William Shakespeare - "The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth"

William Shakespeare - "The Life of Timon of Athens"

Joseph A. Altsheler - "The Star of Gettysburg"

I. T. Thurston - "The Bishop's Shadow"

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Love still has something of the sea
From whence his mother rose,


the further development of that song is already fixed and its knell
rung--to the last line there is no escaping from the dazzling
influences that presided over the first. Yet to carry out such a
figure in detail, as Sir Charles Sedley set himself to do,
tarnishes the sudden glory of the opening. The lady whom Burns
called Clarinda put herself in a like quandary by beginning a song
with this stanza -


Talk not of Love, it gives me pain,
For Love has been my foe;
He bound me in an iron chain,
And plunged me deep in woe.


The last two lines deserve praise--even the praise they obtained
from a great lyric poet. But how is the song to be continued?
Genius might answer the question; to Clarinda there came only the
notion of a valuable contrast to be established between love and
friendship, and a tribute to be paid to the kindly offices of the
latter. The verses wherein she gave effect to this idea make a
poor sequel; friendship, when it is personified and set beside the
tyrant god, wears very much the air of a benevolent county
magistrate, whose chief duty is to keep the peace.

Figures of this sort are in no sense removable decorations, they
are at one with the substance of the thought to be expressed, and
are entitled to the large control they claim. Imagination, working
at white heat, can fairly subdue the matter of the poem to them, or
fuse them with others of the like temper, striking unity out of the
composite mass. One thing only is forbidden, to treat these
substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant
curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on
the way to more exacting topics. The mystics, and the mystical
poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity. Recognising
that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between all
physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the
reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them
over that mysterious frontier. Their failures and misadventures,
familiarly despised as "conceits," left them floundering in
absurdity. Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the
full power and significance of figurative language been realised in
English poetry. These poets, like some of their late descendants,
were tortured by a sense of hidden meaning, and were often content
with analogies that admit of no rigorous explanation. They were
convinced that all intellectual truth is a parable, though its
inner meaning be dark or dubious. The philosophy of friendship
deals with those mathematical and physical conceptions of distance,
likeness, and attraction--what if the law of bodies govern souls
also, and the geometer's compasses measure more than it has entered
into his heart to conceive? Is the moon a name only for a certain
tonnage of dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial while
the law of gravitation is universal? Mysticism will observe no
such partial boundaries.


O more than Moon!
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.


The secret of these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the
greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental
religion and the Catholic Church.

Figure and ornament, therefore, are not interchangeable terms; the
loftiest figurative style most conforms to the precepts of gravity
and chastity. None the less there is a decorative use of figure,
whereby a theme is enriched with imaginations and memories that are
foreign to the main purpose. Under this head may be classed most
of those allusions to the world's literature, especially to
classical and Scriptural lore, which have played so considerable,
yet on the whole so idle, a part in modern poetry. It is here that
an inordinate love of decoration finds its opportunity and its
snare. To keep the most elaborate comparison in harmony with its
occasion, so that when it is completed it shall fall back easily
into the emotional key of the narrative, has been the study of the
great epic poets. Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift
on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty felt and
conquered:


Angel forms, who lay entranced
Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks
In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades
High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge
Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed
Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry,
While with perfidious hatred they pursued
The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld
From the safe shore their floating carcases
And broken chariot-wheels. So thick bestrown,
Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.


The comparison seems to wander away at random, obedient to the
slightest touch of association. Yet in the end it is brought back,
its majesty heightened, and a closer element of likeness introduced
by the skilful turn that substitutes the image of the shattered
Egyptian army for the former images of dead leaves and sea-weed.
The incidental pictures, of the roof of shades, of the watchers
from the shore, and the very name "Red Sea," fortuitous as they may
seem, all lend help to the imagination in bodying forth the scene
described. An earlier figure in the same book of Paradise Lost,
because it exhibits a less conspicuous technical cunning, may even
better show a poet's care for unity of tone and impression. Where
Satan's prostrate bulk is compared to


that sea-beast
Leviathan, which God of all his works
Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,


the picture that follows of the Norse-pilot mooring his boat under
the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind
once more to all the pathos and gloom of those infernal deeps:


while night
Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.


So masterly a handling of the figures which usage and taste
prescribe to learned writers is rare indeed. The ordinary small
scholar disposes of his baggage less happily. Having heaped up
knowledge as a successful tradesman heaps up money, he is apt to
believe that his wealth makes him free of the company of letters,
and a fellow craftsman of the poets. The mark of his style is an
excessive and pretentious allusiveness. It was he whom the
satirist designed in that taunt, Scire tuum nihil est nisi te scire
hoc sciat alter--"My knowledge of thy knowledge is the knowledge
thou covetest." His allusions and learned periphrases elucidate
nothing; they put an idle labour on the reader who understands
them, and extort from baffled ignorance, at which, perhaps, they
are more especially aimed, a foolish admiration. These tricks and
vanities, the very corruption of ornament, will always be found
while the power to acquire knowledge is more general than the
strength to carry it or the skill to wield it. The collector has
his proper work to do in the commonwealth of learning, but the
ownership of a museum is a poor qualification for the name of
artist. Knowledge has two good uses; it may be frankly
communicated for the benefit of others, or it may minister matter
to thought; an allusive writer often robs it of both these
functions. He must needs display his possessions and his modesty
at one and the same time, producing his treasures unasked, and
huddling them in uncouth fashion past the gaze of the spectator,
because, forsooth, he would not seem to make a rarity of them. The
subject to be treated, the groundwork to be adorned, becomes the
barest excuse for a profitless haphazard ostentation. This fault
is very incident to the scholarly style, which often sacrifices
emphasis and conviction to a futile air of encyclopaedic grandeur.

Those who are repelled by this redundance of ornament, from which
even great writers are not wholly exempt, have sometimes been
driven by the force of reaction into a singular fallacy. The
futility of these literary quirks and graces has induced them to
lay art under the same interdict with ornament. Style and
stylists, one will say, have no attraction for him, he had rather
hear honest men utter their thoughts directly, clearly, and simply.
The choice of words, says another, and the conscious manipulation
of sentences, is literary foppery; the word that first offers is
commonly the best, and the order in which the thoughts occur is the
order to be followed. Be natural, be straightforward, they urge,
and what you have to say will say itself in the best possible
manner. It is a welcome lesson, no doubt, that these deluded
Arcadians teach. A simple and direct style--who would not give his
all to purchase that! But is it in truth so easy to be compassed?
The greatest writers, when they are at the top of happy hours,
attain to it, now and again. Is all this tangled contrariety of
things a kind of fairyland, and does the writer, alone among men,
find that a beaten foot-path opens out before him as he goes, to
lead him, straight through the maze, to the goal of his desires?
To think so is to build a childish dream out of facts imperfectly
observed, and worthy of a closer observation. Sometimes the cry
for simplicity is the reverse of what it seems, and is uttered by
those who had rather hear words used in their habitual vague
acceptations than submit to the cutting directness of a good
writer. Habit makes obscurity grateful, and the simple style, in
this view, is the style that allows thought to run automatically
into its old grooves and burrows. The original writers who have
combined real literary power with the heresy of ease and nature are
of another kind. A brutal personality, excellently muscular,
snatching at words as the handiest weapons wherewith to inflict
itself, and the whole body of its thoughts and preferences, on
suffering humanity, is likely enough to deride the daintiness of
conscious art. Such a writer is William Cobbett, who has often
been praised for the manly simplicity of his style, which he raised
into a kind of creed. His power is undeniable; his diction, though
he knew it not, both choice and chaste; yet page after page of his
writing suggests only the reflection that here is a prodigal waste
of good English. He bludgeons all he touches, and spends the same
monotonous emphasis on his dislike of tea and on his hatred of the
Government. His is the simplicity of a crude and violent mind,
concerned only with giving forcible expression to its unquestioned
prejudices. Irrelevance, the besetting sin of the ill-educated, he
glories in, so that his very weakness puts on the semblance of
strength, and helps to wield the hammer.

It is not to be denied that there is a native force of temperament
which can make itself felt even through illiterate carelessness.
"Literary gentlemen, editors, and critics," says Thoreau, himself
by no means a careless writer, "think that they know how to write,
because they have studied grammar and rhetoric; but they are
egregiously mistaken. The ART of composition is as simple as the
discharge of a bullet from a rifle, and its masterpieces imply an
infinitely greater force behind them." This true saying introduces
us to the hardest problem of criticism, the paradox of literature,
the stumbling-block of rhetoricians. To analyse the precise method
whereby a great personality can make itself felt in words, even
while it neglects and contemns the study of words, would be to lay
bare the secrets of religion and life--it is beyond human
competence. Nevertheless a brief and diffident consideration of
the matter may bring thus much comfort, that the seeming
contradiction is no discredit cast on letters, but takes its origin
rather from too narrow and pedantic a view of the scope of letters.

Words are things: it is useless to try to set them in a world
apart. They exist in books only by accident, and for one written
there are a thousand, infinitely more powerful, spoken. They are
deeds: the man who brings word of a lost battle can work no
comparable effect with the muscles of his arm; Iago's breath is as
truly laden with poison and murder as the fangs of the cobra and
the drugs of the assassin. Hence the sternest education in the use
of words is least of all to be gained in the schools, which
cultivate verbiage in a highly artificial state of seclusion. A
soldier cares little for poetry, because it is the exercise of
power that he loves, and he is accustomed to do more with his words
than give pleasure. To keep language in immediate touch with
reality, to lade it with action and passion, to utter it hot from
the heart of determination, is to exhibit it in the plenitude of
power. All this may be achieved without the smallest study of
literary models, and is consistent with a perfect neglect of
literary canons. It is not the logical content of the word, but
the whole mesh of its conditions, including the character,
circumstances, and attitude of the speaker, that is its true
strength. "Damn" is often the feeblest of expletives, and "as you
please" may be the dirge of an empire. Hence it is useless to look
to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of
style; the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are
current only in his own abstract world. A breath of hesitancy will
sometimes make trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in
writing, a thing three times said, and each time said badly, may be
of more effect than that terse, full, and final expression which
the doctors rightly commend. The art of language, regarded as a
question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and
thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has
been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone
you can do next to nothing. The realm where speech holds sway is a
narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic
action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence:
whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the
sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action
and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the
playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds,
a framework for those silences that are more telling than any
speech. Here lies an escape from the poverty of content and method
to which self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and
therefore are epic and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry.
The greater force of the objective treatment is witnessed by many
essayists and lyrical poets, whose ambition has led them, sooner or
later, to attempt the novel or the play. There are weaknesses
inherent in all direct self-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is
greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the saying of it;
a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy
reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the
rack. In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is
brought up short by the question, "Why must you still be talking?"
Even the passionate lyric feels the need of external authorisation,
and some of the finest of lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of
Desdemona, or Wordsworth's Solitary Reaper, are cast in a dramatic
mould, that beauty of diction may be vitalised by an imagined
situation. More than others the dramatic art is an enemy to the
desultory and the superfluous, sooner than others it will cast away
all formal grace of expression that it may come home more directly
to the business and bosoms of men. Its great power and scope are
shown well in this, that it can find high uses for the commonest
stuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of daily
intercourse.

Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of
impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary
facts of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama,
and in its modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and
novelist create their own characters, set their own scenes, lay
their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right
word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities,
all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate.
Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists,
and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their
slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two
removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the
vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response.
Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their
reach; the matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most
they can do is to employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the
meaning of their words is not obvious, and they must go aside to
define it. The strength of their writing has limits set for it by
the nature of the chosen task, and any transgression of these
limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence. All writing
partakes of the quality of the drama, there is always a situation
involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker and the hearer.
A gentleman in black, expounding his views, or narrating his
autobiography to the first comer, can expect no such warmth of
response as greets the dying speech of the baffled patriot; yet he
too may take account of the reasons that prompt speech, may display
sympathy and tact, and avoid the faults of senility. The only
character that can lend strength to his words is his own, and he
sketches it while he states his opinions; the only attitude that
can ennoble his sayings is implied in the very arguments he uses.
Who does not know the curious blank effect of eloquence
overstrained or out of place? The phrasing may be exquisite, the
thought well-knit, the emotion genuine, yet all is, as it were,
dumb-show where no community of feeling exists between the speaker
and his audience. A similar false note is struck by any speaker or
writer who misapprehends his position or forgets his
disqualifications, by newspaper writers using language that is
seemly only in one who stakes his life on his words, by preachers
exceeding the license of fallibility, by moralists condemning
frailty, by speculative traders deprecating frank ways of hazard,
by Satan rebuking sin.

"How many things are there," exclaims the wise Verulam, "which a
man cannot, with any face or comeliness, say or do himself! A
man's person hath many proper relations which he cannot put off. A
man cannot speak to his son but as a father; to his wife, but as a
husband; to his enemy but upon terms; whereas a friend may speak as
the case requires, and not as it sorteth with the person." The
like "proper relations" govern writers, even where their audience
is unknown to them. It has often been remarked how few are the
story-tellers who can introduce themselves, so much as by a passing
reflection or sentiment, without a discordant effect. The friend
who saves the situation is found in one and another of the
creatures of their art.

For those who must play their own part the effort to conceal
themselves is of no avail. The implicit attitude of a writer makes
itself felt; an undue swelling of his subject to heroic dimensions,
an unwarrantable assumption of sympathy, a tendency to truck with
friends or with enemies by the way, are all possible indications of
weakness, which move even the least skilled of readers to discount
what is said, as they catch here and there a glimpse of the old
pot-companion, or the young dandy, behind the imposing literary
mask. Strong writers are those who, with every reserve of power,
seek no exhibition of strength. It is as if language could not
come by its full meaning save on the lips of those who regard it as
an evil necessity. Every word is torn from them, as from a
reluctant witness. They come to speech as to a last resort, when
all other ways have failed. The bane of a literary education is
that it induces talkativeness, and an overweening confidence in
words. But those whose words are stark and terrible seem almost to
despise words.

With words literature begins, and to words it must return.
Coloured by the neighbourhood of silence, solemnised by thought or
steeled by action, words are still its only means of rising above
words. "Accedat verbum ad elementum," said St. Ambrose, "et fiat
sacramentum." So the elementary passions, pity and love, wrath and
terror, are not in themselves poetical; they must be wrought upon
by the word to become poetry. In no other way can suffering be
transformed to pathos, or horror reach its apotheosis in tragedy.

When all has been said, there remains a residue capable of no
formal explanation. Language, this array of conventional symbols
loosely strung together, and blown about by every wandering breath,
is miraculously vital and expressive, justifying not a few of the
myriad superstitions that have always attached to its use. The
same words are free to all, yet no wealth or distinction of
vocabulary is needed for a group of words to take the stamp of an
individual mind and character. "As a quality of style" says Mr.
Pater, "soul is a fact." To resolve how words, like bodies, become
transparent when they are inhabited by that luminous reality, is a
higher pitch than metaphysic wit can fly. Ardent persuasion and
deep feeling enkindle words, so that the weakest take on glory.
The humblest and most despised of common phrases may be the chosen
vessel for the next avatar of the spirit. It is the old problem,
to be met only by the old solution of the Platonist, that


Soul is form, and doth the body make.


The soul is able to inform language by some strange means other
than the choice and arrangement of words and phrases. Real novelty
of vocabulary is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a
parasitical existence, and are always quoting. Quotations,
conscious or unconscious, vary in kind according as the mind is
active to work upon them and make them its own. In its grossest
and most servile form quotation is a lazy folly; a thought has
received some signal or notorious expression, and as often as the
old sense, or something like it, recurs, the old phrase rises to
the lips. This degenerates to simple phrase-mongering, and those
who practise it are not vigilantly jealous of their meaning. Such
an expression as "fine by degrees and beautifully less" is often no
more than a bloated equivalent for a single word--say "diminishing"
or "shrinking." Quotations like this are the warts and excremental
parts of language; the borrowings of good writers are never thus
superfluous, their quotations are appropriations. Whether it be by
some witty turn given to a well-known line, by an original setting
for an old saw, or by a new and unlooked-for analogy, the stamp of
the borrower is put upon the goods he borrows, and he becomes part
owner. Plagiarism is a crime only where writing is a trade;
expression need never be bound by the law of copyright while it
follows thought, for thought, as some great thinker has observed,
is free. The words were once Shakespeare's; if only you can feel
them as he did, they are yours now no less than his. The best
quotations, the best translations, the best thefts, are all equally
new and original works. From quotation, at least, there is no
escape, inasmuch as we learn language from others. All common
phrases that do the dirty work of the world are quotations--poor
things, and not our own. Who first said that a book would "repay
perusal," or that any gay scene was "bright with all the colours of
the rainbow"? There is no need to condemn these phrases, for
language has a vast deal of inferior work to do. The expression of
thought, temperament, attitude, is not the whole of its business.
It is only a literary fop or doctrinaire who will attempt to remint
all the small defaced coinage that passes through his hands, only a
lisping young fantastico who will refuse all conventional garments
and all conventional speech. At a modern wedding the frock-coat is
worn, the presents are "numerous and costly," and there is an
"ovation accorded to the happy pair." These things are part of our
public civilisation, a decorous and accessible uniform, not to be
lightly set aside. But let it be a friend of your own who is to
marry, a friend of your own who dies, and you are to express
yourself--the problem is changed, you feel all the difficulties of
the art of style, and fathom something of the depth of your
unskill. Forbidden silence, we should be in a poor way indeed.

Single words too we plagiarise when we use them without realisation
and mastery of their meaning. The best argument for a succinct
style is this, that if you use words you do not need, or do not
understand, you cannot se them well. It is not what a word means,
but what it means to you, that is of the deepest import. Let it be
a weak word, with a poor history behind it, if you have done good
thinking with it, you may yet use it to surprising advantage. But
if, on the other hand, it be a strong word that has never aroused
more than a misty idea and a flickering emotion in your mind, here
lies your danger. You may use it, for there is none to hinder; and
it will betray you. The commonest Saxon words prove explosive
machines in the hands of rash impotence. It is perhaps a certain
uneasy consciousness of danger, a suspicion that weakness of soul
cannot wield these strong words, that makes debility avoid them,
committing itself rather, as if by some pre-established affinity,
to the vaguer Latinised vocabulary. Yet they are not all to be
avoided, and their quality in practice will depend on some occult
ability in their employer. For every living person, if the
material were obtainable, a separate historical dictionary might be
compiled, recording where each word was first heard or seen, where
and how it was first used. The references are utterly beyond
recovery; but such a register would throw a strange light on
individual styles. The eloquent trifler, whose stock of words has
been accumulated by a pair of light fingers, would stand denuded of
his plausible pretences as soon as it were seen how roguishly he
came by his eloquence. There may be literary quality, it is well
to remember, in the words of a parrot, if only its cage has been
happily placed; meaning and soul there cannot be. Yet the voice
will sometimes be mistaken, by the carelessness of chance
listeners, for a genuine utterance of humanity; and the like is
true in literature. But writing cannot be luminous and great save
in the hands of those whose words are their own by the indefeasible
title of conquest. Life is spent in learning the meaning of great
words, so that some idle proverb, known for years and accepted
perhaps as a truism, comes home, on a day, like a blow. "If there
were not a God," said Voltaire, "it would be necessary to invent
him." Voltaire had therefore a right to use the word, but some of
those who use it most, if they would be perfectly sincere, should
enclose it in quotation marks. Whole nations go for centuries
without coining names for certain virtues; is it credible that
among other peoples, where the names exists the need for them is
epidemic? The author of the Ecclesiastial Polity puts a bolder and
truer face on the matter. "Concerning that Faith, Hope, and
Charity," he writes, "without which there can be no salvation, was
there ever any mention made saving only in that Law which God
himself hath from Heaven revealed? There is not in the world a
syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three,
more than hath been supernaturally received from the mouth of the
eternal God." Howsoever they came to us, we have the words; they,
and many other terms of tremendous import, are bandied about from
mouth to mouth and alternately enriched or impoverished in meaning.
Is the "Charity" of St. Paul's Epistle one with the charity of
"charity-blankets"? Are the "crusades" of Godfrey and of the great
St. Louis, where knightly achievement did homage to the religious
temper, essentially the same as that process of harrying the
wretched and the outcast for which the muddle-headed, greasy
citizen of to-day invokes the same high name? Of a truth, some
kingly words fall to a lower estate than Nebuchadnezzar.

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