

To return to style, and its appropriateness: all depends on the work in
hand, and the audience addressed. Thus, in his valuable Essay on Style,
Mr. Pater says, with perfect truth: {3}

"The otiose, the facile, surplusage: why are these abhorrent to the true
literary artist, except because, in literary as in all other arts,
structure is all important, felt or painfully missed, everywhere?--that
architectural conception of work, which foresees the end in the
beginning, and never loses sight of it, and in every part is conscious of
all the rest, till the last sentence does but, with undiminished vigour,
unfold and justify the first--a condition of literary art, which, in
contradistinction to another quality of the artist himself, to be spoken
of later, I shall call the necessity of _mind_ in style."

These are words which the writer should have always present to his
memory, if he has something serious that he wants to say, or if he wishes
to express himself in the classic and perfect manner. But if it is his
fate merely to be obliged to say something, in the course of his
profession, or if he is bid to discourse for the pleasure of readers in
the Underground Railway, I fear he will often have to forget Mr. Pater.
It may not be literature, the writing of _causeries_, of Roundabout
Papers, of rambling articles "on a broomstick," and yet again, it _may_
be literature! "Parallel, allusion, the allusive way generally, the
flowers in the garden"--Mr. Pater charges heavily against these. The
true artist "knows the narcotic force of these upon the negligent
intelligence to which any _diversion_, literally, is welcome, any vagrant
intruder, because one can go wandering away with it from the immediate
subject . . . In truth all art does but consist in the removal of
surplusage, from the last finish of the gem engraver blowing away the
last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the
finished work to be lying somewhere, according to Michel Angelo's fancy,
in the rough-hewn block of stone."

Excellent, but does this apply to every kind of literary art? What would
become of Montaigne if you blew away his allusions, and drove him out of
"the allusive way," where he gathers and binds so many flowers from all
the gardens and all the rose-hung lanes of literature? Montaigne sets
forth to write an Essay on Coaches. He begins with a few remarks on
seasickness in the common pig; some notes on the Pont Neuf at Paris
follow, and a theory of why tyrants are detested by men whom they have
obliged; a glance at Coaches is then given, next a study of Montezuma's
gardens, presently a brief account of the Spanish cruelties in Mexico and
Peru, last--_retombons a nos coches_--he tells a tale of the Inca, and
the devotion of his Guard: _Another for Hector_!

The allusive style has its proper place, like another, if it is used by
the right man, and the concentrated and structural style has also its
higher province. It would not do to employ either style in the wrong
place. In a rambling discursive essay, for example, a mere straying
after the bird in the branches, or the thorn in the way, he might not
take the safest road who imitated Mr. Pater's style in what follows:

"In this way, according to the well-known saying, 'The style is the man,'
complex or simple, in his individuality, his plenary sense of what he
really has to say, his sense of the world: all cautions regarding style
arising out of so many natural scruples as to the medium through which
alone he can expose that inward sense of things, the purity of this
medium, its laws or tricks of refraction: nothing is to be left there
which might give conveyance to any matter save that." Clearly the author
who has to write so that the man may read who runs will fail if he wrests
this manner from its proper place, and uses it for casual articles: he
will fail to hold the vagrom attention!

Thus a great deal may be done by studying inappropriateness of style, by
adopting a style alien to our matter and to our audience. If we "haver"
discursively about serious, and difficult, and intricate topics, we fail;
and we fail if we write on happy, pleasant, and popular topics in an
abstruse and intent, and analytic style. We fail, too, if in style we go
outside our natural selves. "The style is the man," and the man will be
nothing, and nobody, if he tries for an incongruous manner, not naturally
his own, for example if Miss Yonge were suddenly to emulate the manner of
Lever, or if Mr. John Morley were to strive to shine in the fashion of
_Uncle Remus_, or if Mr. Rider Haggard were to be allured into imitation
by the example, so admirable in itself, of the Master of Balliol. It is
ourselves we must try to improve, our attentiveness, our interest in
life, our seriousness of purpose, and then the style will improve with
the self. Or perhaps, to be perfectly frank, we shall thus convert
ourselves into prigs, throw ourselves out of our stride, lapse into self-
consciousness, lose all that is natural, _naif_, and instinctive within
us. Verily there are many dangers, and the paths to failure are
infinite.

So much for style, of which it may generally be said that you cannot be
too obscure, unnatural, involved, vulgar, slipshod, and metaphorical. See
to it that your metaphors are mixed, though, perhaps, this attention is
hardly needed. The free use of parentheses, in which a reader gets lost,
and of unintelligible allusions, and of references to unread authors--the
_Kalevala_ and Lycophron, and the Scholiast on Apollonius Rhodius, is
invaluable to this end. So much for manner, and now for matter.

The young author generally writes because he wants to write, either for
money, from vanity, or in mere weariness of empty hours and anxiety to
astonish his relations. This is well, he who would fail cannot begin
better than by having nothing to say. The less you observe, the less you
reflect, the less you put yourself in the paths of adventure and
experience, the less you will have to say, and the more impossible will
it be to read your work. Never notice people's manner, conduct, nor even
dress, in real life. Walk through the world with your eyes and ears
closed, and embody the negative results in a story or a poem. As to
Poetry, with a fine instinct we generally begin by writing verse, because
verse is the last thing that the public want to read. The young writer
has usually read a great deal of verse, however, and most of it bad. His
favourite authors are the bright lyrists who sing of broken hearts,
wasted lives, early deaths, disappointment, gloom. Without having even
had an unlucky flirtation, or without knowing what it is to lose a
favourite cat, the early author pours forth laments, just like the
laments he has been reading. He has too a favourite manner, the old
consumptive manner, about the hectic flush, the fatal rose on the pallid
cheek, about the ruined roof tree, the empty chair, the rest in the
village churchyard. This is now a little _rococo_ and forlorn, but
failure may be assured by travelling in this direction. If you are
ambitious to disgust an editor at once, begin your poem with "Only." In
fact you may as well head the lyric "Only." {4}