VIII.

ELEGANCE.

THE last quality of style is far more subtile than either of the others. Any style that we can understand, we have found, is clear; and the secret of clearness lies in the denotation of our words and compositions. Any style that will hold the attention, we have found, is forcible; and not so obviously, but I hope almost as surely, we have determined that the secret of force lies in the connotation of our words and compositions.

But we come at last to

a more elusive matter than force. What is it in style that may be trusted to please us; and what trait in the elements of style may be expected to secure it?

In my first chapter, I suggested to you both the name by which I shall describe the quality in question and the definition I shall give it. Elegance is the distinguishing quality of a style that pleases the taste. By framing and repeating this definition, however, I do not mean that it satisfies me. On the contrary, both name and definition are among the least satisfactory things I have ventured to offer you. Yet, paradoxical as it may seem, this very fact has inclined me not to

attempt to change them; for no single example could much better illustrate what I believe to be the real nature of the quality.

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What we have in view, you see, is the aesthetic quality of style, that subtile something in a work of literary art which makes us feel delight in the workmanship. Beauty, some call it; charm, others; others still, grace, ease, finish, mastery. Yet none of these terms, any more than the one I have chosen, speaks for itself. Most palpable, of course, in kinds of writing whose first object is to give pleasure, — in poetry, or in that finer kind of prose that we recognize as belonging to literature, the quality I mean need not be wholly absent from even the most technical style or the most commonplace matter. We all feel it in the great poets; we all feel it in such prose as Addison's; in less certain form we all feel it in such modern prose as Mr. Matthew Arnold's, or Mr. Walter Pater's, just as we feel its absence in every-day journalism or in the astonishing vagaries of Carlyle or of Mr. Addington Symonds. But I think we do not all feel it in other places where nevertheless it exists; in technical treatises, for example, in every-day letters, in every case where human beings attempt the task of embodying in written words the elusive, immaterial reality of thought and emotion.

Our first task, then, is to realize what we mean; to fix in our minds the quality to which we are now trying to give a name. By so doing, we shall see why any name yet found for it must be unsatisfactory; and

by so seeing we shall learn, I think, more about it than we can learn in any other simple way.

Perhaps the easiest way of approaching our task is for a moment to consider the name for it now before us. A moment ago I said that any one can feel the elegance of Addison's style. Nobody ever had much less fundamental liking for the somewhat priggish Whig who gave English literature the "Spectator" than that stoutest of Georgian Tories, Samuel Johnson. Yet Johnson's Life of Addison closes with these words: "Whoever wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison." The opinion thus expressed has become a tradition. To this day, Addisonian is a word not infrequently used to mean that a style has the finest grace. To a certain extent this is true: if a writer have in view such purposes as Addison's, little higher praise can be given him than that he approaches the standard of excellence that Addison fixed for the wits of Queen Anne's London. In another way, this Addisonian tradition has given rise to what I believe to be grave error. If to be Addisonian is to be excellent, people are apt to fancy, not to be Addisonian is to be something not excellent at all. The logic, when you stop to think, is obviously imperfect; but as a rule, you do not stop to think. Now, the most salient trait of Addison's style is its politeness, its well-bred restraint, its complete freedom from any manner of excess. An admirable trait everybody must admit this, for a great

many purposes; but, to go no farther, to be at once Addisonian and passionate is simply impossible. And whoever should say that passionate writing cannot have the trait before us now the quality that pleases the taste as well as the intellectual quality clearness, and the emotional quality force, would obviously say something that would make his notion. of the quality very different from the notion I am trying to lay before you.

To get a more comprehensive idea of just what this is, it will be worth while to turn to four passages from English poetry, in which four poets, each notable at a different period of our literature, have touched this matter. Among the beautiful passages which make Marlowe's "Tamburlaine," to whoever knows it well, something far more significant than the surging sea of bombast for which it stands in tradition, are these lines on beauty,

"If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From the immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit,—
If these had made one poem's period,
And all combined in beauty's worthiness,

Yet should there hover in their restless heads,

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

And this unspoken word is the final secret of beauty. Fifty years later, in that England of Cavaliers and Puritans that was in feeling centuries away from the passionate Renaissance of Elizabeth, John Ford, in his tragedy of the "Broken Heart," wrote this song:

"Can you paint a thought; or number
Every fancy in a slumber?

Can you count soft minutes roving
From a dial's point by moving ?

"No, oh no! yet you may

Sooner do both that and this,
This and that, and never miss,

Than by any praise display

Beauty's beauty; such a glory
As beyond all fate, all story,
All arms, all arts,

All loves, all hearts,
Greater than those or they,

Do, shall, and must obey."

In a poem as far from these in character as the limits of literature allow-in Pope's "Essay on Criticism”. are these lines, which say the same thing:

"Some beauties yet no precepts can declare,

For there's a happiness as well as care.

Music resembles Poetry; in each

Are nameless graces which no methods teach.

"True wit is Nature to advantage dress'd,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinc d at sight we find,
That gives us back the shadow of the mind."