The question has been sometimes discussed whether the best style is a colorless medium, which, like good glass, only lets the thought be distinctly seen, or whether it imparts a pleasure apart from the ideas it conveys. There are those who hold that when language is simply transparent,—when it comes to us so refined of all its dross, so spiritualized in its substance that we lose sight of it as a vehicle, and the thought stands out with clearness in all its proportions,—we are at the very summit of the literary art. This is the character of Southey’s best prose, and of Paley’s writing, whose statement of a false theory is so lucid that it becomes a refutation. There are writers, however, who charm us by their language, apart from the ideas it conveys. There is a kind of mysterious perfume about it, a delicious aroma, which we keenly enjoy, but for which we cannot account. Poetry often possesses a beauty wholly unconnected with its meaning. Who has not admired, independently of the sense, its “jewels, five words long, that, on the stretched forefinger of all time, sparkle forever”? There are passages in which the mere cadence of the words is by itself delicious to a delicate ear, though we cannot tell how and why. We are conscious of a strange, dreamy sense of enjoyment, such as one feels when lying upon the grass in a June evening, while a brook tinkles over stones among the sedges and trees. Sir Philip Sidney could not hear the old ballad of Chevy Chase without his blood being stirred as by the sound of a trumpet; Boyle felt a tremor at the utterance of two verses of Lucan; and Spence declares that he never repeated particular lines of delicate modulation without a shiver in his blood, not to be expressed. Who is not sensible of certain magical effects, altogether distinct from the thoughts, in some of Coleridge’s weird verse, in Keats’s “Nightingale,” and in the grand harmonies of Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor, Ruskin, and De Quincey?
Perspicuity, or transparency of style, is, undoubtedly, the first law of all composition; but it may be doubted whether vividness, which was the ruling conception of the Greeks with regard to this property of style, is not quite as essential. Style, it has been well said, “is not only a medium; it is also a form. It is not enough that the thoughts be seen through a clear medium; they must be seen in a distinct shape. It is not enough that truth be visible in a clear, pure air; the atmosphere must not only be crystalline and sparkling, but the things in it must be bounded and defined by sharply cut lines.”[25]
A style may be as transparent as rock-water, and yet the thoughts be destitute of boldness and originality. The highest degree of transparency, however, can be attained only by the writer who has thoroughly mastered his theme, and whose whole nature is stirred by it. As that exquisite material through which we gaze from our windows on the beauties of nature, obtains its crystalline beauty after undergoing the furnace,—as it was melted by fire before the rough particles of sand disappeared,—so it is with language. It is only a burning invention that can make it transparent. A powerful imagination must fuse the harsh elements of composition until all foreign substances have disappeared, and every coarse, shapeless word has been absorbed by the heat, and then the language will brighten into that clear and unclouded style through which the most delicate conceptions of the mind and the faintest emotions of the heart are visible.
How many human thoughts have baffled for generations every attempt to give them expression! How many opinions and conclusions are there, which form the basis of our daily reflections, the matter for the ordinary operations of our minds, which were toiled after perhaps for ages, before they were seized and rendered comprehensible! How many ideas are there which we ourselves have grasped at, as if we saw them floating in an atmosphere just above us, and found the arm of our intellect just too short to reach them; and then comes a happier genius, who, in a lucky moment, and from some vantage ground, arrests the meteor in its flight, and, grasping the floating phantom, drags it from the skies to earth; condenses that which was but an impalpable coruscation of spirit; fetters that which was but the lightning-glance of thought; and, having so mastered it, bestows it as a perpetual possession and heritage on mankind!
The arrangement of words by great writers on the printed page has sometimes been compared to the arrangement of soldiers on the field; and if it is interesting to see how a great general marshals his regiments, it is certainly not less so to see how the Alexanders and Napoleons of letters marshal their verbal battalions on the battle-fields of thought. Foremost among those who wield despotic sway over the domain of letters, is my Lord Bacon, whose words are like a Spartan phalanx, closely compacted,—almost crowding each other, so close are their files,—and all moving in irresistible array, without confusion or chasm, now holding some Thermopylæ of new truth against some scholastic Xerxes, now storming some ancient Malakoff of error, but always with “victory sitting eagle-winged on their crests.” A strain of music bursts on your ear, sweet as is Apollo’s lute, and lo! Milton’s dazzling files, clad in celestial panoply, lifting high their gorgeous ensign, which “shines like a meteor, streaming to the wind,” “breathing united force and fixed thought,” come moving on “in perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders.” Next comes Chillingworth, with his glittering rapier, all rhetorical rule and flourish, according to the schools,—passado, montanso, staccato,—one, two, three,—the third in your bosom. Then stalks along Chatham, with his two-handed sword, striking with the edge, while he pierces with the point, and stuns with the hilt, and wielding the ponderous weapon as easily as you would a flail. Next strides Johnson with elephantine tread, with the club of logic in one hand and a revolver in the other, hitting right and left with antithetical blows, and, “when his pistol misses fire, knocking you down with the butt end of it.” Burke, with lighted linstock in hand, stands by a Lancaster gun; he touches it, and forth there burst, with loud and ringing roar, missiles of every conceivable description,—chain shot, stone, iron darts, spikes, shells, grenadoes, torpedoes, and balls, that cut down everything before them. Close after him steals Jeffrey, armed cap-a-pie,—carrying a tomahawk in one hand and a scalping-knife in the other,—steeped to the eye in fight, cunning of fence, master of his weapon and merciless in its use, and “playing it like a tongue of flame” before his trembling victims. There is Brougham, slaying half-a-dozen enemies at once with a tremendous Scotch claymore; Macaulay, running under his opponent’s guard, and stabbing him to the heart with the heavy dagger of a short, epigrammatic sentence; Hugh Elliot, cracking his enemies’ skulls with a sledge-hammer, or pounding them to jelly with his huge fists; Sydney Smith, firing his arrows, feathered with fancy and pointed with the steel of the keenest wit; Disraeli, armed with an oriental scimitar, which dazzles while it kills; Emerson, transfixing his adversaries with a blade of transcendental temper, snatched from the scabbard of Plato; and Carlyle, relentless iconoclast of shams, who “gangs his ain gait,” armed with an antique stone axe, with which he smashes solemn humbugs as you would drugs with a pestle and mortar.
FOOTNOTES:
[22] “The Idea of a University,” by J. H. Newman.
[23] “Essays and Reviews,” by Edwin P. Whipple.
[24] “Words and Their Uses,” by Richard Grant White.
[25] “Homiletics and Pastoral Theology,” by W. G. Shedd, D.D.