Chapter 2

clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason. These are theostentatious 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 ofParadise 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 itsmature 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 sofar 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 speakerworks 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 theindividual 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 largerknowledge, 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 likenessin 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 themot 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 hasbeen 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 fromthe 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 beknown 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 andevil, 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. Thesame 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 opendefiance. 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, thegreat 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, sanghigh 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, inThe 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 seenBut 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 journeymenand 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 subduedTo 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 wouldhave 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 havepromised 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 allconcealment. 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 criticsis 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 launchedagainst 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 discoverythat 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 whenit 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, andunmans 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 truismsor 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 withrealities, 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 raisethem 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 sentimentalhucksters 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 expenseof 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 incongruitiesof 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 laughin 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 thewell-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 ranclear 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 theenergy 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 artAs glorious to this night, being o’er my head,As is a winged messenger of heavenUnto the white-upturned wond’ring eyesOf 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 ofParadise Lostare 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 seemsIn 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 wereThat 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 otherlanguage. 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 theReady 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 permeatesordinary 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 roamat 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 aking may suffer the oppression of a powerful ally. When a lyric begins with the splendid lines,

Love still has something of the seaFrom 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. Theverses 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. Theirfailures 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 forbearTo 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 seais a fine instance of the difficulty felt and conquered:

Angel forms, who lay entrancedThick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooksIn Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shadesHigh over-arched embower; or scattered sedgeAfloat, when with fierce winds Orion armedHath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o’erthrewBusiris and his Memphian chivalry,While with perfidious hatred they pursuedThe sojourners of Goshen, who beheldFrom the safe shore their floating carcasesAnd 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 forththe scene described. An earlier figure in the same book ofParadise 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-beastLeviathan, which God of all his worksCreated 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 nightInvests 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 styleis 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 uncouthfashion 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 whatyou 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 realliterary 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. Theartof 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 ofthe 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 externalauthorisation, and some of the finest of lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth’sSolitary Reaper, are cast in a dramatic mould, that 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 bythe 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 hetoo 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’sperson 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 youngdandy, 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 somestrange 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 andunlooked-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 coinagethat 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.

Back to Index Next