[VIII]
MEANS AND EFFECTS CONTINUED
Few means of literary effect are more subtle than Variety. It must pervade all parts of a composition, yet it is to be perceived only by its effects. Its absence is at once noted, and at once destroys the beauty and attractiveness of any work; yet to define Variety is as difficult as to tell how it is to be secured. Stevenson gives a rule as wise as it is hard to follow: “The one rule is to be infinitely various.”
The need of variety in the use of words is evident. The fault of repetition is sufficiently obvious, yet it is very easily committed. The fact that a sentence has been written in a given form often makes that seem the only correct way of expression. No one but a thoroughly trained writer can be as sensitive to errors in his own work as to mistakes in the writings of others; and so it happens that unless one is very careful the same word may appear two or three times in a passage where synonyms would be better than the repetition. That richness in synonyms which is one of the finest characteristics of English does away with any necessary difficulty in attaining variety in diction. In writing, and yet more in revising, the value and force of synonymous terms cannot be too constantly kept in mind. A knowledge of these, with that cardinal virtue of writers, the dictionary-habit, should carry any student triumphantly past all dangers of monotony in words.
One caution should perhaps be added: Do not be afraid to repeat a word as often as is really necessary. I quoted in an earlier chapter a sentence from Lowell which illustrates what I mean:
The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and be buried in.
Or notice the repetition of “man” and of “department” in this from Macaulay:—
A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded preëminently.—On John Dryden.
Here the judicious repetition of the subject holds the whole closely together, and saves the attention of the reader from fatigue. It serves, also, to mark the distinction between the first half, which is a specification of the causes of failure, and the second half, which states the effects that followed from them. The recurrence of “department” adds to the emphasis in a way which may easily be appreciated by replacing it by a pronoun. Repetitions so cleverly used as this are of course not defects but beauties.