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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 -

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