Style [29]
it is useless to look to the grammarian, or the critic, for a lesson in strength of style; the laws that he has framed, good enough in themselves, are current only in his own abstract world. A breath of hesitancy will sometimes make trash of a powerful piece of eloquence; and even in writing, a thing three times said, and each time said badly, may be of more effect than that terse, full, and final expression which the doctors rightly commend. The art of language, regarded as a question of pattern and cadence, or even as a question of logic and thought-sequence, is a highly abstract study; for although, as has been said, you can do almost anything with words, with words alone you can do next to nothing. The realm where speech holds sway is a narrow shoal or reef, shaken, contorted, and upheaved by volcanic action, beaten upon, bounded, and invaded by the ocean of silence: whoso would be lord of the earth must first tame the fire and the sea. Dramatic and narrative writing are happy in this, that action and silence are a part of their material; the story-teller or the playwright can make of words a background and definition for deeds, a framework for those silences that are more telling than any speech. Here lies an escape from the poverty of content and method to which self-portraiture and self-expression are liable; and therefore are epic and drama rated above all other kinds of poetry. The greater force of the objective treatment is witnessed by many essayists and lyrical poets, whose ambition has led them, sooner or later, to attempt the novel or the play. There are weaknesses inherent in all direct self-revelation; the thing, perhaps, is greatly said, yet there is no great occasion for the saying of it; a fine reticence is observed, but it is, after all, an easy reticence, with none of the dramatic splendours of reticence on the rack. In the midst of his pleasant confidences the essayist is brought up short by the question, "Why must you still be talking?" Even the passionate lyric feels the need of external authorisation, and some of the finest of lyrical poems, like the Willow Song of Desdemona, or Wordsworth's SOLITARY REAPER, are cast in a dramatic mould, that beauty of diction may be vitalised by an imagined situation. More than others the dramatic art is an enemy to the desultory and the superfluous, sooner than others it will cast away all formal grace of expression that it may come home more directly to the business and bosoms of men. Its great power and scope are shown well in this, that it can find high uses for the commonest stuff of daily speech and the emptiest phrases of daily intercourse.
Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary facts of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama, and in its modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and novelist create their own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response. Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their reach; the matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is to employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the meaning of their words is not obvious, and they must go aside to define it. The strength of their writing has limits set for it by the nature of the chosen task, and any transgression of these limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence. All writing partakes of the quality of the drama, there is always a situation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker and the hearer.
Simplicity and strength, then, the vigorous realistic quality of impromptu utterance, and an immediate relation with the elementary facts of life, are literary excellences best known in the drama, and in its modern fellow and rival, the novel. The dramatist and novelist create their own characters, set their own scenes, lay their own plots, and when all has been thus prepared, the right word is born in the purple, an inheritor of great opportunities, all its virtues magnified by the glamour of its high estate. Writers on philosophy, morals, or aesthetics, critics, essayists, and dealers in soliloquy generally, cannot hope, with their slighter means, to attain to comparable effects. They work at two removes from life; the terms that they handle are surrounded by the vapours of discussion, and are rewarded by no instinctive response. Simplicity, in its most regarded sense, is often beyond their reach; the matter of their discourse is intricate, and the most they can do is to employ patience, care, and economy of labour; the meaning of their words is not obvious, and they must go aside to define it. The strength of their writing has limits set for it by the nature of the chosen task, and any transgression of these limits is punished by a fall into sheer violence. All writing partakes of the quality of the drama, there is always a situation involved, the relation, namely, between the speaker and the hearer.