Style, by Walter Raleigh

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Transcribed from the 1904 Edward Arnold edition by DavidPrice,best toy drums for girls email [email protected]

STYLE

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

AUTHOR OF‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL,’
AND ‘ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, ACRITICAL ESSAY’

FIFTH IMPRESSION

LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
Publisher to the India Office
1904

p. vJOANNI SAMPSON

BIBLIOTHECARIO OPTIMO

VIRO OMNISAPIENTIA ÆGYPTIORUM

ERUDITO

LABORUM ETITINERUM SUORUM

SOCIO

HUNCLIBELLUM

D · D· D

AUCTOR

p.viiTABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS
CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY

p.1STYLE

Style, the Latin name for an ironpen, has come to designate the art that handles, with ever freshvitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements of speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an epitomeof literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instrumentshas lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible ofarts.  Thence the application of the word has been extendedto arts other than literature, to the whole range of theactivities of man.  The fact that we use the word“style” in speaking of architecture and sculpture,painting and music, dancing, play-acting, and cricket, that wecan apply it to the careful achievements of the housebreaker andthe poisoner, and to the spontaneous animal movements of thelimbs of man or beast, is the noblest of p. 2unconscioustributes to the faculty of letters.  The pen, scratching onwax or paper, has become the symbol of all that is expressive,all that is intimate, in human nature; not only arms and arts,but man himself, has yielded to it.  His living voice, withits undulations and inflexions, assisted by the mobile play offeature and an infinite variety of bodily gesture, is driven toborrow dignity from the same metaphor; the orator and the actorare fain to be judged by style.  “It is mosttrue,” says the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy,“stylus virum arguit, our style bewraysus.”  Other gestures shift and change and flit, thisis the ultimate and enduring revelation of personality.  Theactor and the orator are condemned to work evanescent effects ontransitory material; the dust that they write on is blown abouttheir graves.  The sculptor and the architect deal in lessperishable ware, but the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, andwill not take the impress of all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and æsthetic, mood and conviction,creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration—p. 3what art butthe art of literature admits the entrance of all these, andguards them from the suddenness of mortality?  What otherart gives scope to natures and dispositions so diverse, and totastes so contrarious?  Euclid and Shelley, Edmund Spenserand Herbert Spencer, King David and David Hume, are all followersof the art of letters.

In the effort to explain the principles of an art sobewildering in its variety, writers on style have gladly availedthemselves of analogy from the other arts, and have spoken, forthe most part, not without a parable.  It is a pleasanttrick they put upon their pupils, whom they gladden with thedelusion of a golden age, and perfection to be sought backwards,in arts less complex.  The teacher of writing, past masterin the juggling craft of language, explains that he is onlycarrying into letters the principles of counterpoint, or that itis all a matter of colour and perspective, or that structure andornament are the beginning and end of his intent.  Professorof eloquence and of thieving, his winged shoes remark him as heskips p. 4frommetaphor to metaphor, not daring to trust himself to the partialand frail support of any single figure.  He lures theastonished novice through as many trades as were ever housed inthe central hall of the world’s fair.  From hisdistracting account of the business it would appear that he isnow building a monument, anon he is painting a picture (withbrushes dipped in a gallipot made of an earthquake); again hestrikes a keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire, drives a nail,treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits a target; orskirmishes around his subject; or lays it bare with a dissectingknife; or embalms a thought; or crucifies an enemy.  What ishe really doing all the time?

Besides the artist two things are to be considered in everyart,—the instrument and the audience; or, to deal in lessfigured phrase, the medium and the public.  From both ofthese the artist, if he would find freedom for the exercise ofall his powers, must sit decently aloof.  It is themisfortune of the actor, the singer, and the dancer, p. 5that theirbodies are their sole instruments.  On to the stage of theiractivities they carry the heart that nourishes them and the lungswherewith they breathe, so that the soul, to escape degradation,must seek a more remote and difficult privacy.  Thatimmemorial right of the soul to make the body its home, a welcomeescape from publicity and a refuge for sincerity, must be largelyforegone by the actor, who has scant liberty to decorate andadminister for his private behoof an apartment that is also aplace of business.  His ownership is limited by thenecessities of his trade; when the customers are gone, he eatsand sleeps in the bar-parlour.  Nor is the instrument of hisperformances a thing of his choice; the poorest skill of theviolinist may exercise itself upon a Stradivarius, but the actoris reduced to fiddle for the term of his natural life upon theface and fingers that he got from his mother.  The serenedetachment that may be achieved by disciples of greater arts canhardly be his, applause touches his personal pride too nearly,the mocking echoes of derision infest the solitude of his retiredimagination.  p.6In none of the world’s great polities has thepractice of this art been found consistent with noble rank orhonourable estate.  Christianity might be expected to sparesome sympathy for a calling that offers prizes to abandonment andself-immolation, but her eye is fixed on a more distant mark thanthe pleasure of the populace, and, as in gladiatorial Rome ofold, her best efforts have been used to stop the games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, hasno warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energyexhaust themselves on the mimicry of life.  The reward ofsocial consideration is refused, it is true, to all artists, oraccepted by them at their immediate peril.  By a naturaladjustment, in countries where the artist has sought and attaineda certain modest social elevation, the issue has been changed,and the architect or painter, when his health is proposed, findshimself, sorely against the grain, returning thanks for theemployer of labour, the genial host, the faithful husband, thetender father, and other pillars of society.  The risk oftoo p. 7greatfamiliarity with an audience which insists on honouring theartist irrelevantly, at the expense of the art, must be run byall; a more clinging evil besets the actor, in that he can at notime wholly escape from his phantasmal second self.  On thiscreature of his art he has lavished the last doit of humancapacity for expression; with what bearing shall he face theexacting realities of life?  Devotion to his profession hasbeggared him of his personality; ague, old age and poverty, loveand death, find in him an entertainer who plies them with afeeble repetition of the triumphs formerly prepared for a largerand less imperious audience.  The veryjournalist—though he, too, when his profession takes him bythe throat, may expound himself to his wife in phrases stolenfrom his own leaders—is a miracle of detachment incomparison; he has not put his laughter to sale.  It is wellfor the soul’s health of the artist that a definiteboundary should separate his garden from his farm, so that whenhe escapes from the conventions that rule his work he may be freeto recreate himself.  But p. 8where shall the weary player keepholiday?  Is not all the world a stage?

Whatever the chosen instrument of an art may be, its appeal tothose whose attention it bespeaks must be made through thesenses.  Music, which works with the vibrations of amaterial substance, makes this appeal through the ear; paintingthrough the eye; it is of a piece with the complexity of theliterary art that it employs both channels,—as it mightseem to a careless apprehension, indifferently.

For the writer’s pianoforte is the dictionary, words arethe material in which he works, and words may either strike theear or be gathered by the eye from the printed page.  Thealternative will be called delusive, for, in European literatureat least, there is no word-symbol that does not imply a spokensound, and no excellence without euphony.  But the other wayis possible, the gulf between mind and mind may be bridged bysomething which has a right to the name of literature although itexacts no aid from the ear.  The picture-writing of theIndians, the hieroglyphs p. 9of Egypt, may be cited as examples ofliterary meaning conveyed with no implicit help from the spokenword.  Such an art, were it capable of high development,would forsake the kinship of melody, and depend for its sensualelements of delight on the laws of decorative pattern.  In aland of deaf-mutes it might come to a measure ofperfection.  But where human intercourse is chiefly byspeech, its connexion with the interests and passions of dailylife would perforce be of the feeblest, it would tend more andmore to cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freerservice to the jealous god of visible beauty.  Theoverpowering rivalry of speech would rob it of all its symbolicintent and leave its bare picture.  Literature has favouredrather the way of the ear and has given itself zealously to thetuneful ordering of sounds.  Let it be repeated, therefore,that for the traffic of letters the senses are but thedoor-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way ofaccess,—the deaf can read by sight, the blind bytouch.  It is not amid the bustle of the live senses, but inp. 10anunder-world of dead impressions that Poetry works her will,raising that in power which was sown in weakness, quickening aspiritual body from the ashes of the natural body.  The mindof man is peopled, like some silent city, with a sleeping companyof reminiscences, associations, impressions, attitudes, emotions,to be awakened into fierce activity at the touch of words. By one way or another, with a fanfaronnade of the marchingtrumpets, or stealthily, by noiseless passages and dark posterns,the troop of suggesters enters the citadel, to do its workwithin.  The procession of beautiful sounds that is a poempasses in through the main gate, and forthwith the by-waysresound to the hurry of ghostly feet, until the small company ofadventurers is well-nigh lost and overwhelmed in that throng ofinsurgent spirits.

To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its componentsense-elements is therefore vain.  Memory, “the warderof the brain,” is a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish tostrangers, giving up to the appeal of a spoken word or unspokenp. 11symbol, anodour or a touch, all that has been garnered by the sensitivecapacities of man.  It is the part of the writer to playupon memory, confusing what belongs to one sense with whatbelongs to another, extorting images of colour at a word, raisingideas of harmony without breaking the stillness of the air. He can lead on the dance of words till their sinuous movementscall forth, as if by mesmerism, the likeness of some adamantinerigidity, time is converted into space, and music begetssculpture.  To see for the sake of seeing, to hear for thesake of hearing, are subsidiary exercises of his complexmetaphysical art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture and music can furnish but the faint beginnings of aphilosophy of letters.  Necessary though they be to awriter, they are transmuted in his service to new forms, and madeto further purposes not their own.

The power of vision—hardly can a writer, least of all ifhe be a poet, forego that part of his equipment.  In dealingwith the impalpable, dim subjects that lie beyond the border-landof exact p.12knowledge, the poetic instinct seeks always to bringthem into clear definition and bright concrete imagery, so thatit might seem for the moment as if painting also could deal withthem.  Every abstract conception, as it passes into thelight of the creative imagination, acquires structure andfirmness and colour, as flowers do in the light of the sun. Life and Death, Love and Youth, Hope and Time, become persons inpoetry, not that they may wear the tawdry habiliments of thestudio, but because persons are the objects of the most familiarsympathy and the most intimate knowledge.

How long, O Death?  And shall thy feetdepart
   Still a young child’s with mine, or wilt thoustand
Full grown the helpful daughter of my heart,
   What time with thee indeed I reach the strand
Of the pale wave which knows thee what thou art,
   And drink it in the hollow of thy hand?

And as a keen eye for the imagery attendant on a word isessential to all writing, whether prose or poetry, that attemptsthe heart, so languor of the visual faculty can work disastereven in the calm periods of philosophic expatiation. “It p.13cannot be doubted,” says one whose dailymeditations enrich The People’s Post-Bag,“that Fear is, to a great extent, the mother ofCruelty.”  Alas, by the introduction of that briefproviso, conceived in a spirit of admirably cautiousself-defence, the writer has unwittingly given himself to thehorns of a dilemma whose ferocity nothing can mitigate. These tempered and conditional truths are not in nature, whichdecrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either a woman isone’s mother, or she is not.  The writer probablymeant merely that “fear is one of the causes ofcruelty,” and had he used a colourless abstract word theplatitude might pass unchallenged.  But a vague desire forthe emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word“mother,” has yet failed to set the sluggishimagination to work, and a word so glowing with picture and vividwith sentiment is damped and dulled by the thumb-mark of besottedusage to mean no more than “cause” or“occasion.”  Only for the poet, perhaps, arewords live winged things, flashing with colour and laden withscent; yet one poor p.14spark of imagination might save them from this saddescent to sterility and darkness.

Of no less import is the power of melody which chooses,rejects, and orders words for the satisfaction that a cunninglyvaried return of sound can give to the ear.  Some criticshave amused themselves with the hope that here, in the laws andpractices regulating the audible cadence of words, may be foundthe first principles of style, the form which fashions thematter, the apprenticeship to beauty which alone can make an artof truth.  And it may be admitted that verse, owning, as itdoes, a professed and canonical allegiance to music, sometimescarries its devotion so far that thought swoons into melody, andthe thing said seems a discovery made by the way in the searchfor tuneful expression.

      What thingunto mine ear
   Wouldst thou convey,—what secret thing,
O wandering water ever whispering?
   Surely thy speech shall be of her,
Thou water, O thou whispering wanderer,
         What messagedost thou bring?

In this stanza an exquisitely modulated tune p. 15is playedupon the syllables that make up the word “wandering,”even as, in the poem from which it is taken, there is every echoof the noise of waters laughing in sunny brooks, or moaning indumb hidden caverns.  Yet even here it would be vain to seekfor reason why each particular sound of every line should beitself and no other.  For melody holds no absolute dominionover either verse or prose; its laws, never to be disregarded,prohibit rather than prescribe.  Beyond the simpleordinances that determine the place of the rhyme in verse, andthe average number of syllables, or rhythmical beats, that occurin the line, where shall laws be found to regulate the sequenceof consonants and vowels from syllable to syllable?  Thosefew artificial restrictions, which verse invents for itself, onceagreed on, a necessary and perilous license makes up the rest ofthe code.  Literature can never conform to the dictates ofpure euphony, while grammar, which has been shaped not in theinterests of prosody, but for the service of thought, bars theway with its clumsy inalterable polysyllables and p. 16themonotonous sing-song of its inflexions.  On the other hand,among a hundred ways of saying a thing, there are more thanninety that a care for euphony may reasonably forbid.  Allwho have consciously practised the art of writing know whatendless and painful vigilance is needed for the avoidance of theunfit or untuneful phrase, how the meaning must be tossed fromexpression to expression, mutilated and deceived, ere it can findrest in words.  The stupid accidental recurrence of a singlebroad vowel; the cumbrous repetition of a particle; the emphaticphrase for which no emphatic place can be found withoutdisorganising the structure of the period; the pert intrusion ona solemn thought of a flight of short syllables, twittering likea flock of sparrows; or that vicious trick of sentences wherebyeach, unmindful of its position and duties, tends to imitate thedeformities of its predecessor;—these are a select few ofthe difficulties that the nature of language and of man conspireto put upon the writer.  He is well served by his mind andear if he can win past all p. 17such traps and ambuscades, robbed ofonly a little of his treasure, indemnified by the carelessgenerosity of his spoilers, and still singing.

Besides their chime in the ear, and the images that they putbefore the mind’s eye, words have, for their last andgreatest possession, a meaning.  They carry messages andsuggestions that, in the effect wrought, elude all the sensesequally.  For the sake of this, their prime office, the restis many times forgotten or scorned, the tune is disordered andhavoc played with the lineaments of the picture, because withoutthese the word can still do its business.  The refutation ofthose critics who, in their analysis of the power of literature,make much of music and picture, is contained in the most movingpassages that have found utterance from man.  Consider theintensity of a saying like that of St. Paul:—“For Iam persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, norprincipalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things tocome, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall beable to separate us from the love of God, which is in ChristJesus our Lord.”

p. 18Dothese verses draw their power from a skilful arrangement of voweland consonant?  But they are quoted from a translation, andcan be translated otherwise, well or ill or indifferently,without losing more than a little of their virtue.  Do theyimpress the eye by opening before it a prospect of vast extent,peopled by vague shapes?  On the contrary, the visualembodiment of the ideas suggested kills the sense of the passage,by lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the measure of apoplar-tree.  Death and life, height and depth, areconceived by the apostle, and creation thrown in like a trinket,only that they may lend emphasis to the denial that is the soulof his purpose.  Other arts can affirm, or seem to affirm,with all due wealth of circumstance and detail; they can heightentheir affirmation by the modesty of reserve, the surprises of astudied brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence; literaturealone can deny, and honour the denial with the last resources ofa power that has the universe for its treasury.  It is thisnegative capability of words, their privative force, whereby p. 19they canimpress the minds with a sense of “vacuity, darkness,solitude, and silence,” that Burke celebrates in the finetreatise of his younger days.  In such a phrase as“the angel of the Lord” language mocks the positiverivalry of the pictorial art, which can offer only the poorpretence of an equivalent in a young man painted withwings.  But the difference between the two arts is evenbetter marked in the matter of negative suggestion; it isinstanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describesthe descent of Æneas and the Sibyl to the shades of thenether world.  Here are amassed all “the images of atremendous dignity” that the poet could forge from thesublime of denial.  The two most famous lines are aprocession of negatives:—

Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram,
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna.

Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day,
And dim, deserted courts where Dis bears sway,
   Night-foundered, and uncertain of the path,
Darkling they took their solitary way.

Here is the secret of some of the cardinal p. 20effects ofliterature; strong epithets like “lonely,”“supreme,” “invisible,”“eternal,” “inexorable,” with thesubstantives that belong to them, borrow their force from thevastness of what they deny.  And not these alone, but manyother words, less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reachthat it can lend, bring before the mind no picture, but a dimemotional framework.  Such words as “ominous,”“fantastic,” “attenuated,”“bewildered,” “justification,” areatmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul with thepassion-laden air that rises from humanity.  It is preciselyin his dealings with words like these, “heated originallyby the breath of others,” that a poet’s fine senseand knowledge most avail him.  The company a word has kept,its history, faculties, and predilections, endear or discommendit to his instinct.  How hardly will poetry consent toemploy such words as “congratulation” or“philanthropist,”—words of good origin, buttainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings and pallid,comfortable, theoretic loves.  How eagerly will the poeticimagination seize on a word p. 21like “control,” whichgives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by nopartiality of association.  All words, the weak and thestrong, the definite and the vague, have their offices to performin language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are seldomserved by those explicit hard words which, like tiresomeexplanatory persons, say all that they mean.  Only in thefocus and centre of man’s knowledge is there place for thehammer-blows of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world ofhints and half-lights, echoes and suggestions, to be come at inthe dusk or not at all.

The combination of these powers in words, of song and imageand meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romanticpoetry.  In Shakespeare’s work, especially, the unionof vivid definite presentment with immense reach of metaphysicalsuggestion seems to intertwine the roots of the universe with theparticular fact; tempting the mind to explore that other side ofthe idea presented to it, the side turned away from it, and heldby something behind.

p.22It will have blood; they say blood win have blood:
Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;
Augurs and understood relations have
By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth
The secret’st man of blood.

This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense and thought,keeps the eye travelling along the utmost skyline of speculation,where the heavens are interfused with the earth.  In short,the third and greatest virtue of words is no other than thevirtue that belongs to the weapons of thought,—a deep,wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies and piercesbehind things to a half-perceived unity of law and essence. In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking,language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposedon a passive material are as nothing to the splendour and gracethat transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wieldedby the energy of thinking purpose.  The contempt that iscast, by the vulgar phrase, on “mere words” bearswitness to the rarity of this serious consummation.  Yet bywords the world was shaped out of chaos, by words the p. 23Christianreligion was established among mankind.  Are these terrificengines fit play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?

And now it begins to be apparent that no adequate descriptionof the art of language can be drawn from the technicalterminology of the other arts, which, like proud debtors, wouldgladly pledge their substance to repay an obligation that theycannot disclaim.  Let one more attempt to supply literaturewith a parallel be quoted from the works of a writer on style,whose high merit it is that he never loses sight, either intheory or in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper tothe craft of letters.  Robert Louis Stevenson, ponderingwords long and lovingly, was impressed by their crabbedindividuality, and sought to elucidate the laws of theirarrangement by a reference to the principles ofarchitecture.  “The sister arts,” he says,“enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like themodeller’s clay; literature alone is condemned to work inmosaic with finite and quite rigid words.  You have seenthose blocks, dear to the nursery: p. 24this one a pillar, that a pediment, athird a window or a vase.  It is with blocks of just sucharbitrary size and figure that the literary architect iscondemned to design the palace of his art.  Nor is this all;for since these blocks or words are the acknowledged currency ofour daily affairs, there are here possible none of thosesuppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity, andvigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, noinscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as inarchitecture; but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraphmust move in a logical progression, and convey a definiteconventional import.”

It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the moroseangularity that words offer to whoso handles them, admirablyinsistent on the chief of the incommodities imposed upon thewriter, the necessity, at all times and at all costs, to meansomething.  The boon of the recurring monotonous expanse,that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of restfulmechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needsshoulder p.25the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varyingpatterns, with his own trowel.  This is indeed the ordeal ofthe master, the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poorfellow, means nothing, and spends his life in the vain effort toget words to do the same.  But if in this respectarchitecture and literature are confessed to differ, thereremains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in the buildingmaterials of the two arts, those blocks of “arbitrary sizeand figure; finite and quite rigid.”  There is truthenough in the comparison to make it illuminative, but he would bea rash dialectician who should attempt to draw from it, by way ofinference, a philosophy of letters.  Words are piled onwords, and bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited tothink words the more intractable.  Truly, it was a man ofletters who said it, avenging himself on his profession for thenever-ending toil it imposed, by miscalling it, with grimpleasantry, the architecture of the nursery.  Finite andquite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds good ofbricks.  They move and change, they wax and p. 26wane, theywither and burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, frommouth to mouth, they are never at a stay.  They take oncolour, intensity, and vivacity from the infection ofneighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and diverseimports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the buildingthat they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff thatcomposes them.  The same epithet is used in the phrases“a fine day” and “fine irony,” in“fair trade” and “a fair goddess.” Were different symbols to be invented for these sundry meaningsthe art of literature would perish.  For words carry withthem all the meanings they have worn, and the writer shall bejudged by those that he selects for prominence in the train ofhis thought.  A slight technical implication, a faint tingeof archaism, in the common turn of speech that you employ, and ina moment you have shaken off the mob that scours the ruttedhighway, and are addressing a select audience of ticket-holderswith closed doors.  A single natural phrase of peasantspeech, a direct physical sense given to a word that genteel p. 27parlanceauthorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and at atouch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa,and have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in theunaccustomed sun.  In choosing a sense for your words youchoose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as itfalls in the sentence, according as its successive ties andassociations are broken or renewed.  And here, seeing thatthe stupidest of all possible meanings is very commonly the slangmeaning, it will be well to treat briefly of slang.  Forslang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two kinds,differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin andworth.  Sometimes it is the technical diction that hasperforce been coined to name the operations, incidents, andhabits of some way of life that society despises or deliberatelyelects to disregard.  This sort of slang, which ofteninvents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is vivid,accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to theworld’s dictionaries and of compass to the world’s p. 28range ofthought.  Society, mistily conscious of the sympathy thatlightens in any habitual name, seems to have become aware, by oneof those wonderful processes of chary instinct which serve thegreat, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a brain, that toaccept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of his tradeis to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on thequestion of property.  For this reason, and by no specialmasonic precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keepthe admirable devices of his nomenclature for the familiar usesof himself and his mates, until a Villon arrives to prove thatthis language, too, was awaiting the advent of its bully andmaster.  In the meantime, what directness and modestsufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock compared with thefumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench!  It isthe trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar ofclassicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged byBlackwood, Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment ofMiss Anna Seward.  Accuser and accused alike recognise thata question of diction p. 29is part of the issue between them;hence the picturesque confession of the culprit, made in proudhumility, that he “clicked a red ’un” mustneeds be interpreted, to save the good faith of the court, intothe vaguer and more general speech of the classicconvention.  Those who dislike to have their watches stolenfind that the poorest language of common life will serve theirsimple turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabularythat has grown around an art.  They can abide no renderingof the fact that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval ofwatch-owners.  They carry their point of morals at the costof foregoing all glitter and finish in the matter ofexpression.

This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, thenatural efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain,and hand, and eye, is worthy of all commendation.  But thereis another kind that goes under the name of slang, the offspringrather of mental sloth, and current chiefly among those idle,jocular classes to whom all art is a bugbear and a puzzle. There is a public for every p. 30one; the pottle-headed lout who in amoment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for anyincident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt,can set his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thenceinto the street, secure of applause and a numerous soddendiscipleship.  Of the same lazy stamp, albeit more amiablein effect, are the thought-saying contrivances whereby one wordis retained to do the work of many.  For the language ofsocial intercourse ease is the first requisite; the averagetalker, who would be hard put to it if he were called on todescribe or to define, must constantly be furnished with thematerials of emphasis, wherewith to drive home his likes anddislikes.  Why should he alienate himself from the sympathyof his fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression ofhis emotions?  What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacyof expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him,leaving him engaged in a belated analysis.  Thus the word ofthe day is on all lips, and what was “vastly fine”last century is “awfully jolly” now; the meaning p. 31is the same,the expression equally inappropriate.  Oaths have theirbrief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast itsfashion-plates.  The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip thefear of solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, asthey run hither and thither pursuing, not self-expression, theprize of letters, but unanimity and self-obliteration, the marksof good breeding.  Like those famous modern poets who arecensured by the author of Paradise Lost, the talkers ofslang are “carried away by custom, to express many thingsotherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would haveexprest them.”  The poverty of their vocabulary makesappeal to the brotherly sympathy of a partial and like-mindedauditor, who can fill out their paltry conventional sketches fromhis own experience of the same events.  Within the limits ofa single school, or workshop, or social circle, slang may serve;just as, between friends, silence may do the work of talk. There are few families, or groups of familiars, that have notsome small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted p. 32by affection,passing current only within those narrow and privilegedboundaries.  This wealth is of no avail to the travellingmind, save as a memorial of home, nor is its material such“as, buried once, men want dug up again.”  A fewhappy words and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness,to the wider world of letters, are all that reach posterity; therest pass into oblivion with the other perishables of theage.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense isevidence, then, that the writer addresses himself merely to theuneducated and thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygonemeanings, on the other hand, and an archaic turn given tolanguage is the mark rather of authors who are ambitious of ahearing from more than one age.  The accretions of timebring round a word many reputable meanings, of which the oldestis like to be the deepest in grain.  It is a counsel ofperfection—some will say, of vaingloriouspedantry—but that shaft flies furthest which is drawn tothe head, and he who desires to be understood in thetwenty-fourth century will p. 33not be careless of the meanings thathis words inherit from the fourteenth.  To know them is ofservice, if only for the piquancy of avoiding them.  Butmany times they cannot wisely be avoided, and the auspices underwhich a word began its career when first it was imported from theFrench or Latin overshadow it and haunt it to the end.

Popular modern usage will often rob common words, like“nice,” “quaint,” or “silly,”of all flavour of their origin, as if it were of no moment toremember that these three words, at the outset of their history,bore the older senses of “ignorant,”“noted,” and “blessed.”  It may begranted that any attempt to return to these older senses,regardless of later implications, is stark pedantry; but adelicate writer will play shyly with the primitive significancein passing, approaching it and circling it, taking it as a pointof reference or departure.  The early faith of Christianity,its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to unlearnedsimplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of“silly”; the history of the word is contained in thatp. 34cry of St.Augustine, Indocti surgunt et rapiunt coelum, or in thefervent sentence of the author of the Imitation,Oportet fieri stultum.  And if there is a latersilliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words,while accepting this last extension, will show himself consciousof his paradox.  So also he will shun the grossness thatemploys the epithet “quaint” to put upon subtlety andthe devices of a studied workmanship an imputation ofeccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in thisregard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo.  Theslipshod use of “nice” to connote any sort ofpleasurable emotion he will take care, in his writings at least,utterly to abhor.  From the daintiness of elegance to thearrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous anddiverse enough; it must not be cruelly burdened with all thelaudatory occasions of an undiscriminating egotism.

It would be easy to cite a hundred other words like these,saved only by their nobler uses in literature from ultimatedefacement.  The higher standard imposed upon the writtenword tends to p.35raise and purify speech also, and since talkers owe thesame debt to writers of prose that these, for their part, owe topoets, it is the poets who must be accounted chief protectors, inthe last resort, of our common inheritance.  Every page ofthe works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowdedwith examples of felicitous and exquisite meaning given to theinfallible word.  Sometimes he accepts the secondary andmore usual meaning of a word only to enrich it by theinterweaving of the primary and etymological meaning.  Thusthe seraph Abdiel, in the passage that narrates his offer ofcombat to Satan, is said to “explore” his ownundaunted heart, and there is no sense of “explore”that does not heighten the description and help thethought.  Thus again, when the poet describes those

         Eremitesand friars,
White, Black, and Gray, with all their trumpery,

who inhabit, or are doomed to inhabit, the Paradise of Fools,he seems to invite the curious reader to recall the derivation of“trumpery,” and so supplement the idea ofworthlessness with that other p. 36idea, equally grateful to the author,of deceit.  The strength that extracts this multiplexresonance of meaning from a single note is matched by the gracethat gives to Latin words like “secure,”“arrive,” “obsequious,”“redound,” “infest,” and“solemn” the fine precision of intent that art canborrow from scholarship.

Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Miltonhimself is bold to write “stood praying” for“continued kneeling in prayer,” and deft to transferthe application of “schism” from the rent garment ofthe Church to those necessary “dissections made in thequarry and in the timber ere the house of God can bebuilt.”  Words may safely veer to every wind thatblows, so they keep within hail of their cardinal meanings, anddrift not beyond the scope of their central employ, but when oncethey lose hold of that, then, indeed, the anchor has begun todrag, and the beach-comber may expect his harvest.

Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart ofsameness, such is the estate of language.  According as theyendeavour to reduce p.37letters to some large haven and abiding-place ofcivility, or prefer to throw in their lot with the centrifugaltendency and ride on the flying crest of change, are writersdubbed Classic or Romantic.  The Romantics areindividualist, anarchic; the strains of their passionateincantation raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guardedsymmetry, but rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres,and draw wild things captive to a voice.  To them Societyand Law seem dull phantoms, by the light cast from a flamingsoul.  They dwell apart, and torture their lives in theeffort to attain to self-expression.  All means and modesoffered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape themto this one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, andappropriate or invent strange jargons.  They furbish up oldwords or weld together new indifferently, that they may possessthe machinery of their speech and not be possessed by it. They are at odds with the idiom of their country in that itserves the common need, and hunt it through all its metamorphosesto subject it to their private will.  p. 38Heretics byprofession, they are everywhere opposed to the party of theClassics, who move by slower ways to ends less personal, but inno wise easier of attainment.  The magnanimity of theClassic ideal has had scant justice done to it by moderncriticism.  To make literature the crowning symbol of aworld-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the electof all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying dutyto one unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knittogether in a single community the scattered efforts of mankindtowards order and reason;—this was surely an aim worthy oflabour and sacrifice.  Both have been freely given, and theend is yet to seek.  The self-assertion of the recusants hasfound eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the self-denialthat was thrown away on this other task, which is farther fromfulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissancegave up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in thename of fellow-citizenship with the ancients and theœcumenical authority of letters?  Scholars,grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury p. 39the lustre oftheir wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in thewinding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numberedwith the family of Cicero, and added to the pious train ofVirgil.  It was a noble illusion, doomed to failure, theversatile genius of language cried out against the monotony oftheir Utopia, and the crowds who were to people the unbuildedcity of their dreams went straying after the feathered chiefs ofthe rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come, themselvesreceived apotheosis and the honours of a new motleypantheon.  The tomb of that great vision bears for epitaphthe ironical inscription which defines a Classic poet as “adead Romantic.”

In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of theclassic ideal is the serenity of paralysis and death.  Auniversal agreement in the use of words facilitatescommunication, but, so inextricably is expression entangled withfeeling, it leaves nothing to communicate.  Inanity dogs thefootsteps of the classic tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed,through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories. Even the irresistible novelty p. 40of personal experience is dulled bybeing cast in the old matrix, and the man who professes to findthe whole of himself in the Bible or in Shakespeare had as goodnot be.  He is a replica and a shadow, a foolish libel onhis Creator, who, from the beginning of time, was never guilty oftautology.  This is the error of the classical creed, toimagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye cannever see the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never berepeated, language alone should be capable of fixity andfinality.  Nature avenges herself on those who would thusmake her prisoner, their truths degenerate to truisms, andfeeling dies in the ice-palaces that they build to houseit.  In their search for permanence they become unreal,abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of thedry bones of life; their art is transformed into a science, theirexpression into an academic terminology.  Immutability istheir ideal, and they find it in the arms of death.  Wordsmust change to live, and a word once fixed becomes useless forthe purposes of art.  Whosoever p. 41would make acquaintance with the goaltowards which the classic practice tends, should seek it in thevocabulary of the Sciences.  There words are fixed and dead,a botanical collection of colourless, scentless, dried weeds, ahortus siccusof proper names, each individual symbolpoorly tethered to some single object or idea.  No windblows through that garden, and no sun shines on it, to discomposethe melancholy workers at their task of tying Latin labels on towithered sticks.  Definition and division are the watchwordsof science, where art is all for composition and creation. Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no value tothe stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a study ofanatomy, or an architect by a knowledge of the strains andstresses that may be put on his material.  The exact logicaldefinition is often necessary for the structure of his thoughtand the ordering of his severer argument.  But often, too,it is the merest beginning; when a word is once defined heoverlays it with fresh associations and buries it under new-foundmoral significances, which may p. 42belie the definition theyconceal.  This is the burden of Jeremy Bentham’squarrel with “question-begging appellatives.”  Aclear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor ofthe age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of thepanopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of suchunimpassioned vocables as “codification” and“international,” Bentham would have been glad topurify the language by purging it of those “affections ofthe soul” wherein Burke had found its highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of such a word as“innovation,” it was hardly prejudice in general thathe attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice againstnovelty.  The surprising vivacity of many of his ownfigures,—although he had the courage of his convictions,and laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccatehis style,—bears witness to a natural skill in the use ofloaded weapons.  He will pack his text with grave argumenton matters ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, inthe notes with a pleasant description of the flesh and p. 43the spiritplaying leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holyprecincts of the Church.  Lapses like these show him farenough from his own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use ofwords.  The claim of reason and logic to enslave languagehas a more modern advocate in the philosopher who denies allutility to a word while it retains traces of its primary sensuousemploy.  The tickling of the senses, the raising of thepassions, these things do indeed interfere with the arid businessof definition.  None the less they are the life’sbreath of literature, and he is a poor stylist who cannot beghalf-a-dozen questions in a single epithet, or state theconclusion he would fain avoid in terms that startle the sensesinto clamorous revolt.

The two main processes of change in words are Distinction andAssimilation.  Endless fresh distinction, to match theinfinite complexity of things, is the concern of the writer, whospends all his skill on the endeavour to cloth the delicacies ofperception and thought with a neatly fitting garment.  Sowords grow and bifurcate, diverge and dwindle, until one root hasmany branches.  p. 44Grammarians tell how“royal” and “regal” grew up by the sideof “kingly,” how “hospital,”“hospice,” “hostel” and“hotel” have come by their several offices.  Theinventor of the word “sensuous” gave to the Englishpeople an opportunity of reconsidering those headstrong moralpreoccupations which had already ruined the meaning of“sensual” for the gentler uses of a poet.  Notonly the Puritan spirit, but every special bias or interest ofman seizes on words to appropriate them to itself. Practical men of business transfer such words as“debenture” or “commodity” from debt orcomfort in general to the palpable concrete symbols of debt orcomfort; and in like manlier doctors, soldiers, lawyers,shipmen,—all whose interest and knowledge are centred onsome particular craft or profession, drag words from the generalstore and adapt them to special uses.  Such words aresometimes reclaimed from their partial applications by theauthority of men of letters, and pass back into their widermeanings enhanced by a new element of graphic association. Language never suffers p. 45by answering to an intelligentdemand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but to all whomany special skill or taste has qualified to handle it.  Thegood writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension, butthere he is, at work among words,—binding the vagabond orliberating the prisoner, exalting the humble or abashing thepresumptuous, incessantly alert to amend their implications,break their lazy habits, and help them to refinement or scope ordecision.  He educates words, for he knows that they arealive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude.  In theregard of literature, as a great critic long ago remarked,“all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not injudgment or understanding,” p. 46and the poorest talkers do notinhabit the slums.  Wherever thought and taste have fallento be menials, there the vulgar dwell.  How should they gainmastery over language?  They are introduced to a vocabularyof some hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million ofmeanings; the wealth is theirs for the taking, and they areencouraged to be spendthrift by the very excess of what theyinherit.  The resources of the tongue they speak are subtlerand more various than ever their ideas can put to use.  Sobegins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon words bythe craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confidentbooby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-temperedswords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter.  A dozenexpressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with thesense of luxury and pomp.  “Vast,”“huge,” “immense,”“gigantic,” “enormous,”“tremendous,” “portentous,” and such-likegroups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barrenuniformity of low employ.  The reign of this democracyannuls differences of status, and insults over differences ofability or disposition.  Thus do synonyms, or many words illapplied to one purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a lastindignity, dictionaries of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and thesame statement can never be repeated in a changed form ofwords.  Where the p. 47ignorance of one writer hasintroduced an unnecessary word into the language, to fill a placealready occupied, the quicker apprehension of others will fastenupon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new work for itto do.  Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, thetrained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differencesworthy of scrupulous expression.  The old foresters haddifferent names for a buck during each successive year of itslife, distinguishing the fawn from the pricket, the pricket fromthe sore, and so forth, as its age increased.  Thus it isalso in that illimitable but not trackless forest of moraldistinctions.  Language halts far behind the truth ofthings, and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use forsome new implement of description.  Every strange word thatmakes its way into a language spins for itself a web of usage andcircumstance, relating itself from whatsoever centre to freshpoints in the circumference.  No two words ever coincidethroughout their whole extent.  If sometimes good writersare found adding epithet to epithet for the same quality, andname to name p.48for the same thing, it is because they despair ofcapturing their meaning at a venture, and so practise to get nearit by a maze of approximations.  Or, it may be, the generousbreadth of their purpose scorns the minuter differences ofrelated terms, and includes all of one affinity, fearing onlylest they be found too few and too weak to cover the groundeffectively.  Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of thePrayer-Book, wherein we “acknowledge and confess” thesins we are forbidden to “dissemble or cloke;” andthe bead-roll of the lawyer, who huddles together “give,devise, and bequeath,” lest the cunning of litigants shouldevade any single verb.  The works of the poets yield stillbetter instances.  When Milton praises the Virtuous YoungLadyof his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors movesher only to “pity and ruth,” it is not for the idlefilling of the line that he joins the second of these nouns tothe first.  Rather he is careful to enlarge and intensifyhis meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, the onecivilised, the other barbarous; and ruth is a quality as muchmore p.49instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness iskeener, harder, and more deliberate than the inborn savagery ofruthlessness.

It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of thisaccumulated and varied emphasis that the need of synonyms isfelt.  There is no more curious problem in the philosophy ofstyle than that afforded by the stubborn reluctance of writers,the good as well as the bad, to repeat a word or phrase. When the thing is, they may be willing to abide by the old ruleand say the word, but when the thing repeats itself they willseldom allow the word to follow suit.  A kind of interdict,not removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded,lies on a once used word.  The causes of this anxiety for avaried expression are manifold.  Where there is merely acolumn to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author intoan illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from hispractice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his ownpuppets.  A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, andanother of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he p. 50be calledupon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breedtyphoid, he will acquit himself voluminously, with only oneallusion (it is a point of pride) to the oyster by name.  Hewill compare the succulent bivalve to Pandora’s box, andlament that it should harbour one of the direst of ills thatflesh is heir to.  He will find a paradox and an epigram inthe notion that the darling of Apicius should suffer neglectunder the frowns of Æsculapius.  Question, hypothesis,lamentation, and platitude dance their allotted round and fillthe ordained space, while Ignorance masquerades in the garb ofcriticism, and Folly proffers her ancient epilogue of chastenedhope.  When all is said, nothing is said; andMontaigne’s Que sçais-je, besides beingbriefer and wittier, was infinitely more informing.

But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished onthought, whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to strugglewith a real meaning, is not subject to these tympanies.  Hefeels no idolatrous dread of repetition when the theme requires,it, and is urged by no necessity of concealing real p. 51identityunder a show of change.  Nevertheless he, too, is hedgedabout by conditions that compel him, now and again, to resort towhat seems a synonym.  The chief of these is theindispensable law of euphony, which governs the sequence not onlyof words, but also of phrases.  In proportion as a phrase ismemorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive,losing for a time something of their individual scope, bringingwith them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrousfragments of their recent association.  That he may avoidthis, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts,if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of hisencumbrance.  By a slight stress laid on the difference ofusage the unshapeliness may be done away with, and a new gracefound where none was sought.  Addison and Landor accuseMilton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun, yetsurely there is something to please the mind, as well as the ear,in the description of the heavenly judgment,

That brought into this world a world of woe.

Where words are not fitted with a single hard p. 52definition,rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning,bringing slight differences of application into clearrelief.  The practice has its dangers for the weak-mindedlover of ornament, yet even so it may be preferable to the flatstupidity of one identical intention for a word or phrase intwenty several contexts.  For the law of incessant change isnot so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before theapprentice, as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever;if the change be not ordered by art it will order itself indefault of art.  The same statement can never be repeatedeven in the same form of words, and it is not the old questionthat is propounded at the third time of asking.  Repetition,that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known tolanguage.  Take the exquisite repetitions in these fewlines:—

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear
Compels me to disturb your season due;
For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime,
Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Here the tenderness of affection returns again p. 53to the lovedname, and the grief of the mourner repeats the word“dead.”  But this monotony of sorrow is theleast part of the effect, which lies rather in the prominencegiven by either repetition to the most moving circumstance ofall—the youthfulness of the dead poet.  The attentionof the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, isconcentrated on the idea which these repeated and exhausted wordsthrow into relief.  Rhetoric is content to borrow force fromsimpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down,at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and themirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon,will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity.  Somemodern writers, admiring the easy power of the device, haveindulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnoldparticularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text likea hawker,

Beating it in upon our weary brains,
As tho’ it were the burden of a song,

clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effortto bring him to reason.  These are the p. 54ostentatiousviolences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive,where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weaponand strike but once.  The callousness of a thick-wittedauditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest soulresolved to stir them.  But he whose message is for mindsattuned and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as ofthe noisiest way of emphasis.  Is the same word wantedagain, he will examine carefully whether the altered incidencedoes not justify and require an altered term, which the world isquick to call a synonym.  The right dictionary of synonymswould give the context of each variant in the usage of the bestauthors.  To enumerate all the names applied by Milton tothe hero of Paradise Lost, without reference to thepassages in which they occur, would be a foolish labour; withsuch reference, the task is made a sovereign lesson instyle.  At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech with hisleman Sin to gain a passage from the lower World, Satan is“the subtle Fiend,” in the garden of Paradise he is“the Tempter” and “the Enemy of Mankind,”p. 55puttinghis fraud upon Eve he is the “wily Adder,” leadingher in full course to the tree he is “the direSnake,” springing to his natural height before theastonished gaze of the cherubs he is “the grislyKing.”  Every fresh designation elaborates hischaracter and history, emphasises the situation, and saves asentence.  So it is with all variable appellations ofconcrete objects; and even in the stricter and more conventionalregion of abstract ideas the same law runs.  Let a word bechanged or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution ofemphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is toplay, lest it should upset the business of the piece byirrelevant clownage in the midst of high matter, saying more orless than is set down for it in the author’s purpose.

The chameleon quality of language may claim yet anotherillustration.  Of origins we know nothing certainly, nor howwords came by their meanings in the remote beginning, whenspeech, like the barnacle-goose of the herbalist, was suspendedover an expectant world, ripening on a tree.  But this weknow, that language in its p. 56mature state is fed and fattened onmetaphor.  Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician,but the earliest principle of change in language.  The wholeprocess of speech is a long series of exhilarating discoveries,whereby words, freed from the swaddling bands of their nativity,are found capable of new relations and a wider metaphoricalemploy.  Then, with the growth of exact knowledge, thestraggling associations that attended the word on its travels arestraitened and confined, its meaning is settled, adjusted, andbalanced, that it may bear its part in the scrupulous depositionof truth.  Many are the words that have run this doublecourse, liberated from their first homely offices and transformedby poetry, reclaimed in a more abstract sense, and appropriatedto a new set of facts by science.  Yet a third chance awaitsthem when the poet, thirsty for novelty, passes by the old simplefounts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest technicalapplications of specialised terms.  Everywhere the intuitionof poetry, impatient of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lagsso p. 57farbehind, is busy in advance to find likenesses not susceptible ofscientific demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy theheart while they leave the colder intellect only halfconvinced.  When an elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers isconfronted with the principle of gravitation he gives voice toscience in verse:—

That very law which moulds a tear,
   And bids it trickle from its source,
That law preserves the earth a sphere,
   And guides the planets in their course.

But a seer like Wordsworth will never be content to writetunes for a text-book of physics, he boldly confounds thearbitrary limits of matter and morals in one splendid apostropheto Duty:—

   Flowers laugh before thee ontheir beds;
   And fragrance in thy footing treads;
   Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh andstrong.

Poets, it is said, anticipate science; here in these fourlines is work for a thousand laboratories for a thousandyears.  But the truth has been understated; every writer andevery speaker p.58works ahead of science, expressing analogies andcontrasts, likenesses and differences, that will not abide theapparatus of proof.  The world of perception and will, ofpassion and belief, is an uncaptured virgin, airily deriding fromafar the calculated advances and practised modesty of the oldbawd Science; turning again to shower a benediction of unexpectedcaresses on the most cavalier of her wooers, Poetry.  Thisworld, the child of Sense and Faith, shy, wild, and provocative,for ever lures her lovers to the chase, and the record of theirhopes and conquests is contained in the lover’s language,made up wholly of parable and figure of speech.  There isnothing under the sun nor beyond it that does not concern man,and it is the unceasing effort of humanity, whether by letters orby science, to bring “the commerce of the mind and ofthings” to terms of nearer correspondence.  ButLiterature, ambitious to touch life on all its sides, distruststhe way of abstraction, and can hardly be brought to abandon thepoint of view whence things are seen in their immediate relationto the p.59individual soul.  This kind of research is the workof letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that arenever like to be numerically tabulated, changes and developmentsthat defy all metrical standards to be traced anddescribed.  The greater men of science have been cast in sogenerous a mould that they have recognised the partial nature oftheir task; they have known how to play with science as apastime, and to win and wear her decorations for a holidayfavour.  They have not emaciated the fulness of theirfaculties in the name of certainty, nor cramped their humanityfor the promise of a future good.  They have been theservants of Nature, not the slaves of method.  But thegrammarian of the laboratory is often the victim of histrade.  He staggers forth from his workshop, where prolongedconcentration on a mechanical task, directed to a provisional anddoubtful goal, has dimmed his faculties; the glaring motley ofthe world, bathed in sunlight, dazzles him; the questions, moral,political, and personal, that his method has relegated to somefuture of larger p.60knowledge, crowd upon him, clamorous for solution, notto be denied, insisting on a settlement to-day.  He isforced to make a choice, and may either forsake the divinity heserves, falling back, for the practical and æstheticconduct of life, on those common instincts of sensuality whichoscillate between the conventicle and the tavern as the poles ofduty and pleasure, or, more pathetically still, he may attempt tobring the code of the observatory to bear immediately on thevagaries of the untameable world, and suffer the pedant’sdisaster.  A martyr to the good that is to be, he hasvoluntarily maimed himself “for the kingdom ofHeaven’s sake”—if, perchance, the kingdom ofHeaven might come by observation.  The enthusiasm of hisself-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to chainlanguage also to the bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the poet’s right-hand weapon, he despises; allthat is tentative, individual, struck off at the urging of amood, he disclaims and suspects.  Yet the very rewards thatscience promises have their parallel in the domain ofletters.  The discovery of likeness p. 61in the midstof difference, and of difference in the midst of likeness, is thekeenest pleasure of the intellect; and literary expression, ashas been said, is one long series of such discoveries, each withits thrill of incommunicable happiness, all unprecedented, andperhaps unverifiable by later experiment.  The finestinstrument of these discoveries is metaphor, the spectroscope ofletters.

Enough has been said of change; it remains to speak of onemore of those illusions of fixity wherein writers seek exemptionfrom the general lot.  Language, it has been shown, is to befitted to thought; and, further, there are no synonyms. What more natural conclusion could be drawn by the enthusiasm ofthe artist than that there is some kind of preordained harmonybetween words and things, whereby expression and thought tallyexactly, like the halves of a puzzle?  This illusion, calledin France the doctrine of the mot propre, is a willo’ the wisp which has kept many an artist dancing on itstrail.  That there is one, and only one way of expressingone thing has p.62been the belief of other writers besides GustaveFlaubert, inspiriting them to a desperate and fruitfulindustry.  It is an amiable fancy, like the dream of MichaelAngelo, who loved to imagine that the statue existed already inthe block of marble, and had only to be stripped of itssuperfluous wrappings, or like the indolent fallacy of thoseeconomic soothsayers to whom Malthus brought rough awakening,that population and the means of subsistence move side by side inharmonious progress.  But hunger does not imply food, andthere may hover in the restless heads of poets, as themselvestestify—

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at theleast,
Which into words no virtue can digest.

Matter and form are not so separable as the popular philosophywould have them; indeed, the very antithesis between them is acardinal instance of how language reacts on thought, modifyingand fixing a cloudy truth.  The idea pursues form not onlythat it may be known to others, but that it may know itself, andthe body in which it becomes incarnate is not to be distinguishedfrom p. 63theinforming soul.  It is recorded of a famous Latin historianhow he declared that he would have made Pompey win the battle ofPharsalia had the effective turn of the sentence requiredit.  He may stand for the true type of the literaryartist.  The business of letters, howsoever simple it mayseem to those who think truth-telling a gift of nature, is inreality two-fold, to find words for a meaning, and to find ameaning for words.  Now it is the words that refuse toyield, and now the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed themis at the same time altering his words to suit his meaning, andmodifying and shaping his meaning to satisfy the requirements ofhis words.  The humblest processes of thought have had theirfirst education from language long before they took shape inliterature.  So subtle is the connexion between the two thatit is equally possible to call language the form given to thematter of thought, or, inverting the application of the figure,to speak of thought as the formal principle that shapes the rawmaterial of language.  It is not until the two become onethat they can be p.64known for two.  The idea to be expressed is a kindof mutual recognition between thought and language, which heremeet and claim each other for the first time, just as in thefirst glance exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its eyeson the world, and pleads for life.  But thought, although itmay indulge itself with the fancy of a predestined affiance, isnot confined to one mate, but roves free and is the father ofmany children.  A belief in the inevitable word is the lastrefuge of that stubborn mechanical theory of the universe whichhas been slowly driven from science, politics, and history. Amidst so much that is undulating, it has pleased writers toimagine that truth persists and is provided by heavenlymunificence with an imperishable garb of language.  But thisalso is vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, factgoes the way of fiction, and what is known is no more perdurablethan what is made.  Not words nor works, but only that whichis formless endures, the vitality that is another name forchange, the breath that fills and shatters the bubbles of goodand p. 65evil,of beauty and deformity, of truth and untruth.

No art is easy, least of all the art of letters.  Applythe musical analogy once more to the instrument whereonliterature performs its voluntaries.  With a living keyboardof notes which are all incessantly changing in value, so thatwhat rang true under Dr. Johnson’s hand may sound flat orsharp now, with a range of a myriad strings, some falling muteand others being added from day to day, with numberlesspermutations and combinations, each of which alters the tone andpitch of the units that compose it, with fluid ideas that neverhave an outlined existence until they have found their phrasesand the improvisation is complete, is it to be wondered at thatthe art of style is eternally elusive, and that the attempt toreduce it to rule is the forlorn hope of academicinfatuation?

These difficulties and complexities of the instrument are,nevertheless, the least part of the ordeal that is to beundergone by the writer.  The p. 66same musical note or phrase affectsdifferent ears in much the same way; not so the word or group ofwords.  The pure idea, let us say, is translated intolanguage by the literary composer; who is to be responsible forthe retranslation of the language into idea?  Here beginsthe story of the troubles and weaknesses that are imposed uponliterature by the necessity it lies under of addressing itself toan audience, by its liability to anticipate the corruptions thatmar the understanding of the spoken or written word.  A wordis the operative symbol of a relation between two minds, and ischosen by the one not without regard to the quality of the effectactually produced upon the other.  Men must be spoken to intheir accustomed tongue, and persuaded that the unknown Godproclaimed by the poet is one whom aforetime they ignorantlyworshipped.  The relation of great authors to the public maybe compared to the war of the sexes, a quiet watchful antagonismbetween two parties mutually indispensable to each other, at onetime veiling itself in endearments, at another breaking out intoopen p.67defiance.  He who has a message to deliver mustwrestle with his fellows before he shall be permitted to ply themwith uncomfortable or unfamiliar truths.  The public, likethe delicate Greek Narcissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself;and the name of its only other perfect lover is Echo.  Yeteven great authors must lay their account with the public, and itis instructive to observe how different are the attitudes theyhave adopted, how uniform the disappointment they havefelt.  Some, like Browning and Mr. Meredith in our own day,trouble themselves little about the reception given to theirwork, but are content to say on, until the few who care to listenhave expounded them to the many, and they are applauded, in theend, by a generation whom they have trained to appreciatethem.  Yet this noble and persevering indifference is noneof their choice, and long years of absolution from criticism mustneeds be paid for in faults of style.  “Writing forthe stage,” Mr. Meredith himself has remarked, “wouldbe a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style into whichsome great ones fall at times.”  Denied such acorrective, the p.68great one is apt to sit alone and tease his meditationsinto strange shapes, fortifying himself against obscurity andneglect with the reflection that most of the words he uses are tobe found, after all, in the dictionary.  It is not, however,from the secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrungby the indignities of his position, but rather from genius in theact of earning a full meed of popular applause.  BothShakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote for the stage, both were blownby the favouring breath of their plebeian patrons into reputationand a competence.  Each of them passed through the thick ofthe fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the artist isexposed to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on the onehand and the necessity for pleasing the rabble on theother.  When any man is awake to the fact that the public isa vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread and hisfame are in their gift—it is a stern passage for his soul,a touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself lyric wings in thetwo great Odes to Himself, sang p. 69high and aloof for a while, then thefrenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself fordeeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman, who, in The Tears of Peace, compares“men’s refuse ears” to those gates in ancientcities which were opened only when the bodies of executedmalefactors were to be cast away, who elsewhere gives utterance,in round terms, to his belief that

No truth of excellence was ever seen
But bore the venom of the vulgar’s spleen,

—even the violences of this great and haughty spiritmust pale beside the more desperate violences of the dramatistwho commended his play to the public in the famous line,

By God, ’tis good, and if you like’t,you may.

This stormy passion of arrogant independence disturbs theserenity of atmosphere necessary for creative art.  Agreater than Jonson donned the suppliant’s robes, likeCoriolanus, and with the inscrutable honeyed smile about his lipsbegged for the “most sweet voices” of the journeymenp. 70andgallants who thronged the Globe Theatre.  Only once does thewail of anguish escape him—

Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here andthere,
   And made myself a motley to the view,
Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

And again—

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand,
   And almost thence my nature is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand,
   Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.

Modern vulgarity, speaking through the mouths of Shakesperiancommentators, is wont to interpret these lines as a protestagainst the contempt wherewith Elizabethan society regarded theprofessions of playwright and actor.  We are asked toconceive that Shakespeare humbly desires the pity of his bosomfriend because he is not put on the same level of socialestimation with a brocaded gull or a prosperous stupid goldsmithof the Cheap.  No, it is a cry, from the depth of hisnature, for forgiveness because he has sacrificed a little on thealtar of popularity.  Jonson would p. 71have boastedthat he never made this sacrifice.  But he lost the calm ofhis temper and the clearness of his singing voice, he degradedhis magnanimity by allowing it to engage in street-brawls, and heendangered the sanctuary of the inviolable soul.

At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenthcenturies are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in itsmost gracious mood, makes an ill task-master for the man ofletters.  It is worth the pains to ask why, and to attemptto show how much of an author’s literary quality isinvolved in his attitude towards his audience.  Such aninquiry will take us, it is true, into bad company, and exhibitthe vicious, the fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to anadmiring crowd.  But style is a property of all written andprinted matter, so that to track it to its causes and origins isa task wherein literary criticism may profit by the humbler aidof anthropological research.

Least of all authors is the poet subject to the tyranny of hisaudience.  “Poetry and eloquence,” p. 72says JohnStuart Mill, “are both alike the expression or utterance offeeling.  But if we may be excused the antithesis, we shouldsay that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.  Eloquencesupposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us tolie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of alistener.”  Poetry, according to this discerningcriticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the thoughts rise unforcedand unchecked, taking musical form in obedience only to the lawof their being, giving pleasure to an audience only as themountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst of a passingtraveller.  In lyric poetry, language, from being a utensil,or a medium of traffic and barter, passes back to its place amongnatural sounds; its affinity is with the wind among the trees andthe stream among the rocks; it is the cry of the heart, as simpleas the breath we draw, and as little ordered with a view toapplause.  Yet speech grew up in society, and even in themost ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of understanding andresponse.  It were rash to say that the poets need noaudience; the loneliest have p. 73promised themselves a tardyrecognition, and some among the greatest came to their maturityin the warm atmosphere of a congenial society.  Indeed theratification set upon merit by a living audience, fit though few,is necessary for the development of the most humane andsympathetic genius; and the memorable ages of literature, inGreece or Rome, in France or England, have been the ages of aliterary society.  The nursery of our greatest dramatistsmust be looked for, not, it is true, in the transfiguredbear-gardens of the Bankside, but in those enchanted taverns,islanded and bastioned by the protective decree—

Idiota, insulsus, tristis,turpis, abesto.

The poet seems to be soliloquising because he is addressinghimself, with the most entire confidence, to a small company ofhis friends, who may even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be thecreatures of his imagination.  Real or imaginary, they aretaken by him for his equals; he expects from them a quickintelligence and a perfect sympathy, which may enable him todespise all p.74concealment.  He never preaches to them, norscolds, nor enforces the obvious.  Content that what he hasspoken he has spoken, he places a magnificent trust on a singleexpression.  He neither explains, nor falters, nor repents;he introduces his work with no preface, and cumbers it with nonotes.  He will not lower nor raise his voice for the sakeof the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across hisentertainment.  His living auditors, unsolicited for thetribute of worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of inthe likeness of what he would have them to be, raised to acompanion pinnacle of friendship, and constituted peers andjudges, if they will, of his achievement.  Sometimes theycome late.

This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour andself-respect, is unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand byintimacy mutual concession to a base ideal, and who are soaccustomed to deal with masks, that when they see a face they areshocked as by some grotesque.  Now a poet, likeMontaigne’s naked philosopher, is all face; and thebewilderment of his masked and muffled critics p. 75is thegreater.  Wherever he attracts general attention he cannotbut be misunderstood.  The generality of modern men andwomen who pretend to literature are not hypocrites, or they mightgo near to divine him,—for hypocrisy, though rooted incowardice, demands for its flourishing a clear intellectualatmosphere, a definite aim, and a certain detachment of thedirecting mind.  But they are habituated to trim themselvesby the cloudy mirror of opinion, and will mince and temporise, asif for an invisible audience, even in their bedrooms.  Theirmasks have, for the most part, grown to their faces, so that,except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it is hardlythemselves that they express.  The apparition of a poetdisquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, andapologises to no idols.  His candour frightens them: theyavert their eyes from it; or they treat it as a licensed whim;or, with a sudden gleam of insight, and apprehension of what thismeans for them and theirs, they scream aloud for fear.  Amodern instance may be found in the angry protestations launchedp. 76againstRossetti’s Sonnets, at the time of their first appearance,by a writer who has since matched himself very exactly with anaudience of his own kind.  A stranger freak of burgesscriticism is everyday fare in the odd world peopled by thebiographers of Robert Burns.  The nature of Burns, one wouldthink, was simplicity itself; it could hardly puzzle a ploughman,and two sailors out of three would call him brother.  But helit up the whole of that nature by his marvellous genius forexpression, and grave personages have been occupied ever since indiscussing the dualism of his character, and professing to findsome dark mystery in the existence of this, that, or the othertrait—a love of pleasure, a hatred of shams, a deep senseof religion.  It is common human nature, after all, that isthe mystery, but they seem never to have met with it, and treatit as if it were the poet’s eccentricity.  They areall agog to worship him, and when they have made an image of himin their own likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactlyhits their taste, they break into noisy lamentation over thediscovery p.77that the original was human, and had feet of clay. They deem “Mary in Heaven” so admirable that theycould find it in their hearts to regret that she was ever onearth.  This sort of admirers constantly refuses to bear apart in any human relationship; they ask to be fawned on, ortrodden on, by the poet while he is in life; when he is dead theymake of him a candidate for godship, and heckle him.  It isa misfortune not wholly without its compensations that most greatpoets are dead before they are popular.

If great and original literary artists—here groupedtogether under the title of poets—will not enter intotransactions with their audience, there is no lack of authors whowill.  These are not necessarily charlatans; they may haveby nature a ready sympathy with the grossness of the publictaste, and thus take pleasure in studying to gratify it. But man loses not a little of himself in crowds, and somedegradation there must be where the one adapts himself to themany.  The British public is not seen at its best when it isenjoying a holiday in a foreign country, nor when p. 78it is makingexcursions into the realm of imaginative literature: those whocater for it in these matters must either study its tastes orshare them.  Many readers bring the worst of themselves to anovel; they want lazy relaxation, or support for their nonsense,or escape from their creditors, or a free field for emotions thatthey dare not indulge in life.  The reward of an author whomeets them half-way in these respects, who neither puzzles nordistresses them, who asks nothing from them, but compliments themon their great possessions and sends them away rejoicing, is afull measure of acceptance, and editions unto seventy timesseven.

The evils caused by the influence of the audience on thewriter are many.  First of all comes a fault far enoughremoved from the characteristic vices of the charlatan—towit, sheer timidity and weakness.  There is a kind ofstage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand toaddress an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he standsup to deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces.  This isthe true panic fear, that walks at mid-day, and p. 79unmans thosewhom it visits.  Hence come reservations, qualifications,verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering courage, which apesprogress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with theirfeet.  The writing produced under these auspices is of nogreater moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervouspatient.  All self-expression is a challenge thrown down tothe world, to be taken up by whoso will; and the spirit oftimidity, when it touches a man, suborns him with the reminderthat he holds his life and goods by the sufferance of hisfellows.  Thereupon he begins to doubt whether it is worthwhile to court a verdict of so grave possibilities, or to riskoffending a judge—whose customary geniality is merely theoutcome of a fixed habit of inattention.  In doubt whetherto speak or keep silence, he takes a middle course, and whilepurporting to speak for himself, is careful to lay stress only onthe points whereon all are agreed, to enlarge eloquently on thedoubtfulness of things, and to give to words the very leastmeaning that they will carry.  Such a procedure, whichglides over essentials, and handles truisms p. 80ortrivialities with a fervour of conviction, has its functions inpractice.  It will win for a politician the coveted anddeserved repute of a “safe” man—safe, eventhough the cause perish.  Pleaders and advocates aresometimes driven into it, because to use vigorous, clean, crispEnglish in addressing an ordinary jury or committee is likeflourishing a sword in a drawing-room: it will lose thecase.  Where the weakest are to be convinced speech muststoop: a full consideration of the velleities and uncertainties,a little bombast to elevate the feelings without committing thejudgment, some vague effusion of sentiment, an inappositeblandness, a meaningless rodomontade—these are the by-waysto be travelled by the style that is a willing slave to itsaudience.  The like is true of thosedocuments—petitions, resolutions, congratulatory addresses,and so forth—that are written to be signed by a multitudeof names.  Public occasions of this kind, where all andsundry are to be satisfied, have given rise to a newparliamentary dialect, which has nothing of the freshness ofindividual emotion, is powerless to deal with p. 81realities,and lacks all resonance, vitality, and nerve.  There is nocure for this, where the feelings and opinions of a crowd are tobe expressed.  But where indecision is the ruling passion ofthe individual, he may cease to write.  Popularity was neveryet the prize of those whose only care is to avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popularfavour are by the twin gates of laughter and tears.  Pathosknits the soul and braces the nerves, humour purges the eyesightand vivifies the sympathies; the counterfeits of these qualitieswork the opposite effects.  It is comparatively easy toappeal to passive emotions, to play upon the melting mood of adiffuse sensibility, or to encourage the narrow mind to dispensea patron’s laughter from the vantage-ground of its ownsmall preconceptions.  Our annual crop of sentimentalistsand mirth-makers supplies the reading public with food. Tragedy, which brings the naked soul face to face with theaustere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns the light inward anddissipates the mists of self-affection and self-esteem, p. 82have longsince given way on the public stage to the flattery of Melodrama,under many names.  In the books he reads and in the plays hesees the average man recognises himself in the hero, andvociferates his approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenthcentury was of a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and sought a cultivated enjoyment inevanescent shades of feeling, and the fantasies of unsubstantialgrief.  The real Princess of Hans Andersen’s story,who passed a miserable night because there was a small beanconcealed beneath the twenty eider-down beds on which she slept,might stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that took apride in these ridiculous susceptibilities.  The modernsentimentalist works in a coarser material.  That ancient,subtle, and treacherous affinity among the emotions, wherebyreligious exaltation has before now been made the ally of theunpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler and moreuseful device.  By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled togratify the prurience of his public and to raise p. 83them in theirown muddy conceit at one and the same time.  The plea serveswell with those artless readers who have been accustomed toconsider the moral of a story as something separable fromimagination, expression, and style—a quality, it may be,inherent in the plot, or a kind of appendix, exercising aretrospective power of jurisdiction and absolution over theextravagances of the piece to which it is affixed.  Letvirtue be rewarded, and they are content though it should neverbe vitally imagined or portrayed.  If their eyes were openedthey might cry with Brutus—“O miserable Virtue! Thou art but a phrase, and I have followed thee as though thouwert a reality.”

It is in quite another kind, however, that the modern purveyorof sentiment exercises his most characteristic talent. There are certain real and deeply-rooted feelings, common tohumanity, concerning which, in their normal operation, a gravereticence is natural.  They are universal in their appeal,men would be ashamed not to feel them, and it is no small part ofthe business of life to keep them under strict control. Here is the sentimental p. 84hucksters most valuedopportunity.  He tears these primary instincts from thewholesome privacy that shelters them in life, and cries them upfrom his booth in the market-place.  The elemental forces ofhuman life, which beget shyness in children, and touch thespirits of the wise to solemn acquiescence, awaken him to noisierdeclamation.  He patronises the stern laws of love and pity,hawking them like indulgences, cheapening and commanding themlike the medicines of a mountebank.  The censure of hiscritics he impudently meets by pointing to his wares: are notsome of the most sacred properties of humanity—sympathywith suffering, family affection, filial devotion, and therest—displayed upon his stall?  Not thus shall heevade the charges brought against him.  It is the sensualside of the tender emotions that he exploits for the comfort ofthe million.  All the intricacies which life offers to thewill and the intellect he lards and obliterates by the timelyeffusion of tearful sentiment.  His humanitarianism is amore popular, as it is an easier, ideal than humanity—itasks no expense p.85of thought.  There is a scanty public in Englandfor tragedy or for comedy: the characters and situations handledby the sentimentalist might perchance furnish comedy with atheme; but he stilts them for a tragic performance, and theytumble into watery bathos, where a numerous public awaitsthem.

A similar degradation of the intellectual elements that arepresent in all good literature is practised by those whose singleaim is to provoke laughter.  In much of our so-called comicwriting a superabundance of boisterous animal spirits, restrainedfrom more practical expression by the ordinances of civilsociety, finds outlet and relief.  The grimaces andcaperings of buffoonery, the gymnastics of the punster and theparodist, the revels of pure nonsense may be, at their best, arefreshment and delight, but they are not comedy, and have provedin effect not a little hostile to the existence of comedy. The prevalence of jokers, moreover, spoils the game of humour;the sputter and sparkle of their made jokes interferes with thatluminous contemplation of the incongruities p. 86of life andthe universe which is humour’s essence.  All that isludicrous depends on some disproportion: Comedy judges the actualworld by contrasting it with an ideal of sound sense, Humourreveals it in its true dimensions by turning on it the light ofimagination and poetry.  The perception of theseincongruities, which are eternal, demands some expense ofintellect; a cheaper amusement may be enjoyed by him who iscontent to take his stand on his own habits and prejudices and tolaugh at all that does not square with them.  This was themethod of the age which, in the abysmal profound of waggery,engendered that portentous birth, the comic paper. Foreigners, it is said, do not laugh at the wit of thesejournals, and no wonder, for only a minute study of the customsand preoccupations of certain sections of English society couldenable them to understand the point of view.  From time totime one or another of the writers who are called upon for theirweekly tale of jokes seems struggling upward to the free domainof Comedy; but in vain, his public holds him down, and compelshim to laugh p.87in chains.  Some day, perchance, a literaryhistorian, filled with the spirit of Cervantes or ofMolière, will give account of the Victorian era, and, notdisdaining small things, will draw a picture of the society whichinspired and controlled so resolute a jocularity.  Then, atlast, will the spirit of Comedy recognise that these were indeedwhat they claimed to be—comic papers.

“The style is the man;” but the social andrhetorical influences adulterate and debase it, until not one manin a thousand achieves his birthright, or claims his secondself.  The fire of the soul burns all too feebly, and warmsitself by the reflected heat from the society around it.  Wegive back words of tepid greeting, without improvement.  Wetalk to our fellows in the phrases we learn from them, which cometo mean less and less as they grow worn with use.  Then weexaggerate and distort, heaping epithet upon epithet in theendeavour to get a little warmth out of the smoulderingpile.  The quiet cynicism of our everyday demeanour is openand shameless, we callously anticipate objections founded on thep. 88well-knownvacuity of our seeming emotions, and assure our friends that weare “truly” grieved or “sincerely”rejoiced at their hap—as if joy or grief that really existswere some rare and precious brand of joy or grief.  In itstrivial conversational uses so simple and pure a thing as joybecomes a sandwich-man—humanity degraded to anadvertisement.  The poor dejected word shuffles alongthrough the mud in the service of the sleek trader who employsit, and not until it meets with a poet is it rehabilitated andrestored to dignity.

This is no indictment of society, which came into being beforeliterature, and, in all the distraction of its multifariousconcerns, can hardly keep a school for Style.  It is rathera demonstration of the necessity, amid the wealthy disorder ofmodern civilisation, for poetic diction.  One of the hardestof a poet’s tasks is the search for his vocabulary. Perhaps in some idyllic pasture-land of Utopia there may haveflourished a state where division of labour was unknown, wherecommunity of ideas, as well as of property, was absolute, andwhere the language of every day ran p. 89clear into poetry without the need ofa refining process.  They say that Cædmon was acow-keeper: but the shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil arefigments of a courtly brain, and Wordsworth himself, in hisboldest flights of theory, was forced to allow ofselection.  Even by selection from among the chaos ofimplements that are in daily use around him, a poet can barelyequip himself with a choice of words sufficient for his needs; hemust have recourse to his predecessors; and so it comes aboutthat the poetry of the modern world is a store-house of obsoletediction.  The most surprising characteristic of the rightpoetic diction, whether it draw its vocabulary from near at hand,or avail itself of the far-fetched inheritance preserved by thepoets, is its matchless sincerity.  Something ofextravagance there may be in those brilliant clusters of romanticwords that are everywhere found in the work of Shakespeare, orSpenser, or Keats, but they are the natural leafage and fruitageof a luxuriant imagination, which, lacking these, could notattain to its full height.  Only by the p. 90energy of thearts can a voice be given to the subtleties and raptures ofemotional experience; ordinary social intercourse affords neitheropportunity nor means for this fervour of self-revelation. And if the highest reach of poetry is often to be found in theuse of common colloquialisms, charged with the intensity ofrestrained passion, this is not due to a greater sincerity ofexpression, but to the strength derived from dramaticsituation.  Where speech spends itself on its subject, dramastands idle; but where the dramatic stress is at its greatest,three or four words may enshrine all the passion of themoment.  Romeo’s apostrophe from under thebalcony—

O, speak again, bright Angel! for thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white-upturned wond’ring eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him,
When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds,
And sails upon the bosom of the air—

though it breathe the soul of romance, must yield, for sheereffect, to his later soliloquy, spoken when the news ofJuliet’s death is brought to him,

p.91Well, Juliet, I will lie with thee to-night.

And even the constellated glories of Paradise Lostareless moving than the plain words wherein Samson forecasts hisapproaching end—

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,
My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems
In all her functions weary of herself;
My race of glory run and race of shame,
And I shall shortly be with them that rest.

Here are simple words raised to a higher power and animatedwith a purer intention than they carry in ordinary life.  Itis this unfailing note of sincerity, eloquent or laconic, thathas made poetry the teacher of prose.  Phrases which, to allseeming, might have been hit on by the first comer, are often cutaway from their poetical context and robbed of their musicalvalue that they may be transferred to the service of prose. They bring with them, down to the valley, a wafted sense of someregion of higher thought and purer feeling.  They bear,perhaps, no marks of curious diction to know them by. Whence comes the irresistible pathos of the lines—

p.92I cannot but remember such things were
That were most precious to me?

The thought, the diction, the syntax, might all occur inprose.  Yet when once the stamp of poetry has been put upona cry that is as old as humanity, prose desists from rivalry, andis content to quote.  Some of the greatest prose-writershave not disdained the help of these borrowed graces for thecrown of their fabric.  In this way De Quincey widens theimaginative range of his prose, and sets back the limits assignedto prose diction.  So too, Charles Lamb, interweaving thestuff of experience with phrases quoted or altered from thepoets, illuminates both life and poetry, letting his sympathetichumour play now on the warp of the texture, and now on thewoof.  The style of Burke furnishes a still better example,for the spontaneous evolution of his prose might be thought toforbid the inclusion of borrowed fragments.  Yet whenever heis deeply stirred, memories of Virgil, Milton, or the EnglishBible rise to his aid, almost as if strong emotion could expressitself in no other p.93language.  Even the poor invectives of politicalcontroversy gain a measure of dignity from the skilfulapplication of some famous line; the touch of the poet’ssincerity rests on them for a moment, and seems to lend them analien splendour.  It is like the blessing of a priest,invoked by the pious, or by the worldly, for the good success ofwhatever business they have in hand.  Poetry has no temporalends to serve, no livelihood to earn, and is under no temptationto cog and lie: wherefore prose pays respect to that loftiercalling, and that more unblemished sincerity.

Insincerity, on the other hand, is the commonest vice ofstyle.  It is not to be avoided, except in the rarest cases,by those to whom the written use of language is unfamiliar; sothat a shepherd who talks pithy, terse sense will be unable toexpress himself in a letter without having recourse to theReady Letter-writer—“This comes hoping to findyou well, as it also leaves me at present”—and asoldier, without the excuse of ignorance, will describe asuccessful advance as having been made against “a thickhail of bullets.”  It permeates p. 94ordinaryjournalism, and all writing produced under commercialpressure.  It taints the work of the young artist, caught bythe romantic fever, who glories in the wealth of vocabularydiscovered to him by the poets, and seeks often in vain for athought stalwart enough to wear that glistering armour. Hence it is that the masters of style have always had to preachrestraint, self-denial, austerity.  His style is aman’s own; yet how hard it is to come by!  It is aman’s bride, to be won by labours and agonies that bespeaka heroic lover.  If he prove unable to endure the trial,there are cheaper beauties, nearer home, easy to be conquered,and faithless to their conqueror.  Taking up with them, hemay attain a brief satisfaction, but he will never redeem hisquest.

As a body of practical rules, the negative precepts ofasceticism bring with them a certain chill.  The page isdull; it is so easy to lighten it with some flash of wittyirrelevance: the argument is long and tedious, why not relieve itby wandering into some of those green enclosures that openalluring doors upon the wayside?  To roam p. 95at will,spring-heeled, high-hearted, and catching at all good fortunes,is the ambition of the youth, ere yet he has subdued himself to adestination.  The principle of self-denial seems at firstsight a treason done to genius, which was always privileged to bewilful.  In this view literature is a fortuitous series ofhappy thoughts and heaven-sent findings.  But the end ofthat plan is beggary.  Sprightly talk about the first objectthat meets the eye and the indulgence of vagabond habits soondegenerate to a professional garrulity, a forced face of dismalcheer, and a settled dislike of strenuous exercise.  Theeconomies and abstinences of discipline promise a kinder fatethan this.  They test and strengthen purpose, without whichno great work comes into being.  They save the expenditureof energy on those pastimes and diversions which lead no nearerto the goal.  To reject the images and arguments thatproffer a casual assistance yet are not to be brought under theperfect control of the main theme is difficult; how should it beotherwise, for if they were not already dear to the writer theywould not have volunteered their aid.

p. 96It isthe more difficult, in that to refuse the unfit is no warrant ofbetter help to come.  But to accept them is to fall back forgood upon a makeshift, and to hazard the enterprise in a hubbubof disorderly claims.  No train of thought is strengthenedby the addition of those arguments that, like camp-followers,swell the number and the noise, without bearing a part in theorganisation.  The danger that comes in with the employmentof figures of speech, similes, and comparisons is greaterstill.  The clearest of them may be attended by some elementof grotesque or paltry association, so that while they illuminethe subject they cannot truly be said to illustrate it.  Thenoblest, including those time-honoured metaphors that draw theirpatent of nobility from war, love, religion, or the chase, inproportion as they are strong and of a vivid presence, are alsodomineering—apt to assume command of the theme long aftertheir proper work is done.  So great is the headstrong powerof the finest metaphors, that an author may be incommoded by onethat does his business for him handsomely, as a p. 97king maysuffer the oppression of a powerful ally.  When a lyricbegins with the splendid lines,

Love still has something of the sea
From whence his mother rose,

the further development of that song is already fixed and itsknell rung—to the last line there is no escaping from thedazzling influences that presided over the first.  Yet tocarry out such a figure in detail, as Sir Charles Sedley sethimself to do, tarnishes the sudden glory of the opening. The lady whom Burns called Clarinda put herself in a likequandary by beginning a song with this stanza—

Talk not of Love, it gives me pain,
   For Love has been my foe;
He bound me in an iron chain,
   And plunged me deep in woe.

The last two lines deserve praise—even the praise theyobtained from a great lyric poet.  But how is the song to becontinued?  Genius might answer the question; to Clarindathere came only the notion of a valuable contrast to beestablished between love and friendship, and a tribute to be paidto the kindly offices of the latter.  The p. 98verseswherein she gave effect to this idea make a poor sequel;friendship, when it is personified and set beside the tyrant god,wears very much the air of a benevolent county magistrate, whosechief duty is to keep the peace.

Figures of this sort are in no sense removable decorations,they are at one with the substance of the thought to beexpressed, and are entitled to the large control theyclaim.  Imagination, working at white heat, can fairlysubdue the matter of the poem to them, or fuse them with othersof the like temper, striking unity out of the compositemass.  One thing only is forbidden, to treat thesesubstantial and living metaphors as if they were elegantcuriosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptlyon the way to more exacting topics.  The mystics, and themystical poets, knew better than to countenance thisfrivolity.  Recognising that there is a profound andintimate correspondence between all physical manifestations andthe life of the soul, they flung the reins on the neck ofmetaphor in the hope that it might carry them over thatmysterious frontier.  Their p. 99failures and misadventures,familiarly despised as “conceits,” left themfloundering in absurdity.  Yet not since the time of Donneand Crashaw has the full power and significance of figurativelanguage been realised in English poetry.  These poets, likesome of their late descendants, were tortured by a sense ofhidden meaning, and were often content with analogies that admitof no rigorous explanation.  They were convinced that allintellectual truth is a parable, though its inner meaning be darkor dubious.  The philosophy of friendship deals with thosemathematical and physical conceptions of distance, likeness, andattraction—what if the law of bodies govern souls also, andthe geometer’s compasses measure more than it has enteredinto his heart to conceive?  Is the moon a name only for acertain tonnage of dead matter, and is the law of passionparochial while the law of gravitation is universal? Mysticism will observe no such partial boundaries.

O more than Moon!
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.

p. 100Thesecret of these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of thegreatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendentalreligion and the Catholic Church.

Figure and ornament, therefore, are not interchangeable terms;the loftiest figurative style most conforms to the precepts ofgravity and chastity.  None the less there is a decorativeuse of figure, whereby a theme is enriched with imaginations andmemories that are foreign to the main purpose.  Under thishead may be classed most of those allusions to the world’sliterature, especially to classical and Scriptural lore, whichhave played so considerable, yet on the whole so idle, a part inmodern poetry.  It is here that an inordinate love ofdecoration finds its opportunity and its snare.  To keep themost elaborate comparison in harmony with its occasion, so thatwhen it is completed it shall fall back easily into the emotionalkey of the narrative, has been the study of the great epicpoets.  Milton’s description of the rebel legionsadrift on the flaming sea p. 101is a fine instance of the difficultyfelt and conquered:

         Angelforms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed
Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o’erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursued
The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore their floating carcases
And broken chariot-wheels.  So thick bestrown,
Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.

The comparison seems to wander away at random, obedient to theslightest touch of association.  Yet in the end it isbrought back, its majesty heightened, and a closer element oflikeness introduced by the skilful turn that substitutes theimage of the shattered Egyptian army for the former images ofdead leaves and sea-weed.  The incidental pictures, of theroof of shades, of the watchers from the shore, and the very name“Red Sea,” fortuitous as they may seem, all lend helpto the imagination in bodying forth p. 102the scene described.  Anearlier figure in the same book of Paradise Lost, becauseit exhibits a less conspicuous technical cunning, may even bettershow a poet’s care for unity of tone and impression. Where Satan’s prostrate bulk is compared to

            thatsea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,

the picture that follows of the Norse-pilot mooring his boatunder the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunesthe mind once more to all the pathos and gloom of those infernaldeeps:

            whilenight
Invests the sea, and wishèd morn delays.

So masterly a handling of the figures which usage and tasteprescribe to learned writers is rare indeed.  The ordinarysmall scholar disposes of his baggage less happily.  Havingheaped up knowledge as a successful tradesman heaps up money, heis apt to believe that his wealth makes him free of the companyof letters, and a fellow craftsman of the poets.  The markof his style p.103is an excessive and pretentious allusiveness.  Itwas he whom the satirist designed in that taunt, Scire tuumnihil est nisi te scire hoc sciat alter—“Myknowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge thoucovetest.”  His allusions and learned periphraseselucidate nothing; they put an idle labour on the reader whounderstands them, and extort from baffled ignorance, at which,perhaps, they are more especially aimed, a foolishadmiration.  These tricks and vanities, the very corruptionof ornament, will always be found while the power to acquireknowledge is more general than the strength to carry it or theskill to wield it.  The collector has his proper work to doin the commonwealth of learning, but the ownership of a museum isa poor qualification for the name of artist.  Knowledge hastwo good uses; it may be frankly communicated for the benefit ofothers, or it may minister matter to thought; an allusive writeroften robs it of both these functions.  He must needsdisplay his possessions and his modesty at one and the same time,producing his treasures unasked, and huddling them in uncouth p. 104fashionpast the gaze of the spectator, because, forsooth, he would notseem to make a rarity of them.  The subject to be treated,the groundwork to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for aprofitless haphazard ostentation.  This fault is veryincident to the scholarly style, which often sacrifices emphasisand conviction to a futile air of encyclopædicgrandeur.

Those who are repelled by this redundance of ornament, fromwhich even great writers are not wholly exempt, have sometimesbeen driven by the force of reaction into a singularfallacy.  The futility of these literary quirks and graceshas induced them to lay art under the same interdict withornament.  Style and stylists, one will say, have noattraction for him, he had rather hear honest men utter theirthoughts directly, clearly, and simply.  The choice ofwords, says another, and the conscious manipulation of sentences,is literary foppery; the word that first offers is commonly thebest, and the order in which the thoughts occur is the order tobe followed.  Be natural, be straightforward, they urge, andwhat p. 105youhave to say will say itself in the best possible manner.  Itis a welcome lesson, no doubt, that these deluded Arcadiansteach.  A simple and direct style—who would not givehis all to purchase that!  But is it in truth so easy to becompassed?  The greatest writers, when they are at the topof happy hours, attain to it, now and again.  Is all thistangled contrariety of things a kind of fairyland, and does thewriter, alone among men, find that a beaten foot-path opens outbefore him as he goes, to lead him, straight through the maze, tothe goal of his desires?  To think so is to build a childishdream out of facts imperfectly observed, and worthy of a closerobservation.  Sometimes the cry for simplicity is thereverse of what it seems, and is uttered by those who had ratherhear words used in their habitual vague acceptations than submitto the cutting directness of a good writer.  Habit makesobscurity grateful, and the simple style, in this view, is thestyle that allows thought to run automatically into its oldgrooves and burrows.  The original writers who have combinedreal p.106literary power with the heresy of ease and nature areof another kind.  A brutal personality, excellentlymuscular, snatching at words as the handiest weapons wherewith toinflict itself, and the whole body of its thoughts andpreferences, on suffering humanity, is likely enough to deridethe daintiness of conscious art.  Such a writer is WilliamCobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity ofhis style, which he raised into a kind of creed.  His poweris undeniable; his diction, though he knew it not, both choiceand chaste; yet page after page of his writing suggests only thereflection that here is a prodigal waste of good English. He bludgeons all he touches, and spends the same monotonousemphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of theGovernment.  His is the simplicity of a crude and violentmind, concerned only with giving forcible expression to itsunquestioned prejudices.  Irrelevance, the besetting sin ofthe ill-educated, he glories in, so that his very weakness putson the semblance of strength, and helps to wield the hammer.

p. 107It isnot to be denied that there is a native force of temperamentwhich can make itself felt even through illiteratecarelessness.  “Literary gentlemen, editors, andcritics,” says Thoreau, himself by no means a carelesswriter, “think that they know how to write, because theyhave studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiouslymistaken.  The artof composition is as simple as thedischarge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply aninfinitely greater force behind them.”  This truesaying introduces us to the hardest problem of criticism, theparadox of literature, the stumbling-block of rhetoricians. To analyse the precise method whereby a great personality canmake itself felt in words, even while it neglects and contemnsthe study of words, would be to lay bare the secrets of religionand life—it is beyond human competence.  Neverthelessa brief and diffident consideration of the matter may bring thusmuch comfort, that the seeming contradiction is no discredit caston letters, but takes its origin rather from too narrow andpedantic a view of the scope of letters.

p. 108Wordsare things: it is useless to try to set them in a worldapart.  They exist in books only by accident, and for onewritten there are a thousand, infinitely more powerful,spoken.  They are deeds: the man who brings word of a lostbattle can work no comparable effect with the muscles of his arm;Iago’s breath is as truly laden with poison and murder asthe fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin.  Hencethe sternest education in the use of words is least of all to begained in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highlyartificial state of seclusion.  A soldier cares little forpoetry, because it is the exercise of power that he loves, and heis accustomed to do more with his words than give pleasure. To keep language in immediate touch with reality, to lade it withaction and passion, to utter it hot from the heart ofdetermination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of power. All this may be achieved without the smallest study of literarymodels, and is consistent with a perfect neglect of literarycanons.  It is not the logical content of the word, but thewhole mesh of its conditions, p. 109including the character,circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that is its truestrength.  “Damn” is often the feeblest ofexpletives, and “as you please” may be the dirge ofan empire.  Hence it is useless to look to the grammarian,or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style; the laws thathe has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only in hisown abstract world.  A breath of hesitancy will sometimesmake trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing,a thing three times said, and each time said badly, may be ofmore effect than that terse, full, and final expression which thedoctors rightly commend.  The art of language, regarded as aquestion of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logicand thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although,as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, withwords alone you can do next to nothing.  The realm wherespeech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted,and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, andinvaded by the ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of p. 110the earthmust first tame the fire and the sea.  Dramatic andnarrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence area part of their material; the story-teller or the playwright canmake of words a background and definition for deeds, a frameworkfor those silences that are more telling than any speech. Here lies an escape from the poverty of content and method towhich self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; andtherefore are epic and drama rated above all other kinds ofpoetry.  The greater force of the objective treatment iswitnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets, whose ambition hasled them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or theplay.  There are weaknesses inherent in all directself-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet thereis no great occasion for the saying of it; a fine reticence isobserved, but it is, after all, an easy reticence, with none ofthe dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack.  In themidst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought upshort by the question, “Why must you still betalking?”  Even the passionate lyric feels the need ofexternal p.111authorisation, and some of the finest of lyrical poems,like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth’sSolitary Reaper, are cast in a dramatic mould, that beautyof diction may be vitalised by an imagined situation.  Morethan others the dramatic art is an enemy to the desultory and thesuperfluous, sooner than others it will cast away all formalgrace of expression that it may come home more directly to thebusiness and bosoms of men.  Its great power and scope areshown well in this, that it can find high uses for the commoneststuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of dailyintercourse.

Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic qualityof impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with theelementary facts of life, are literary excellences best known inthe drama, and in its modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and novelist create their own characters, set theirown scenes, lay their own plots, and when all has been thusprepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor ofgreat opportunities, all its virtues magnified by p. 112the glamourof its high estate.  Writers on philosophy, morals, oræsthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquygenerally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain tocomparable effects.  They work at two removes from life; theterms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours ofdiscussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response. Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond theirreach; the matter of their discourse is intricate, and the mostthey can do is to employ patience, care, and economy of labour;the meaning of their words is not obvious, and they must go asideto define it.  The strength of their writing has limits setfor it by the nature of the chosen task, and any transgression ofthese limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence.  Allwriting partakes of the quality of the drama, there is always asituation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker andthe hearer.  A gentleman in black, expounding his views, ornarrating his autobiography to the first comer, can expect nosuch warmth of response as greets the dying speech of the baffledpatriot; yet he p.113too may take account of the reasons that prompt speech,may display sympathy and tact, and avoid the faults ofsenility.  The only character that can lend strength to hiswords is his own, and he sketches it while he states hisopinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings isimplied in the very arguments he uses.  Who does not knowthe curious blank effect of eloquence overstrained or out ofplace?  The phrasing may be exquisite, the thoughtwell-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it were, dumb-showwhere no community of feeling exists between the speaker and hisaudience.  A similar false note is struck by any speaker orwriter who misapprehends his position or forgets hisdisqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that isseemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachersexceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemningfrailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard,by Satan rebuking sin.

“How many things are there,” exclaims the wiseVerulam, “which a man cannot, with any face or comeliness,say or do himself!  A man’s p. 114person hathmany proper relations which he cannot put off.  A man cannotspeak to his son but as a father; to his wife, but as a husband;to his enemy but upon terms; whereas a friend may speak as thecase requires, and not as it sorteth with theperson.”  The like “proper relations”govern writers, even where their audience is unknown tothem.  It has often been remarked how few are thestory-tellers who can introduce themselves, so much as by apassing reflection or sentiment, without a discordanteffect.  The friend who saves the situation is found in oneand another of the creatures of their art.

For those who must play their own part the effort to concealthemselves is of no avail.  The implicit attitude of awriter makes itself felt; an undue swelling of his subject toheroic dimensions, an unwarrantable assumption of sympathy, atendency to truck with friends or with enemies by the way, areall possible indications of weakness, which move even the leastskilled of readers to discount what is said, as they catch hereand there a glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young p. 115dandy,behind the imposing literary mask.  Strong writers are thosewho, with every reserve of power, seek no exhibition ofstrength.  It is as if language could not come by its fullmeaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an evilnecessity.  Every word is torn from them, as from areluctant witness.  They come to speech as to a last resort,when all other ways have failed.  The bane of a literaryeducation is that it induces talkativeness, and an overweeningconfidence in words.  But those whose words are stark andterrible seem almost to despise words.

With words literature begins, and to words it mustreturn.  Coloured by the neighbourhood of silence,solemnised by thought or steeled by action, words are still itsonly means of rising above words.  “Accedat verbumad elementum,” said St. Ambrose, “et fiatsacramentum.”  So the elementary passions, pityand love, wrath and terror, are not in themselves poetical; theymust be wrought upon by the word to become poetry.  In noother way can suffering be transformed to pathos, or horror reachits apotheosis in tragedy.

p. 116Whenall has been said, there remains a residue capable of no formalexplanation.  Language, this array of conventional symbolsloosely strung together, and blown about by every wanderingbreath, is miraculously vital and expressive, justifying not afew of the myriad superstitions that have always attached to itsuse.  The same words are free to all, yet no wealth ordistinction of vocabulary is needed for a group of words to takethe stamp of an individual mind and character.  “As aquality of style” says Mr. Pater, “soul is afact.”  To resolve how words, like bodies, becometransparent when they are inhabited by that luminous reality, isa higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly.  Ardentpersuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakesttake on glory.  The humblest and most despised of commonphrases may be the chosen vessel for the next avatar of thespirit.  It is the old problem, to be met only by the oldsolution of the Platonist, that

Soul is form, and doth the body make.

The soul is able to inform language by some p. 117strangemeans other than the choice and arrangement of words andphrases.  Real novelty of vocabulary is impossible; in thematter of language we lead a parasitical existence, and arealways quoting.  Quotations, conscious or unconscious, varyin kind according as the mind is active to work upon them andmake them its own.  In its grossest and most servile formquotation is a lazy folly; a thought has received some signal ornotorious expression, and as often as the old sense, or somethinglike it, recurs, the old phrase rises to the lips.  Thisdegenerates to simple phrase-mongering, and those who practise itare not vigilantly jealous of their meaning.  Such anexpression as “fine by degrees and beautifully less”is often no more than a bloated equivalent for a singleword—say “diminishing” or“shrinking.”  Quotations like this are the wartsand excremental parts of language; the borrowings of good writersare never thus superfluous, their quotations areappropriations.  Whether it be by some witty turn given to awell-known line, by an original setting for an old saw, or by anew and p.118unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of the borrower is putupon the goods he borrows, and he becomes part owner. Plagiarism is a crime only where writing is a trade; expressionneed never be bound by the law of copyright while it followsthought, for thought, as some great thinker has observed, isfree.  The words were once Shakespeare’s; if only youcan feel them as he did, they are yours now no less thanhis.  The best quotations, the best translations, the bestthefts, are all equally new and original works.  Fromquotation, at least, there is no escape, inasmuch as we learnlanguage from others.  All common phrases that do the dirtywork of the world are quotations—poor things, and not ourown.  Who first said that a book would “repayperusal,” or that any gay scene was “bright with allthe colours of the rainbow”?  There is no need tocondemn these phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferiorwork to do.  The expression of thought, temperament,attitude, is not the whole of its business.  It is only aliterary fop or doctrinaire who will attempt to remint all thesmall defaced coinage p. 119that passes through his hands, onlya lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventionalgarments and all conventional speech.  At a modern weddingthe frock-coat is worn, the presents are “numerous andcostly,” and there is an “ovation accorded to thehappy pair.”  These things are part of our publiccivilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to belightly set aside.  But let it be a friend of your own whois to marry, a friend of your own who dies, and you are toexpress yourself—the problem is changed, you feel all thedifficulties of the art of style, and fathom something of thedepth of your unskill.  Forbidden silence, we should be in apoor way indeed.

Single words too we plagiarise when we use them withoutrealisation and mastery of their meaning.  The best argumentfor a succinct style is this, that if you use words you do notneed, or do not understand, you cannot use them well.  It isnot what a word means, but what it means to you, that is of thedeepest import.  Let it be a weak word, with a poor historybehind it, if you p.120have done good thinking with it, you may yet use it tosurprising advantage.  But if, on the other hand, it be astrong word that has never aroused more than a misty idea and aflickering emotion in your mind, here lies your danger.  Youmay use it, for there is none to hinder; and it will betrayyou.  The commonest Saxon words prove explosive machines inthe hands of rash impotence.  It is perhaps a certain uneasyconsciousness of danger, a suspicion that weakness of soul cannotwield these strong words, that makes debility avoid them,committing itself rather, as if by some pre-established affinity,to the vaguer Latinised vocabulary.  Yet they are not all tobe avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on someoccult ability in their employer.  For every living person,if the material were obtainable, a separate historical dictionarymight be compiled, recording where each word was first heard orseen, where and how it was first used.  The references areutterly beyond recovery; but such a register would throw astrange light on individual styles.  The eloquent trifler,whose stock of words p. 121has been accumulated by a pair oflight fingers, would stand denuded of his plausible pretences assoon as it were seen how roguishly he came by hiseloquence.  There may be literary quality, it is well toremember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has beenhappily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be.  Yet thevoice will sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chancelisteners, for a genuine utterance of humanity; and the like istrue in literature.  But writing cannot be luminous andgreat save in the hands of those whose words are their own by theindefeasible title of conquest.  Life is spent in learningthe meaning of great words, so that some idle proverb, known foryears and accepted perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day,like a blow.  “If there were not a God,” saidVoltaire, “it would be necessary to inventhim.”  Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word,but some of those who use it most, if they would be perfectlysincere, should enclose it in quotation marks.  Wholenations go for centuries without coining names for certainvirtues; is it credible p. 122that among other peoples, where thenames exists the need for them is epidemic?  The author ofthe Ecclesiastial Polityputs a bolder and truer face onthe matter.  “Concerning that Faith, Hope, andCharity,” he writes, “without which there can be nosalvation, was there ever any mention made saving only in thatLaw which God himself hath from Heaven revealed?  There isnot in the world a syllable muttered with certain truthconcerning any of these three, more than hath been supernaturallyreceived from the mouth of the eternal God.” Howsoever they came to us, we have the words; they, and manyother terms of tremendous import, are bandied about from mouth tomouth and alternately enriched or impoverished in meaning. Is the “Charity” of St. Paul’s Epistle one withthe charity of “charity-blankets”?  Are the“crusades” of Godfrey and of the great St. Louis,where knightly achievement did homage to the religious temper,essentially the same as that process of harrying the wretched andthe outcast for which the muddle-headed, greasy citizen of p. 123to-dayinvokes the same high name?  Of a truth, some kingly wordsfall to a lower estate than Nebuchadnezzar.

Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar.  Itis in this obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set withthorns, and haunted by shadows, this World of Words, as theElizabethans finely called it, that we wander, eternal pioneers,during the course of our mortal lives.  To be overtaken by amaster, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured skill andcourage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make thecrooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gainfresh confidence from despair.  He twines wreaths of theentangling ivy, and builds ramparts of the thorns.  Heblazes his mark upon the secular oaks, as a guidance to latertravellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of moulderingrubbish.  There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity, clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real andeasy.  In the light of great literary achievement, straightand wonderful, like the roads of the ancient Romans, barbarismtorments p.124the mind like a riddle.  Yet there are the duskybarbarians!—fleeing from the harmonious tread of theordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass ofvulgar sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits oflow thought.

It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculativeconsideration of any subject with the counsels of practicalwisdom.  The words of this essay have been vain indeed ifthe idea that style may be imparted by tuition has eluded them,and survived.  There is a useful art of Grammar, which takesfor its province the right and the wrong in speech.  Styledeals only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, onoccasion, the rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offencesagainst them.  Yet no one is a better judge of equity forignorance of the law, and grammatical practice offers a fairfield wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and versatility. The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, themarshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, tobe learned.  There p. 125is a kind of inarticulate disorderto which writers are liable, quite distinct from a bad style, andcaused chiefly by lack of exercise.  An unpractised writerwill sometimes send a beautiful and powerful phrase jostlingalong in the midst of a clumsy sentence—like a crowned kingescorted by a mob.

But Style cannot be taught.  Imitation of the masters, orof some one chosen master, and the constant purging of languageby a severe criticism, have their uses, not to be belittled; theyhave also their dangers.  The greater part of what is calledthe teaching of style must always be negative, bad habits may bebroken down, old malpractices prohibited.  The pillory andthe stocks are hardly educational agents, but they make it easierfor honest men to enjoy their own.  If style could really betaught, it is a question whether its teachers should not beregarded as mischief-makers and enemies of mankind.  TheRosicrucians professed to have found the philosopher’sstone, and the shadowy sages of modern Thibet are said, by thosewho speak for them, to have compassed the p.126instantaneous transference of bodies from place toplace.  In either case, the holders of these secrets havelaudably refused to publish them, lest avarice and malice shouldrun amuck in human society.  A similar fear might well visitthe conscience of one who should dream that he had divulged tothe world at large what can be done with language.  Of thisthere is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency,emphasis, and other warlike equipments at the disposal of evilforces, but style, like the Christian religion, is one of thoseopen secrets which are most easily and most effectively kept bythe initiate from age to age.  Divination is the only meansof access to these mysteries.  The formal attempt to imparta good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher ofgesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected;and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatricalpostures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, areall that can be imparted.  The truth of the old Romanteachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a goodorator it is first of all necessary to be a good man.  Goodp. 127style isthe greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the soul.  Thesoul of the cheat shuns nothing so much.  “Always beready to speak your minds” said Blake, “and a baseman will avoid you.”  But to insist that he also shallspeak his mind is to go a step further, it is to take from theimpostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative whine, hismumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to standerect among its fellows and declare itself.  His occupationis gone, and he does not love the censor who deprives him of theweapons of his mendicity.

All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of thesoul.  Mind we have in common, inasmuch as the laws of rightreason are not different for different minds.  Thereforeclearness and arrangement can be taught, sheer incompetence inthe art of expression can be partly remedied.  But who shallimpose laws upon the soul?  It is thus of common note thatone may dislike or even hate a particular style while admiringits facility, its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matterset forth.  Milton, a chaster and more unerring p. 128master ofthe art than Shakespeare, reveals no such lovablepersonality.  While persons count for much, style, the indexto persons, can never count for little. “Speak,” it has been said, “that I may knowyou”—voice-gesture is more than feature.  Write,and after you have attained to some control over the instrument,you write yourself down whether you will or no.  There is novice, however unconscious, no virtue, however shy, no touch ofmeanness or of generosity in your character, that will not passon to the paper.  You anticipate the Day of Judgment andfurnish the recording angel with material.  The Art ofCriticism in literature, so often decried and given a subordinateplace among the arts, is none other than the art of reading andinterpreting these written evidences.  Criticism has beenpopularly opposed to creation, perhaps because the kind ofcreation that it attempts is rarely achieved, and so the worldforgets that the main business of Criticism, after all, is not tolegislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.  Graves,at its command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and p. 129let themforth.  It is by the creative power of this art that theliving man is reconstructed from the litter of blurred andfragmentary paper documents that he has left to posterity.

THEEND

Printed byR. & R. Clark, Limited,Edinburgh

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