And whispers of eternal home!
Never so near our Lord as then,
We touch His Wounds—more heal’d than healing:
Never so close to Mary’s Heart,
Hear too for us its throbs appealing:
And when for other scenes we part,
It is with John and Magdalen.
THE LITERARY EXTRAVAGANCE OF THE DAY.
La Bruyère sees in all extravagance of phrase some symptom of weakness. “To say modestly of anything it is good or it is bad, and to give reasons why it is so, needs good sense and expression. It is much shorter to pronounce in a decisive tone either that it is execrable or admirable.” He himself is a model of clearness and exactness of expression. His English counterpart is Swift, of whom Thackeray said: “He writes as if for the police.” Nothing in literature surpasses the vraisemblance of Gulliver’s Travels, which reads like a book of authentic adventure. Its artlessness is the perfection of art concealing art. La Bruyère also says: “What art is needed to be natural (rentrer dans la nature)! What time, what rules, what attention, what labor to dance with the ease and grace with which we walk, to sing as easily as we talk, to speak and express one’s self as one’s self thinks!” To speak or to write as one thinks seems, in these days of tumid and extravagant expression, to be one of the lost arts. We generally say either more or less than we think, usually more. For this reason we should turn to the older classical writers, because of the importance they attribute to diction, and the sense of duty they attach to it.
The new rhetorical doctrine is, “Let the style take care of itself. Give us thought.” Robert Browning, whose poetry nobody understands, probably not even himself, declares in favor of “burrs of expression that will stick in the attention.” Any one who has scrambled through the labyrinths of some of his poems has had “burrs” enough to suffice him for a lifetime. It is clear that this plea for thought to the neglect of style is an excuse for slovenly composition. There is no reason why thought should not have clear, precise, and beautiful expression. Unless style be made a subject of deep attention, and be brought to the severest test of rhetorical criticism, there is an end of literature. If the barbaric “yawp” of Walt Whitman is to pass for poetry; if the pictorial daubs of J. A. Froude are to be considered historical portraitures; and if extravagant and exaggerated forms of speech are to be ranked as striking beauties, the literary critics and the lovers of literature in general must gird themselves for a tougher battle for letters than they ever did for any attack that threatened them from Philistia. What we call the Extravagant School of Literature numbers eminent names, and is by no means confined to the more obvious and pronounced sensationalism of the daily press. Contemporaneous history, criticism, poetry, sectarian theology, and, wonderful to say, philosophy and science deal largely in exaggerated expression and extravagant theory.