[CHAPTER VIII.]
THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.
Le style c’est de l’homme.—Buffon.
Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.—Goethe.
No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.—Ruskin.
It was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same opinion,—sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects look larger in a fog, so their thoughts “loom up through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that is mistaken for sublimity.” This style of writing is sometimes called “transcendental”; and if by this is meant that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, “What a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible English!”—whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendentalists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual nakedness,—the convenient shelter for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates the shallow.
But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,—thoughts so swift and so many-hued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one’s study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid declamation:
“Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,—could I wreak