THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.
Le style c’est de l’homme.--BUFFON.
Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of
his mind; therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let
him first be clear in his thoughts; and if he would write in a
noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.--GOETHE.
No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere
heart.--RUSKIN.
It was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that
language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a
class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same
opinion,--sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition
to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit
of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist.
As all objects look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “loom up
through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence
that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is sometimes
called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant that it transcends
all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers
of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a
remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, “What
a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in
intelligible English!”--whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness
and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes
the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is,
that the profoundest authors are always the clearest, and the
_chiaro-oscuro_ which these transcendentalists affect, instead of
shrouding thoughts which mankind cannot well afford to lose, is but
a cloak for their intellectual nakedness,--the convenient shelter
for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks
and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is
it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates
the shallow.
But, whether language be or be not fitted to _cloak_ our ideas, as
Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons
to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to _express_ them.
How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though
we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize
them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand
times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled
birds, they have swept by him,--thoughts so swift and so many-hued
that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery?
How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one’s study,
or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled
with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest
tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken
words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we
cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us,
but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but,
when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the
greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense
into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish
of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines
of splendid declamation:
“Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,--could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,--into one word,
And that one word were lightning, I would speak;
But, as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.”
So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:
“I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal,
And half conceal the soul within.”
De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words
corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor
can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by
God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician’s heart,
never to roll forth from harp or organ.
“The sea of thought is a boundless sea,
Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;
The waves that would tell of the mystery
Die and fall on the shore of speech.”
“Thought,” says the eloquent Du Ponceau, “is vast as the air; it
embraces far more than languages can express;--or rather, languages
_express_ nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks
from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd
of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with
lightning-like rapidity.”
The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons
who have conception without expression,--gifted, thoughtful men,
lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who
hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such
men they term men of “passive genius.” Their minds are like black
glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any
for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them “the dumb ones of
earth,” for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but
are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these
dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all
men, even the most fluent; for there are thoughts which mock at all
attempts to express them, however “well-languaged” the thinker may
be.
It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it,
“_la pensée devenue matière_”; for the very expression involves a
contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols,--imperfect, too, at
best,--and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought
is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It
is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to
express,--shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when
their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail,
not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought
which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in
mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though
produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than
an _asymptote_ to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its
limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of
the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: “I am all which
hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted
my veil.”
“Full oft
Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force
Which thunders down the echo it creates;
Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been.”
Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in the lines of
Boileau:
“Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,
L’expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure;
Ce que l’on concoit bien s’énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément.”
In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets
we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force
and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is
doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression
are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly
convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the
fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What
the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language
is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those
melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive
conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be
wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The
Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue
of every one of his audience; but “who among them could have
answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them
could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it
all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?” So with our
English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know
how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole
boundless range of imagination, which some English author has
not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an
accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy
of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression, which
fall scarcely short of perfection itself? Is there not something
almost like sorcery in the potent spell which some of these mighty
magicians of language are able to exercise over the soul? Yet the
right arrangement of the right words is the whole secret of the
witchery,--a charm within the reach of any one of equal genius.
Possess yourself of the necessary ideas, and feel them deeply, and
you will not often complain of the barrenness of language. You will
find it abounding in riches,--exuberant beyond the demand of your
intensest thought. “The statue is not more surely included in the
block of marble, than is all conceivable splendor of utterance in
‘Webster’s Unabridged.’” As Goethe says:
“Be thine to seek the honest gain,
No shallow-sounding fool;
Sound sense finds utterance for itself,
Without the critic’s rule;
If to your heart your tongue be true,
Why hunt for words with much ado?”
But we hear some one say,--is this the only secret of apt words? Is
nothing more necessary to be done by one who would obtain a command
of language? Does not Dr. Blair tell us to study the “Spectator,”
if we would learn to write well; and does not Dr. Johnson, too,
declare that “whoever wishes to obtain an English style, familiar
but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his
days and nights to the volumes of Addison?” Yes, and it is a pity
that Johnson did not act upon his own advice. That it is well for
a writer to familiarize himself with the best models of style
(models sufficiently numerous to prevent that mannerism which is
apt to result from unconscious imitation, when he is familiar with
but one) nobody can doubt. A man’s vocabulary depends largely on
the company lie keeps; and without a proper vocabulary no man can
he a good writer. Words are the material that the author works in,
and he must use as much care in their selection as the sculptor
in choosing his marble, or the painter in choosing his colors.
By listening to those who speak well, by profound study of the
masterpieces of literature, by exercises in translation, and, above
all, by frequent and careful practice in speaking and writing, he
may not only enrich his vocabulary, learn the secret of the great
writer’s charm, and elevate and refine his taste as he can in no
other way, but acquire such a mastery of language that it shall
become, at last, a willing and ready instrument, obedient to the
lightest challenge of his thought. Words, apt and telling, will
then flow spontaneously, though the result of the subtlest art,
like the waters of our city fountains, which, with much toil and
at great expense, are carried into the public squares, yet appear
to gush forth naturally. But to suppose that a good style can be
acquired by imitating any one writer, or any set of writers, is one
of the greatest follies that can be imagined. Such a supposition is
based on the notion that fine writing is an addition from without
to the matter treated of,--a kind of ornament superinduced, or
luxury indulged in, by one who has sufficient genius; whereas the
brilliant or powerful writer is not one who has merely a copious
vocabulary, and can turn on at will any number of splendid phrases
and swelling sentences, but he is one who has something to say,
and knows how to say it. Whether he dashes off his compositions
at a heat, or elaborates them with fastidious nicety and care,
he has but one aim, which he keeps steadily before him, and that
is to give forth what is in him. From this very earnestness it
follows that, whatever be the brilliancy of his diction, or the
harmony of his style,--whether it blaze with the splendors of
a gorgeous rhetoric, or take the ear prisoner with its musical
surprises,--he never makes these an end, but has always the charm
of an incommunicable simplicity.
Such a person “writes passionately because he feels keenly;
forcibly, because he conceives vividly; he sees too clearly to
be vague; he is too serious to be otiose: he can analyze his
subject, and therefore he is rich; he embraces it as a whole and
in parts, and therefore he is consistent; he has a firm hold of
it, and therefore he is luminous. When his imagination wells up,
it overflows in ornament; when his heart is touched, it thrills
along his verse. He always has the right word for the right idea,
and never a word too much. If he is brief, it is because few words
suffice; when he is lavish of them, still each word has its mark,
and aids, not embarrasses, the vigorous march of his elocution.
He expresses what all feel, but what all cannot say, and his
sayings pass into proverbs among the people, and his phrases
become household words and idioms of their daily speech, which is
tessellated with the rich fragments of his language, as we see in
foreign lands the marbles of Roman grandeur worked into the walls
and pavements of modern palaces.”[22]
It follows from all this that there is no model style, and that
the kind of style demanded in any composition depends upon the man
and his theme. The first law of good writing is that it should
be an expression of a man’s self,--a reflected image of his own
character. If we know what the man is, we know what his style
should be. If it mirrors his individuality, it is, relatively,
good; if it is not a self-portraiture, it is bad, however polished
its periods, or rhythmical its cadences. The graces and witcheries
of expression which charm us in an original writer, offend us
in a copyist. Style is sometimes, though not very happily,
termed the dress of thought. It is really, as Wordsworth long
ago declared, the _incarnation_ of thought. In Greek, the same
word, Logos, stands for reason and speech,--and why? Because they
cannot be divided; because thought and expression are one. They
each co-exist, not one _with_ the other, but _in_ and _through_
the other. Not till we can separate the soul and the body, life
and motion, the convex and concave of a curve, shall we be able
to divorce thought from the language which only can embody it.
But allowing, for the moment, that style is the verbal clothing
of ideas, who but the most poverty-stricken person would think
of wearing the clothes of another? It is true that there are
certain general qualities, such as clearness, force, flexibility,
simplicity, variety, which all good styles will alike possess, just
as all good clothing will have certain qualities in common. But for
all men to clothe their thoughts in the same manner would be as
foolish as for a giant to array himself in the garments of a dwarf,
a stout man in those of a thin, or a brunette in those of a blonde.
Robert Hall, when preaching in early life at Cambridge, England,
for a short time aped Dr. Johnson; but he soon saw the folly of it.
“I might as well have attempted,” said he, “to dance a hornpipe in
the cumbrous costume of Gog and Magog. My puny thoughts could not
sustain the load of words in which I tried to clothe them.”
It is with varieties of style as with the varieties of the
human face, or of the leaves of the forest; while they are
obvious in their general resemblance, yet there are never two
indistinguishably alike. Sometimes the differences are very
slight,--so minute and subtle, as almost to defy characterization;
yet, like the differences in musical styles which closely resemble
each other, they are _felt_ by the discerning reader, and so
strongly that he will scarcely mistake the authorship, even on a
single reading. Men of similar natures will have similar styles;
but think of Waller aping the gait of Wordsworth, or Leigh
Hunt that of Milton! Can any one conceive of Hooker’s style as
slipshod,--of Dryden’s as feeble and obscure,--of Gibbon’s as mean
and vulgar,--of Burke’s as timid and creeping,--of Carlyle’s as
dainty and mincing,--of Emerson’s as diffuse and pointless,--or of
Napier’s as lacking picturesqueness, _verve_, and fire?
There are some writers of a quiet, even temperament, whose
sentences flow gently along like a stream through a level country,
that hardly disturbs the stillness of the air by a sound; there are
others vehement, rapid, redundant, that roll on like a mountain
torrent forcing its way over all obstacles, and filling the valleys
and woods with the echoes of its roar. One author, deep in one
place, and shallow in another, reminds you of the Ohio, here
unfordable, and there full of sand bars,--now hurrying on with
rapid current, and now expanding into lovely lakes, fringed with
forests and overhung with hills; another, always brimming with
thought, reminds you of the Mississippi, which rolls onward the
same vast volume, with no apparent diminution, from Cairo to New
Orleans. “Sydney Smith, concise, brisk, and brilliant, has a manner
of composition which exactly corresponds to those qualities; but
how would Lord Bacon look in Smith’s sentences? How grandly the
soul of Milton rolls and winds through the arches and labyrinths
of his involved and magnificent diction, waking musical echoes
at every new turn and variation of its progress; but how could
the thought of such a light trifler as Cibber travel through so
glorious a maze, without being lost or crushed in the journey? The
plain, manly language of John Locke could hardly be translated into
the terminology of Kant,--would look out of place in the rapid and
sparkling movement of Cousin’s periods,--and would appear mean in
the cadences of Dugald Stewart.”[23]
Not only has every original writer his own style, which mirrors his
individuality, but the writers of every age differ from those of
every other age. Joubert has well said that if the French authors
of to-day were to write as men wrote in the time of Louis XIV,
their style would lack truthfulness, for the French of to-day have
not the same dispositions, the same opinions, the same manners. A
woman who should write like Madame Sévigné would be ridiculous,
because she is not Madame Sévigné. The more one’s writing smacks
of his own character and of the manners of his time, the more
widely must his style diverge from that of the writers who were
models only because they excelled in manifesting in their works
either the manners of _their_ own age or _their_ own character.
Who would tolerate to-day a writer who should reproduce, however
successfully, the stately periods of Johnson, the mellifluous
lines of Pope, or the faultless but nerveless periods of Addison?
The style that is to please to-day must be dense with meaning and
full of color; it must be suggestive, sharp, and incisive. So
far is imitation of the old masterpieces from being commendable,
that, as Joubert says, good taste itself permits one to avoid
imitating the best styles, for taste, even good taste, changes with
manners,--“_Le bon goût lui-même, en ce cas, permet qu’on s’écarte
du meilleur goût, car le goût change avec les mœurs, même le bon
goût_.”
Let no man, then, aim at the cultivation of style for style’s sake,
independently of ideas, for all such aims will result in failure.
To suppose that noble or impressive language is a communicable
trick of rhetoric and accent, is one of the most mischievous of
fallacies. Every writer has his own ideas and feelings,--his own
conceptions, judgments, discriminations, and comparisons,--which
are personal, proper to himself, in the same sense that his looks,
his voice, his air, his gait, and his action are personal. If
he has a vulgar mind, he will write vulgarly; if he has a noble
nature, he will write nobly; in every case, the beauty or ugliness
of his moral countenance, the force and keenness or the feebleness
of his logic, will be imaged in his language. It follows,
therefore, as Ruskin says, that all the virtues of language are,
in their roots, moral: it becomes accurate, if the writer desires
to be true; clear, if he write with sympathy and a desire to be
intelligible; powerful, if he has earnestness; pleasant, if he has
a sense of rhythm and order.
This sensibility of language to the impulses and qualities of him
who uses it; its flexibility in accommodating itself to all the
thoughts, feelings, imaginations, and aspirations which pass within
him, so as to become the faithful expression of his personality,
indicating the very pulsating and throbbing of his intellect, and
attending on his own inward world of thought as its very shadow;
and, strangest, perhaps, the magical power it has, where thought
transcends the sensuous capacities of language, to suggest the idea
or mood it cannot directly convey, and to give forth an aroma which
no analysis of word or expression reveals,--is one of the marvels
of human speech. The writer, therefore, who is so magnetized by
another’s genius that he cannot say anything in his own way, but
is perpetually imitating the other’s structure of sentence and
turns of expression, confesses his barrenness. The only way to make
another’s style one’s own is to possess one’s self of his mind
and soul. If we would reproduce his peculiarities of diction, we
must first acquire the qualities that produced them. “Language,”
says Goldwin Smith, “is not a musical instrument into which, if
a fool breathe, it will make melody. Its tones are evoked only
by the spirit of high or tender thought; and though truth is not
always eloquent, real eloquence is always the glow of truth.”
As Sainte-Beuve says of the plainness and brevity of Napoleon’s
style,--“_Prétendre imiter le precédé de diction du héros qui sut
abréger Cæsar lui-même_ ... _il convient_ d’avoir fait d’aussi
grandes choses _pour avoir le droit d’être aussi nu_.”
It is not imitation, but general culture,--as another has said,
the constant submission of a teachable, apprehensive mind to
the influence of minds of the highest order, in daily life and
books,--that brings out upon style its daintiest bloom and its
richest fruitage. “So in the making of a fine singer, after the
voice has been developed, and the rudiments of vocalization have
been learned, farther instruction is almost of no avail. But the
frequent hearing of the best music given by the best singers
and instrumentalists,--the living in an atmosphere of art and
literature,--will develop and perfect a vocal style in one who has
the gift of song; and, for any other, all the instruction of all
the musical professors that ever came out of Italy will do no more
than teach an avoidance of positive errors in musical grammar.”[24]
The Cabalists believed that whoever found the mystic word for
anything attained to as absolute mastery over that thing as did
the robbers over the door of their cave in the Arabian tale. The
converse is true of expression; for he who is thoroughly possessed
of his thought becomes master of the _word_ fitted to express
it, while he who has but a half-possession of it vainly seeks to
torture out of language the secret of that inspiration which should
be in himself. The secret of force in writing or speaking lies not
in Blair’s “Rhetoric,” or Roget’s “Thesaurus,”--not in having a
copious vocabulary, or a dozen words for every idea,--but in having
something that you earnestly wish to say, and making the parts
of speech vividly conscious of it. Phidias, the great Athenian
sculptor, said of one of his pupils that he had an inspired thumb,
because the modelling clay yielded to its careless touch a grace
of sweep which it refused to the utmost pains of others. So he who
has thoroughly possessed himself of his thought will not have to
hunt through his dictionary for apt and expressive words,--a method
which is but an outside remedy for an inward defect,--but will find
language eagerly obedient to him, as if every word should say,
“_Bid_ me discourse; I will enchant thine ear,”
and fit expressions, as Milton says, “like so many nimble and airy
servitors, will trip about him at command, and, in well-ordered
files, fall aptly into their own places.” It was the boast of
Dante that no word had ever forced him to say what _he_ would not,
though he had forced many a word to say what _it_ would not; and so
will every writer, who as vividly conceives and as deeply feels his
theme, be able to conjure out of words their uttermost secret _of_
power or pathos.
The question has been sometimes discussed whether the best style is
a colorless medium, which, like good glass, only lets the thought
be distinctly seen, or whether it imparts a pleasure apart from
the ideas it conveys. There are those who hold that when language
is simply transparent,--when it comes to us so refined of all its
dross, so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it
as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness in all
its proportions,--we are at the very summit of the literary art.
This is the character of Southey’s best prose, and of Paley’s
writing, whose statement of a false theory is so lucid that it
becomes a refutation. There are writers, however, who charm us by
their language, apart from the ideas it conveys. There is a kind
of mysterious perfume about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly
enjoy, but for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a
beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has not admired,
independently of the sense, its “jewels, five words long, that,
on the stretched forefinger of all time, sparkle forever”? There
are passages in which the mere cadence of the words is by itself
delicious to a delicate ear, though we cannot tell how and why. We
are conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one
feels when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a brook
tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. Sir Philip Sidney
could not hear the old ballad of Chevy Chase without his blood
being stirred as by the sound of a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at
the utterance of two verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he
never repeated particular lines of delicate modulation without a
shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not sensible of
certain magical effects, altogether distinct from the thoughts, in
some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s “Nightingale,” and in
the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin,
and De Quincey?
Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly, the first
law of all composition; but it may be doubted whether _vividness_,
which was the ruling conception of the Greeks with regard to this
property of style, is not quite as essential. Style, it has been
well said, “is not only a medium; it is also a form. It is not
enough that the thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must
be seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be visible
in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only be crystalline
and sparkling, but the things in it must be bounded and defined by
sharply cut lines.”[25]
A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet the thoughts
be destitute of boldness and originality. The highest degree of
transparency, however, can be attained only by the writer who has
thoroughly mastered his theme, and whose whole nature is stirred
by it. As that exquisite material through which we gaze from our
windows on the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty
after undergoing the furnace,--as it was melted by fire before the
rough particles of sand disappeared,--so it is with language. It is
only a burning invention that can make it transparent. A powerful
imagination must fuse the harsh elements of composition until all
foreign substances have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless
word has been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will
brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which the most
delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest emotions of the
heart are visible.
How many human thoughts have baffled for generations every attempt
to give them expression! How many opinions and conclusions are
there, which form the basis of our daily reflections, the matter
for the ordinary operations of our minds, which were toiled
after perhaps for ages, before they were seized and rendered
comprehensible! How many ideas are there which we ourselves have
grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere just above
us, and found the arm of our intellect just too short to reach
them; and then comes a happier genius, who, in a lucky moment, and
from some vantage ground, arrests the meteor in its flight, and,
grasping the floating phantom, drags it from the skies to earth;
condenses that which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit;
fetters that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and,
having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession and
heritage on mankind!
The arrangement of words by great writers on the printed page
has sometimes been compared to the arrangement of soldiers on
the field; and if it is interesting to see how a great general
marshals his regiments, it is certainly not less so to see how the
Alexanders and Napoleons of letters marshal their verbal battalions
on the battle-fields of thought. Foremost among those who wield
despotic sway over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose
words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,--almost
crowding each other, so close are their files,--and all moving
in irresistible array, without confusion or chasm, now holding
some Thermopylæ of new truth against some scholastic Xerxes, now
storming some ancient Malakoff of error, but always with “victory
sitting eagle-winged on their crests.” A strain of music bursts
on your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s dazzling
files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their gorgeous
ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming to the wind,”
“breathing united force and fixed thought,” come moving on “in
perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders.”
Next comes Chillingworth, with his glittering rapier, all
rhetorical rule and flourish, according to the schools,--_passado_,
_montanso_, _staccato_,--one, two, three,--the third in your bosom.
Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword, striking
with the edge, while he pierces with the point, and stuns with the
hilt, and wielding the ponderous weapon as easily as you would a
flail. Next strides Johnson with elephantine tread, with the club
of logic in one hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right
and left with antithetical blows, and, “when his pistol misses
fire, knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke, with
lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun; he touches
it, and forth there burst, with loud and ringing roar, missiles
of every conceivable description,--chain shot, stone, iron darts,
spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes, and balls, that cut down
everything before them. Close after him steals Jeffrey, armed
cap-a-pie,--carrying a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife
in the other,--steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence,
master of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “playing it
like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims. There is
Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once with a tremendous
Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running under his opponent’s guard,
and stabbing him to the heart with the heavy dagger of a short,
epigrammatic sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls
with a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge
fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with fancy and
pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli, armed with
an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while it kills; Emerson,
transfixing his adversaries with a blade of transcendental temper,
snatched from the scabbard of Plato; and Carlyle, relentless
iconoclast of shams, who “gangs his ain gait,” armed with an
antique stone axe, with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you
would drugs with a pestle and mortar.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] “The Idea of a University,” by J. H. Newman.
[23] “Essays and Reviews,” by Edwin P. Whipple.
[24] “Words and Their Uses,” by Richard Grant White.
[25] “Homiletics and Pastoral Theology,” by W. G. Shedd, D.D.