Style

Transcribed from the 1904 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email

ccx074@.org

STYLE

* * * * *

BY

WALTER RALEIGH

AUTHOR OF ‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL,’

AND ‘ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A CRITICAL ESSAY’

* * * * *

_FIFTH IMPRESSION_

* * * * *

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD

Publisher to the India Office

1904

* * * * *

JOANNI SAMPSON

BIBLIOTHECARIO OPTIMO

VIRO OMNI SAPIENTIA ÆGYPTIORUM

ERUDITO

LABORUM ET ITINERUM SUORUM

SOCIO

HUNC LIBELLUM

D · D · D

AUCTOR

TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS

CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY

PAGE

The Triumph of Letters 1

The Problem of Style 3

The Instrument and the Audience, with a Digression on the 4

Actor

The Sense-Elements 8

The Functions of Sense 10

Picture 11

Melody 14

Meaning, Exampled in Negation 17

The Weapons of Thought 21

The Analogy from Architecture 23

The Analogy Rectified. The Law of Change 24

The Good Slang 27

The Bad Slang 29

Archaism 32

Romantic and Classic 36

The Palsy of Definition 39

Distinction 43

Assimilation 45

Synonyms 46

Variety of Expression 49

Variety Justified 50

Metaphor and Abstraction: Poetry and Science 55

The Doctrine of the _Mot Propre_ 61

The Instrument 65

The Audience 65

The Relation of the Author to his Audience 71

The Poet and his Audience 71

Public Caterers 77

The Cautelous Man 78

Sentimentalism and Jocularity 81

The Tripe-Seller 83

The Wag 85

Social and Rhetorical Corruptions 87

Sincerity 88

Insincerity 93

Austerity 94

The Figurative Style 98

Decoration 100

Allusiveness 102

Simplicity and Strength 104

The Paradox of Letters 107

Drama 108

Implicit Drama 111

Words Again 115

Quotation 116

Appropriation 119

The World of Words 123

The Teaching of Style 124

The Conclusion 127

STYLE

STYLE, the Latin name for an iron pen, has come to designate the art that

handles, with ever fresh vitality and wary alacrity, the fluid elements

of speech. By a figure, obvious enough, which yet might serve for an

epitome of literary method, the most rigid and simplest of instruments

has lent its name to the subtlest and most flexible of arts. Thence the

application of the word has been extended to arts other than literature,

to the whole range of the activities 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 we can apply it to the

careful achievements of the housebreaker and the poisoner, and to the

spontaneous animal movements of the limbs of man or beast, is the noblest

of unconscious tributes to the faculty of letters. The pen, scratching

on wax 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, with its undulations and

inflexions, assisted by the mobile play of feature and an infinite

variety of bodily gesture, is driven to borrow dignity from the same

metaphor; the orator and the actor are fain to be judged by style. “It

is most true,” says the author of _The Anatomy of Melancholy_, “_stylus

virum arguit_, our style bewrays us.” Other gestures shift and change

and flit, this is the ultimate and enduring revelation of personality.

The actor and the orator are condemned to work evanescent effects on

transitory material; the dust that they write on is blown about their

graves. The sculptor and the architect deal in less perishable ware, but

the stuff is recalcitrant and stubborn, and will not take the impress of

all states of the soul. Morals, philosophy, and æsthetic, mood and

conviction, creed and whim, habit, passion, and demonstration—what art

but the art of literature admits the entrance of all these, and guards

them from the suddenness of mortality? What other art gives scope to

natures and dispositions so diverse, and to tastes so contrarious?

Euclid and Shelley, Edmund Spenser and Herbert Spencer, King David and

David Hume, are all followers of the art of letters.

In the effort to explain the principles of an art so bewildering in its

variety, writers on style have gladly availed themselves of analogy from

the other arts, and have spoken, for the most part, not without a

parable. It is a pleasant trick they put upon their pupils, whom they

gladden with the delusion of a golden age, and perfection to be sought

backwards, in arts less complex. The teacher of writing, past master in

the juggling craft of language, explains that he is only carrying into

letters the principles of counterpoint, or that it is all a matter of

colour and perspective, or that structure and ornament are the beginning

and end of his intent. Professor of eloquence and of thieving, his

winged shoes remark him as he skips from metaphor to metaphor, not daring

to trust himself to the partial and frail support of any single figure.

He lures the astonished novice through as many trades as were ever housed

in the central hall of the world’s fair. From his distracting account of

the business it would appear that he is now building a monument, anon he

is painting a picture (with brushes dipped in a gallipot made of an

earthquake); again he strikes a keynote, weaves a pattern, draws a wire,

drives a nail, treads a measure, sounds a trumpet, or hits a target; or

skirmishes around his subject; or lays it bare with a dissecting knife;

or embalms a thought; or crucifies an enemy. What is he really doing all

the time?

* * * * *

Besides the artist two things are to be considered in every art,—the

instrument and the audience; or, to deal in less figured phrase, the

medium and the public. From both of these the artist, if he would find

freedom for the exercise of all his powers, must sit decently aloof. It

is the misfortune of the actor, the singer, and the dancer, that their

bodies are their sole instruments. On to the stage of their activities

they carry the heart that nourishes them and the lungs wherewith they

breathe, so that the soul, to escape degradation, must seek a more remote

and difficult privacy. That immemorial right of the soul to make the

body its home, a welcome escape from publicity and a refuge for

sincerity, must be largely foregone by the actor, who has scant liberty

to decorate and administer for his private behoof an apartment that is

also a place of business. His ownership is limited by the necessities of

his trade; when the customers are gone, he eats and sleeps in the

bar-parlour. Nor is the instrument of his performances a thing of his

choice; the poorest skill of the violinist may exercise itself upon a

Stradivarius, but the actor is reduced to fiddle for the term of his

natural life upon the face and fingers that he got from his mother. The

serene detachment that may be achieved by disciples of greater arts can

hardly be his, applause touches his personal pride too nearly, the

mocking echoes of derision infest the solitude of his retired

imagination. In none of the world’s great polities has the practice of

this art been found consistent with noble rank or honourable estate.

Christianity might be expected to spare some sympathy for a calling that

offers prizes to abandonment and self-immolation, but her eye is fixed on

a more distant mark than the pleasure of the populace, and, as in

gladiatorial Rome of old, her best efforts have been used to stop the

games. Society, on the other hand, preoccupied with the art of life, has

no warmer gift than patronage for those whose skill and energy exhaust

themselves on the mimicry of life. The reward of social consideration is

refused, it is true, to all artists, or accepted by them at their

immediate peril. By a natural adjustment, in countries where the artist

has sought and attained a certain modest social elevation, the issue has

been changed, and the architect or painter, when his health is proposed,

finds himself, sorely against the grain, returning thanks for the

employer of labour, the genial host, the faithful husband, the tender

father, and other pillars of society. The risk of too great familiarity

with an audience which insists on honouring the artist irrelevantly, at

the expense of the art, must be run by all; a more clinging evil besets

the actor, in that he can at no time wholly escape from his phantasmal

second self. On this creature of his art he has lavished the last doit

of human capacity for expression; with what bearing shall he face the

exacting realities of life? Devotion to his profession has beggared him

of his personality; ague, old age and poverty, love and death, find in

him an entertainer who plies them with a feeble repetition of the

triumphs formerly prepared for a larger and less imperious audience. The

very journalist—though he, too, when his profession takes him by the

throat, may expound himself to his wife in phrases stolen from his own

leaders—is a miracle of detachment in comparison; he has not put his

laughter to sale. It is well for the soul’s health of the artist that a

definite boundary should separate his garden from his farm, so that when

he escapes from the conventions that rule his work he may be free to

recreate himself. But where shall the weary player keep holiday? Is not

all the world a stage?

Whatever the chosen instrument of an art may be, its appeal to those

whose attention it bespeaks must be made through the senses. Music,

which works with the vibrations of a material substance, makes this

appeal through the ear; painting through the eye; it is of a piece with

the complexity of the literary art that it employs both channels,—as it

might seem to a careless apprehension, indifferently.

For the writer’s pianoforte is the dictionary, words are the material in

which he works, and words may either strike the ear or be gathered by the

eye from the printed page. The alternative will be called delusive, for,

in European literature at least, there is no word-symbol that does not

imply a spoken sound, and no excellence without euphony. But the other

way is possible, the gulf between mind and mind may be bridged by

something which has a right to the name of literature although it exacts

no aid from the ear. The picture-writing of the Indians, the hieroglyphs

of Egypt, may be cited as examples of literary meaning conveyed with no

implicit help from the spoken word. Such an art, were it capable of high

development, would forsake the kinship of melody, and depend for its

sensual elements of delight on the laws of decorative pattern. In a land

of deaf-mutes it might come to a measure of perfection. But where human

intercourse is chiefly by speech, its connexion with the interests and

passions of daily life would perforce be of the feeblest, it would tend

more and more to cast off the fetters of meaning that it might do freer

service to the jealous god of visible beauty. The overpowering rivalry

of speech would rob it of all its symbolic intent and leave its bare

picture. Literature has favoured rather the way of the ear and has given

itself zealously to the tuneful ordering of sounds. Let it be repeated,

therefore, that for the traffic of letters the senses are but the

door-keepers of the mind; none of them commands an only way of

access,—the deaf can read by sight, the blind by touch. It is not amid

the bustle of the live senses, but in an under-world of dead impressions

that Poetry works her will, raising that in power which was sown in

weakness, quickening a spiritual body from the ashes of the natural body.

The mind of man is peopled, like some silent city, with a sleeping

company of 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 marching trumpets, or stealthily, by

noiseless passages and dark posterns, the troop of suggesters enters the

citadel, to do its work within. The procession of beautiful sounds that

is a poem passes in through the main gate, and forthwith the by-ways

resound to the hurry of ghostly feet, until the small company of

adventurers is well-nigh lost and overwhelmed in that throng of insurgent

spirits.

To attempt to reduce the art of literature to its component

sense-elements is therefore vain. Memory, “the warder of the brain,” is

a fickle trustee, whimsically lavish to strangers, giving up to the

appeal of a spoken word or unspoken symbol, an odour or a touch, all that

has been garnered by the sensitive capacities of man. It is the part of

the writer to play upon memory, confusing what belongs to one sense with

what belongs to another, extorting images of colour at a word, raising

ideas of harmony without breaking the stillness of the air. He can lead

on the dance of words till their sinuous movements call forth, as if by

mesmerism, the likeness of some adamantine rigidity, time is converted

into space, and music begets sculpture. To see for the sake of seeing,

to hear for the sake of hearing, are subsidiary exercises of his complex

metaphysical art, to be counted among its rudiments. Picture and music

can furnish but the faint beginnings of a philosophy of letters.

Necessary though they be to a writer, they are transmuted in his service

to new forms, and made to further purposes not their own.

The power of vision—hardly can a writer, least of all if he be a poet,

forego that part of his equipment. In dealing with the impalpable, dim

subjects that lie beyond the border-land of exact knowledge, the poetic

instinct seeks always to bring them into clear definition and bright

concrete imagery, so that it might seem for the moment as if painting

also could deal with them. Every abstract conception, as it passes into

the light of the creative imagination, acquires structure and firmness

and colour, as flowers do in the light of the sun. Life and Death, Love

and Youth, Hope and Time, become persons in poetry, not that they may

wear the tawdry habiliments of the studio, but because persons are the

objects of the most familiar sympathy and the most intimate knowledge.

How long, O Death? And shall thy feet depart

Still a young child’s with mine, or wilt thou stand

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 is essential to all

writing, whether prose or poetry, that attempts the heart, so languor of

the visual faculty can work disaster even in the calm periods of

philosophic expatiation. “It cannot be doubted,” says one whose daily

meditations enrich _The People’s Post-Bag_, “that Fear is, to a great

extent, the mother of Cruelty.” Alas, by the introduction of that brief

proviso, conceived in a spirit of admirably cautious self-defence, the

writer has unwittingly given himself to the horns of a dilemma whose

ferocity nothing can mitigate. These tempered and conditional truths are

not in nature, which decrees, with uncompromising dogmatism, that either

a woman is one’s mother, or she is not. The writer probably meant merely

that “fear is one of the causes of cruelty,” and had he used a colourless

abstract word the platitude might pass unchallenged. But a vague desire

for the emphasis and glamour of literature having brought in the word

“mother,” has yet failed to set the sluggish imagination to work, and a

word so glowing with picture and vivid with sentiment is damped and

dulled by the thumb-mark of besotted usage to mean no more than “cause”

or “occasion.” Only for the poet, perhaps, are words live winged things,

flashing with colour and laden with scent; yet one poor spark of

imagination might save them from this sad descent to sterility and

darkness.

Of no less import is the power of melody which chooses, rejects, and

orders words for the satisfaction that a cunningly varied return of sound

can give to the ear. Some critics have amused themselves with the hope

that here, in the laws and practices regulating the audible cadence of

words, may be found the first principles of style, the form which

fashions the matter, the apprenticeship to beauty which alone can make an

art of truth. And it may be admitted that verse, owning, as it does, a

professed and canonical allegiance to music, sometimes carries its

devotion so far that thought swoons into melody, and the thing said seems

a discovery made by the way in the search for tuneful expression.

What thing unto 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 message dost thou bring?

In this stanza an exquisitely modulated tune is played upon the syllables

that make up the word “wandering,” even as, in the poem from which it is

taken, there is every echo of the noise of waters laughing in sunny

brooks, or moaning in dumb hidden caverns. Yet even here it would be

vain to seek for reason why each particular sound of every line should be

itself and no other. For melody holds no absolute dominion over either

verse or prose; its laws, never to be disregarded, prohibit rather than

prescribe. Beyond the simple ordinances that determine the place of the

rhyme in verse, and the average number of syllables, or rhythmical beats,

that occur in the line, where shall laws be found to regulate the

sequence of consonants and vowels from syllable to syllable? Those few

artificial restrictions, which verse invents for itself, once agreed on,

a necessary and perilous license makes up the rest of the code.

Literature can never conform to the dictates of pure euphony, while

grammar, which has been shaped not in the interests of prosody, but for

the service of thought, bars the way with its clumsy inalterable

polysyllables and the monotonous sing-song of its inflexions. On the

other hand, among a hundred ways of saying a thing, there are more than

ninety that a care for euphony may reasonably forbid. All who have

consciously practised the art of writing know what endless and painful

vigilance is needed for the avoidance of the unfit or untuneful phrase,

how the meaning must be tossed from expression to expression, mutilated

and deceived, ere it can find rest in words. The stupid accidental

recurrence of a single broad vowel; the cumbrous repetition of a

particle; the emphatic phrase for which no emphatic place can be found

without disorganising the structure of the period; the pert intrusion on

a solemn thought of a flight of short syllables, twittering like a flock

of sparrows; or that vicious trick of sentences whereby each, unmindful

of its position and duties, tends to imitate the deformities of its

predecessor;—these are a select few of the difficulties that the nature

of language and of man conspire to put upon the writer. He is well

served by his mind and ear if he can win past all such traps and

ambuscades, robbed of only a little of his treasure, indemnified by the

careless generosity of his spoilers, and still singing.

Besides their chime in the ear, and the images that they put before the

mind’s eye, words have, for their last and greatest possession, a

meaning. They carry messages and suggestions that, in the effect

wrought, elude all the senses equally. For the sake of this, their prime

office, the rest is many times forgotten or scorned, the tune is

disordered and havoc played with the lineaments of the picture, because

without these the word can still do its business. The refutation of

those critics who, in their analysis of the power of literature, make

much of music and picture, is contained in the most moving passages that

have found utterance from man. Consider the intensity of a saying like

that of St. Paul:—“For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor

angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to

come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to

separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Do these verses draw their power from a skilful arrangement of vowel and

consonant? But they are quoted from a translation, and can be translated

otherwise, well or ill or indifferently, without losing more than a

little of their virtue. Do they impress the eye by opening before it a

prospect of vast extent, peopled by vague shapes? On the contrary, the

visual embodiment of the ideas suggested kills the sense of the passage,

by lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the measure of a

poplar-tree. Death and life, height and depth, are conceived by the

apostle, and creation thrown in like a trinket, only that they may lend

emphasis to the denial that is the soul of his purpose. Other arts can

affirm, or seem to affirm, with all due wealth of circumstance and

detail; they can heighten their affirmation by the modesty of reserve,

the surprises of a studied brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence;

literature alone can deny, and honour the denial with the last resources

of a power that has the universe for its treasury. It is this negative

capability of words, their privative force, whereby they can impress the

minds with a sense of “vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence,” that

Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger days. In such a

phrase as “the angel of the Lord” language mocks the positive rivalry of

the pictorial art, which can offer only the poor pretence of an

equivalent in a young man painted with wings. But the difference between

the two arts is even better marked in the matter of negative suggestion;

it is instanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describes

the descent of Æneas and the Sibyl to the shades of the nether world.

Here are amassed all “the images of a tremendous dignity” that the poet

could forge from the sublime of denial. The two most famous lines are a

procession 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 effects of literature; strong

epithets like “lonely,” “supreme,” “invisible,” “eternal,” “inexorable,”

with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the

vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words,

less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend,

bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such

words as “ominous,” “fantastic,” “attenuated,” “bewildered,”

“justification,” are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the

soul with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity. It is

precisely in his dealings with words like these, “heated originally by

the breath of others,” that a poet’s fine sense and knowledge most avail

him. The company a word has kept, its history, faculties, and

predilections, endear or discommend it to his instinct. How hardly will

poetry consent to employ such words as “congratulation” or

“philanthropist,”—words of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in

fraudulent rejoicings and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How

eagerly will the poetic imagination seize on a word like “control,” which

gives scope by its very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of

association. All words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the

vague, have their offices to perform in language, but the loftiest

purposes of poetry are seldom served by those explicit hard words which,

like tiresome explanatory persons, say all that they mean. Only in the

focus and centre of man’s knowledge is there place for the hammer-blows

of affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints and half-lights,

echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.

The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and meaning,

has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry. In

Shakespeare’s work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment

with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the

roots of the universe with the particular fact; tempting the mind to

explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away

from it, and held by something behind.

It 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 the virtue that belongs to the weapons of

thought,—a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies and

pierces behind 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 imposed on a passive

material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that transfigure even

the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the energy of thinking

purpose. The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar phrase, on “mere

words” bears witness to the rarity of this serious consummation. Yet by

words the world was shaped out of chaos, by words the Christian religion

was established among mankind. Are these terrific engines fit

play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?

And now it begins to be apparent that no adequate description of the art

of language can be drawn from the technical terminology of the other

arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly pledge their substance to

repay an obligation that they cannot disclaim. Let one more attempt to

supply literature with a parallel be quoted from the works of a writer on

style, whose high merit it is that he never loses sight, either in theory

or in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper to the craft of

letters. Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was

impressed by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the

laws of their arrangement by a reference to the principles of

architecture. “The sister arts,” he says, “enjoy the use of a plastic

and ductile material, like the modeller’s clay; literature alone is

condemned to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have

seen those blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a

pediment, a third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such

arbitrary size and figure that the literary architect is condemned to

design the palace of his art. Nor is this all; for since these blocks or

words are the acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here

possible none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief,

continuity, and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no

inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture;

but every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical

progression, and convey a definite conventional import.”

It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the morose angularity

that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably insistent on the chief

of the incommodities imposed upon the writer, the necessity, at all times

and at all costs, to mean something. The boon of the recurring

monotonous expanse, that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of

restful mechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs

shoulder the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying

patterns, with his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master,

the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing,

and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same. But

if in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to differ,

there remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in the building

materials of the two arts, those blocks of “arbitrary size and figure;

finite and quite rigid.” There is truth enough in the comparison to make

it illuminative, but he would be a rash dialectician who should attempt

to draw from it, by way of inference, a philosophy of letters. Words are

piled on words, and bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to

think words the more intractable. Truly, it was a man of letters who

said it, avenging himself on his profession for the never-ending toil it

imposed, by miscalling it, with grim pleasantry, the architecture of the

nursery. Finite and quite rigid words are not, in any sense that holds

good of bricks. They move and change, they wax and wane, they wither and

burgeon; from age to age, from place to place, from mouth to mouth, they

are never at a stay. They take on colour, intensity, and vivacity from

the infection of neighbourhood; the same word is of several shapes and

diverse imports in one and the same sentence; they depend on the building

that they compose for the very chemistry of the stuff that composes 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 meanings the art of literature would perish. For words

carry with them all the meanings they have worn, and the writer shall be

judged by those that he selects for prominence in the train of his

thought. A slight technical implication, a faint tinge of archaism, in

the common turn of speech that you employ, and in a moment you have

shaken off the mob that scours the rutted highway, and are addressing a

select audience of ticket-holders with closed doors. A single natural

phrase of peasant speech, a direct physical sense given to a word that

genteel parlance authorises readily enough in its metaphorical sense, and

at a touch you have blown the roof off the drawing-room of the villa, and

have set its obscure inhabitants wriggling in the unaccustomed sun. In

choosing a sense for your words you choose also an audience for them.

To one word, then, there are many meanings, according as it falls in the

sentence, according as its successive ties and associations are broken or

renewed. And here, seeing that the stupidest of all possible meanings is

very commonly the slang meaning, it will be well to treat briefly of

slang. For slang, in the looser acceptation of the term, is of two

kinds, differing, and indeed diametrically opposite, in origin and worth.

Sometimes it is the technical diction that has perforce been coined to

name the operations, incidents, and habits of some way of life that

society despises or deliberately elects to disregard. This sort of

slang, which often invents names for what would otherwise go nameless, is

vivid, accurate, and necessary, an addition of wealth to the world’s

dictionaries and of compass to the world’s range of thought. Society,

mistily conscious of the sympathy that lightens in any habitual name,

seems to have become aware, by one of those wonderful processes of chary

instinct which serve the great, vulnerable, timid organism in lieu of a

brain, that to accept of the pickpocket his names for the mysteries of

his trade is to accept also a new moral stand-point and outlook on the

question of property. For this reason, and by no special masonic

precautions of his own, the pickpocket is allowed to keep the admirable

devices of his nomenclature for the familiar uses of himself and his

mates, until a Villon arrives to prove that this language, too, was

awaiting the advent of its bully and master. In the meantime, what

directness and modest sufficiency of utterance distinguishes the dock

compared with the fumbling prolixity of the old gentleman on the bench!

It is the trite story,—romanticism forced to plead at the bar of

classicism fallen into its dotage, Keats judged by _Blackwood_,

Wordsworth exciting the pained astonishment of Miss Anna Seward. Accuser

and accused alike recognise that a question of diction is part of the

issue between them; hence the picturesque confession of the culprit, made

in proud humility, that he “clicked a red ’un” must needs be interpreted,

to save the good faith of the court, into the vaguer and more general

speech of the classic convention. Those who dislike to have their

watches stolen find that the poorest language of common life will serve

their simple turn, without the rich technical additions of a vocabulary

that has grown around an art. They can abide no rendering of the fact

that does not harp incessantly on the disapproval of watch-owners. They

carry their point of morals at the cost of foregoing all glitter and

finish in the matter of expression.

This sort of slang, therefore, technical in origin, the natural

efflorescence of highly cultivated agilities of brain, and hand, and eye,

is worthy of all commendation. But there is another kind that goes under

the name of slang, the offspring rather 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 one; the pottle-headed lout

who in a moment of exuberance strikes on a new sordid metaphor for any

incident in the beaten round of drunkenness, lubricity, and debt, can set

his fancy rolling through the music-halls, and thence into the street,

secure of applause and a numerous sodden discipleship. Of the same lazy

stamp, albeit more amiable in effect, are the thought-saying contrivances

whereby one word is retained to do the work of many. For the language of

social intercourse ease is the first requisite; the average talker, who

would be hard put to it if he were called on to describe or to define,

must constantly be furnished with the materials of emphasis, wherewith to

drive home his likes and dislikes. Why should he alienate himself from

the sympathy of his fellows by affecting a singularity in the expression

of his emotions? What he craves is not accuracy, but immediacy of

expression, lest the tide of talk should flow past him, leaving him

engaged in a belated analysis. Thus the word of the day is on all lips,

and what was “vastly fine” last century is “awfully jolly” now; the

meaning is the same, the expression equally inappropriate. Oaths have

their brief periods of ascendency, and philology can boast its

fashion-plates. The tyrant Fashion, who wields for whip the fear of

solitude, is shepherd to the flock of common talkers, as they run hither

and thither pursuing, not self-expression, the prize of letters, but

unanimity and self-obliteration, the marks of good breeding. Like those

famous modern poets who are censured by the author of _Paradise Lost_,

the talkers of slang are “carried away by custom, to express many things

otherwise, and for the most part worse than else they would have exprest

them.” The poverty of their vocabulary makes appeal to the brotherly

sympathy of a partial and like-minded auditor, who can fill out their

paltry conventional sketches from his own experience of the same events.

Within the limits of a 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 not some

small coinage of this token-money, issued and accepted by affection,

passing current only within those narrow and privileged boundaries. This

wealth is of no avail to the travelling mind, save as a memorial of home,

nor is its material such “as, buried once, men want dug up again.” A few

happy words and phrases, promoted, for some accidental fitness, to the

wider world of letters, are all that reach posterity; the rest pass into

oblivion with the other perishables of the age.

A profusion of words used in an ephemeral slang sense is evidence, then,

that the writer addresses himself merely to the uneducated and

thoughtless of his own day; the revival of bygone meanings, on the other

hand, and an archaic turn given to language is the mark rather of authors

who are ambitious of a hearing from more than one age. The accretions of

time bring round a word many reputable meanings, of which the oldest is

like to be the deepest in grain. It is a counsel of perfection—some will

say, of vainglorious pedantry—but that shaft flies furthest which is

drawn to the head, and he who desires to be understood in the

twenty-fourth century will not be careless of the meanings that his words

inherit from the fourteenth. To know them is of service, if only for the

piquancy of avoiding them. But many times they cannot wisely be avoided,

and the auspices under which a word began its career when first it was

imported from the French 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 to

remember that these three words, at the outset of their history, bore the

older senses of “ignorant,” “noted,” and “blessed.” It may be granted

that any attempt to return to these older senses, regardless of later

implications, is stark pedantry; but a delicate writer will play shyly

with the primitive significance in passing, approaching it and circling

it, taking it as a point of reference or departure. The early faith of

Christianity, its beautiful cult of childhood, and its appeal to

unlearned simplicity, have left their mark on the meaning of “silly”; the

history of the word is contained in that cry of St. Augustine, _Indocti

surgunt et rapiunt coelum_, or in the fervent sentence of the author of

the _Imitation_, _Oportet fieri stultum_. And if there is a later

silliness, altogether unblest, the skilful artificer of words, while

accepting this last extension, will show himself conscious of his

paradox. So also he will shun the grossness that employs the epithet

“quaint” to put upon subtlety and the devices of a studied workmanship an

imputation of eccentricity; or, if he falls in with the populace in this

regard, he will be careful to justify his innuendo. The slipshod use of

“nice” to connote any sort of pleasurable emotion he will take care, in

his writings at least, utterly to abhor. From the daintiness of elegance

to the arrogant disgust of folly the word carries meanings numerous and

diverse enough; it must not be cruelly burdened with all the laudatory

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 ultimate defacement. The higher

standard imposed upon the written word tends to raise and purify speech

also, and since talkers owe the same debt to writers of prose that these,

for their part, owe to poets, it is the poets who must be accounted chief

protectors, in the last resort, of our common inheritance. Every page of

the works of that great exemplar of diction, Milton, is crowded with

examples of felicitous and exquisite meaning given to the infallible

word. Sometimes he accepts the secondary and more usual meaning of a

word only to enrich it by the interweaving of the primary and

etymological meaning. Thus the seraph Abdiel, in the passage that

narrates his offer of combat to Satan, is said to “explore” his own

undaunted heart, and there is no sense of “explore” that does not

heighten the description and help the thought. Thus again, when the poet

describes those

Eremites and 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 of worthlessness with that other idea, equally

grateful to the author, of deceit. The strength that extracts this

multiplex resonance of meaning from a single note is matched by the grace

that gives to Latin words like “secure,” “arrive,” “obsequious,”

“redound,” “infest,” and “solemn” the fine precision of intent that art

can borrow from scholarship.

Such an exactitude is consistent with vital change; Milton himself is

bold to write “stood praying” for “continued kneeling in prayer,” and

deft to transfer the application of “schism” from the rent garment of the

Church to those necessary “dissections made in the quarry and in the

timber ere the house of God can be built.” Words may safely veer to

every wind that blows, so they keep within hail of their cardinal

meanings, and drift not beyond the scope of their central employ, but

when once they lose hold of that, then, indeed, the anchor has begun to

drag, and the beach-comber may expect his harvest.

Fixity in the midst of change, fluctuation at the heart of sameness, such

is the estate of language. According as they endeavour to reduce letters

to some large haven and abiding-place of civility, or prefer to throw in

their lot with the centrifugal tendency and ride on the flying crest of

change, are writers dubbed Classic or Romantic. The Romantics are

individualist, anarchic; the strains of their passionate incantation

raise no cities to confront the wilderness in guarded symmetry, but

rather bring the stars shooting from their spheres, and draw wild things

captive to a voice. To them Society and Law seem dull phantoms, by the

light cast from a flaming soul. They dwell apart, and torture their

lives in the effort to attain to self-expression. All means and modes

offered them by language they seize on greedily, and shape them to this

one end; they ransack the vocabulary of new sciences, and appropriate or

invent strange jargons. They furbish up old words or weld together new

indifferently, that they may possess the machinery of their speech and

not be possessed by it. They are at odds with the idiom of their country

in that it serves the common need, and hunt it through all its

metamorphoses to subject it to their private will. Heretics by

profession, they are everywhere opposed to the party of the Classics, who

move by slower ways to ends less personal, but in no wise easier of

attainment. The magnanimity of the Classic ideal has had scant justice

done to it by modern criticism. To make literature the crowning symbol

of a world-wide civilisation; to roof in the ages, and unite the elect of

all time in the courtesy of one shining assembly, paying duty to one

unquestioned code; to undo the work of Babel, and knit together in a

single community the scattered efforts of mankind towards order and

reason;—this was surely an aim worthy of labour and sacrifice. Both have

been freely given, and the end is yet to seek. The self-assertion of the

recusants has found eulogists in plenty, but who has celebrated the

self-denial that was thrown away on this other task, which is farther

from fulfilment now than it was when the scholars of the Renaissance gave

up their patriotism and the tongue of their childhood in the name of

fellow-citizenship with the ancients and the œcumenical authority of

letters? Scholars, grammarians, wits, and poets were content to bury the

lustre of their wisdom and the hard-won fruits of their toil in the

winding-sheet of a dead language, that they might be numbered with the

family of Cicero, and added to the pious train of Virgil. It was a noble

illusion, doomed to failure, the versatile genius of language cried out

against the monotony of their Utopia, and the crowds who were to people

the unbuilded city of their dreams went straying after the feathered

chiefs of the rebels, who, when the fulness of time was come, themselves

received apotheosis and the honours of a new motley pantheon. The tomb

of that great vision bears for epitaph the ironical inscription which

defines a Classic poet as “a dead Romantic.”

In truth the Romantics are right, and the serenity of the classic ideal

is the serenity of paralysis and death. A universal agreement in the use

of words facilitates communication, but, so inextricably is expression

entangled with feeling, it leaves nothing to communicate. Inanity dogs

the footsteps of the classic tradition, which is everywhere lackeyed,

through a long decline, by the pallor of reflected glories. Even the

irresistible novelty of personal experience is dulled by being cast in

the old matrix, and the man who professes to find the whole of himself in

the Bible or in Shakespeare had as good not be. He is a replica and a

shadow, a foolish libel on his Creator, who, from the beginning of time,

was never guilty of tautology. This is the error of the classical creed,

to imagine that in a fleeting world, where the quickest eye can never see

the same thing twice, and a deed once done can never be repeated,

language alone should be capable of fixity and finality. Nature avenges

herself on those who would thus make her prisoner, their truths

degenerate to truisms, and feeling dies in the ice-palaces that they

build to house it. In their search for permanence they become unreal,

abstract, didactic, lovers of generalisation, cherishers of the dry bones

of life; their art is transformed into a science, their expression into

an academic terminology. Immutability is their ideal, and they find it

in the arms of death. Words must change to live, and a word once fixed

becomes useless for the purposes of art. Whosoever would make

acquaintance with the goal towards which the classic practice tends,

should seek it in the vocabulary of the Sciences. There words are fixed

and dead, a botanical collection of colourless, scentless, dried weeds, a

_hortus siccus_ of proper names, each individual symbol poorly tethered

to some single object or idea. No wind blows through that garden, and no

sun shines on it, to discompose the melancholy workers at their task of

tying Latin labels on to withered sticks. Definition and division are

the watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and creation.

Not that the exact definable sense of a word is of no value to the

stylist; he profits by it as a painter profits by a study of anatomy, or

an architect by a knowledge of the strains and stresses that may be put

on his material. The exact logical definition is often necessary for the

structure of his thought and the ordering of his severer argument. But

often, too, it is the merest beginning; when a word is once defined he

overlays it with fresh associations and buries it under new-found moral

significances, which may belie the definition they conceal. This is the

burden of Jeremy Bentham’s quarrel with “question-begging appellatives.”

A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the

age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of the panopticon, and

donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as

“codification” and “international,” Bentham would have been glad to

purify the language by purging it of those “affections of the 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 that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice

against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own

figures,—although he had the courage of his convictions, and laboured,

throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his style,—bears

witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded weapons. He will pack

his text with grave argument on matters ecclesiastical, and indulge

himself and literature, in the notes with a pleasant description of the

flesh and the spirit playing leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around

the holy precincts of the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough

from his own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words. The claim

of reason and logic to enslave language has a more modern advocate in the

philosopher who denies all utility to a word while it retains traces of

its primary sensuous employ. The tickling of the senses, the raising of

the passions, these things do indeed interfere with the arid business of

definition. None the less they are the life’s breath of literature, and

he is a poor stylist who cannot beg half-a-dozen questions in a single

epithet, or state the conclusion he would fain avoid in terms that

startle the senses into clamorous revolt.

The two main processes of change in words are Distinction and

Assimilation. Endless fresh distinction, to match the infinite

complexity of things, is the concern of the writer, who spends all his

skill on the endeavour to cloth the delicacies of perception and thought

with a neatly fitting garment. So words grow and bifurcate, diverge and

dwindle, until one root has many branches. Grammarians tell how “royal”

and “regal” grew up by the side of “kingly,” how “hospital,” “hospice,”

“hostel” and “hotel” have come by their several offices. The inventor of

the word “sensuous” gave to the English people an opportunity of

reconsidering those headstrong moral preoccupations which had already

ruined the meaning of “sensual” for the gentler uses of a poet. Not only

the Puritan spirit, but every special bias or interest of man seizes on

words to appropriate them to itself. Practical men of business transfer

such words as “debenture” or “commodity” from debt or comfort in general

to the palpable concrete symbols of debt or comfort; and in like manlier

doctors, soldiers, lawyers, shipmen,—all whose interest and knowledge are

centred on some particular craft or profession, drag words from the

general store and adapt them to special uses. Such words are sometimes

reclaimed from their partial applications by the authority of men of

letters, and pass back into their wider meanings enhanced by a new

element of graphic association. Language never suffers by answering to

an intelligent demand; it is indebted not only to great authors, but to

all whom any special skill or taste has qualified to handle it. The good

writer may be one who disclaims all literary pretension, but there he is,

at work among words,—binding the vagabond or liberating the prisoner,

exalting the humble or abashing the presumptuous, incessantly alert to

amend their implications, break their lazy habits, and help them to

refinement or scope or decision. He educates words, for he knows that

they are alive.

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude. In the regard of

literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, “all are the multitude;

only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding,” and the

poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums. Wherever thought and taste

have fallen to be menials, there the vulgar dwell. How should they gain

mastery over language? They are introduced to a vocabulary of some

hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the

wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be

spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit. The resources of

the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas

can put to use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon

words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confident

booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords he has

manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A dozen expressions to serve one

slovenly meaning inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp. “Vast,”

“huge,” “immense,” “gigantic,” “enormous,” “tremendous,” “portentous,”

and such-like groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a

barren uniformity of low employ. The reign of this democracy annuls

differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or

disposition. Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one purpose,

begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the same

statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words. Where the

ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary word into the

language, to fill a place already occupied, the quicker apprehension of

others will fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new

work for it to do. Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, the

trained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differences worthy

of scrupulous expression. The old foresters had different names for a

buck during each successive year of its life, distinguishing the fawn

from the pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age

increased. Thus it is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest

of moral distinctions. Language halts far behind the truth of things,

and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new

implement of description. Every strange word that makes its way into a

language spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance, relating

itself from whatsoever centre to fresh points in the circumference. No

two words ever coincide throughout their whole extent. If sometimes good

writers are found adding epithet to epithet for the same quality, and

name to name for the same thing, it is because they despair of capturing

their meaning at a venture, and so practise to get near it by a maze of

approximations. Or, it may be, the generous breadth of their purpose

scorns the minuter differences of related terms, and includes all of one

affinity, fearing only lest they be found too few and too weak to cover

the ground effectively. Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of the

Prayer-Book, wherein we “acknowledge and confess” the sins we are

forbidden to “dissemble or cloke;” and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who

huddles together “give, devise, and bequeath,” lest the cunning of

litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets yield

still better instances. When Milton praises the _Virtuous Young Lady_ of

his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to “pity

and ruth,” it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the

second of these nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge and

intensify his meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, the one

civilised, the other barbarous; and ruth is a quality as much more

instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness is keener, harder,

and more deliberate than the inborn savagery of ruthlessness.

It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of this accumulated and

varied emphasis that the need of synonyms is felt. There is no more

curious problem in the philosophy of style 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 rule and say the word, but when the thing repeats itself they will

seldom 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 a varied expression are manifold.

Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the

hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage

passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his

own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another

of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to

marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, he will

acquit himself voluminously, with only one allusion (it is a point of

pride) to the oyster by name. He will compare the succulent bivalve to

Pandora’s box, and lament that it should harbour one of the direst of

ills that flesh is heir to. He will find a paradox and an epigram in the

notion that the darling of Apicius should suffer neglect under the frowns

of Æsculapius. Question, hypothesis, lamentation, and platitude dance

their allotted round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance

masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly proffers her ancient

epilogue of chastened hope. When all is said, nothing is said; and

Montaigne’s _Que sçais-je_, besides being briefer and wittier, was

infinitely more informing.

But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought,

whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real

meaning, is not subject to these tympanies. He feels no idolatrous dread

of repetition when the theme requires, it, and is urged by no necessity

of concealing real identity under a show of change. Nevertheless he,

too, is hedged about by conditions that compel him, now and again, to

resort to what seems a synonym. The chief of these is the indispensable

law of euphony, which governs the sequence not only of words, but also of

phrases. In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose

it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their

individual scope, bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly,

some cumbrous fragments of their recent association. That he may avoid

this, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he

be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance. By a

slight stress laid on the difference of usage the unshapeliness may be

done away with, and a new grace found where none was sought. Addison and

Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun,

yet surely 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 definition, rigidly

observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight

differences of application into clear relief. The practice has its

dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament, yet even so it may be

preferable to the flat stupidity of one identical intention for a word or

phrase in twenty several contexts. For the law of incessant change is

not so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before the apprentice,

as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever; if the change be

not ordered by art it will order itself in default of art. The same

statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is

not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking.

Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known

to language. Take the exquisite repetitions in these few lines:—

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 to the loved name, and the

grief of the mourner repeats the word “dead.” But this monotony of

sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies rather in the

prominence given by either repetition to the most moving circumstance of

all—the youthfulness of the dead poet. The attention of the discursive

intellect, impatient of reiteration, is concentrated on the idea which

these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is

content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often

bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same

phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a

buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some

modern writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged

themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his

prose essays, falls to crying his text like a 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 effort to bring

him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who

would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to

employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a

thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest

soul resolved to stir them. But he whose message is for minds attuned

and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way

of emphasis. Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully

whether the altered incidence does not justify and require an altered

term, which the world is quick to call a synonym. The right dictionary

of synonyms would give the context of each variant in the usage of the

best authors. To enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the hero

of _Paradise Lost_, without reference to the passages in which they

occur, would be a foolish labour; with such reference, the task is made a

sovereign lesson in style. At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech

with his leman 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,” putting his fraud upon Eve he is the “wily Adder,”

leading her in full course to the tree he is “the dire Snake,” springing

to his natural height before the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is

“the grisly King.” Every fresh designation elaborates his character and

history, emphasises the situation, and saves a sentence. So it is with

all variable appellations of concrete objects; and even in the stricter

and more conventional region of abstract ideas the same law runs. Let a

word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of

emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest

it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the

midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for it in the

author’s purpose.

The chameleon quality of language may claim yet another illustration. Of

origins we know nothing certainly, nor how words came by their meanings

in the remote beginning, when speech, like the barnacle-goose of the

herbalist, was suspended over an expectant world, ripening on a tree.

But this we know, that language in its mature state is fed and fattened

on metaphor. Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician, but the

earliest principle of change in language. The whole process 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 metaphorical employ. Then, with the growth of exact knowledge,

the straggling associations that attended the word on its travels are

straitened and confined, its meaning is settled, adjusted, and balanced,

that it may bear its part in the scrupulous deposition of truth. Many

are the words that have run this double course, liberated from their

first homely offices and transformed by poetry, reclaimed in a more

abstract sense, and appropriated to a new set of facts by science. Yet a

third chance awaits them when the poet, thirsty for novelty, passes by

the old simple founts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest

technical applications of specialised terms. Everywhere the intuition of

poetry, impatient of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lags so far

behind, is busy in advance to find likenesses not susceptible of

scientific demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy the heart

while they leave the colder intellect only half convinced. When an

elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers is confronted with the principle of

gravitation he gives voice to science 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 write tunes for a

text-book of physics, he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of matter

and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty:—

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds;

And fragrance in thy footing treads;

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;

And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

Poets, it is said, anticipate science; here in these four lines is work

for a thousand laboratories for a thousand years. But the truth has been

understated; every writer and every speaker works ahead of science,

expressing analogies and contrasts, likenesses and differences, that will

not abide the apparatus of proof. The world of perception and will, of

passion and belief, is an uncaptured virgin, airily deriding from afar

the calculated advances and practised modesty of the old bawd Science;

turning again to shower a benediction of unexpected caresses on the most

cavalier of her wooers, Poetry. This world, the child of Sense and

Faith, shy, wild, and provocative, for ever lures her lovers to the

chase, and the record of their hopes and conquests is contained in the

lover’s language, made up wholly of parable and figure of speech. There

is nothing under the sun nor beyond it that does not concern man, and it

is the unceasing effort of humanity, whether by letters or by science, to

bring “the commerce of the mind and of things” to terms of nearer

correspondence. But Literature, ambitious to touch life on all its

sides, distrusts the way of abstraction, and can hardly be brought to

abandon the point of view whence things are seen in their immediate

relation to the individual soul. This kind of research is the work of

letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to

be numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all metrical

standards to be traced and described. The greater men of science have

been cast in so generous a mould that they have recognised the partial

nature of their task; they have known how to play with science as a

pastime, and to win and wear her decorations for a holiday favour. They

have not emaciated the fulness of their faculties in the name of

certainty, nor cramped their humanity for the promise of a future good.

They have been the servants of Nature, not the slaves of method. But the

grammarian of the laboratory is often the victim of his trade. He

staggers forth from his workshop, where prolonged concentration on a

mechanical task, directed to a provisional and doubtful goal, has dimmed

his faculties; the glaring motley of the world, bathed in sunlight,

dazzles him; the questions, moral, political, and personal, that his

method has relegated to some future of larger knowledge, crowd upon him,

clamorous for solution, not to be denied, insisting on a settlement

to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may either forsake the

divinity he serves, falling back, for the practical and æsthetic conduct

of life, on those common instincts of sensuality which oscillate between

the conventicle and the tavern as the poles of duty and pleasure, or,

more pathetically still, he may attempt to bring the code of the

observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries of the untameable world,

and suffer the pedant’s disaster. A martyr to the good that is to be, he

has voluntarily maimed himself “for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake”—if,

perchance, the kingdom of Heaven might come by observation. The

enthusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to

chain language also to the bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the

poet’s right-hand weapon, he despises; all that is tentative, individual,

struck off at the urging of a mood, he disclaims and suspects. Yet the

very rewards that science promises have their parallel in the domain of

letters. The discovery of likeness in the midst of difference, and of

difference in the midst of likeness, is the keenest pleasure of the

intellect; and literary expression, as has been said, is one long series

of such discoveries, each with its thrill of incommunicable happiness,

all unprecedented, and perhaps unverifiable by later experiment. The

finest instrument of these discoveries is metaphor, the spectroscope of

letters.

Enough has been said of change; it remains to speak of one more of those

illusions of fixity wherein writers seek exemption from the general lot.

Language, it has been shown, is to be fitted to thought; and, further,

there are no synonyms. What more natural conclusion could be drawn by

the enthusiasm of the artist than that there is some kind of preordained

harmony between words and things, whereby expression and thought tally

exactly, like the halves of a puzzle? This illusion, called in France

the doctrine of the _mot propre_, is a will o’ the wisp which has kept

many an artist dancing on its trail. That there is one, and only one way

of expressing one thing has been the belief of other writers besides

Gustave Flaubert, inspiriting them to a desperate and fruitful industry.

It is an amiable fancy, like the dream of Michael Angelo, who loved to

imagine that the statue existed already in the block of marble, and had

only to be stripped of its superfluous wrappings, or like the indolent

fallacy of those economic soothsayers to whom Malthus brought rough

awakening, that population and the means of subsistence move side by side

in harmonious progress. But hunger does not imply food, and there may

hover in the restless heads of poets, as themselves testify—

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest.

Matter and form are not so separable as the popular philosophy would have

them; indeed, the very antithesis between them is a cardinal instance of

how language reacts on thought, modifying and fixing a cloudy truth. The

idea pursues form not only that it may be known to others, but that it

may know itself, and the body in which it becomes incarnate is not to be

distinguished from the informing soul. It is recorded of a famous Latin

historian how he declared that he would have made Pompey win the battle

of Pharsalia had the effective turn of the sentence required it. He may

stand for the true type of the literary artist. The business of letters,

howsoever simple it may seem to those who think truth-telling a gift of

nature, is in reality two-fold, to find words for a meaning, and to find

a meaning for words. Now it is the words that refuse to yield, and now

the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed them is at the same time

altering his words to suit his meaning, and modifying and shaping his

meaning to satisfy the requirements of his words. The humblest processes

of thought have had their first education from language long before they

took shape in literature. So subtle is the connexion between the two

that it is equally possible to call language the form given to the matter

of thought, or, inverting the application of the figure, to speak of

thought as the formal principle that shapes the raw material of language.

It is not until the two become one that they can be known for two. The

idea to be expressed is a kind of mutual recognition between thought and

language, which here meet and claim each other for the first time, just

as in the first glance exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its

eyes on the world, and pleads for life. But thought, although it may

indulge itself with the fancy of a predestined affiance, is not confined

to one mate, but roves free and is the father of many children. A belief

in the inevitable word is the last refuge of that stubborn mechanical

theory of the universe which has been slowly driven from science,

politics, and history. Amidst so much that is undulating, it has pleased

writers to imagine that truth persists and is provided by heavenly

munificence with an imperishable garb of language. But this also is

vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of

fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable than what is made. Not

words nor works, but only that which is formless endures, the vitality

that is another name for change, the breath that fills and shatters the

bubbles of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of truth and untruth.

No art is easy, least of all the art of letters. Apply the musical

analogy once more to the instrument whereon literature performs its

voluntaries. With a living keyboard of notes which are all incessantly

changing in value, so that what rang true under Dr. Johnson’s hand may

sound flat or sharp now, with a range of a myriad strings, some falling

mute and others being added from day to day, with numberless permutations

and combinations, each of which alters the tone and pitch of the units

that compose it, with fluid ideas that never have an outlined existence

until they have found their phrases and the improvisation is complete, is

it to be wondered at that the art of style is eternally elusive, and that

the attempt to reduce it to rule is the forlorn hope of academic

infatuation?

* * * * *

These difficulties and complexities of the instrument are, nevertheless,

the least part of the ordeal that is to be undergone by the writer. The

same musical note or phrase affects different ears in much the same way;

not so the word or group of words. The pure idea, let us say, is

translated into language by the literary composer; who is to be

responsible for the retranslation of the language into idea? Here begins

the story of the troubles and weaknesses that are imposed upon literature

by the necessity it lies under of addressing itself to an audience, by

its liability to anticipate the corruptions that mar the understanding of

the spoken or written word. A word is the operative symbol of a relation

between two minds, and is chosen by the one not without regard to the

quality of the effect actually produced upon the other. Men must be

spoken to in their accustomed tongue, and persuaded that the unknown God

proclaimed by the poet is one whom aforetime they ignorantly worshipped.

The relation of great authors to the public may be compared to the war of

the sexes, a quiet watchful antagonism between two parties mutually

indispensable to each other, at one time veiling itself in endearments,

at another breaking out into open defiance. He who has a message to

deliver must wrestle with his fellows before he shall be permitted to ply

them with uncomfortable or unfamiliar truths. The public, like the

delicate Greek Narcissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself; and the name

of its only other perfect lover is Echo. Yet even great authors must lay

their account with the public, and it is instructive to observe how

different are the attitudes they have adopted, how uniform the

disappointment they have felt. Some, like Browning and Mr. Meredith in

our own day, trouble themselves little about the reception given to their

work, but are content to say on, until the few who care to listen have

expounded them to the many, and they are applauded, in the end, by a

generation whom they have trained to appreciate them. Yet this noble and

persevering indifference is none of their choice, and long years of

absolution from criticism must needs be paid for in faults of style.

“Writing for the stage,” Mr. Meredith himself has remarked, “would be a

corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style into which some great ones

fall at times.” Denied such a corrective, the great one is apt to sit

alone and tease his meditations into strange shapes, fortifying himself

against obscurity and neglect with the reflection that most of the words

he uses are to be found, after all, in the dictionary. It is not,

however, from the secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrung

by the indignities of his position, but rather from genius in the act of

earning a full meed of popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson

wrote for the stage, both were blown by the favouring breath of their

plebeian patrons into reputation and a competence. Each of them passed

through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the

artist is exposed to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on the

one hand and the necessity for pleasing the rabble on the other. When

any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is

conscious also that his bread and his fame 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 the two great Odes to Himself, sang high and aloof for a while, then

the frenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself for

deeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman,

who, in _The Tears of Peace_, compares “men’s refuse ears” to those gates

in ancient cities which were opened only when the bodies of executed

malefactors 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 spirit must pale beside the

more desperate violences of the dramatist who 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 the serenity of

atmosphere necessary for creative art. A greater than Jonson donned the

suppliant’s robes, like Coriolanus, and with the inscrutable honeyed

smile about his lips begged for the “most sweet voices” of the journeymen

and gallants who thronged the Globe Theatre. Only once does the wail of

anguish escape him—

Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there,

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 Shakesperian

commentators, is wont to interpret these lines as a protest against the

contempt wherewith Elizabethan society regarded the professions of

playwright and actor. We are asked to conceive that Shakespeare humbly

desires the pity of his bosom friend because he is not put on the same

level of social estimation with a brocaded gull or a prosperous stupid

goldsmith of the Cheap. No, it is a cry, from the depth of his nature,

for forgiveness because he has sacrificed a little on the altar of

popularity. Jonson would have boasted that he never made this sacrifice.

But he lost the calm of his temper and the clearness of his singing

voice, he degraded his magnanimity by allowing it to engage in

street-brawls, and he endangered the sanctuary of the inviolable soul.

At least these great artists of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries

are agreed upon one thing, that the public, even in its most gracious

mood, makes an ill task-master for the man of letters. It is worth the

pains to ask why, and to attempt to show how much of an author’s literary

quality is involved in his attitude towards his audience. Such an

inquiry will take us, it is true, into bad company, and exhibit the

vicious, the fatuous, and the frivolous posturing to an admiring crowd.

But style is a property of all written and printed matter, so that to

track it to its causes and origins is a task wherein literary criticism

may profit by the humbler aid of anthropological research.

Least of all authors is the poet subject to the tyranny of his audience.

“Poetry and eloquence,” says John Stuart Mill, “are both alike the

expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the

antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is overheard.

Eloquence supposes an audience; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us

to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener.” Poetry,

according to this discerning criticism, is an inspired soliloquy; the

thoughts rise unforced and unchecked, taking musical form in obedience

only to the law of their being, giving pleasure to an audience only as

the mountain spring may chance to assuage the thirst of a passing

traveller. In lyric poetry, language, from being a utensil, or a medium

of traffic and barter, passes back to its place among natural sounds; its

affinity is with the wind among the trees and the stream among the rocks;

it is the cry of the heart, as simple as the breath we draw, and as

little ordered with a view to applause. Yet speech grew up in society,

and even in the most ecstatic of its uses may flag for lack of

understanding and response. It were rash to say that the poets need no

audience; the loneliest have promised themselves a tardy recognition, and

some among the greatest came to their maturity in the warm atmosphere of

a congenial society. Indeed the ratification set upon merit by a living

audience, fit though few, is necessary for the development of the most

humane and sympathetic genius; and the memorable ages of literature, in

Greece or Rome, in France or England, have been the ages of a literary

society. The nursery of our greatest dramatists must be looked for, not,

it is true, in the transfigured bear-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 addressing himself, with

the most entire confidence, to a small company of his friends, who may

even, in unhappy seasons, prove to be the creatures of his imagination.

Real or imaginary, they are taken by him for his equals; he expects from

them a quick intelligence and a perfect sympathy, which may enable him to

despise all concealment. He never preaches to them, nor scolds, nor

enforces the obvious. Content that what he has spoken he has spoken, he

places a magnificent trust on a single expression. He neither explains,

nor falters, nor repents; he introduces his work with no preface, and

cumbers it with no notes. He will not lower nor raise his voice for the

sake of the profane and idle who may chance to stumble across his

entertainment. His living auditors, unsolicited for the tribute of

worship or an alms, find themselves conceived of in the likeness of what

he would have them to be, raised to a companion pinnacle of friendship,

and constituted peers and judges, if they will, of his achievement.

Sometimes they come late.

This blend of dignity and intimacy, of candour and self-respect, is

unintelligible to the vulgar, who understand by intimacy mutual

concession to a base ideal, and who are so accustomed to deal with masks,

that when they see a face they are shocked as by some grotesque. Now a

poet, like Montaigne’s naked philosopher, is all face; and the

bewilderment of his masked and muffled critics is the greater. Wherever

he attracts general attention he cannot but be misunderstood. The

generality of modern men and women who pretend to literature are not

hypocrites, or they might go near to divine him,—for hypocrisy, though

rooted in cowardice, demands for its flourishing a clear intellectual

atmosphere, a definite aim, and a certain detachment of the directing

mind. But they are habituated to trim themselves by the cloudy mirror of

opinion, and will mince and temporise, as if for an invisible audience,

even in their bedrooms. Their masks have, for the most part, grown to

their faces, so that, except in some rare animal paroxysm of emotion, it

is hardly themselves that they express. The apparition of a poet

disquiets them, for he clothes himself with the elements, and apologises

to no idols. His candour frightens them: they avert their eyes from it;

or they treat it as a licensed whim; or, with a sudden gleam of insight,

and apprehension of what this means for them and theirs, they scream

aloud for fear. A modern instance may be found in the angry

protestations launched against Rossetti’s Sonnets, at the time of their

first appearance, by a writer who has since matched himself very exactly

with an audience of his own kind. A stranger freak of burgess criticism

is everyday fare in the odd world peopled by the biographers of Robert

Burns. The nature of Burns, one would think, was simplicity itself; it

could hardly puzzle a ploughman, and two sailors out of three would call

him brother. But he lit up the whole of that nature by his marvellous

genius for expression, and grave personages have been occupied ever since

in discussing the dualism of his character, and professing to find some

dark mystery in the existence of this, that, or the other trait—a love of

pleasure, a hatred of shams, a deep sense of religion. It is common

human nature, after all, that is the mystery, but they seem never to have

met with it, and treat it as if it were the poet’s eccentricity. They

are all agog to worship him, and when they have made an image of him in

their own likeness, and given it a tin-pot head that exactly hits their

taste, they break into noisy lamentation over the discovery that the

original was human, and had feet of clay. They deem “Mary in Heaven” so

admirable that they could find it in their hearts to regret that she was

ever on earth. This sort of admirers constantly refuses to bear a part

in any human relationship; they ask to be fawned on, or trodden on, by

the poet while he is in life; when he is dead they make of him a

candidate for godship, and heckle him. It is a misfortune not wholly

without its compensations that most great poets are dead before they are

popular.

If great and original literary artists—here grouped together under the

title of poets—will not enter into transactions with their audience,

there is no lack of authors who will. These are not necessarily

charlatans; they may have by nature a ready sympathy with the grossness

of the public taste, and thus take pleasure in studying to gratify it.

But man loses not a little of himself in crowds, and some degradation

there must be where the one adapts himself to the many. The British

public is not seen at its best when it is enjoying a holiday in a foreign

country, nor when it is making excursions into the realm of imaginative

literature: those who cater for it in these matters must either study its

tastes or share them. Many readers bring the worst of themselves to a

novel; they want lazy relaxation, or support for their nonsense, or

escape from their creditors, or a free field for emotions that they dare

not indulge in life. The reward of an author who meets them half-way in

these respects, who neither puzzles nor distresses them, who asks nothing

from them, but compliments them on their great possessions and sends them

away rejoicing, is a full measure of acceptance, and editions unto

seventy times seven.

The evils caused by the influence of the audience on the writer are many.

First of all comes a fault far enough removed from the characteristic

vices of the charlatan—to wit, sheer timidity and weakness. There is a

kind of stage-fright that seizes on a man when he takes pen in hand to

address an unknown body of hearers, no less than when he stands up to

deliver himself to a sea of expectant faces. This is the true panic

fear, that walks at mid-day, and unmans those whom it visits. Hence come

reservations, qualifications, verbosity, and the see-saw of a wavering

courage, which apes progress and purpose, as soldiers mark time with

their feet. The writing produced under these auspices is of no greater

moment than the incoherent loquacity of a nervous patient. All

self-expression is a challenge thrown down to the world, to be taken up

by whoso will; and the spirit of timidity, when it touches a man, suborns

him with the reminder that he holds his life and goods by the sufferance

of his fellows. Thereupon he begins to doubt whether it is worth while

to court a verdict of so grave possibilities, or to risk offending a

judge—whose customary geniality is merely the outcome of a fixed habit of

inattention. In doubt whether to speak or keep silence, he takes a

middle course, and while purporting to speak for himself, is careful to

lay stress only on the points whereon all are agreed, to enlarge

eloquently on the doubtfulness of things, and to give to words the very

least meaning that they will carry. Such a procedure, which glides over

essentials, and handles truisms or trivialities with a fervour of

conviction, has its functions in practice. It will win for a politician

the coveted and deserved repute of a “safe” man—safe, even though the

cause perish. Pleaders and advocates are sometimes driven into it,

because to use vigorous, clean, crisp English in addressing an ordinary

jury or committee is like flourishing a sword in a drawing-room: it will

lose the case. Where the weakest are to be convinced speech must stoop:

a full consideration of the velleities and uncertainties, a little

bombast to elevate the feelings without committing the judgment, some

vague effusion of sentiment, an inapposite blandness, a meaningless

rodomontade—these are the by-ways to be travelled by the style that is a

willing slave to its audience. The like is true of those

documents—petitions, resolutions, congratulatory addresses, and so

forth—that are written to be signed by a multitude of names. Public

occasions of this kind, where all and sundry are to be satisfied, have

given rise to a new parliamentary dialect, which has nothing of the

freshness of individual emotion, is powerless to deal with realities, and

lacks all resonance, vitality, and nerve. There is no cure for this,

where the feelings and opinions of a crowd are to be expressed. But

where indecision is the ruling passion of the individual, he may cease to

write. Popularity was never yet the prize of those whose only care is to

avoid offence.

For hardier aspirants, the two main entrances to popular favour are by

the twin gates of laughter and tears. Pathos knits the soul and braces

the nerves, humour purges the eyesight and vivifies the sympathies; the

counterfeits of these qualities work the opposite effects. It is

comparatively easy to appeal to passive emotions, to play upon the

melting mood of a diffuse sensibility, or to encourage the narrow mind to

dispense a patron’s laughter from the vantage-ground of its own small

preconceptions. Our annual crop of sentimentalists and mirth-makers

supplies the reading public with food. Tragedy, which brings the naked

soul face to face with the austere terrors of Fate, Comedy, which turns

the light inward and dissipates the mists of self-affection and

self-esteem, have long since given way on the public stage to the

flattery of Melodrama, under many names. In the books he reads and in

the plays he sees the average man recognises himself in the hero, and

vociferates his approbation.

The sensibility that came into vogue during the eighteenth century was of

a finer grain than its modern counterpart. It studied delicacy, and

sought a cultivated enjoyment in evanescent shades of feeling, and the

fantasies of unsubstantial grief. The real Princess of Hans Andersen’s

story, who passed a miserable night because there was a small bean

concealed beneath the twenty eider-down beds on which she slept, might

stand for a type of the aristocracy of feeling that took a pride in these

ridiculous susceptibilities. The modern sentimentalist works in a

coarser material. That ancient, subtle, and treacherous affinity among

the emotions, whereby religious exaltation has before now been made the

ally of the unpurified passions, is parodied by him in a simpler and more

useful device. By alleging a moral purpose he is enabled to gratify the

prurience of his public and to raise them in their own muddy conceit at

one and the same time. The plea serves well with those artless readers

who have been accustomed to consider the moral of a story as something

separable from imagination, expression, and style—a quality, it may be,

inherent in the plot, or a kind of appendix, exercising a retrospective

power of jurisdiction and absolution over the extravagances of the piece

to which it is affixed. Let virtue be rewarded, and they are content

though it should never be vitally imagined or portrayed. If their eyes

were opened they might cry with Brutus—“O miserable Virtue! Thou art but

a phrase, and I have followed thee as though thou wert a reality.”

It is in quite another kind, however, that the modern purveyor of

sentiment exercises his most characteristic talent. There are certain

real and deeply-rooted feelings, common to humanity, concerning which, in

their normal operation, a grave reticence is natural. They are universal

in their appeal, men would be ashamed not to feel them, and it is no

small part of the business of life to keep them under strict control.

Here is the sentimental hucksters most valued opportunity. He tears

these primary instincts from the wholesome privacy that shelters them in

life, and cries them up from his booth in the market-place. The

elemental forces of human life, which beget shyness in children, and

touch the spirits of the wise to solemn acquiescence, awaken him to

noisier declamation. He patronises the stern laws of love and pity,

hawking them like indulgences, cheapening and commanding them like the

medicines of a mountebank. The censure of his critics he impudently

meets by pointing to his wares: are not some of the most sacred

properties of humanity—sympathy with suffering, family affection, filial

devotion, and the rest—displayed upon his stall? Not thus shall he evade

the charges brought against him. It is the sensual side of the tender

emotions that he exploits for the comfort of the million. All the

intricacies which life offers to the will and the intellect he lards and

obliterates by the timely effusion of tearful sentiment. His

humanitarianism is a more popular, as it is an easier, ideal than

humanity—it asks no expense of thought. There is a scanty public in

England for tragedy or for comedy: the characters and situations handled

by the sentimentalist might perchance furnish comedy with a theme; but he

stilts them for a tragic performance, and they tumble into watery bathos,

where a numerous public awaits them.

A similar degradation of the intellectual elements that are present in

all good literature is practised by those whose single aim is to provoke

laughter. In much of our so-called comic writing a superabundance of

boisterous animal spirits, restrained from more practical expression by

the ordinances of civil society, finds outlet and relief. The grimaces

and caperings of buffoonery, the gymnastics of the punster and the

parodist, the revels of pure nonsense may be, at their best, a

refreshment and delight, but they are not comedy, and have proved in

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 that luminous contemplation of the

incongruities of life and the universe which is humour’s essence. All

that is ludicrous depends on some disproportion: Comedy judges the actual

world by contrasting it with an ideal of sound sense, Humour reveals it

in its true dimensions by turning on it the light of imagination and

poetry. The perception of these incongruities, which are eternal,

demands some expense of intellect; a cheaper amusement may be enjoyed by

him who is content to take his stand on his own habits and prejudices and

to laugh at all that does not square with them. This was the method 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 these journals, and no wonder, for only a minute study of

the customs and preoccupations of certain sections of English society

could enable them to understand the point of view. From time to time one

or another of the writers who are called upon for their weekly tale of

jokes seems struggling upward to the free domain of Comedy; but in vain,

his public holds him down, and compels him to laugh in chains. Some day,

perchance, a literary historian, filled with the spirit of Cervantes or

of Molière, will give account of the Victorian era, and, not disdaining

small things, will draw a picture of the society which inspired and

controlled so resolute a jocularity. Then, at last, will the spirit of

Comedy recognise that these were indeed what they claimed to be—comic

papers.

“The style is the man;” but the social and rhetorical influences

adulterate and debase it, until not one man in a thousand achieves his

birthright, or claims his second self. The fire of the soul burns all

too feebly, and warms itself by the reflected heat from the society

around it. We give back words of tepid greeting, without improvement.

We talk to our fellows in the phrases we learn from them, which come to

mean less and less as they grow worn with use. Then we exaggerate and

distort, heaping epithet upon epithet in the endeavour to get a little

warmth out of the smouldering pile. The quiet cynicism of our everyday

demeanour is open and shameless, we callously anticipate objections

founded on the well-known vacuity of our seeming emotions, and assure our

friends that we are “truly” grieved or “sincerely” rejoiced at their

hap—as if joy or grief that really exists were some rare and precious

brand of joy or grief. In its trivial conversational uses so simple and

pure a thing as joy becomes a sandwich-man—humanity degraded to an

advertisement. The poor dejected word shuffles along through the mud in

the service of the sleek trader who employs it, and not until it meets

with a poet is it rehabilitated and restored to dignity.

This is no indictment of society, which came into being before

literature, and, in all the distraction of its multifarious concerns, can

hardly keep a school for Style. It is rather a demonstration of the

necessity, amid the wealthy disorder of modern civilisation, for poetic

diction. One of the hardest of a poet’s tasks is the search for his

vocabulary. Perhaps in some idyllic pasture-land of Utopia there may

have flourished a state where division of labour was unknown, where

community of ideas, as well as of property, was absolute, and where the

language of every day ran clear into poetry without the need of a

refining process. They say that Cædmon was a cow-keeper: but the

shepherds of Theocritus and Virgil are figments of a courtly brain, and

Wordsworth himself, in his boldest flights of theory, was forced to allow

of selection. Even by selection from among the chaos of implements that

are in daily use around him, a poet can barely equip himself with a

choice of words sufficient for his needs; he must have recourse to his

predecessors; and so it comes about that the poetry of the modern world

is a store-house of obsolete diction. The most surprising characteristic

of the right poetic diction, whether it draw its vocabulary from near at

hand, or avail itself of the far-fetched inheritance preserved by the

poets, is its matchless sincerity. Something of extravagance there may

be in those brilliant clusters of romantic words that are everywhere

found in the work of Shakespeare, or Spenser, or Keats, but they are the

natural leafage and fruitage of a luxuriant imagination, which, lacking

these, could not attain to its full height. Only by the energy of the

arts can a voice be given to the subtleties and raptures of emotional

experience; ordinary social intercourse affords neither opportunity nor

means for this fervour of self-revelation. And if the highest reach of

poetry is often to be found in the use of common colloquialisms, charged

with the intensity of restrained passion, this is not due to a greater

sincerity of expression, but to the strength derived from dramatic

situation. Where speech spends itself on its subject, drama stands idle;

but where the dramatic stress is at its greatest, three or four words may

enshrine all the passion of the moment. Romeo’s apostrophe from under

the balcony—

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 sheer effect, to

his later soliloquy, spoken when the news of Juliet’s death is brought to

him,

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

And even the constellated glories of _Paradise Lost_ are less moving than

the plain words wherein Samson forecasts his approaching 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 animated with a purer

intention than they carry in ordinary life. It is this unfailing note of

sincerity, eloquent or laconic, that has made poetry the teacher of

prose. Phrases which, to all seeming, might have been hit on by the

first comer, are often cut away from their poetical context and robbed of

their musical value that they may be transferred to the service of prose.

They bring with them, down to the valley, a wafted sense of some region

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—

I cannot but remember such things were

That were most precious to me?

The thought, the diction, the syntax, might all occur in prose. Yet when

once the stamp of poetry has been put upon a cry that is as old as

humanity, prose desists from rivalry, and is content to quote. Some of

the greatest prose-writers have not disdained the help of these borrowed

graces for the crown of their fabric. In this way De Quincey widens the

imaginative range of his prose, and sets back the limits assigned to

prose diction. So too, Charles Lamb, interweaving the stuff of

experience with phrases quoted or altered from the poets, illuminates

both life and poetry, letting his sympathetic humour play now on the warp

of the texture, and now on the woof. The style of Burke furnishes a

still better example, for the spontaneous evolution of his prose might be

thought to forbid the inclusion of borrowed fragments. Yet whenever he

is deeply stirred, memories of Virgil, Milton, or the English Bible rise

to his aid, almost as if strong emotion could express itself in no other

language. Even the poor invectives of political controversy gain a

measure of dignity from the skilful application of some famous line; the

touch of the poet’s sincerity rests on them for a moment, and seems to

lend them an alien splendour. It is like the blessing of a priest,

invoked by the pious, or by the worldly, for the good success of whatever

business they have in hand. Poetry has no temporal ends to serve, no

livelihood to earn, and is under no temptation to cog and lie: wherefore

prose pays respect to that loftier calling, and that more unblemished

sincerity.

Insincerity, on the other hand, is the commonest vice of style. It is

not to be avoided, except in the rarest cases, by those to whom the

written use of language is unfamiliar; so that a shepherd who talks

pithy, terse sense will be unable to express himself in a letter without

having recourse to the _Ready Letter-writer_—“This comes hoping to find

you well, as it also leaves me at present”—and a soldier, without the

excuse of ignorance, will describe a successful advance as having been

made against “a thick hail of bullets.” It permeates ordinary

journalism, and all writing produced under commercial pressure. It

taints the work of the young artist, caught by the romantic fever, who

glories in the wealth of vocabulary discovered to him by the poets, and

seeks often in vain for a thought stalwart enough to wear that glistering

armour. Hence it is that the masters of style have always had to preach

restraint, self-denial, austerity. His style is a man’s own; yet how

hard it is to come by! It is a man’s bride, to be won by labours and

agonies that bespeak a 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, he may attain a brief

satisfaction, but he will never redeem his quest.

As a body of practical rules, the negative precepts of asceticism bring

with them a certain chill. The page is dull; it is so easy to lighten it

with some flash of witty irrelevance: the argument is long and tedious,

why not relieve it by wandering into some of those green enclosures that

open alluring doors upon the wayside? To roam at will, spring-heeled,

high-hearted, and catching at all good fortunes, is the ambition of the

youth, ere yet he has subdued himself to a destination. The principle of

self-denial seems at first sight a treason done to genius, which was

always privileged to be wilful. In this view literature is a fortuitous

series of happy thoughts and heaven-sent findings. But the end of that

plan is beggary. Sprightly talk about the first object that meets the

eye and the indulgence of vagabond habits soon degenerate to a

professional garrulity, a forced face of dismal cheer, and a settled

dislike of strenuous exercise. The economies and abstinences of

discipline promise a kinder fate than this. They test and strengthen

purpose, without which no great work comes into being. They save the

expenditure of energy on those pastimes and diversions which lead no

nearer to the goal. To reject the images and arguments that proffer a

casual assistance yet are not to be brought under the perfect control of

the main theme is difficult; how should it be otherwise, for if they were

not already dear to the writer they would not have volunteered their aid.

It is the more difficult, in that to refuse the unfit is no warrant of

better help to come. But to accept them is to fall back for good upon a

makeshift, and to hazard the enterprise in a hubbub of disorderly claims.

No train of thought is strengthened by the addition of those arguments

that, like camp-followers, swell the number and the noise, without

bearing a part in the organisation. The danger that comes in with the

employment of figures of speech, similes, and comparisons is greater

still. The clearest of them may be attended by some element of grotesque

or paltry association, so that while they illumine the subject they

cannot truly be said to illustrate it. The noblest, including those

time-honoured metaphors that draw their patent of nobility from war,

love, religion, or the chase, in proportion as they are strong and of a

vivid presence, are also domineering—apt to assume command of the theme

long after their proper work is done. So great is the headstrong power

of the finest metaphors, that an author may be incommoded by one that

does his business for him handsomely, as a king may suffer the oppression

of a powerful ally. When a lyric begins 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 its knell

rung—to the last line there is no escaping from the dazzling influences

that presided over the first. Yet to carry out such a figure in detail,

as Sir Charles Sedley set himself to do, tarnishes the sudden glory of

the opening. The lady whom Burns called Clarinda put herself in a like

quandary 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 they obtained from a

great lyric poet. But how is the song to be continued? Genius might

answer the question; to Clarinda there came only the notion of a valuable

contrast to be established between love and friendship, and a tribute to

be paid to the kindly offices of the latter. The verses wherein 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, whose chief 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 be expressed, and are entitled

to the large control they claim. Imagination, working at white heat, can

fairly subdue the matter of the poem to them, or fuse them with others of

the like temper, striking unity out of the composite mass. One thing

only is forbidden, to treat these substantial and living metaphors as if

they were elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over

abruptly on the way to more exacting topics. The mystics, and the

mystical poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity.

Recognising that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between

all physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the

reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them over

that mysterious frontier. Their failures and misadventures, familiarly

despised as “conceits,” left them floundering in absurdity. Yet not

since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the full power and significance

of figurative language been realised in English poetry. These poets,

like some of their late descendants, were tortured by a sense of hidden

meaning, and were often content with analogies that admit of no rigorous

explanation. They were convinced that all intellectual truth is a

parable, though its inner meaning be dark or dubious. The philosophy of

friendship deals with those mathematical and physical conceptions of

distance, likeness, and attraction—what if the law of bodies govern souls

also, and the geometer’s compasses measure more than it has entered into

his heart to conceive? Is the moon a name only for a certain tonnage of

dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial 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.

The secret of these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest

poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental religion and the

Catholic Church.

Figure and ornament, therefore, are not interchangeable terms; the

loftiest figurative style most conforms to the precepts of gravity and

chastity. None the less there is a decorative use of figure, whereby a

theme is enriched with imaginations and memories that are foreign to the

main purpose. Under this head may be classed most of those allusions to

the world’s literature, especially to classical and Scriptural lore,

which have played so considerable, yet on the whole so idle, a part in

modern poetry. It is here that an inordinate love of decoration finds

its opportunity and its snare. To keep the most elaborate comparison in

harmony with its occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall

back easily into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study

of the great epic poets. Milton’s description of the rebel legions

adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty felt and

conquered:

Angel forms, 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 the slightest

touch of association. Yet in the end it is brought back, its majesty

heightened, and a closer element of likeness introduced by the skilful

turn that substitutes the image of the shattered Egyptian army for the

former images of dead leaves and sea-weed. The incidental pictures, of

the roof of shades, of the watchers from the shore, and the very name

“Red Sea,” fortuitous as they may seem, all lend help to the imagination

in bodying forth the scene described. An earlier figure in the same book

of _Paradise Lost_, because it exhibits a less conspicuous technical

cunning, may even better show a poet’s care for unity of tone and

impression. Where Satan’s prostrate bulk is compared to

that sea-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 boat under the

lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind once more

to all the pathos and gloom of those infernal deeps:

while night

Invests the sea, and wishèd morn delays.

So masterly a handling of the figures which usage and taste prescribe to

learned writers is rare indeed. The ordinary small scholar disposes of

his baggage less happily. Having heaped up knowledge as a successful

tradesman heaps up money, he is apt to believe that his wealth makes him

free of the company of letters, and a fellow craftsman of the poets. The

mark of his style is an excessive and pretentious allusiveness. It was

he whom the satirist designed in that taunt, _Scire tuum nihil est nisi

te scire hoc sciat alter_—“My knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge

thou covetest.” His allusions and learned periphrases elucidate nothing;

they put an idle labour on the reader who understands them, and extort

from baffled ignorance, at which, perhaps, they are more especially

aimed, a foolish admiration. These tricks and vanities, the very

corruption of ornament, will always be found while the power to acquire

knowledge is more general than the strength to carry it or the skill to

wield it. The collector has his proper work to do in the commonwealth of

learning, but the ownership of a museum is a poor qualification for the

name of artist. Knowledge has two good uses; it may be frankly

communicated for the benefit of others, or it may minister matter to

thought; an allusive writer often robs it of both these functions. He

must needs display his possessions and his modesty at one and the same

time, producing his treasures unasked, and huddling them in uncouth

fashion past the gaze of the spectator, because, forsooth, he would not

seem to make a rarity of them. The subject to be treated, the groundwork

to be adorned, becomes the barest excuse for a profitless haphazard

ostentation. This fault is very incident to the scholarly style, which

often sacrifices emphasis and conviction to a futile air of encyclopædic

grandeur.

Those who are repelled by this redundance of ornament, from which even

great writers are not wholly exempt, have sometimes been driven by the

force of reaction into a singular fallacy. The futility of these

literary quirks and graces has induced them to lay art under the same

interdict with ornament. Style and stylists, one will say, have no

attraction for him, he had rather hear honest men utter their thoughts

directly, clearly, and simply. The choice of words, says another, and

the conscious manipulation of sentences, is literary foppery; the word

that first offers is commonly the best, and the order in which the

thoughts occur is the order to be followed. Be natural, be

straightforward, they urge, and what you have to say will say itself in

the best possible manner. It is a welcome lesson, no doubt, that these

deluded Arcadians teach. A simple and direct style—who would not give

his all to purchase that! But is it in truth so easy to be compassed?

The greatest writers, when they are at the top of happy hours, attain to

it, now and again. Is all this tangled contrariety of things a kind of

fairyland, and does the writer, alone among men, find that a beaten

foot-path opens out before him as he goes, to lead him, straight through

the maze, to the goal of his desires? To think so is to build a childish

dream out of facts imperfectly observed, and worthy of a closer

observation. Sometimes the cry for simplicity is the reverse of what it

seems, and is uttered by those who had rather hear words used in their

habitual vague acceptations than submit to the cutting directness of a

good writer. Habit makes obscurity grateful, and the simple style, in

this view, is the style that allows thought to run automatically into its

old grooves and burrows. The original writers who have combined real

literary power with the heresy of ease and nature are of another kind. A

brutal personality, excellently muscular, snatching at words as the

handiest weapons wherewith to inflict itself, and the whole body of its

thoughts and preferences, on suffering humanity, is likely enough to

deride the daintiness of conscious art. Such a writer is William

Cobbett, who has often been praised for the manly simplicity of his

style, which he raised into a kind of creed. His power is undeniable;

his diction, though he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page

after page of his writing suggests only the reflection that here is a

prodigal waste of good English. He bludgeons all he touches, and spends

the same monotonous emphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of

the Government. His is the simplicity of a crude and violent mind,

concerned only with giving forcible expression to its unquestioned

prejudices. Irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated, he

glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the semblance of strength,

and helps to wield the hammer.

It is not to be denied that there is a native force of temperament which

can make itself felt even through illiterate carelessness. “Literary

gentlemen, editors, and critics,” says Thoreau, himself by no means a

careless writer, “think that they know how to write, because they have

studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are egregiously mistaken. The

_art_ of composition is as simple as the discharge of a bullet from a

rifle, and its masterpieces imply an infinitely greater force behind

them.” This true saying introduces us to the hardest problem of

criticism, the paradox of literature, the stumbling-block of

rhetoricians. To analyse the precise method whereby a great personality

can make itself felt in words, even while it neglects and contemns the

study of words, would be to lay bare the secrets of religion and life—it

is beyond human competence. Nevertheless a brief and diffident

consideration of the matter may bring thus much comfort, that the seeming

contradiction is no discredit cast on letters, but takes its origin

rather from too narrow and pedantic a view of the scope of letters.

Words are things: it is useless to try to set them in a world apart.

They exist in books only by accident, and for one written there are a

thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken. They are deeds: the man who

brings word of a lost battle can work no comparable effect with the

muscles of his arm; Iago’s breath is as truly laden with poison and

murder as the fangs of the cobra and the drugs of the assassin. Hence

the sternest education in the use of words is least of all to be gained

in the schools, which cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of

seclusion. A soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise

of power that he loves, and he is accustomed to do more with his words

than give pleasure. To keep language in immediate touch with reality, to

lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot from the heart of

determination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of power. All this may

be achieved without the smallest study of literary models, and is

consistent with a perfect neglect of literary canons. It is not the

logical content of the word, but the whole mesh of its conditions,

including the character, circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that

is its true strength. “Damn” is often the feeblest of expletives, and

“as you please” may be the dirge of an empire. Hence it is useless to

look to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style;

the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only

in his own abstract world. A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make

trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing, a thing

three times said, and each time said badly, may be of more effect than

that terse, full, and final expression which the doctors rightly commend.

The art of language, regarded as a question of pattern and cadence, or

even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract

study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with

words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where

speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and

upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the

ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the

fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that

action and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the

playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds, a

framework for those silences that are more telling than any speech. Here

lies an escape from the poverty of content and method to which

self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore are epic

and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry. The greater force of

the objective treatment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets,

whose ambition has led them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or the

play. There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the

thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the

saying of it; a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy

reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack.

In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought up short

by the question, “Why must you still be talking?” Even the passionate

lyric feels the need of external authorisation, and some of the finest of

lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth’s

_Solitary Reaper_, are cast in a dramatic mould, that beauty of diction

may be vitalised by an imagined situation. More than others the dramatic

art is an enemy to the desultory and the superfluous, sooner than others

it will cast away all formal grace of expression that it may come home

more directly to the business and bosoms of men. Its great power and

scope are shown well in this, that it can find high uses for the

commonest stuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of daily

intercourse.

Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of

impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary facts

of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama, and in its

modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and novelist create

their own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own plots, and when

all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an

inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the

glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or æsthetics,

critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with

their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two

removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the

vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response.

Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their reach; the

matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is to

employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the meaning of their words

is not obvious, and they must go aside to define it. The strength of

their writing has limits set for it by the nature of the chosen task, and

any transgression of these limits is punished by a fall into sheer

violence. All writing partakes of the quality of the drama, there is

always a situation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker

and the hearer. A gentleman in black, expounding his views, or narrating

his autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of

response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he too

may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display sympathy

and tact, and avoid the faults of senility. The only character that can

lend strength to his words is his own, and he sketches it while he states

his opinions; the only attitude that can ennoble his sayings is implied

in the very arguments he uses. Who does not know the curious blank

effect of eloquence overstrained or out of place? The phrasing may be

exquisite, the thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it

were, dumb-show where no community of feeling exists between the speaker

and his audience. A similar false note is struck by any speaker or

writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his disqualifications,

by newspaper writers using language that is seemly only in one who stakes

his life on his words, by preachers exceeding the license of fallibility,

by moralists condemning frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank

ways of hazard, by Satan rebuking sin.

“How many things are there,” exclaims the wise Verulam, “which a man

cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself! A man’s person

hath many proper relations which he cannot put off. A man cannot speak

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 the case requires, and not

as it sorteth with the person.” The like “proper relations” govern

writers, even where their audience is unknown to them. It has often been

remarked how few are the story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so

much as by a passing reflection or sentiment, without a discordant

effect. The friend who saves the situation is found in one and another

of the creatures of their art.

For those who must play their own part the effort to conceal themselves

is of no avail. The implicit attitude of a writer makes itself felt; an

undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions, an unwarrantable

assumption of sympathy, a tendency to truck with friends or with enemies

by the way, are all possible indications of weakness, which move even the

least skilled of readers to discount what is said, as they catch here and

there a glimpse of the old pot-companion, or the young dandy, behind the

imposing literary mask. Strong writers are those who, with every reserve

of power, seek no exhibition of strength. It is as if language could not

come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as an

evil necessity. Every word is torn from them, as from a reluctant

witness. They come to speech as to a last resort, when all other ways

have failed. The bane of a literary education is that it induces

talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in words. But those whose

words are stark and terrible seem almost to despise words.

With words literature begins, and to words it must return. Coloured by

the neighbourhood of silence, solemnised by thought or steeled by action,

words are still its only means of rising above words. “_Accedat verbum

ad elementum_,” said St. Ambrose, “_et fiat sacramentum_.” So the

elementary passions, pity and love, wrath and terror, are not in

themselves poetical; they must be wrought upon by the word to become

poetry. In no other way can suffering be transformed to pathos, or

horror reach its apotheosis in tragedy.

When all has been said, there remains a residue capable of no formal

explanation. Language, this array of conventional symbols loosely strung

together, and blown about by every wandering breath, is miraculously

vital and expressive, justifying not a few of the myriad superstitions

that have always attached to its use. The same words are free to all,

yet no wealth or distinction of vocabulary is needed for a group of words

to take the stamp of an individual mind and character. “As a quality of

style” says Mr. Pater, “soul is a fact.” To resolve how words, like

bodies, become transparent when they are inhabited by that luminous

reality, is a higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent

persuasion and deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on

glory. The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the

chosen vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It is the old problem,

to be met only by the old solution of the Platonist, that

Soul is form, and doth the body make.

The soul is able to inform language by some strange means other than the

choice and arrangement of words and phrases. Real novelty of vocabulary

is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a parasitical existence,

and are always quoting. Quotations, conscious or unconscious, vary in

kind according as the mind is active to work upon them and make them its

own. In its grossest and most servile form quotation is a lazy folly; a

thought has received some signal or notorious expression, and as often as

the old sense, or something like it, recurs, the old phrase rises to the

lips. This degenerates to simple phrase-mongering, and those who

practise it are not vigilantly jealous of their meaning. Such an

expression as “fine by degrees and beautifully less” is often no more

than a bloated equivalent for a single word—say “diminishing” or

“shrinking.” Quotations like this are the warts and excremental parts of

language; the borrowings of good writers are never thus superfluous,

their quotations are appropriations. Whether it be by some witty turn

given to a well-known line, by an original setting for an old saw, or by

a new and unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of the borrower is put upon the

goods he borrows, and he becomes part owner. Plagiarism is a crime only

where writing is a trade; expression need never be bound by the law of

copyright while it follows thought, for thought, as some great thinker

has observed, is free. The words were once Shakespeare’s; if only you

can feel them as he did, they are yours now no less than his. The best

quotations, the best translations, the best thefts, are all equally new

and original works. From quotation, at least, there is no escape,

inasmuch as we learn language from others. All common phrases that do

the dirty work of the world are quotations—poor things, and not our own.

Who first said that a book would “repay perusal,” or that any gay scene

was “bright with all the colours of the rainbow”? There is no need to

condemn these phrases, for language has a vast deal of inferior work to

do. The expression of thought, temperament, attitude, is not the whole

of its business. It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will

attempt to remint all the small defaced coinage that passes through his

hands, only a lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventional

garments and all conventional speech. At a modern wedding the frock-coat

is worn, the presents are “numerous and costly,” and there is an “ovation

accorded to the happy pair.” These things are part of our public

civilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to be lightly set

aside. But let it be a friend of your own who is to marry, a friend of

your own who dies, and you are to express yourself—the problem is

changed, you feel all the difficulties of the art of style, and fathom

something of the depth of your unskill. Forbidden silence, we should be

in a poor way indeed.

Single words too we plagiarise when we use them without realisation and

mastery of their meaning. The best argument for a succinct style is

this, that if you use words you do not need, or do not understand, you

cannot use them well. It is not what a word means, but what it means to

you, that is of the deepest import. Let it be a weak word, with a poor

history behind it, if you have done good thinking with it, you may yet

use it to surprising advantage. But if, on the other hand, it be a

strong word that has never aroused more than a misty idea and a

flickering emotion in your mind, here lies your danger. You may use it,

for there is none to hinder; and it will betray you. The commonest Saxon

words prove explosive machines in the hands of rash impotence. It is

perhaps a certain uneasy consciousness of danger, a suspicion that

weakness of soul cannot wield 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 to be

avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on some occult ability

in their employer. For every living person, if the material were

obtainable, a separate historical dictionary might be compiled, recording

where each word was first heard or seen, where and how it was first used.

The references are utterly beyond recovery; but such a register would

throw a strange light on individual styles. The eloquent trifler, whose

stock of words has been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would

stand denuded of his plausible pretences as soon as it were seen how

roguishly he came by his eloquence. There may be literary quality, it is

well to remember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has been

happily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be. Yet the voice will

sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chance listeners, for a

genuine utterance of humanity; and the like is true in literature. But

writing cannot be luminous and great save in the hands of those whose

words are their own by the indefeasible title of conquest. Life is spent

in learning the meaning of great words, so that some idle proverb, known

for years and accepted perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day, like a

blow. “If there were not a God,” said Voltaire, “it would be necessary

to invent him.” Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word, but some

of those who use it most, if they would be perfectly sincere, should

enclose it in quotation marks. Whole nations go for centuries without

coining names for certain virtues; is it credible that among other

peoples, where the names exists the need for them is epidemic? The

author of the _Ecclesiastial Polity_ puts a bolder and truer face on the

matter. “Concerning that Faith, Hope, and Charity,” he writes, “without

which there can be no salvation, was there ever any mention made saving

only in that Law which God himself hath from Heaven revealed? There is

not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of

these three, more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth

of the eternal God.” Howsoever they came to us, we have the words; they,

and many other terms of tremendous import, are bandied about from mouth

to mouth and alternately enriched or impoverished in meaning. Is the

“Charity” of St. Paul’s Epistle one with the 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 and the

outcast for which the muddle-headed, greasy citizen of to-day invokes the

same high name? Of a truth, some kingly words fall to a lower estate

than Nebuchadnezzar.

Here, among words, our lot is cast, to make or mar. It is in this

obscure thicket, overgrown with weeds, set with thorns, and haunted by

shadows, this World of Words, as the Elizabethans finely called it, that

we wander, eternal pioneers, during the course of our mortal lives. To

be overtaken by a master, one who comes along with the gaiety of assured

skill and courage, with the gravity of unflinching purpose, to make the

crooked ways straight and the rough places plain, is to gain fresh

confidence from despair. He twines wreaths of the entangling ivy, and

builds ramparts of the thorns. He blazes his mark upon the secular oaks,

as a guidance to later travellers, and coaxes flame from heaps of

mouldering rubbish. There is no sense of cheer like this. Sincerity,

clarity, candour, power, seem real once more, real and easy. In the

light of great literary achievement, straight and wonderful, like the

roads of the ancient Romans, barbarism torments the mind like a riddle.

Yet there are the dusky barbarians!—fleeing from the harmonious tread of

the ordered legions, running to hide themselves in the morass of vulgar

sentiment, to ambush their nakedness in the sand-pits of low thought.

* * * * *

It is a venerable custom to knit up the speculative consideration of any

subject with the counsels of practical wisdom. The words of this essay

have been vain indeed if the idea that style may be imparted by tuition

has eluded them, and survived. There is a useful art of Grammar, which

takes for its province the right and the wrong in speech. Style deals

only with what is permissible to all, and even revokes, on occasion, the

rigid laws of Grammar or countenances offences against them. Yet no one

is a better judge of equity for ignorance of the law, and grammatical

practice offers a fair field wherein to acquire ease, accuracy and

versatility. The formation of sentences, the sequence of verbs, the

marshalling of the ranks of auxiliaries are all, in a sense, to be

learned. There is a kind of inarticulate disorder to which writers are

liable, quite distinct from a bad style, and caused chiefly by lack of

exercise. An unpractised writer will sometimes send a beautiful and

powerful phrase jostling along in the midst of a clumsy sentence—like a

crowned king escorted by a mob.

But Style cannot be taught. Imitation of the masters, or of some one

chosen master, and the constant purging of language by a severe

criticism, have their uses, not to be belittled; they have also their

dangers. The greater part of what is called the teaching of style must

always be negative, bad habits may be broken down, old malpractices

prohibited. The pillory and the stocks are hardly educational agents,

but they make it easier for honest men to enjoy their own. If style

could really be taught, it is a question whether its teachers should not

be regarded as mischief-makers and enemies of mankind. The Rosicrucians

professed to have found the philosopher’s stone, and the shadowy sages of

modern Thibet are said, by those who speak for them, to have compassed

the instantaneous transference of bodies from place to place. In either

case, the holders of these secrets have laudably refused to publish them,

lest avarice and malice should run amuck in human society. A similar

fear might well visit the conscience of one who should dream that he had

divulged to the world at large what can be done with language. Of this

there is no danger; rhetoric, it is true, does put fluency, emphasis, and

other warlike equipments at the disposal of evil forces, but style, like

the Christian religion, is one of those open secrets which are most

easily and most effectively kept by the initiate from age to age.

Divination is the only means of access to these mysteries. The formal

attempt to impart a good style is like the melancholy task of the teacher

of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for

the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not

truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be

imparted. The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here

witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be

a good man. Good style is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the

soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much. “Always be ready to

speak your minds” said Blake, “and a base man will avoid you.” But to

insist that he also shall speak his mind is to go a step further, it is

to take from the impostor his wooden leg, to prohibit his lucrative

whine, his mumping and his canting, to force the poor silly soul to stand

erect among its fellows and declare itself. His occupation is gone, and

he does not love the censor who deprives him of the weapons of his

mendicity.

All style is gesture, the gesture of the mind and of the soul. Mind we

have in common, inasmuch as the laws of right reason are not different

for different minds. Therefore clearness and arrangement can be taught,

sheer incompetence in the art of expression can be partly remedied. But

who shall impose laws upon the soul? It is thus of common note that one

may dislike or even hate a particular style while admiring its facility,

its strength, its skilful adaptation to the matter set forth. Milton, a

chaster and more unerring master of the art than Shakespeare, reveals no

such lovable personality. While persons count for much, style, the index

to persons, can never count for little. “Speak,” it has been said, “that

I may know you”—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 no vice, however unconscious, no

virtue, however shy, no touch of meanness or of generosity in your

character, that will not pass on to the paper. You anticipate the Day of

Judgment and furnish the recording angel with material. The Art of

Criticism in literature, so often decried and given a subordinate place

among the arts, is none other than the art of reading and interpreting

these written evidences. Criticism has been popularly opposed to

creation, perhaps because the kind of creation that it attempts is rarely

achieved, and so the world forgets that the main business of Criticism,

after all, is not to legislate, nor to classify, but to raise the dead.

Graves, at its command, have waked their sleepers, oped, and let them

forth. It is by the creative power of this art that the living man is

reconstructed from the litter of blurred and fragmentary paper documents

that he has left to posterity.

* * * * *

THE END

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_Printed by_ R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, _Edinburgh_