There are discordant words that harrow up the feelings, and there are smooth, velvety, caressing words whose sweet sorcery holds us in their thrall, and that flow on and on harmoniously like the rippling of many waters that never fall out of tune.
Words cannot be measured with the measuring-reed of a man; they are spiritual forces; "they are angels of blessing or cursing. Unuttered we control them, uttered they control us." A man may have much wisdom packed into his capacious mind, but to unfold it attractively so that it glitters in the public eye and arrests attention is where the master art of handling words comes in.
One secret of successful writing is to express your thoughts in as few words as possible. Be frugal in your expenditure of words as a miser over the outlay of his hoarded gold. Write clearly, tersely, compactly, for words, like coins of the realm, are most esteemed when they contain large value in little space. The more briefly a thing is said, the more brilliantly it is put. The rarest of all qualities in a writer is--measure, saying exactly as much as you mean to say and not a word more or less. If a picture is complete, everything added is something taken away.
The "command of language" is often a snare of the devil into which men fall and do themselves grievous hurt. A redundancy of flowery words and empty fluency of speech confuse the thought and confound the meaning; skip half the telling and you know more of the tale. Oh the dreariness of some solid reading I have done in my time!--very learned and logical dissertations, but dulness crowned it all; even the dry bones of scientific matter clogged with technicalities can be made to live by a touch of style. Cartloads of words rumbling along the rutty road of argument slowly to their destination are not half so forceful as an apt image which flies straight to the point on wings of inspiration, and gets there first.
No subject is uninteresting if discoursed with an engaging pen, for words throw colour-magic on things that are common-place and give charm to them. I have watched Italian sunlight playing on the crumbling plaster walls of a peasant's cottage on the Tuscan hills, drenching them in opal and rose-carmine splendours, changing them into the image of a fairy palace. Words cast sunlight on commonplace, familiar things, flushing them with a radiance all their own, and so awaking our mind to see new beauties, or old beauties made manifest in a new light which had been staled by the lethargy of custom. Miss Mitford's village was an ordinary Berkshire village mute in the annals of English history, but it was surprised into fame by the romantic pen of its lady historian. A splendid accident of literary achievement adorned it with immortality, for it unfolds vividly before our wondering eyes the beauty of petty things and plain people in village life. The world owes to her genial pen a debt of gratitude; for it has won our sympathies, and in reading her book we can read our own village with interest instead of boredom, and see for ourselves the beauty and pathos and comedy of common people and homely things around us.
Art is the gift of God to man. It is impossible to buy or barter for the possession of it. You may cultivate, improve, perfect the indwelling talent, but the Divine seed is sown mysteriously in the life of the child when brought to birth. In whom the secret power lies dormant none know until the appointed hour reveals its budding graces. Inscrutable is the Divine favour; none can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. It is not inherited like gold or lands; it is not an entailed honour which accompanies the family title. Genius seldom, like an heirloom, passes from sire to son in direct succession.
A man may possess the advantages that education, training, culture give, yet all these excellent acquirements combined cannot manufacture an artist. It needs the live coal taken from off the altar to kindle the sacred flame which illumines the artist's soul.
The painter's art is subject to this very mysterious law. Philip Gilbert Hamerton describes the working of the artistic spirit in man. He says: "Painting is a pursuit in which thought, scholarship, information, go for little; whereas a strange, unaccountable talent working in obscure ways achieves the only results worth having. Here is a field in which neither birth nor condition is of any use, and wealth itself of exceeding little; here faculty alone avails, and a kind of faculty so subtle and peculiar, so difficult to estimate before years have been spent in developing it, or wasted in the vain attempt to develop where it does not exist."
There are pictures you and I dearly love, and they are priceless treasures in the market; yet there is no deep thought or display of learning in them to win our admiration. They violate facts of history, they outrage the grammar of academic art, and even their drawing may be inaccurate. Why, then, are such works cherished and treasured? Because, with all their faults, they have power, they have feeling; they speak to the heart. The men who painted them were unlearned and ignorant, but they were artists to the finger-tips. There is a spiritual something breathing beneath the surface of the true painter's work which leaps to the eye and draws upon us and bestirs our emotions. Other pictures--laboured, scholastic, monumental, they leave us cold and passionless, and we pass them by on the other side.
A good architect also is to the manner born. The principles of proportion in designing a building are difficult to adjust to give pleasure to the eye. Now, the sense of proportion is a gift which some men possess and others lack; although they are architects by profession, they are amateurs in construction. Without that subtle sense of proportion a man blunders through his designs, and puts no feeling of beauty or joy in the finished structure which is the work of his hands. Ruskin says: "It is just as rational an attempt to teach a young architect how to proportion truly and well by calculating for him the proportions of fine works as it would be to teach him to compare melodies by calculating the mathematical relations of the notes in Beethoven's 'Adelaide' or Mozart's 'Requiem.' The man who has eye and intellect will invent beautiful proportions, and cannot help it; but he can no more tell us how to do it than Wordsworth could tell us how to write a sonnet, or than Scott could have told us how to plan a romance."