*Really the nephew.
To be serious, then, as we always wish to be, if possible, Mr. Channing (whom we suppose to be a very young man, since we are precluded from supposing him a very old one), appears to have been inoculated at the same moment with virus from Tennyson and from Carlyle, etc.
Notes.
The three paragraphs which we have quoted illustrate three different methods of using ridicule. The first is the simple one of contemptuous epithets——“calling names,” as we put it in colloquial parlance. So long as it is good-humored and the writer does not show personal malice, it is a good way; but the reader soon tires of it. A sense of fairness prevents him from listening to mere calling of names very long. So in the second paragraph Poe changes his method to one more subtile: he pretends to apologize and find excuses, virtually saying to the reader, “Oh, I'm going to be perfectly fair,” while at the same time the excuses are so absurd that the effect is ridicule of a still more intense and biting type. In the third paragraph Poe seems to answer the reader's mental comment to the effect that “you are merely amusing us by your clever wit” by asserting that he means to be extremely serious. He then proceeds about his business with a most solemn face, which is as amusing in literature as it is in comic representations on the stage.
In practising upon this type of writing one must select a subject that he feels to be decidedly in need of suppression. Perhaps the most impersonal and easy subject to select for practice is a popular novel in which one can see absurdities, or certain ridiculous departments in the newspapers, such as the personal-advice column. Taking such a subject, adapt Poe's language to it with as little change as possible.
CHAPTER VI.
THE RHETORICAL, IMPASSIONED AND LOFTY STYLES:
Macaulay and De Quincey. The familiar style of the humorist is almost universal in its availability. It is the style of conversation, to a great extent—at least of the best conversation,—of letter-writing, of essay-writing, and, in large part, of fiction. But there are moments when a different and more, hard and artificial style is required. These moments are few, and many people never have them at all. Some people try to have them and thereby fall into the fault of “fine writing.” But it is certainly very important that when the great moment comes we should be prepared for it. Then a lofty and more or less artificial style is demanded as imperatively as the key-stone of an arch when the arch is completed except for the key-stone. Without the ability to write one lofty sentence, all else that we have said may completely fail of its effect, however excellent in itself.
There are three kinds of prose which may be used on such occasions as we have described. The lowest and most common of these, as it is the most artificial and most easily acquired, is the rhetorical, or oratorical, style, the style of all orators, the style which is called eloquence. Of course we may find specimens of it in actual oratory, but it is best illustrated in its use for written compositions in Macaulay. The next variety, more rarely used, was especially developed if not actually invented by De Quincey and was called by him impassioned prose.
It would seem at first that language could go no higher; but it does mount a little higher simply by trying to do less, and we have loftiness in its plain simplicity, as when man stands bareheaded and humble in the presence of God alone.