Style
by Walter Raleigh
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

by

Walter Raleigh

1904 Edward Arnold edition

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 every-day 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 th