Part 3

Compare now the case of the ruder multitude. In the regard of literature, as a great critic long ago remarked, “all are the multitude; only they differ in clothes, not in judgment or understanding,” and the poorest talkers do not inhabit the slums. Wherever thought and taste have fallen to be menials, there the vulgar dwell. How should they gain mastery over language? They are introduced to a vocabulary of some hundred thousand words, which quiver through a million of meanings; the wealth is theirs for the taking, and they are encouraged to be spendthrift by the very excess of what they inherit. The resources of the tongue they speak are subtler and more various than ever their ideas can put to use. So begins the process of assimilation, the edge put upon words by the craftsman is blunted by the rough treatment of the confident booby, who is well pleased when out of many highly-tempered swords he has manufactured a single clumsy coulter. A dozen expressions to serve one slovenly meaning inflate him with the sense of luxury and pomp. “Vast,” “huge,” “immense,” “gigantic,” “enormous,” “tremendous,” “portentous,” and such-like groups of words, lose all their variety of sense in a barren uniformity of low employ. The reign of this democracy annuls differences of status, and insults over differences of ability or disposition. Thus do synonyms, or many words ill applied to one purpose, begin to flourish, and, for a last indignity, dictionaries of synonyms.

Let the truth be said outright: there are no synonyms, and the same statement can never be repeated in a changed form of words. Where the ignorance of one writer has introduced an unnecessary word into the language, to fill a place already occupied, the quicker apprehension of others will fasten upon it, drag it apart from its fellows, and find new work for it to do. Where a dull eye sees nothing but sameness, the trained faculty of observation will discern a hundred differences worthy of scrupulous expression. The old foresters had different names for a buck during each successive year of its life, distinguishing the fawn from the pricket, the pricket from the sore, and so forth, as its age increased. Thus it is also in that illimitable but not trackless forest of moral distinctions. Language halts far behind the truth of things, and only a drowsy perception can fail to devise a use for some new implement of description. Every strange word that makes its way into a language spins for itself a web of usage and circumstance, relating itself from whatsoever centre to fresh points in the circumference. No two words ever coincide throughout their whole extent. If sometimes good writers are found adding epithet to epithet for the same quality, and name to name for the same thing, it is because they despair of capturing their meaning at a venture, and so practise to get near it by a maze of approximations. Or, it may be, the generous breadth of their purpose scorns the minuter differences of related terms, and includes all of one affinity, fearing only lest they be found too few and too weak to cover the ground effectively. Of this sort are the so-called synonyms of the Prayer-Book, wherein we “acknowledge and confess” the sins we are forbidden to “dissemble or cloke;” and the bead-roll of the lawyer, who huddles together “give, devise, and bequeath,” lest the cunning of litigants should evade any single verb. The works of the poets yield still better instances. When Milton praises the Virtuous Young Lady of his sonnet in that the spleen of her detractors moves her only to “pity and ruth,” it is not for the idle filling of the line that he joins the second of these nouns to the first. Rather he is careful to enlarge and intensify his meaning by drawing on the stores of two nations, the one civilised, the other barbarous; and ruth is a quality as much more instinctive and elemental than pity as pitilessness is keener, harder, and more deliberate than the inborn savagery of ruthlessness.

It is not chiefly, however, for the purposes of this accumulated and varied emphasis that the need of synonyms is felt. There is no more curious problem in the philosophy of style than that afforded by the stubborn reluctance of writers, the good as well as the bad, to repeat a word or phrase. When the thing is, they may be willing to abide by the old rule and say the word, but when the thing repeats itself they will seldom allow the word to follow suit. A kind of interdict, not removed until the memory of the first occurrence has faded, lies on a once used word. The causes of this anxiety for a varied expression are manifold. Where there is merely a column to fill, poverty of thought drives the hackney author into an illicit fulness, until the trick of verbiage passes from his practice into his creed, and makes him the dupe of his own puppets. A commonplace book, a dictionary of synonyms, and another of phrase and fable equip him for his task; if he be called upon to marshal his ideas on the question whether oysters breed typhoid, he will acquit himself voluminously, with only one allusion (it is a point of pride) to the oyster by name. He will compare the succulent bivalve to Pandora’s box, and lament that it should harbour one of the direst of ills that flesh is heir to. He will find a paradox and an epigram in the notion that the darling of Apicius should suffer neglect under the frowns of Æsculapius. Question, hypothesis, lamentation, and platitude dance their allotted round and fill the ordained space, while Ignorance masquerades in the garb of criticism, and Folly proffers her ancient epilogue of chastened hope. When all is said, nothing is said; and Montaigne’s Que sçais-je, besides being briefer and wittier, was infinitely more informing.

But we dwell too long with disease; the writer nourished on thought, whose nerves are braced and his loins girt to struggle with a real meaning, is not subject to these tympanies. He feels no idolatrous dread of repetition when the theme requires, it, and is urged by no necessity of concealing real identity under a show of change. Nevertheless he, too, is hedged about by conditions that compel him, now and again, to resort to what seems a synonym. The chief of these is the indispensable law of euphony, which governs the sequence not only of words, but also of phrases. In proportion as a phrase is memorable, the words that compose it become mutually adhesive, losing for a time something of their individual scope, bringing with them, if they be torn away too quickly, some cumbrous fragments of their recent association. That he may avoid this, a sensitive writer is often put to his shifts, and extorts, if he be fortunate, a triumph from the accident of his encumbrance. By a slight stress laid on the difference of usage the unshapeliness may be done away with, and a new grace found where none was sought. Addison and Landor accuse Milton, with reason, of too great a fondness for the pun, yet surely there is something to please the mind, as well as the ear, in the description of the heavenly judgment,

That brought into this world a world of woe.

Where words are not fitted with a single hard definition, rigidly observed, all repetition is a kind of delicate punning, bringing slight differences of application into clear relief. The practice has its dangers for the weak-minded lover of ornament, yet even so it may be preferable to the flat stupidity of one identical intention for a word or phrase in twenty several contexts. For the law of incessant change is not so much a counsel of perfection to be held up before the apprentice, as a fundamental condition of all writing whatsoever; if the change be not ordered by art it will order itself in default of art. The same statement can never be repeated even in the same form of words, and it is not the old question that is propounded at the third time of asking. Repetition, that is to say, is the strongest generator of emphasis known to language. Take the exquisite repetitions in these few lines:—

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer.

Here the tenderness of affection returns again to the loved name, and the grief of the mourner repeats the word “dead.” But this monotony of sorrow is the least part of the effect, which lies rather in the prominence given by either repetition to the most moving circumstance of all—the youthfulness of the dead poet. The attention of the discursive intellect, impatient of reiteration, is concentrated on the idea which these repeated and exhausted words throw into relief. Rhetoric is content to borrow force from simpler methods; a good orator will often bring his hammer down, at the end of successive periods, on the same phrase; and the mirthless refrain of a comic song, or the catchword of a buffoon, will raise laughter at last by its brazen importunity. Some modern writers, admiring the easy power of the device, have indulged themselves with too free a use of it; Matthew Arnold particularly, in his prose essays, falls to crying his text like a hawker,

Beating it in upon our weary brains, As tho’ it were the burden of a song,

clattering upon the iron of the Philistine giant in the effort to bring him to reason. These are the ostentatious violences of a missionary, who would fain save his enemy alive, where a grimmer purpose is glad to employ a more silent weapon and strike but once. The callousness of a thick-witted auditory lays the need for coarse method on the gentlest soul resolved to stir them. But he whose message is for minds attuned and tempered will beware of needless reiteration, as of the noisiest way of emphasis. Is the same word wanted again, he will examine carefully whether the altered incidence does not justify and require an altered term, which the world is quick to call a synonym. The right dictionary of synonyms would give the context of each variant in the usage of the best authors. To enumerate all the names applied by Milton to the hero of Paradise Lost, without reference to the passages in which they occur, would be a foolish labour; with such reference, the task is made a sovereign lesson in style. At Hell gates, where he dallies in speech with his leman Sin to gain a passage from the lower World, Satan is “the subtle Fiend,” in the garden of Paradise he is “the Tempter” and “the Enemy of Mankind,” putting his fraud upon Eve he is the “wily Adder,” leading her in full course to the tree he is “the dire Snake,” springing to his natural height before the astonished gaze of the cherubs he is “the grisly King.” Every fresh designation elaborates his character and history, emphasises the situation, and saves a sentence. So it is with all variable appellations of concrete objects; and even in the stricter and more conventional region of abstract ideas the same law runs. Let a word be changed or repeated, it brings in either case its contribution of emphasis, and must be carefully chosen for the part it is to play, lest it should upset the business of the piece by irrelevant clownage in the midst of high matter, saying more or less than is set down for it in the author’s purpose.

The chameleon quality of language may claim yet another illustration. Of origins we know nothing certainly, nor how words came by their meanings in the remote beginning, when speech, like the barnacle-goose of the herbalist, was suspended over an expectant world, ripening on a tree. But this we know, that language in its mature state is fed and fattened on metaphor. Figure is not a late device of the rhetorician, but the earliest principle of change in language. The whole process of speech is a long series of exhilarating discoveries, whereby words, freed from the swaddling bands of their nativity, are found capable of new relations and a wider metaphorical employ. Then, with the growth of exact knowledge, the straggling associations that attended the word on its travels are straitened and confined, its meaning is settled, adjusted, and balanced, that it may bear its part in the scrupulous deposition of truth. Many are the words that have run this double course, liberated from their first homely offices and transformed by poetry, reclaimed in a more abstract sense, and appropriated to a new set of facts by science. Yet a third chance awaits them when the poet, thirsty for novelty, passes by the old simple founts of figure to draw metaphor from the latest technical applications of specialised terms. Everywhere the intuition of poetry, impatient of the sturdy philosophic cripple that lags so far behind, is busy in advance to find likenesses not susceptible of scientific demonstration, to leap to comparisons that satisfy the heart while they leave the colder intellect only half convinced. When an elegant dilettante like Samuel Rogers is confronted with the principle of gravitation he gives voice to science in verse:—

That very law which moulds a tear, And bids it trickle from its source, That law preserves the earth a sphere, And guides the planets in their course.

But a seer like Wordsworth will never be content to write tunes for a text-book of physics, he boldly confounds the arbitrary limits of matter and morals in one splendid apostrophe to Duty:—

Flowers laugh before thee on their beds; And fragrance in thy footing treads; Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong; And the most ancient heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.

Poets, it is said, anticipate science; here in these four lines is work for a thousand laboratories for a thousand years. But the truth has been understated; every writer and every speaker works ahead of science, expressing analogies and contrasts, likenesses and differences, that will not abide the apparatus of proof. The world of perception and will, of passion and belief, is an uncaptured virgin, airily deriding from afar the calculated advances and practised modesty of the old bawd Science; turning again to shower a benediction of unexpected caresses on the most cavalier of her wooers, Poetry. This world, the child of Sense and Faith, shy, wild, and provocative, for ever lures her lovers to the chase, and the record of their hopes and conquests is contained in the lover’s language, made up wholly of parable and figure of speech. There is nothing under the sun nor beyond it that does not concern man, and it is the unceasing effort of humanity, whether by letters or by science, to bring “the commerce of the mind and of things” to terms of nearer correspondence. But Literature, ambitious to touch life on all its sides, distrusts the way of abstraction, and can hardly be brought to abandon the point of view whence things are seen in their immediate relation to the individual soul. This kind of research is the work of letters; here are facts of human life to be noted that are never like to be numerically tabulated, changes and developments that defy all metrical standards to be traced and described. The greater men of science have been cast in so generous a mould that they have recognised the partial nature of their task; they have known how to play with science as a pastime, and to win and wear her decorations for a holiday favour. They have not emaciated the fulness of their faculties in the name of certainty, nor cramped their humanity for the promise of a future good. They have been the servants of Nature, not the slaves of method. But the grammarian of the laboratory is often the victim of his trade. He staggers forth from his workshop, where prolonged concentration on a mechanical task, directed to a provisional and doubtful goal, has dimmed his faculties; the glaring motley of the world, bathed in sunlight, dazzles him; the questions, moral, political, and personal, that his method has relegated to some future of larger knowledge, crowd upon him, clamorous for solution, not to be denied, insisting on a settlement to-day. He is forced to make a choice, and may either forsake the divinity he serves, falling back, for the practical and æsthetic conduct of life, on those common instincts of sensuality which oscillate between the conventicle and the tavern as the poles of duty and pleasure, or, more pathetically still, he may attempt to bring the code of the observatory to bear immediately on the vagaries of the untameable world, and suffer the pedant’s disaster. A martyr to the good that is to be, he has voluntarily maimed himself “for the kingdom of Heaven’s sake”—if, perchance, the kingdom of Heaven might come by observation. The enthusiasm of his self-denial shows itself in his unavailing struggle to chain language also to the bare rock of ascertained fact. Metaphor, the poet’s right-hand weapon, he despises; all that is tentative, individual, struck off at the urging of a mood, he disclaims and suspects. Yet the very rewards that science promises have their parallel in the domain of letters. The discovery of likeness in the midst of difference, and of difference in the midst of likeness, is the keenest pleasure of the intellect; and literary expression, as has been said, is one long series of such discoveries, each with its thrill of incommunicable happiness, all unprecedented, and perhaps unverifiable by later experiment. The finest instrument of these discoveries is metaphor, the spectroscope of letters.

Enough has been said of change; it remains to speak of one more of those illusions of fixity wherein writers seek exemption from the general lot. Language, it has been shown, is to be fitted to thought; and, further, there are no synonyms. What more natural conclusion could be drawn by the enthusiasm of the artist than that there is some kind of preordained harmony between words and things, whereby expression and thought tally exactly, like the halves of a puzzle? This illusion, called in France the doctrine of the mot propre, is a will o’ the wisp which has kept many an artist dancing on its trail. That there is one, and only one way of expressing one thing has been the belief of other writers besides Gustave Flaubert, inspiriting them to a desperate and fruitful industry. It is an amiable fancy, like the dream of Michael Angelo, who loved to imagine that the statue existed already in the block of marble, and had only to be stripped of its superfluous wrappings, or like the indolent fallacy of those economic soothsayers to whom Malthus brought rough awakening, that population and the means of subsistence move side by side in harmonious progress. But hunger does not imply food, and there may hover in the restless heads of poets, as themselves testify—

One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, Which into words no virtue can digest.

Matter and form are not so separable as the popular philosophy would have them; indeed, the very antithesis between them is a cardinal instance of how language reacts on thought, modifying and fixing a cloudy truth. The idea pursues form not only that it may be known to others, but that it may know itself, and the body in which it becomes incarnate is not to be distinguished from the informing soul. It is recorded of a famous Latin historian how he declared that he would have made Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia had the effective turn of the sentence required it. He may stand for the true type of the literary artist. The business of letters, howsoever simple it may seem to those who think truth-telling a gift of nature, is in reality two-fold, to find words for a meaning, and to find a meaning for words. Now it is the words that refuse to yield, and now the meaning, so that he who attempts to wed them is at the same time altering his words to suit his meaning, and modifying and shaping his meaning to satisfy the requirements of his words. The humblest processes of thought have had their first education from language long before they took shape in literature. So subtle is the connexion between the two that it is equally possible to call language the form given to the matter of thought, or, inverting the application of the figure, to speak of thought as the formal principle that shapes the raw material of language. It is not until the two become one that they can be known for two. The idea to be expressed is a kind of mutual recognition between thought and language, which here meet and claim each other for the first time, just as in the first glance exchanged by lovers, the unborn child opens its eyes on the world, and pleads for life. But thought, although it may indulge itself with the fancy of a predestined affiance, is not confined to one mate, but roves free and is the father of many children. A belief in the inevitable word is the last refuge of that stubborn mechanical theory of the universe which has been slowly driven from science, politics, and history. Amidst so much that is undulating, it has pleased writers to imagine that truth persists and is provided by heavenly munificence with an imperishable garb of language. But this also is vanity, there is one end appointed alike to all, fact goes the way of fiction, and what is known is no more perdurable than what is made. Not words nor works, but only that which is formless endures, the vitality that is another name for change, the breath that fills and shatters the bubbles of good and evil, of beauty and deformity, of truth and untruth.

No art is easy, least of all the art of letters. Apply the musical analogy once more to the instrument whereon literature performs its voluntaries. With a living keyboard of notes which are all incessantly changing in value, so that what rang true under Dr. Johnson’s hand may sound flat or sharp now, with a range of a myriad strings, some falling mute and others being added from day to day, with numberless permutations and combinations, each of which alters the tone and pitch of the units that compose it, with fluid ideas that never have an outlined existence until they have found their phrases and the improvisation is complete, is it to be wondered at that the art of style is eternally elusive, and that the attempt to reduce it to rule is the forlorn hope of academic infatuation?

* * * * *

These difficulties and complexities of the instrument are, nevertheless, the least part of the ordeal that is to be undergone by the writer. The same musical note or phrase affects different ears in much the same way; not so the word or group of words. The pure idea, let us say, is translated into language by the literary composer; who is to be responsible for the retranslation of the language into idea? Here begins the story of the troubles and weaknesses that are imposed upon literature by the necessity it lies under of addressing itself to an audience, by its liability to anticipate the corruptions that mar the understanding of the spoken or written word. A word is the operative symbol of a relation between two minds, and is chosen by the one not without regard to the quality of the effect actually produced upon the other. Men must be spoken to in their accustomed tongue, and persuaded that the unknown God proclaimed by the poet is one whom aforetime they ignorantly worshipped. The relation of great authors to the public may be compared to the war of the sexes, a quiet watchful antagonism between two parties mutually indispensable to each other, at one time veiling itself in endearments, at another breaking out into open defiance. He who has a message to deliver must wrestle with his fellows before he shall be permitted to ply them with uncomfortable or unfamiliar truths. The public, like the delicate Greek Narcissus, is sleepily enamoured of itself; and the name of its only other perfect lover is Echo. Yet even great authors must lay their account with the public, and it is instructive to observe how different are the attitudes they have adopted, how uniform the disappointment they have felt. Some, like Browning and Mr. Meredith in our own day, trouble themselves little about the reception given to their work, but are content to say on, until the few who care to listen have expounded them to the many, and they are applauded, in the end, by a generation whom they have trained to appreciate them. Yet this noble and persevering indifference is none of their choice, and long years of absolution from criticism must needs be paid for in faults of style. “Writing for the stage,” Mr. Meredith himself has remarked, “would be a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style into which some great ones fall at times.” Denied such a corrective, the great one is apt to sit alone and tease his meditations into strange shapes, fortifying himself against obscurity and neglect with the reflection that most of the words he uses are to be found, after all, in the dictionary. It is not, however, from the secluded scholar that the sharpest cry of pain is wrung by the indignities of his position, but rather from genius in the act of earning a full meed of popular applause. Both Shakespeare and Ben Jonson wrote for the stage, both were blown by the favouring breath of their plebeian patrons into reputation and a competence. Each of them passed through the thick of the fight, and well knew that ugly corner where the artist is exposed to cross fires, his own idea of masterly work on the one hand and the necessity for pleasing the rabble on the other. When any man is awake to the fact that the public is a vile patron, when he is conscious also that his bread and his fame are in their gift—it is a stern passage for his soul, a touchstone for the strength and gentleness of his spirit. Jonson, whose splendid scorn took to itself lyric wings in the two great Odes to Himself, sang high and aloof for a while, then the frenzy caught him, and he flung away his lyre to gird himself for deeds of mischief among nameless and noteless antagonists. Even Chapman, who, in The Tears of Peace, compares “men’s refuse ears” to those gates in ancient cities which were opened only when the bodies of executed malefactors were to be cast away, who elsewhere gives utterance, in round terms, to his belief that

No truth of excellence was ever seen But bore the venom of the vulgar’s spleen,

—even the violences of this great and haughty spirit must pale beside the more desperate violences of the dramatist who commended his play to the public in the famous line,

By God, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may.

This stormy passion of arrogant independence disturbs the serenity of atmosphere necessary for creative art. A greater than Jonson donned the suppliant’s robes, like Coriolanus, and with the inscrutable honeyed smile about his lips begged for the “most sweet voices” of the journeymen and gallants who thronged the Globe Theatre. Only once does the wail of anguish escape him—

Alas! ’tis true, I have gone here and there, And made myself a motley to the view, Gored mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear.

And again—

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand, And almost thence my nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand, Pity me then, and wish I were renewed.