Strange horror seize thee, and pangs unfelt before!”
“The hand of a master,” says Montgomery, “is felt through every movement of this sentence, especially toward the close, where it seems to grapple with the throat of the reader; the hard staccato stops that well might take the breath, in attempting to pronounce ‘or, with one stroke of this dart,’ are followed by an explosion of sound in the last line, like a heavy discharge of artillery, in which, though a full syllable is interpolated even at the cæsural pause, it is carried off almost without the reader perceiving the surplusage.” No poet better understood than Milton the art of heightening the majesty of his strains by an occasional sacrifice of their harmony. By substituting quantities for accented verse, he produces an effect like that of the skilful organist who throws into the full tide of instrumental music an occasional discord, giving intenser sweetness to the notes that follow.
It is this necromantic power over language,—this skill in striking “the electric chain with which we are darkly bound,” till its vibrations thrill along the chords of the heart, and its echoes ring in all the secret chambers of the soul,—which blinds us to the absurdities of “Paradise Lost.” While following this mighty magician of language through
—— “many a winding bout
Of linked sweetness long drawn out,”
we overlook the incongruity with which he makes angels fight with “villanous saltpetre” and divinities talk Calvinism, puts the subtleties of Greek syntax into the mouth of Eve, and exhibits the Omnipotent Father arguing like a school divine. As with Milton, so with his great predecessor, Dante. Wondrous as is his power of creating pictures in a few lines, he owes it mainly to the directness, simplicity, and intensity of his language. In him “the invisible becomes visible; darkness becomes palpable; silence describes a character; a word acts as a flash of lightning, which displays some gloomy neighborhood where a tower is standing, with dreadful faces at the window.”
The difference in the use of words by different writers is as great as that in the use of paints by great and poor artists; and there is as great a difference in the effect upon the understanding and the sensibilities of their readers. Who that is familiar with Bacon’s writings can ever fail to recognize one of his sentences, so dense with pith, and going to the mark as if from a gun? In him, it has been remarked, language was always the flexible and obedient instrument of the thought; not, as in the productions of a lower order of mind, its rebellious and recalcitrant slave.
“All authors below the highest seem to use the mighty gift of expression with a certain secret timidity, lest the lever should prove too ponderous for the hand that essays to wield it; or rather, they resemble the rash student in the old legend, who was overmastered by the demons which he had unguardedly provoked.” Who that is familiar with Dryden’s “full, resounding line,” has not admired the magic effects he produces with the most familiar words? Macaulay well says that in the management of the scientific vocabulary he succeeded as completely as his contemporary, Gibbons, succeeded in carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. Emerson, in speaking of the intense vitality of Montaigne’s words, says that if you cut them, they will bleed. Joubert, in revealing the secret of Rousseau’s charm, says: “He imparted, if I may so speak, bowels of feeling to the words he used (donna des entrailles à tous les mots), and poured into them such a charm, sweetness so penetrating, energy so puissant, that his writings have an effect upon the soul something like that of those illicit pleasures which steal away our taste and intoxicate our understanding.” So in the weird poetic fictions of Coleridge there is an indescribable witchery of phrase and conceit that affects the imagination as if one had eaten of “the insane root that takes the reason prisoner.”
How much is the magic of Tennyson’s verse due to “the fitting of aptest words to things,” which we find on every page of his poetry! He has not only the vision, but the faculty divine, and no secret of his art is hid from him. Foot and pause, rhyme and rhythm, alliteration; subtle, penetrative words that touch the very quick of the truth; cunning words that have a spell in them for the memory and the imagination; old words, with their weird influence,
“Bright through the rubbish of some hundred years,”