J—— was reading me parts of his new book in manuscript to-day, and I objected that it lacked style. "Why, all the successful writers tell me that style is unnecessary," he said in an injured tone. "D—— says he just writes ahead and pays no attention to it. He says that the laboriousness of Stevenson and Flaubert has 'gone out' and the public are bored by it. And just see how successful D—— is!"
What was one to say? I merely tried to look convinced and begged him to continue. And yet Emerson said that when the distraught Hamlet cried to the mailed spirit of his father,
"What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon?"
he was so possessed by the verbal magic of the phrase that he could attend no more to the rest of the play.
Perhaps it is some penetrating assonance in that "complete steel"—in those sibilant repetitions of "revisit'st thus the glimpses"—that makes its witchery. Poe carefully analyzed the science of it—which is no science at all, but the inscrutable magic of inspiration. Such lines as
"Came up through the lair of the lion
With love in her luminous eyes"
are built upon that theory of liquid consonants and open vowels, and it has no magic at all, while "To Annie"—which was written without conscious plan—is full of it.
"Her grand family funerals" is instinct with that prickling delight of the magic of words, as is "the wizard rout" of the bodiless airs that blew through her "casement open to the night."
Tennyson's famous alliteration,