Transcribed from the 1904 Edward Arnold edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
STYLE
* * * * *
BY
WALTER RALEIGH
AUTHOR OF ‘THE ENGLISH NOVEL,’
AND ‘ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, A CRITICAL ESSAY’
* * * * *
_FIFTH IMPRESSION_
* * * * *
LONDON
EDWARD ARNOLD
Publisher to the India Office
1904
* * * * *
JOANNI SAMPSON
BIBLIOTHECARIO OPTIMO
VIRO OMNI SAPIENTIA ÆGYPTIORUM
ERUDITO
LABORUM ET ITINERUM SUORUM
SOCIO
HUNC LIBELLUM
D · D · D
AUCTOR
TABLE OF THE PRINCIPAL MATTERS
CONTAINED IN THIS ESSAY
PAGE
The Triumph of Letters 1
The Problem of Style 3
The Instrument and the Audience, with a Digression on the 4
Actor
The Sense-Elements 8
The Functions of Sense 10
Picture 11
Melody 14
Meaning, Exampled in Negation 17
The Weapons of Thought 21
The Analogy from Architecture 23
The Analogy Rectified. The Law of Change 24
The Good Slang 27
The Bad Slang 29
Archaism 32
Romantic and Classic 36
The Palsy of Definition 39
Distinction 43
Assimilation 45
Synonyms 46
Variety of Expression 49
Variety Justified 50
Metaphor and Abstraction: Poetry and Science 55
The Doctrine of the _Mot Propre_ 61
The Instrument 65
The Audience 65
The Relation of the Author to his Audience 71
The Poet and his Audience 71
Public Caterers 77
The Cautelous Man 78
Sentimentalism and Jocularity 81
The Tripe-Seller 83
The Wag 85
Social and Rhetorical Corruptions 87
Sincerity 88
Insincerity 93
Austerity 94
The Figurative Style 98
Decoration 100
Allusiveness 102
Simplicity and Strength 104
The Paradox of Letters 107
Drama 108
Implicit Drama 111
Words Again 115
Quotation 116
Appropriation 119
The World of Words 123
The Teaching of Style 124
The Conclusion 127
STYLE
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 æsthetic, 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 Æneas 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 œcumenical 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.