1 : CHAPTER I - ON SOME TECHNICAL ELEMENTS OF STYLE IN LITERATURE
THERE is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown
the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and
occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface
that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and
to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked
by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys. In a similar
way, psychology itself, when pushed to any nicety, discovers
an abhorrent baldness, but rather from the fault of our
analysis than from any poverty native to the mind. And
perhaps in aesthetics the reason is the same: those
disclosures which seem fatal to the dignity of art seem so
perhaps only in the proportion of our ignorance; and those
conscious and unconscious artifices which it seems unworthy
of the serious artist to employ were yet, if we had the power
to trace them to their springs, indications of a delicacy of
the sense finer than we conceive, and hints of ancient
harmonies in nature. This ignorance at least is largely
irremediable. We shall never learn the affinities of beauty,
for they lie too deep in nature and too far back in the
mysterious history of man. The amateur, in consequence, will
always grudgingly receive details of method, which can be
stated but never can wholly be explained; nay, on the
principle laid down in HUDIBRAS, that
Still the less they understand,
The more they admire the sleight-of-hand,
many are conscious at each new disclosure of a diminution in
the ardour of their pleasure. I must therefore warn that
well-known character, the general reader, that I am here
embarked upon a most distasteful business: taking down the
picture from the wall and looking on the back; and, like the
inquiring child, pulling the musical cart to pieces.
1. CHOICE OF WORDS. - The art of literature stands apart
from among its sisters, because the material in which the
literary artist works is the dialect of life; hence, on the
one hand, a strange freshness and immediacy of address to the
public mind, which is ready prepared to understand it; but
hence, on the other, a singular limitation. The sister arts
enjoy the use of a plastic and ductile material, like the
modellers clay; literature alone is condemned to work in
mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
these 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.
Now the first merit which attracts in the pages of a good
writer, or the talk of a brilliant conversationalist, is the
apt choice and contrast of the words employed. It is,
indeed, a strange art to take these blocks, rudely conceived
for the purpose of the market or the bar, and by tact of
application touch them to the finest meanings and
distinctions, restore to them their primal energy, wittily
shift them to another issue, or make of them a drum to rouse
the passions. But though this form of merit is without doubt
the most sensible and seizing, it is far from being equally
present in all writers. The effect of words in Shakespeare,
their singular justice, significance, and poetic charm, is
different, indeed, from the effect of words in Addison or
Fielding. Or, to take an example nearer home, the words in
Carlyle seem electrified into an energy of lineament, like
the faces of men furiously moved; whilst the words in
Macaulay, apt enough to convey his meaning, harmonious enough
in sound, yet glide from the memory like undistinguished
elements in a general effect. But the first class of writers
have no monopoly of literary merit. There is a sense in
which Addison is superior to Carlyle; a sense in which Cicero
is better than Tacitus, in which Voltaire excels Montaigne:
it certainly lies not in the choice of words; it lies not in
the interest or value of the matter; it lies not in force of
intellect, of poetry, or of humour. The three first are but
infants to the three second; and yet each, in a particular
point of literary art, excels his superior in the whole.
What is that point?
2. THE WEB. - Literature, although it stands apart by reason
of the great destiny and general use of its medium in the
affairs of men, is yet an art like other arts. Of these we
may distinguish two great classes: those arts, like
sculpture, painting, acting, which are representative, or, as
used to be said very clumsily, imitative; and those, like
architecture, music, and the dance, which are self-
sufficient, and merely presentative. Each class, in right of
this distinction, obeys principles apart; yet both may claim
a common ground of existence, and it may be said with
sufficient justice that the motive and end of any art
whatever is to make a pattern; a pattern, it may be, of
colours, of sounds, of changing attitudes, geometrical
figures, or imitative lines; but still a pattern. That is
the plane on which these sisters meet; it is by this that
they are arts; and if it be well they should at times forget
their childish origin, addressing their intelligence to
virile tasks, and performing unconsciously that necessary
function of their life, to make a pattern, it is still
imperative that the pattern shall be made.
Music and literature, the two temporal arts, contrive their
pattern of sounds in time; or, in other words, of sounds and
pauses. Communication may be made in broken words, the
business of life be carried on with substantives alone; but
that is not what we call literature; and the true business of
the literary artist is to plait or weave his meaning,
involving it around itself; so that each sentence, by
successive phrases, shall first come into a kind of knot, and
then, after a moment of suspended meaning, solve and clear
itself. In every properly constructed sentence there should
be observed this knot or hitch; so that (however delicately)
we are led to foresee, to expect, and then to welcome the
successive phrases. The pleasure may be heightened by an
element of surprise, as, very grossly, in the common figure
of the antithesis, or, with much greater subtlety, where an
antithesis is first suggested and then deftly evaded. Each
phrase, besides, is to be comely in itself; and between the
implication and the evolution of the sentence there should be
a satisfying equipoise of sound; for nothing more often
disappoints the ear than a sentence solemnly and sonorously
prepared, and hastily and weakly finished. Nor should the
balance be too striking and exact, for the one rule is to be
infinitely various; to interest, to disappoint, to surprise,
and yet still to gratify; to be ever changing, as it were,
the stitch, and yet still to give the effect of an ingenious
neatness.
The conjurer juggles with two oranges, and our pleasure in
beholding him springs from this, that neither is for an
instant overlooked or sacrificed. So with the writer. His
pattern, which is to please the supersensual ear, is yet
addressed, throughout and first of all, to the demands of
logic. Whatever be the obscurities, whatever the intricacies
of the argument, the neatness of the fabric must not suffer,
or the artist has been proved unequal to his design. And, on
the other hand, no form of words must be selected, no knot
must be tied among the phrases, unless knot and word be
precisely what is wanted to forward and illuminate the
argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game. The
genius of prose rejects the CHEVILLE no less emphatically
than the laws of verse; and the CHEVILLE, I should perhaps
explain to some of my readers, is any meaningless or very
watered phrase employed to strike a balance in the sound.
Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is by the
brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we
judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a
peg to plait about, takes up at once two or more elements or
two or more views of the subject in hand; combines,
implicates, and contrasts them; and while, in one sense, he
was merely seeking an occasion for the necessary knot, he
will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched the
meaning, or to have transacted the work of two sentences in
the space of one. In the change from the successive shallow
statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous
flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast
amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly
see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and
stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the
generation and affinity of events. The wit we might imagine
to be lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these
perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome,
this double purpose attained, these two oranges kept
simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not,
afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little
recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect,
not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most
natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which
attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the
greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of
the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous
for the mind; and it is by the means of such designed
reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most
pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action
most perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and
logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style,
that is the foundation of the art of literature. Books
indeed continue to be read, for the interest of the fact or
fable, in which this quality is poorly represented, but still
it will be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we
continue to peruse and reperuse with pleasure whose only
merit is the elegance of texture? I am tempted to mention
Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is dead, I will. It
is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and toothless
criticism of life; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most
intricate and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once
of elegance and of good sense; and the two oranges, even if
one of them be rotten, kept dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for
though in verse also the implication of the logical texture
is a crowning beauty, yet in verse it may be dispensed with.
You would think that here was a death-blow to all I have been
saying; and far from that, it is but a new illustration of
the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to
weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has
been formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For
that is the essence of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical;
it may be merely alliterative; it may, like the French,
depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence of the rhyme;
or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely fanciful
device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on
what principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be
pure convention; it may have no inherent beauty; all that we
have a right to ask of any prosody is, that it shall lay down
a pattern for the writer, and that what it lays down shall be
neither too easy nor too hard. Hence it comes that it is
much easier for men of equal facility to write fairly
pleasing verse than reasonably interesting prose; for in
prose the pattern itself has to be invented, and the
difficulties first created before they can be solved. Hence,
again, there follows the peculiar greatness of the true
versifier: such as Shakespeare, Milton, and Victor Hugo,
whom I place beside them as versifier merely, not as poet.
These not only knit and knot the logical texture of the style
with all the dexterity and strength of prose; they not only
fill up the pattern of the verse with infinite variety and
sober wit; but they give us, besides, a rare and special
pleasure, by the art, comparable to that of counterpoint,
with which they follow at the same time, and now contrast,
and now combine, the double pattern of the texture and the
verse. Here the sounding line concludes; a little further
on, the well-knit sentence; and yet a little further, and
both will reach their solution on the same ringing syllable.
The best that can be offered by the best writer of prose is
to show us the development of the idea and the stylistic
pattern proceed hand in hand, sometimes by an obvious and
triumphant effort, sometimes with a great air of ease and
nature. The writer of verse, by virtue of conquering another
difficulty, delights us with a new series of triumphs. He
follows three purposes where his rival followed only two; and
the change is of precisely the same nature as that from
melody to harmony. Or if you prefer to return to the
juggler, behold him now, to the vastly increased enthusiasm
of the spectators, juggling with three oranges instead of
two. Thus it is: added difficulty, added beauty; and the
pattern, with every fresh element, becoming more interesting
in itself.
Yet it must not be thought that verse is simply an addition;
something is lost as well as something gained; and there
remains plainly traceable, in comparing the best prose with
the best verse, a certain broad distinction of method in the
web. Tight as the versifier may draw the knot of logic, yet
for the ear he still leaves the tissue of the sentence
floating somewhat loose. In prose, the sentence turns upon a
pivot, nicely balanced, and fits into itself with an
obtrusive neatness like a puzzle. The ear remarks and is
singly gratified by this return and balance; while in verse
it is all diverted to the measure. To find comparable
passages is hard; for either the versifier is hugely the
superior of the rival, or, if he be not, and still persist in
his more delicate enterprise, he fails to be as widely his
inferior. But let us select them from the pages of the same
writer, one who was ambidexter; let us take, for instance,
Rumours Prologue to the Second Part of HENRY IV., a fine
flourish of eloquence in Shakespeares second manner, and set
it side by side with Falstaffs praise of sherris, act iv.
scene iii.; or let us compare the beautiful prose spoken
throughout by Rosalind and Orlando; compare, for example, the
first speech of all, Orlandos speech to Adam, with what
passage it shall please you to select - the Seven Ages from
the same play, or even such a stave of nobility as Othellos
farewell to war; and still you will be able to perceive, if
you have an ear for that class of music, a certain superior
degree of organisation in the prose; a compacter fitting of
the parts; a balance in the swing and the return as of a
throbbing pendulum. We must not, in things temporal, take
from those who have little, the little that they have; the
merits of prose are inferior, but they are not the same; it
is a little kingdom, but an independent.
3. RHYTHM OF THE PHRASE. - Some way back, I used a word
which still awaits an application. Each phrase, I said, was
to be comely; but what is a comely phrase? In all ideal and
material points, literature, being a representative art, must
look for analogies to painting and the like; but in what is
technical and executive, being a temporal art, it must seek
for them in music. Each phrase of each sentence, like an air
or a recitative in music, should be so artfully compounded
out of long and short, out of accented and unaccented, as to
gratify the sensual ear. And of this the ear is the sole
judge. It is impossible to lay down laws. Even in our
accentual and rhythmic language no analysis can find the
secret of the beauty of a verse; how much less, then, of
those phrases, such as prose is built of, which obey no law
but to be lawless and yet to please? The little that we know
of verse (and for my part I owe it all to my friend Professor
Fleeming Jenkin) is, however, particularly interesting in the
present connection. We have been accustomed to describe the
heroic line as five iambic feet, and to be filled with pain
and confusion whenever, as by the conscientious schoolboy, we
have heard our own description put in practice.
All night | the dread | less an | gel un | pursued, (2)
goes the schoolboy; but though we close our ears, we cling to
our definition, in spite of its proved and naked
insufficiency. Mr. Jenkin was not so easily pleased, and
readily discovered that the heroic line consists of four
groups, or, if you prefer the phrase, contains four pauses:
All night | the dreadless | angel | unpursued.
Four groups, each practically uttered as one word: the
first, in this case, an iamb; the second, an amphibrachys;
the third, a trochee; and the fourth, an amphimacer; and yet
our schoolboy, with no other liberty but that of inflicting
pain, had triumphantly scanned it as five iambs. Perceive,
now, this fresh richness of intricacy in the web; this fourth
orange, hitherto unremarked, but still kept flying with the
others. What had seemed to be one thing it now appears is
two; and, like some puzzle in arithmetic, the verse is made
at the same time to read in fives and to read in fours.
But again, four is not necessary. We do not, indeed, find
verses in six groups, because there is not room for six in
the ten syllables; and we do not find verses of two, because
one of the main distinctions of verse from prose resides in
the comparative shortness of the group; but it is even common
to find verses of three. Five is the one forbidden number;
because five is the number of the feet; and if five were
chosen, the two patterns would coincide, and that opposition
which is the life of verse would instantly be lost. We have
here a clue to the effect of polysyllables, above all in
Latin, where they are so common and make so brave an
architecture in the verse; for the polysyllable is a group of
Natures making. If but some Roman would return from Hades
(Martial, for choice), and tell me by what conduct of the
voice these thundering verses should be uttered - AUT
LACEDOE-MONIUM TARENTUM, for a case in point - I feel as if
I should enter at last into the full enjoyment of the best of
human verses.
But, again, the five feet are all iambic, or supposed to be;
by the mere count of syllables the four groups cannot be all
iambic; as a question of elegance, I doubt if any one of them
requires to be so; and I am certain that for choice no two of
them should scan the same. The singular beauty of the verse
analysed above is due, so far as analysis can carry us, part,
indeed, to the clever repetition of L, D, and N, but part to
this variety of scansion in the groups. The groups which,
like the bar in music, break up the verse for utterance, fall
uniambically; and in declaiming a so-called iambic verse, it
may so happen that we never utter one iambic foot. And yet
to this neglect of the original beat there is a limit.
Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts, (3)
is, with all its eccentricities, a good heroic line; for
though it scarcely can be said to indicate the beat of the
iamb, it certainly suggests no other measure to the ear. But
begin
Mother Athens, eye of Greece,
or merely Mother Athens, and the game is up, for the
trochaic beat has been suggested. The eccentric scansion of
the groups is an adornment; but as soon as the original beat
has been forgotten, they cease implicitly to be eccentric.
Variety is what is sought; but if we destroy the original
mould, one of the terms of this variety is lost, and we fall
back on sameness. Thus, both as to the arithmetical measure
of the verse, and the degree of regularity in scansion, we
see the laws of prosody to have one common purpose: to keep
alive the opposition of two schemes simultaneously followed;
to keep them notably apart, though still coincident; and to
balance them with such judicial nicety before the reader,
that neither shall be unperceived and neither signally
prevail.
The rule of rhythm in prose is not so intricate. Here, too,
we write in groups, or phrases, as I prefer to call them, for
the prose phrase is greatly longer and is much more
nonchalantly uttered than the group in verse; so that not
only is there a greater interval of continuous sound between
the pauses, but, for that very reason, word is linked more
readily to word by a more summary enunciation. Still, the
phrase is the strict analogue of the group, and successive
phrases, like successive groups, must differ openly in length
and rhythm. The rule of scansion in verse is to suggest no
measure but the one in hand; in prose, to suggest no measure
at all. Prose must be rhythmical, and it may be as much so
as you will; but it must not be metrical. It may be
anything, but it must not be verse. A single heroic line may
very well pass and not disturb the somewhat larger stride of
the prose style; but one following another will produce an
instant impression of poverty, flatness, and disenchantment.
The same lines delivered with the measured utterance of verse
would perhaps seem rich in variety. By the more summary
enunciation proper to prose, as to a more distant vision,
these niceties of difference are lost. A whole verse is
uttered as one phrase; and the ear is soon wearied by a
succession of groups identical in length. The prose writer,
in fact, since he is allowed to be so much less harmonious,
is condemned to a perpetually fresh variety of movement on a
larger scale, and must never disappoint the ear by the trot
of an accepted metre. And this obligation is the third
orange with which he has to juggle, the third quality which
the prose writer must work into his pattern of words. It may
be thought perhaps that this is a quality of ease rather than
a fresh difficulty; but such is the inherently rhythmical
strain of the English language, that the bad writer - and
must I take for example that admired friend of my boyhood,
Captain Reid? - the inexperienced writer, as Dickens in his
earlier attempts to be impressive, and the jaded writer, as
any one may see for himself, all tend to fall at once into
the production of bad blank verse. And here it may be
pertinently asked, Why bad? And I suppose it might be enough
to answer that no man ever made good verse by accident, and
that no verse can ever sound otherwise than trivial when
uttered with the delivery of prose. But we can go beyond
such answers. The weak side of verse is the regularity of
the beat, which in itself is decidedly less impressive than
the movement of the nobler prose; and it is just into this
weak side, and this alone, that our careless writer falls. A
peculiar density and mass, consequent on the nearness of the
pauses, is one of the chief good qualities of verse; but this
our accidental versifier, still following after the swift
gait and large gestures of prose, does not so much as aspire
to imitate. Lastly, since he remains unconscious that he is
making verse at all, it can never occur to him to extract
those effects of counterpoint and opposition which I have
referred to as the final grace and justification of verse,
and, I may add, of blank verse in particular.
4. CONTENTS OF THE PHRASE. - Here is a great deal of talk
about rhythm - and naturally; for in our canorous language
rhythm is always at the door. But it must not be forgotten
that in some languages this element is almost, if not quite,
extinct, and that in our own it is probably decaying. The
even speech of many educated Americans sounds the note of
danger. I should see it go with something as bitter as
despair, but I should not be desperate. As in verse no
element, not even rhythm, is necessary, so, in prose also,
other sorts of beauty will arise and take the place and play
the part of those that we outlive. The beauty of the
expected beat in verse, the beauty in prose of its larger and
more lawless melody, patent as they are to English hearing,
are already silent in the ears of our next neighbours; for in
France the oratorical accent and the pattern of the web have
almost or altogether succeeded to their places; and the
French prose writer would be astounded at the labours of his
brother across the Channel, and how a good quarter of his
toil, above all INVITA MINERVA, is to avoid writing verse.
So wonderfully far apart have races wandered in spirit, and
so hard it is to understand the literature next door!
Yet French prose is distinctly better than English; and
French verse, above all while Hugo lives, it will not do to
place upon one side. What is more to our purpose, a phrase
or a verse in French is easily distinguishable as comely or
uncomely. There is then another element of comeliness
hitherto overlooked in this analysis: the contents of the
phrase. Each phrase in literature is built of sounds, as
each phrase in music consists of notes. One sound suggests,
echoes, demands, and harmonises with another; and the art of
rightly using these concordances is the final art in
literature. It used to be a piece of good advice to all
young writers to avoid alliteration; and the advice was
sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for
that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of
those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of
the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends
implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel
demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated;
and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow
the adventures of a letter through any passage that has
particularly pleased you; find it, perhaps, denied a while,
to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole
broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one
liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will
find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is
written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick
to perceive unheard melodies; and the eye, which directs
the pen and deciphers the printed phrase. Well, even as
there are rhymes for the eye, so you will find that there are
assonances and alliterations; that where an author is running
the open A, deceived by the eye and our strange English
spelling, he will often show a tenderness for the flat A; and
that where he is running a particular consonant, he will not
improbably rejoice to write it down even when it is mute or
bears a different value.
Here, then, we have a fresh pattern - a pattern, to speak
grossly, of letters - which makes the fourth preoccupation of
the prose writer, and the fifth of the versifier. At times
it is very delicate and hard to perceive, and then perhaps
most excellent and winning (I say perhaps); but at times
again the elements of this literal melody stand more boldly
forward and usurp the ear. It becomes, therefore, somewhat a
matter of conscience to select examples; and as I cannot very
well ask the reader to help me, I shall do the next best by
giving him the reason or the history of each selection. The
two first, one in prose, one in verse, I chose without
previous analysis, simply as engaging passages that had long
re-echoed in my ear.
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue,
unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees
her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal
garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. (4)
Down to virtue, the current S and R are both announced and
repeated unobtrusively, and by way of a grace-note that
almost inseparable group PVF is given entire. (5) The next
phrase is a period of repose, almost ugly in itself, both S
and R still audible, and B given as the last fulfilment of
PVF. In the next four phrases, from that never down to
run for, the mask is thrown off, and, but for a slight
repetition of the F and V, the whole matter turns, almost too
obtrusively, on S and R; first S coming to the front, and
then R. In the concluding phrase all these favourite
letters, and even the flat A, a timid preference for which is
just perceptible, are discarded at a blow and in a bundle;
and to make the break more obvious, every word ends with a
dental, and all but one with T, for which we have been
cautiously prepared since the beginning. The singular
dignity of the first clause, and this hammer-stroke of the
last, go far to make the charm of this exquisite sentence.
But it is fair to own that S and R are used a little
coarsely.
In Xanady did Kubla Khan
(KANDL)
A stately pleasure dome decree,
(KDLSR)
Where Alph the sacred river ran,
(KANDLSR)
Through caverns measureless to man,
(KANLSR)
Down to a sunless sea. (6)
(NDLS)
Here I have put the analysis of the main group alongside the
lines; and the more it is looked at, the more interesting it
will seem. But there are further niceties. In lines two and
four, the current S is most delicately varied with Z. In
line three, the current flat A is twice varied with the open
A, already suggested in line two, and both times (where and
sacred) in conjunction with the current R. In the same
line F and V (a harmony in themselves, even when shorn of
their comrade P) are admirably contrasted. And in line four
there is a marked subsidiary M, which again was announced in
line two. I stop from weariness, for more might yet be said.
My next example was recently quoted from Shakespeare as an
example of the poets colour sense. Now, I do not think
literature has anything to do with colour, or poets anyway
the better of such a sense; and I instantly attacked this
passage, since purple was the word that had so pleased the
writer of the article, to see if there might not be some
literary reason for its use. It will be seen that I
succeeded amply; and I am bound to say I think the passage
exceptional in Shakespeare - exceptional, indeed, in
literature; but it was not I who chose it.
The BaRge she sat iN, like a BURNished throNe
BURNT oN the water: the POOP was BeateN gold,
PURPle the sails and so PUR* Fumed that
* per
The wiNds were love-sick with them. (7)
It may be asked why I have put the F of perfumed in
capitals; and I reply, because this change from P to F is the
completion of that from B to P, already so adroitly carried
out. Indeed, the whole passage is a monument of curious
ingenuity; and it seems scarce worth while to indicate the
subsidiary S, L, and W. In the same article, a second
passage from Shakespeare was quoted, once again as an example
of his colour sense:
A mole cinque-spotted like the crimson drops
I the bottom of a cowslip. (8)
It is very curious, very artificial, and not worth while to
analyse at length: I leave it to the reader. But before I
turn my back on Shakespeare, I should like to quote a
passage, for my own pleasure, and for a very model of every
technical art:
But in the wind and tempest of her frown,
P. V. (9) F. (st) (ow)
Distinction with a loud and powerful fan,
W.P. F. (st) (ow) L.
Puffing at all, winnows the light away;
W. P. F. L.
And what hath mass and matter by itself
W. F. L. M. A.
Lies rich in virtue and unmingled. (10)
V. L. M.
From these delicate and choice writers I turned with some
curiosity to a player of the big drum - Macaulay. I had in
hand the two-volume edition, and I opened at the beginning of
the second volume. Here was what I read:
The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the
degree of the maladministration which has produced them. It
is therefore not strange that the government of Scotland,
having been during many years greatly more corrupt than the
government of England, should have fallen with a far heavier
ruin. The movement against the last king of the house of
Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland destructive.
The English complained not of the law, but of the violation
of the law.
This was plain-sailing enough; it was our old friend PVF,
floated by the liquids in a body; but as I read on, and
turned the page, and still found PVF with his attendant
liquids, I confess my mind misgave me utterly. This could be
no trick of Macaulays; it must be the nature of the English
tongue. In a kind of despair, I turned half-way through the
volume; and coming upon his lordship dealing with General
Cannon, and fresh from Claverhouse and Killiecrankie, here,
with elucidative spelling, was my reward:
Meanwhile the disorders of Kannons Kamp went on inKreasing.
He Kalled a Kouncil of war to Konsider what Kourse it would
be advisable to taKe. But as soon as the Kouncil had met, a
preliminary Kuestion was raised. The army was almost
eKsKlusively a Highland army. The recent vKktory had been
won eKsKlusively by Highland warriors. Great chieFs who had
brought siKs or SeVen hundred Fighting men into the Field did
not think it Fair that they should be outVoted by gentlemen
From Ireland, and From the Low Kountries, who bore indeed
King Jamess Kommission, and were Kalled Kolonels and
Kaptains, but who were Kolonels without regiments and
Kaptains without Kompanies.
A moment of FV in all this world of Ks! It was not the
English language, then, that was an instrument of one string,
but Macaulay that was an incomparable dauber.
It was probably from this barbaric love of repeating the same
sound, rather than from any design of clearness, that he
acquired his irritating habit of repeating words; I say the
one rather than the other, because such a trick of the ear is
deeper-seated and more original in man than any logical
consideration. Few writers, indeed, are probably conscious
of the length to which they push this melody of letters.
One, writing very diligently, and only concerned about the
meaning of his words and the rhythm of his phrases, was
struck into amazement by the eager triumph with which he
cancelled one expression to substitute another. Neither
changed the sense; both being mono-syllables, neither could
affect the scansion; and it was only by looking back on what
he had already written that the mystery was solved: the
second word contained an open A, and for nearly half a page
he had been riding that vowel to the death.
In practice, I should add, the ear is not always so exacting;
and ordinary writers, in ordinary moments, content themselves
with avoiding what is harsh, and here and there, upon a rare
occasion, buttressing a phrase, or linking two together, with
a patch of assonance or a momentary jingle of alliteration.
To understand how constant is this preoccupation of good
writers, even where its results are least obtrusive, it is
only necessary to turn to the bad. There, indeed, you will
find cacophony supreme, the rattle of incongruous consonants
only relieved by the jaw-breaking hiatus, and whole phrases
not to be articulated by the powers of man.
CONCLUSION. - We may now briefly enumerate the elements of
style. We have, peculiar to the prose writer, the task of
keeping his phrases large, rhythmical, and pleasing to the
ear, without ever allowing them to fall into the strictly
metrical: peculiar to the versifier, the task of combining
and contrasting his double, treble, and quadruple pattern,
feet and groups, logic and metre - harmonious in diversity:
common to both, the task of artfully combining the prime
elements of language into phrases that shall be musical in
the mouth; the task of weaving their argument into a texture
of committed phrases and of rounded periods - but this
particularly binding in the case of prose: and, again common
to both, the task of choosing apt, explicit, and
communicative words. We begin to see now what an intricate
affair is any perfect passage; how many faculties, whether of
taste or pure reason, must be held upon the stretch to make
it; and why, when it is made, it should afford us so complete
a pleasure. From the arrangement of according letters, which
is altogether arabesque and sensual, up to the architecture
of the elegant and pregnant sentence, which is a vigorous act
of the pure intellect, there is scarce a faculty in man but
has been exercised. We need not wonder, then, if perfect
sentences are rare, and perfect pages rarer.
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