WORDS.

“DO you read the dictionary?” asked M. Théophile Gautier of a young and

ardent disciple who had come to him for counsel. “It is the most

fruitful and interesting of books. Words have an individual and a

relative value. They should be chosen before being placed in position.

This word is a mere pebble; that a fine pearl or an amethyst. In art the

handicraft is everything, and the absolute distinction of the artist

lies, not so much in his capacity to feel nature, as in his power to

render it.”

We are always pleased to have a wholesome truth presented to us with

such genial vivacity, so that we may feel ourselves less edified than

diverted, and learn our lesson without the mortifying consciousness of

ignorance. He is a wise preceptor who conceals from us his awful rod of

office, and grafts his knowledge dexterously upon our self-esteem.

“Men must be taught as if you taught them not,

And things unknown proposed as things forgot.”

An appreciation of words is so rare that everybody naturally thinks he

possesses it, and this universal sentiment results in the misuse of a

material whose beauty enriches the loving student beyond the dreams of

avarice. Musicians know the value of chords; painters know the value of

colors; writers are often so blind to the value of words that they are

content with a bare expression of their thoughts, disdaining the “labor

of the file,” and confident that the phrase first seized is for them the

phrase of inspiration. They exaggerate the importance of what they have

to say,—lacking which we should be none the poorer,—and underrate the

importance of saying it in such fashion that we may welcome its very

moderate significance. It is in the habitual and summary recognition of

the laws of language that scholarship delights, says Mr. Pater; and

while the impatient thinker, eager only to impart his views, regards

these laws as a restriction, the true artist finds in them an

opportunity, and rejoices, as Goethe rejoiced, to work within conditions

and limits.

For every sentence that may be penned or spoken the right words exist.

They lie concealed in the inexhaustible wealth of a vocabulary enriched

by centuries of noble thought and delicate manipulation. He who does not

find them and fit them into place, who accepts the first term which

presents itself rather than search for the expression which accurately

and beautifully embodies his meaning, aspires to mediocrity, and is

content with failure. The exquisite adjustment of a word to its

significance, which was the instrument of Flaubert’s daily martyrdom and

daily triumph; the generous sympathy of a word with its surroundings,

which was the secret wrung by Sir Thomas Browne from the mysteries of

language,—these are the twin perfections which constitute style, and

substantiate genius. Cardinal Newman also possesses in an extraordinary

degree Flaubert’s art of fitting his words to the exact thoughts they

are designed to convey. Such a brief sentence as “Ten thousand

difficulties do not make one doubt” reveals with pregnant simplicity the

mental attitude of the writer. Sir Thomas Browne, working under fewer

restraints, and without the severity of intellectual discipline,

harmonizes each musical syllable into a prose of leisurely sweetness and

sonorous strength. “Court not felicity too far, and weary not the

favorable hand of fortune.” “Man is a noble animal, splendid in ashes,

and pompous in the grave.” “The race of delight is short, and pleasures

have mutable faces.” Such sentences, woven with curious skill from the

rich fabric of seventeenth-century English, defy the wreckage of time.

In them a gentle dignity of thought finds its appropriate expression,

and the restfulness of an unvexed mind breathes its quiet beauty into

each cadenced line. Here are no “boisterous metaphors,” such as Dryden

scorned, to give undue emphasis at every turn, and amaze the careless

reader with the cheap delights of turbulence. Here is no trace of that

“full habit of speech,” hateful to Mr. Arnold’s soul, and which, in the

years to come, was to be the gift of journalism to literature.

The felicitous choice of words, which with most writers is the result of

severe study and unswerving vigilance, seems with a favored few—who

should be envied and not imitated—to be the genuine fruit of

inspiration, as though caprice itself could not lead them far astray.

Shelley’s letters and prose papers teem with sentences in which the

beautiful words are sufficient satisfaction in themselves, and of more

value than the conclusions they reveal. They have a haunting sweetness,

a pure perfection, which makes the act of reading them a sustained and

dulcet pleasure. Sometimes this effect is produced by a few simple terms

reiterated into lingering music. “We are born, and our birth is

unremembered, and our infancy remembered but in fragments; we live on,

and in living we lose the apprehension of life.” Sometimes a clearer

note is struck with the sure and delicate touch which is the excellence

of art. “For the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some

invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory

brightness.” The substitution of the word “glow” for “brightness” would,

I think, make this sentence extremely beautiful. If it lacks the

fullness and melody of those incomparable passages in which Burke, the

great master of words, rivets our admiration forever, it has the same

peculiar and lasting hold upon our imaginations and our memories. Once

read, we can no more forget its charm than we can forget “that chastity

of honor which felt a stain like a wound,” or the mournful cadence of

regret over virtues deemed superfluous in an age of strictly

iconoclastic progress. “Never more shall we behold that generous loyalty

to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that

subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself,

the spirit of an exalted freedom.” It is the fashion at present to

subtly depreciate Burke’s power by some patronizing allusion to the

“grand style,”—a phrase which, except when applied to Milton, appears to

hold in solution an undefined and undefinable reproach. But until we can

produce something better, or something as good, those “long savorsome

Latin words,” checked and vivified by “racy Saxon monosyllables,” must

still represent an excellence which it is easier to belittle than to

emulate.

It is strange that our chilling disapprobation of what we are prone to

call “fine writing” melts into genial applause over the freakish

perversity so dear to modern unrest. We look askance upon such an

old-time master of his craft as the Opium-Eater, and require to be told

by a clear-headed, unenthusiastic critic like Mr. George Saintsbury that

the balanced harmony of De Quincey’s style is obtained often by the use

of extremely simple words, couched in the clearest imaginable form.

Place by the side of Mr. Pater’s picture of Monna Lisa—too well known to

need quotation—De Quincey’s equally famous description of Our Lady of

Darkness. Both passages are as beautiful as words can make them, but the

gift of simplicity is in the hands of the older writer. Or take the

single sentence which describes for us the mystery of Our Lady of Sighs:

“And her eyes, if they were ever seen, would be neither sweet nor

subtle; no man could read their story; they would be found filled with

perishing dreams, and with wrecks of forgotten delirium.” Here, as Mr.

Saintsbury justly points out, are no needless adjectives, no unusual or

extravagant words. The sense is adequate to the sound, and the sound is

only what is required as accompaniment to the sense. We are not

perplexed and startled, as when Browning introduces us to

“the Tyrrhene whelk’s pearl-sheeted lip,”

or to a woman’s

“morbid, olive, faultless shoulder-blades.”

We are not irritated and confused, as when Carlyle—whose misdeeds, like

those of Browning, are matters of pure volition—is pleased, for our

sharper discipline, to write “like a comet inscribing with its tail.” No

man uses words more admirably, or abuses them more shamefully, than

Carlyle. That he should delight in seeing his pages studded all over

with such spikes as “mammonism,” “flunkeyhood,” “nonentity,” and

“simulacrum,” that he should repeat them again and again with unwearying

self-content, is an enigma that defies solution, save on the simple

presumption that they are designed, like other instruments of torture,

to test the fortitude of the sufferer. It is best to scramble over them

as bravely as we can, and forget our scars in the enjoyment of those

vivid and matchless pictures in which each word plays its part, and

supplies its share of outline and emphasis to the scene. The art that

can dictate such a brief bit of description as “little red-colored pulpy

infants” is the art of a Dutch master who, on five inches of canvas,

depicts for us with subdued vehemence the absolute realities of life.

“All freaks,” remarks Mr. Arnold, “tend to impair the beauty and power

of language;” yet so prone are we to confuse the bizarre with the

picturesque that at present a great deal of English literature resembles

a linguistic museum, where every type of monstrosity is cheerfully

exhibited and admired. Writers of splendid capacity, of undeniable

originality and force, are not ashamed to add their curios to the group,

either from sheer impatience of restraint, or, as I sometimes think,

from a grim and perverted sense of humor, which is enlivened by noting

how far they can venture beyond bounds. When Mr. George Meredith is

pleased to tell us that one of his characters “neighed a laugh,” that

another “tolled her naughty head,” that a third “stamped; her aspect

spat,” and that a fourth was discovered “pluming a smile upon his

succulent mouth,” we cannot smother a dawning suspicion that he is

diverting himself at our expense, and pluming a smile of his own, more

sapless than succulent, over the naïve simplicity of the public. Perhaps

it is a yearning after subtlety rather than a spirit of uncurbed humor

which prompts Vernon Lee to describe for us Carlo’s “dark Renaissance

face perplexed with an incipient laugh;” but really a very interesting

and improving little paper might be written on the extraordinary laughs

and smiles which cheer the somewhat saturnine pages of modern analytic

fiction. “Correctness, that humble merit of prose,” has been snubbed

into a recognition of her insignificance. She is as tame as a woman with

only one head and two arms amid her more striking and richly endowed

sisters in the museum.

“A language long employed by a delicate and critical society,” says Mr.

Walter Bagehot, “is a treasure of dexterous felicities;” and to awaken

the literary conscience to its forgotten duty of guarding this treasure

is the avowed vocation of Mr. Pater, and of another stylist, less

understood and less appreciated, Mr. Oscar Wilde. Their labors are

scantily rewarded in an age which has but little instinct for form, and

which habitually allows itself the utmost license of phraseology. That

“unblessed freedom from restraint,” which to the clear-eyed Greeks

appeared diametrically opposed to a wise and well-ordered liberty, and

which finds its amplest expression in the poems of Walt Whitman, has

dazzled us only to betray. The emancipation of the savage is

sufficiently comprehensive, but his privileges are not always as

valuable as they may at first sight appear. Mr. Brownell, in his

admirable volume “French Traits,” unhesitatingly defines Whitman’s slang

as “the riotous medium of the under-languaged;” and the reproach is not

too harsh nor too severe. Even Mr. G. C. Macaulay, one of the most acute

and enthusiastic of his English critics, admits sadly that it is “gutter

slang,” equally purposeless and indefensible. That a man who held within

himself the elements of greatness should have deliberately lessened the

force of his life’s work by a willful misuse of his material is one of

those bitter and irremediable errors which sanity forever deplores. We

are inevitably repelled by the employment of trivial or vulgar words in

serious poetry, and they become doubly offensive when brought into

relation with the beauty and majesty of nature. It is neither pleasant

nor profitable to hear the sun’s rays described as

“scooting obliquely high and low.”

It is still less satisfactory to have the universe addressed in this

convivial and burlesque fashion:—

“Earth, you seem to look for something at my hands;

Say, old Topknot, what do you want?”

There is a kind of humorousness which a true sense of humor would render

impossible; there is a species of originality from which the artist

shrinks aghast; and worse than mere vulgarity is the constant employment

of words indecorous in themselves, and irreverent in their

application,—the smirching of clean and noble things with adjectives

grossly unfitted for such use, and repellent to all the canons of good

taste. This is not the “gentle pressure” which Sophocles put upon common

words to wring from them a fresh significance; it is a deliberate abuse

of terms, and betrays a lack of that fine quality of self-repression

which embraces the power of selection, and is the best characteristic of

literary morality. “Oh, for the style of honest men!” sighs

Sainte-Beuve, sick of such unreserved disclosures; “of men who have

revered everything worthy of respect, whose innate feelings have ever

been governed by the principles of good taste. Oh, for the polished,

pure, and moderate writers!”

There is a pitiless French maxim, less popular with English and

Americans than with our Gallic neighbors,—“Le secret d’ennuyer est de

tout dire.” Mr. Pater indeed expresses the same thought in ampler

English fashion (which but emphasizes the superiority of the French)

when he says, “For in truth all art does but consist in the removal of

surplusage, from the last finish of the gem-engraver blowing away the

last particle of invisible dust, back to the earliest divination of the

finished work to be, lying somewhere, according to Michelangelo’s fancy,

in the rough-hewn block of stone.” That the literary artist tests his

skill by a masterly omission of all that is better left unsaid is a

truth widely admitted and scantily utilized. Authors who have not taken

the trouble _de faire leur toilette_ admit us with painful frankness

into their dressing-rooms, and suffer us to gaze more intimately than is

agreeable to us upon the dubious mysteries of their deshabille. Authors

who have the gift of continuity disregard with insistent generosity the

limits of time and patience. What a noble poem was lost to myriads of

readers when “The Ring and the Book” reached its twenty thousandth line!

How inexorable is the tyranny of a great and powerful poet who will

spare his readers nothing! Authors who are indifferent to the beauties

of reserve charge down upon us with a dreadful impetuosity from which

there is no escape. The strength that lies in delicacy, the chasteness

of style which does not abandon itself to every impulse, are qualities

ill-understood by men who subordinate taste to fervor, and whose words,

coarse, rank, or unctuous, betray the undisciplined intellect that

mistakes passion for power. “The language of poets,” says Shelley, “has

always effected a certain uniform and harmonious recurrence of sound,

without which it were not poetry;” and it is the sustained effort to

secure this balanced harmony, this magnificent work within limits, which

constitutes the achievement of the poet, and gives beauty and dignity to

his art. “Where is the man who can flatter himself that he knows the

language of prose, if he has not assiduously practiced the language of

poetry?” asks M. Francisque Sarcey, whose requirements are needlessly

exacting, but whose views would have been cordially indorsed by at least

one great master of English. Dryden always maintained that the admirable

quality of his prose was due to his long training in a somewhat

mechanical verse. A more modern and diverting approximation of M.

Sarcey’s views may be found in the robust statement of Benjamin

Franklin: “I approved, for my part, the amusing one’s self now and then

with poetry, so far as to improve one’s language, but no farther.” It is

a pity that people cannot always be born in the right generation! What a

delicious picture is presented to our fancy of a nineteenth-century

Franklin amusing himself and improving his language by an occasional

study of “Sordello”!

The absolute mastery of words, which is the prerogative of genius, can

never be acquired by painstaking, or revealed to criticism. Mr. Lowell,

pondering deeply on the subject, has devoted whole pages to a scholarly

analysis of the causes which assisted Shakespeare to his unapproached

and unapproachable vocabulary. The English language was then, Mr. Lowell

reminds us, a living thing, “hot from the hearts and brains of a people;

not hardened yet, but moltenly ductile to new shapes of sharp and clear

relief in the moulds of new thought. Shakespeare found words ready to

his use, original and untarnished, types of thought whose edges were

unworn by repeated impressions.... No arbitrary line had been drawn

between high words and low; vulgar then meant simply what was common;

poetry had not been aliened from the people by the establishment of an

Upper House of vocables. The conception of the poet had no time to cool

while he was debating the comparative respectability of this phrase or

that; but he snatched what word his instinct prompted, and saw no

indiscretion in making a king speak as his country nurse might have

taught him.”

It is a curious thing, however, that the more we try to account for the

miracles of genius, the more miraculous they grow. We can never hope to

understand the secret of Homer’s style. It is best to agree simply with

Mr. Pater: “Homer was always saying things in this manner.” We can never

know how Keats came to write,

“With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,”

or those other lines, perhaps the most beautiful in our language,

“Magic casements, opening on the foam

Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”

It is all a mystery, hidden from the uninspired, and Mr. Lowell’s

clean-built scaffolding, while it helps us to a comprehensive enjoyment

of Shakespeare, leaves us dumb and amazed as ever before the

concentrated splendor of a single line,—

“In cradle of the rude, imperious surge.”

There is only one way to fathom its conception. The great waves reared

their foamy heads, and whispered him the words.

The richness of Elizabethan English, the freedom and delight with which

men sounded and explored the charming intricacies of a tongue that was

expanding daily into fresh majesty and beauty, must have given to

literature some of the allurements of navigation. Mariners sailed away

upon stormy seas, on strange, half-hinted errands; haunted by the shadow

of glory, dazzled by the lustre of wealth. Scholars ventured far upon

the unknown ocean of letters; haunted by the seductions of prose,

dazzled by the fairness of verse. They brought back curious spoils,

gaudy, subtle, sumptuous, according to the taste or potency of the

discoverer. Their words have often a mingled weight and sweetness,

whether conveying briefly a single thought, like Burton’s “touched with

the loadstone of love,” or adding strength and lustre to the ample

delineations of Ben Jonson. “Give me that wit whom praise excites, glory

puts on, or disgrace grieves; he is to be nourished with ambition,

pricked forward with honors, checked with reprehension, and never to be

suspected of sloth.” Bacon’s admirable conciseness, in which nothing is

disregarded, but where every word carries its proper value and expresses

its exact significance, is equaled only by Cardinal Newman. “Reading

maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and study an exact man,” says

Bacon; and this simple accuracy of definition reminds us inevitably of

the lucid terseness with which every sentence of the “Apologia” reveals

the thought it holds. “The truest expedience is to answer right out when

you are asked; the wisest economy is to have no management; the best

prudence is not to be a coward.” As for the _naïveté_ and the

picturesqueness which lend such inexpressible charm to the earlier

writers and atone for so many of their misdeeds, what can be more

agreeable than to hear Sir Walter Raleigh remark with cheerful

ingenuousness, “Some of our captaines garoused of wine till they were

reasonable pleasant”!—a most engaging way of narrating a not altogether

uncommon occurrence. And what can be more winning to the ear than the

simple grace with which Roger Ascham writes of familiar things: “In the

whole year, Springtime, Summer, Fall of the Leaf, and Winter; and in one

day, Morning, Noontime, Afternoon, and Eventide, altereth the course of

the weather, the pith of the bow, the strength of the man”! It seems an

easy thing to say “fall of the leaf” for fall, and “eventide” for

evening, but in such easy things lies the subtle beauty of language; in

the rejection of such nice distinctions lies the barrenness of common

speech. We can hardly spare the time, in these hurried days, to speak of

the fall of the leaf, to use four words where one would suffice, merely

because the four words have a graceful significance, and the one word

has none; and so, even in composition, this finely colored phrase, with

its hint of russet, wind-swept woods, is lost to us forever. Yet compare

with it the line which Lord Tennyson, that great master of beautiful

words, puts into Marian’s song:—

“‘Have you still any honey, my dear?’

She said, ‘It’s the fall of the year;

But come, come!’”

How tame and gray is the idiom which conveys a fact, which defines a

season, but suggests nothing to our imaginations, by the side of the

idiom which brings swiftly before our eyes the brilliant desolation of

autumn!

The narrow vocabulary, which is the conversational freehold of people

whose education should have provided them a broader field, admits of

little that is picturesque or forcible, and of less that is finely

graded or delicately conceived. Ordinary conversation appears to consist

mainly of “ands,” “buts,” and “thes,” with an occasional “well” to give

a flavor of nationality, a “yes” or “no” to stand for individual

sentiment, and a few widely exaggerated terms to destroy value and

perspective.

Is this, one wonders, the “treasure of dexterous felicities” which Mr.

Bagehot contemplated with such delight, and which a critical society is

destined to preserve flawless and uncontaminated? Is this the “heroic

utterance,” the great “mother tongue,” possessing which we all become—or

so Mr. Sydney Dobell assures us—

“Lords of an empire wide as Shakespeare’s soul,

Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme,

And rich as Chaucer’s speech and fair as Spenser’s dream”?

Is this the element whose beauty excites Mr. Oscar Wilde to such

rapturous and finely worded praise,—praise which awakens in us a noble

emulation to prove what we can accomplish with a medium at once so

sumptuous and so flexible? “For the material that painter or sculptor

uses is meagre in comparison with language,” says Mr. Wilde. “Words have

not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, color as rich and

vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the

Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which

reveals itself in marble or in bronze; but thought and passion and

spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had

criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great

art critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is

to know the principles of all the arts.”

This is not claiming too much, for in truth Mr. Wilde is sufficiently

well equipped to illustrate his claim. If his sentences are sometimes

overloaded with ornament, the decorations are gold, not tinsel; if his

vocabulary is gorgeous, it is never glaring; if his allusions are

fanciful, they are controlled and subdued into moderation. Even the

inevitable and swiftly uttered reproach of “fine writing” cannot

altogether blind us to the fact that his are beautiful words,—pearls and

amethysts M. Gautier would call them,—aptly chosen, and fitted into

place with the careful skill of a goldsmith. They are free, moreover,

from that vice of unexpectedness which is part of fine writing, and

which Mr. Saintsbury finds so prevalent among the literary workers of

to-day; the desire to surprise us by some new and profoundly irrelevant

application of a familiar word. The “veracity” of a bar of music, the

finely executed “passage” of a marble chimney-piece, the “andante” of a

sonnet, and the curious statement, commonly applied to Mr. Gladstone,

that he is “part of the conscience of a nation,”—these are the vagaries

which to Mr. Saintsbury, and to every other student of words, appear so

manifestly discouraging. Mr. James Payn tells a pleasant story of an

æsthetic sideboard which was described to him as having a Chippendale

feeling about it, before which touching conceit the ever famous “fringes

of the north star” pale into insignificance. A recent editor of

Shelley’s letters and essays says with seeming seriousness in his

preface that the “Witch of Atlas” is a “characteristic outcome,” an

“exquisite mouse of fancy brought forth by what mountain of Shelleyan

imagination.” Now, when a careful student and an appreciative reader can

bring himself to speak of a poem as a “mouse of fancy,” merely for the

sake of forcing a conceit, and confronting us with the perils of the

unexpected, it is time we turned soberly back to first principles and to

our dictionaries; it is time we listened anew to M. Gautier’s advice,

and studied the value of words.

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