is barred out from poetic uses; the verse of Kipling and Eugene Field, of Will Carleton and James Whitcomb Riley would at once disprove this and dictate a broader standard. In humorous and folk-verse free use is made of colloquialisms, dialect, even slang; but in this case the poetic setting metre, rhyme, and general spirit of the poem - supplies the imaginative atmosphere and removes the language in fitting degree from its ordinary associations. ILLUSTRATION.—In the following stanza from Kipling there is the cockney dialect, the colloquial swing, and the bad grammar; but it is poetry of a sort — it is poetic feeling kept up by the lilt of the verse : — "We're most of us liars, we 're 'arf of us thieves, an' the rest are as rank as can be, But once in a while we can finish in style (which I 'ope it won't 'appen to me). But it makes you think better o' you an' your friends, an' the work you may 'ave to do, When you think o' the sinkin' Victorier's Jollies soldier an' sailor too! - Now there isn't no room for to say you don't know they 'ave proved it plain and true That whether it's Widow, or whether it's ship, Victorier's work is to do, III. Language employed for its Picturing Power. The language of poetry is the language of imagery; that is, there is a constant effort to employ words and phrasing that shall have as much as possible of the vividness and concreteness of an object of sense. Prose obeys the same tendency, though in the two the motives differ. In poetry the significance of the imagery itself—its beauty, its connotation of ideal truths— is a motive; and accordingly the imagery becomes the substance of the thought, and is worked out seemingly for its own sake.2 In prose the motive is lucidity and concentration: 1 KIPLING, The Seven Seas, p. 155. 2" Imagery is sometimes not the mere alien apparelling of a thought, and of a nature to be detached from the thought, but is the coefficient that, being superadded to something else, absolutely makes the thought."— DE QUINCEY, Essay on Language. the picture is a shorthand illuminator of a thought that in literal language is felt to lack life. Picturing language is to prose like an illustrative figure; to poetry a natural attire. In prose composition, therefore, such language, valuable as it is, must be kept soberly and judiciously in hand; it may easily clog and overload the expression and produce the effect of display. The following are the chief aspects of this use of language: 1. Epithet. - By far the most common way is to crowd the picture into single words, called epithets. An epithet may be defined as a descriptive adjective1; that is to say, giving an attribute not essential to the understanding of its principal, but (as the derivation of the word, from èπí and ríoŋμɩ, “to add to," implies) added extra, in order to supply some descriptive or coloring feature. An epithet, from its brevity, is an instrument alike of imagery and vigor; it involves in most cases the implicatory figure called Trope.2 The following kinds of epithets may here be defined and exemplified: 1. By far the most numerous and natural are the epithets that answer most closely to the type defined above; we may name them decorative epithets, epithets that add a coloring, a descriptive trait, to their principal. Distinctively a poetic feature, such epithets, from their lack of metrical suggestion, are also the most available picturing agency in poetic prose." ILLUSTRATIONS. -1. The following stanza, from Keats's Lamia, will show by the words here italicized how rich poetic literature often is in epithet, and how much of the coloring is added thereby : "Upon a time, before the faery broods Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods, 1 An epithet may also take the form of name or sobriquet, added for connotation of character; see p. 91, above. 2 See above, p. 87. 8 Or prose of the imaginative type, concerning which see below, p. 168. Before King Oberon's bright diadem, From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip'd lawns, His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft: From high Olympus had he stolen light, On this side of Jove's clouds, to escape the sight Of his great summoner, and made retreat Into a forest on the shores of Crete." 2. The following examples, from prose works, make us aware that we are reading prose of an exceptional kind, prose akin, in sentiment and feeling, to poetry. "With bossy beaten work of mountain chains"; mighty masses of leaden rock and heathy moor;" are from Ruskin.1 "They roamed the daisied fields together," is from George Eliot. 66 3. Such epithets may sometimes, by a license very rare in prose, be used without their substantives; thus, Milton has "the dank," "the dry," for water and land. Sometimes also an epithet may be used substantively and be modified by a second epithet; as, "the breezy blue," "the sheeted dead," 66 the dead vast of the night." Some stock expressions similar to these last examples have crept into prose, as, "Our honored dead,” “the great departed." 2. A rather more artificial kind of epithets, and therefore more restricted to poetry, may be named essential epithets, epithets that merely express some quality already involved in the noun. Being so obvious, this quality might go unthought of if it were not thus brought out and made the charactergiving quality of the passage. In the same class with these, as obeying a similar principle, may be mentioned conventional epithets, epithets employed as a constant accompaniment, a kind of trade-mark, of their nouns, without special reference to their fitness on any given occasion. This use is found in old and ballad poetry. "Wet waves," "white milk," EXAMPLES. 1. Of Essential Epithet: "green pastures, ,""the sharp sword." "And he commanded them to make all sit down by companies upon the green grass,” Mark vi. 39, is instanced 1 The longer passage in which these epithets occur is quoted as an illustration of the Imaginative Type of Prose, on p. 168, below. as the language of an eye-witness, to whom the essential feature of greenness was a vividly remembered characteristic of the scene. The essential epithet in “bright sword” is given on p. 111, above, as a means of making picturesqueness a part of prose expression. 2. Of Conventional Epithet. In Homer Achilles is always "swiftfooted," when he is sitting in council or sleeping, as well as when he is running. So, too, we have "bright-eyed Athené," "white-armed Juno "; as also in the early ballads and in poetry modeled on their style, "the doughty Douglas," "the bold Sir Bedivere "; adjective and noun making one term indivisible for the purpose and tone of the poem in which they occur. 3. The kind of epithet most used in prose, and used rather for striking brevity than for picturesqueness, may be called the phrasal or packed epithet; an epithet that suggests what would require a phrase or sentence to express in full. It is a much valued means of packing language as full of implied thought as it will bear. "Even copious Dryden wanted, or forgot the epithet copious is equivalent to " though he was copious," implying that in his great wealth of expression Dryden could have afforded to strike out the poorer passages, being able to supply their place with better. - In the couplet, "Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain, Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the main,” — the full sense implied in the epithet unbending is that the corn had not time, as she passed over it so swiftly, to bend beneath her. The decorative epithet swift, in the first line, has no such concentration of meaning. The following, from Keats, "So the two brothers and their murder'd man derives its bold concentration from the fact that, as the context shows, the epithet means "whom they were about to murder," or, "murdered in anticipation." 2. The Adjective and Adverb in Prose. Closely parallel to the poetic use of epithets for their picturing power is the use of modifiers, the adjective and the adverb, in prose, for fulness This is a feature of meaning and for roundedness of phrase. of diction that needs the careful guardianship of sound taste, because while it has great capabilities it may be pushed into disagreeable effects equally great. It is for this reason that the useful but too sweeping advice has been given, "Never use two adjectives where one will do; never use an adjective at all where a noun will do." Instead of taking up with this undiscriminatingly, it will be better to ascertain the good and the bad of the case. On the one hand, it is the adjective and the adverb, most largely, that supply warmth, color, depth to the assertion; to the austere outline of noun and verb they add as it were a wealth and amplitude of meaning which makes the sentence a thing of animation and emotion. Without these the style may easily become bald.1 On the other hand, these intensifying elements are the easiest to lavish; and when used in profusion they may become a source of weakness, not aiding the assertion but swamping it with qualifications 2; besides, too, they may make 1 An example of a bald style is given above, p. 136. — See EARLE, English Prose, pp. 177-182, from which the following sentences may be quoted: "To write without adjectives may be a counsel of safety, but it never can lead to high excellence. The utmost that can be attained without adjectives is correctness of outline; there is no warmth, no colour, no emotion. ... To allot adjectives rightly requires a good knowledge of the subject united with sound taste and literary judgment. Used under these conditions, they are among the smartest and most effective of the elements of language, and together with a richness of meaning they convey a warmth of feeling and a colour to the imagination which exceeds the power of either verb, substantive, or adverb." 2 For the obverse of this, see under Condensation for Vigor, p. 295, below. The following is suggestive here: "Lord North . . . took occasion on the next day to express his assurance that Sir George had spoken in warmth. 'No,' said Savile, ‘I spoke what I thought last night, and I think the same this morning. Honorable members have betrayed their trust. I will add no epithets, because epithets only weaken. I will not say they have betrayed their country corruptly, flagitiously, and scandalously; but I do say they have betrayed their country, and I stand here to receive the punishment for having said so.". - TREVELYAN, Early History of Charles James Fox, p. 199. |