This noblesse oblige operates to prune away negligences, to make each phrase full and rounded, to induce a play of imagination and apt choice and urbanity which will make the reader aware at every moment that the writer values his good will. Thus in every well-meant discourse the key of words, as compared with colloquialism or dead reportage, will be high, will be mindfully self-consistent, will be watchful not to flat the note.1 EXAMPLES OF UNTUNED PROSE.-As an illustration of lack of tone and distinction, with a criticism upon it, the following is quoted by Professor Earle from the Saturday Review: — Notwithstanding the praise heaped upon them by Mr. Laing, these Sagas cannot be called a model of historical writing. Although occasionally picturesque and incisive, the style is, on the whole, bald in the extreme. Here is a specimen, taken absolutely at random, which sets out the history of a certain Halfdan: 'Halfdan was the name of King Eystein's son who succeeded him. He was called Halfdan the Mild, but the Bad Entertainer that is to say, he was reported to be generous, and to give his men as much gold as other men gave of silver, but he starved them in their diet. He was a good warrior, who had been long in Viking cruises, and had collected great property. He was married to Hlif, a daughter of King Vestmara. Holtar, in Vestfold, was his chief house, and he died there on a bed of sickness, and was buried at Borro under a mound.' This kind of writing, although it has the merit of simplicity, when followed over an expanse of fourteen hundred pages, ends by confusing the mind.” 2. In addition to this elevation incumbent upon all, every literary work strikes a certain keynote, elevated or colloquial or humorous or graceful; and while it is often an elegance defined, and yet is felt. It is a blending of modesty and dignity. It is the difference between presentable and unpresentable. Literary diction must not wear an appearance of slackness or negligence, it must not be in undress;-it must not ignore the presence of the public before whom it appears. Without incorrectness or the breaking of any rule, a sentence may betray a want of something, we can hardly say what, which makes it unsatisfactory, we can hardly say why. This is the defect which is vaguely characterized as 'bald.'"- EARLE, English Prose, p. 173. 1 The key of words, as related to connotation and emotional congruity, has already been discussed; see above, p. 104. and advantage to rise on occasion into a higher strain, it is unfortunate to fall unadvisedly below the level adopted. This is most noticeable when prosaic words and turns of expression creep into poetry. While prose, especially on impassioned or exalted occasions, may easily rise into the poetic,1 as soon as poetry sinks, by as much as a single phrase, to the level of prose, the disenchanting effect is felt at once. EXAMPLE. In the following stanza of poetry, none of which indeed is keyed very high, the prosaic tone and movement of the bracketed lines, as compared with the rest, are plainly felt : "So, from the sunshine and the green of love, We enter on our story's darker part; An impulse of repugnance in the heart, So also there is naught that falls below Her generous reach, though grimed with guilt and woe." The fact that the vocabulary is in strata, lower and higher, and that the congruous level must be maintained, is apparent when a slang or colloquial expression creeps inadvertently into a severe discourse, or when a very commonplace thing is said. in a solemn way or vice versa; it makes the literary sense at once aware of the claims of tone, of taste, of keeping. EXAMPLE. - In the following passage the objection to the italicized words is not that they are incorrect, but that they flat the note: "The task was indeed mighty, but Luther was a giant among men. Nor was his fatherland entirely out of sorts. The life-lessons of Wyckliffe and Huss had not been lost." "3 A few years ago a very amusing little biography, written in English by a native Hindostanee, was published in Calcutta; and the most ludicrous faults in its style were owing to the fact that the writer, having obtained all his words from a dictionary, had no sense of the difference of tone and spirit in different expressions. Words, idioms, proverbial expressions 1 See above, p. 113, footnote, and the chapter on Poetic Diction below. belonging to the most curiously discordant strata of thought were jumbled together. The following sentences will illustrate this: "His first business, on making an income, was to extricate his family from the difficulties in which it had been lately enwrapped, and to restore happiness and sunshine to those sweet and well-beloved faces on which he had not seen the soft and fascinating beams of a simper for many a grim-visaged year.” “It was all along the case, and it is so up to this time with the Lieutenant Governors, to give seats to non-professional men (who are or were as if cocks of the roost, or in other words, Natives of high social status) in the Council." "He then came in his chamber to take his wonted tiffin, and felt a slight headache, which gradually aggravated and became so uncontrollable that he felt like a toad under a harrow."1 It is one of the privileges of humor or of satire to lower the key intentionally, in some word or passage, thus by the connotation furnished by a different association infusing a passing shade of emotion-ridicule or contempt — into the idea conveyed. This is one of the refinements of literature, pleasing according to the good taste with which it is employed. EXAMPLE. In the following sentence the writer's contempt is conveyed simply by choosing words out of a more rudimentary and sordid sphere of ideas than that in which the account would naturally move: "George III., who took a deep personal interest in the war, which, consciously or unconsciously, he felt to be the test of his schemes and the trial of his power, set his agents running over Europe to buy soldiers from anybody who had men to sell."2 This matter has already been discussed to some extent under the Key of Words; see above, p. 104. 1 Life of Onookool Chunder Mookerjee. 2 HENRY CABOT LODGE, in Scribner's Magazine, April, 1898, p. 387. CHAPTER VI. POETIC DICTION AND ITS INTERACTIONS WITH PROSE. IN our discussion of prose diction we have had in mind merely a form of expression. Its antithesis, then, as confined correspondingly to form of expression, is not poetry, but verse. Poetry is more than an antithesis to prose; it includes not only form but material, mood, and thought. To this comprehensive term poetry it is hard to get an exact antithesis; the nearest, perhaps, is matter-of-fact, that is, practical knowledge or instruction, as distinguished from thought idealized by fancy and subjective feeling. Between prose and poetry, then, there is a tract of common ground, left over after verse has taken up as much of the antithesis as it can. On this tract there is tendency to incursion from both sides: prose occupying it in greater or less degree as its occasion becomes more like that of poetry; poetry occupying it in the peculiarities of word and phrase by which both it and prose are vitalized. The result is, that while in the two kinds of discourse the bulk of usage remains identical, any access of poetic feeling in either shows itself in those ways of expression which we name distinctively poetic diction.1 1 "Prose is distinct from Poetry as the offspring is distinct from the mother. Their nature is one, but their functions apart. Both Poetry and Prose are children of Music. Both retain the virtue of their origin, and share in the family patrimony. By the detachment of Prose, Poetry has gained increased elevation through limitation to her highest and truest province. Poetry has retained, not all the Music, but only its mightiest department, the Music of the heart. The mind also has its Music, and that branch has fallen to the lot of Prose. So the music of Prose is that which chimes with Reason, the music of Poetry that which harmonizes with hope and fear, with love and aversion, with aspiration and awe. Yet Poetry and Poetic diction is in part dictated by, or rather blends artistically with, the exactions of poetic metre, which latter subject will be discussed in the next chapter. Its principle, however, is more fundamental than this: it goes down to the mood, the feeling, that underlies expression, and that makes diction and metre alike its medium of utterance. What Poetic Diction is. The motive of poetic diction is reducible to a single principle: spiritual exaltation. As poetry is the language of emotion and imagination, its verbal peculiarities answer to the spontaneous endeavor to make utterance more effective, in impressiveness or picturesqueness. In a word, poetic diction is heightened language, — the result in words of the inspiration that controls the poet's mind. Or to express it according to the more scientific conception required by a text-book of rhetoric, it is language so employed and ordered as to connote fervid feeling and imaginative beauty.1 This elevated diction interacts with the diction of prose; that is to say, when prose has an emotional or imaginative occasion it takes on very much the same peculiarities of expression, but with a difference, due to its different predominance of motive. In prose the motive is practical and didactic, with spiritual exaltation as the helper. In poetry the motive is fervid and ideal, with matter-of-fact as the helper. Naturally, then, in poetry itself the poetic diction is freer and bolder, has more the abandon of existing for its own sake; while in any kind of prose, however poetic, the diction Prose are not estranged, they are still akin, and neither is quite shut out from the heritage of the other. Poetry abhors unreason, and Prose cherishes right feeling." EARLE, English Prose, p. 330. 1 A poet's sense of the office of poetic diction is indicated in this couplet from Tennyson's poem, The Wreck :— "The word of the Poet by whom the deeps of the world are stirr'd, 2 See this illustrated above, p. 111. |