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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Style, by Walter Raleigh
+(#2 in our series by Walter Raleigh)
+
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+
+Title: Style
+
+Author: Walter Raleigh
+
+Release Date: September, 1997  [EBook #1038]
+[This file was first posted on September 2, 1997]
+[Most recently updated: May 23, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: US-ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, STYLE ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+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
+aesthetic, 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 AEneas 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 oecumenical 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 AEsculapius.
+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 scais-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 modem
+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
+aesthetic 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 Moliere, 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 Caedmon 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 wished 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 encyclopaedic 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 aesthetics, 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 se 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.
+
+
+
+
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