Macaulay's style is highly artificial, but its rotundity, its movement, its impressive sweep have made it popular. Almost any one can acquire some of its features; but the ease with which it is acquired makes it dangerous in a high degree, for the writer becomes fascinated with it and uses it far too often. It is true that Macaulay used it practically all the time; but it is very doubtful it Macaulay would have succeeded so well with it to-day, when the power of simplicity is so much better understood.
De Quincey's “impassioned prose” was an attempt on his part to imitate the effects of poetry in prose. Without doubt he succeeded wonderfully; but the art is so difficult that no one else has equalled him and prose of the kind that he wrote is not often written. Still, it is worth while to try to catch some of his skill. He began to write this kind of composition in “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater,” but he reached perfection only in some compositions intended as sequels to that book, namely, “Suspiria de Profundis,” and “The English Mail Coach,” with its “Vision of Sudden Death,” and “Dream-Fugue” upon the theme of sudden death.
What we should strive for above all is the mighty effect of simple and bare loftiness of thought. Masters of this style have not been few, and they seem to slip into it with a sudden and easy upward sweep that can be compared to nothing so truly as to the upward flight of an eagle. They mount because their spirits are lofty. No one who has not a lofty thought has any occasion to write the lofty style; and such a person will usually succeed best by paying very little attention to the manner when he actually comes to write of high ideas. Still, the lofty style should be studied and mastered like any other.
It is to be noted that all these styles are applicable chiefly if not altogether to description. Narration may become intense at times, but its intensity demands no especial alteration of style. Dialogue, too, may be lofty, but only in dramas of passion, and very few people are called upon to write these. But it is often necessary to indicate a loftier, a more serious atmosphere, and this is effected by description of surrounding details in an elevated manner.
One of the most natural, simple, and graceful of lofty descriptions may be found in Ruskin's “King of the Golden River,” Chapter III, where he pictures the mountain scenery:
It was, indeed, a morning that might have made any one happy, even with no Golden River to seek for. Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley, out of which rose the massy mountains,—their lower cliffs in pale gray shadow, hardly distinguishable from the floating vapor, but gradually ascending till they caught the sunlight, which ran in sharp touches of ruddy color along the angular crags, and pierced in long, level rays, through their fringes of spear-like Pine. Far above, shot up splintered masses of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow, traced down their chasms like a line of forked lightning; and, far beyond, and far above all these, fainter than the morning cloud, but purer and changeless, slept in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the eternal snow.
If we ask how this loftiness is attained, the reply must be, first, that the subject is lofty and deserving of lofty description. Indeed, the description never has a right to be loftier than the subject. Then, examining this passage in detail, we find that the words are all dignified, and in their very sound they are lofty, as for instance “massy,” “myriads,” “castellated,” “angular crags.” The very sound of the words seems to correspond to the idea. Notice the repetition of the letter i in “Level lines of dewy mist lay stretched along the valley.” This repetition of a letter is called alliteration, and here it serves to suggest in and of itself the idea of the level. The same effect is produced again in “streak of sunlit snow” with the repetition of s. The entire passage is filled with alliteration, but it is used so naturally that you would never think of it unless your attention were called to it.
Next, we note that the structure rises gradually but steadily upward.
We never jump to loftiness, and always find it necessary to climb there.
“Jumping to loftiness” is like trying to lift oneself by one's boot-straps: it is very ridiculous to all who behold it. Ruskin begins with a very ordinary sentence. He says it was a fine morning, just as any one might say it. But the next sentence starts suddenly upward from the dead level, and to the end of the paragraph we rise, terrace on terrace, by splendid sweeps and jagged cliffs, till at the end we reach “the eternal snow.”
Exercise.