In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds, and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.
As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art, and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like Hamlet, say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia from the attempt to climb out over the stream on a willow branch, forgive his erring mother as more sinned against than sinning, welcome Laertes back to Denmark, and with the Ghost of his father blessing the whole group, and Polonius with his arm in a sling, severely but not fatally wounded, form the sort of stage picture, as the curtain went down, that has sent audiences home, dissolved in happy tears, from so many theatres. But Shakespeare, being a dramatist as well as a playwright, learned from Hamlet himself that Hamlet could not end as he had meant him to end. Hamlet, in fact, could not really end at all, and, in the sort of anticlimax in which the tragedy closes, he must rise from death, another and a truer ghost than the buried majesty of Denmark, and walk the world forever.
Could Eugenio, however, advise his youthful correspondents to work so reckless of their original conceptions as Shakespeare had probably done? The question was serious; it put him upon his conscience, and he decided that at the most he could not do more than urge them, with all the earnestness of his nature, to write their Hamlets from the beginning forward, and never from the ending backward, even in their own minds. He saw that if he were to answer them collectively (and he certainly did not intend to answer them severally) he must say that their only hope of producing an effective whole was through indefatigable work upon every part. Make each smallest detail beautiful, and despise none because it seemed to perform a poor and lowly office in the assemblage of the parts. Let these youths be sure that they could not know the meaning of any design from imagining it, but only from expressing it, and that the true result could come only from the process. They could not hope to outdo Shakespeare and foreknow their respective Hamlets; they must slowly make their Hamlets' acquaintance by living with them.
If Eugenio's correspondents were dashed by this hard saying, he thought he might raise their spirits by adding that they would find compensation for their slow, arduous toil in particulars from a fact which he had noted in his own case. A thing well done looks always very much better in the retrospect than could have been hoped. A good piece of work would smile radiantly upon them when it was accomplished. Besides, after a certain experience in doing, they would learn that the greatest happiness which could come to them from their work would be through the perfecting of details. This would make their performance a succession of little victories which alone could constitute the great ultimate triumph.
"But style, but style!" they might return. "What about style? That was one of the miracles we asked you the sleight of, and are you going to say nothing about that? Or did you mean style, in your talk about perfecting details? Do you want us to take infinite pains in acquiring a style?"
"By no means," Eugenio was prepared to declare in the event of this come-back. "Do not think about style. If you do your work well, patiently, faithfully, truly, style will infallibly be added unto you. That is the one thing you must not try for. If you try for style, you will be like a man thinking about his clothes or his manners. You will be self-conscious, which is the fatal opposite of being yourself. You will be yourself when you are lost in your work, and then you will come into the only style that is proper to you: the beauty and the grace that any sort of workman has in the exercise of his craft. You will then have, without seeking it, your own swing of phrase, your own turn of expression, your own diction, and these will be your style by which every reader will know you. But if you have a manner which you have borrowed or imitated, people will see that it is second-hand and no better than something shop-worn or cast off. Besides, style is a thing that has been grossly overvalued in the general appraisal of literary qualities. The stylists are not the greatest artists, the supreme artists. Who would think of Shakespeare as a stylist, or Tolstoy, or Dante?"
Eugenio thought he could count upon a vanity in his correspondents so dense as not to be pierced by any irony. In fact, it could not be said that, though he felt the pathos of their appeals, he greatly respected the motives which actuated them in writing to him. They themselves respected their motives because they did not know them as he did, but probably they did not pity themselves so much as he pitied them. He realized that they turned to him from a literary remoteness which they did not realize, and it was very natural that they should turn for help outside their circumstance; but Eugenio had not lived to his age without learning that many natural impulses are mistaken if not wrong. He reflected sadly that those far-off solitaries could alone burst their circumstance and find their way out of it. He perceived that they could do this only by their own devout and constant toil in the line of their aspiration. But would it avail to tell them so?
One of the knowledges of a period of life which we will call the riper maturity is that we need all the accumulated vigilance of the past to secure us from the ever-besetting dangers of the present: the dangers of indolence, of slovenly performance, of indistinct vision, of weakening conscience in our work. We need every atom of force, every particle of the stored electricity of youth, to keep us going in later years. While we are still young we are aware of an environing and pervading censure, coming from the rivalry, the envy, the generous emulation, the approval, the disapproval, the love, the hate of all those who witness our endeavor. No smallest slip, no slightest defect will be lost upon this censure, equally useful whether sympathetic or antipathetic. But as we grow old we are sensible of a relaxing, a lifting, a withdrawal of the environing and pervading censure. We have become the objects of a compassionate toleration or a contemptuous indifference; it no longer matters greatly to the world whether we do our work well or ill. But if we love our work as we ought till we die, it should matter more than ever to us whether we do it well or ill. We have come to the most perilous days of our years when we are tempted not so much to slight our work as to spare our nerves, in which the stored electricity is lower and scanter than it was, and to let a present feeble performance blight the fame of strenuous achievements in the past. We may then make our choice of two things—stop working; stop going, cease to move, to exist—or gather at each successive effort whatever remains of habit, of conscience, of native force, and put it into effect till our work, which we have not dropped, drops us.
Should Eugenio address these hard sayings to his appealing, his palpitating correspondents? He found himself on the point of telling them that of all the accumulated energies which could avail them when they came of his age, or were coming of it, there was none that would count for so much as the force of habit; and what could be more banal than that? It would not save it from banality if he explained that he meant the habit of loving the very best one can do, and doing that and not something less. It would still be banal to say that now in their youth was the only time they would have to form the habit of tirelessly doing their best at every point, and that they could not buy or beg or borrow such a habit for the simple reason that nobody who had it could sell or give or lend it.
Besides, as Eugenio very well perceived, his correspondents were not only young now, but were always intending to be so. He remembered how it used to be with himself, and that was how it used to be. He saw abundance of old, or older, people about him, but he himself instinctively expected to live on and on, without getting older, and to hive up honey from experience without the beeswax which alone they seemed to have stored from the opening flowers of the past. Yet, in due course of time, he found himself an old or older man simply through living on and on and not dying earlier. Upon the whole, he liked it and would not have gone back and died earlier if he could. But he felt that it would be useless trying to convince his youthful correspondents that, whether they liked it or not, they too would grow old, or older, if they lived. How, then, teach them by precept, if they would not learn by universal example, that unless they were to be very miserable old men, and even miserable old women, they must have the habit of work? How instruct them further that unless they had the habit of good work, patient, faithful, fine work, the habit which no one can buy, beg, or borrow, because no one can sell, give, or lend it, they were worse than idle, cumberers of the earth, with no excuse for being above it?