VII.

FORCE.

THE emotional quality of style, to which we come now, is far more subtile. In the first place, its aspects are so various that in many of the textbooks it is described not as a single quality, but as a great number of separate ones, varying literally from the ridiculous to the sublime. In order fully to understand what we are considering, then, we shall do well, before we attempt a definition, to recall various examples of the quality; to know, in a general way, what the general impression is that we wish to define.

In reading anything, or indeed in listening to any prolonged speech, we are all aware of something more than the literal facts or ideas which the words express. These general impressions, indeed, are the chief things of which in ordinary reading we are conscious. In reading "Pickwick," for example, or one of Mark Twain's better books, we can give no very distinct account of exactly what the book told us; but we are very sure that it made us laugh, and we very properly call the book humorous. The death of Colonel Newcome brings tears to the eyes of a great many people by no means lachrymose in habit; and within a very

few years I have seen people still similarly affected by that death of Clarissa Harlowe that set all England to crying in George the Second's time. Take, almost at random, a couplet or two from Pope; these are about the poor:

"God cannot love' (says Blunt, with tearless eyes)

'The wretch he starves'- and piously denies ;

But the good Bishop, with a meeker air,

Admits, and leaves them, Providence's care.'

You feel the satirical power here; it is the same quality that in a far deeper form makes "Gulliver" so terribly fascinating. Take any of the papers in the "Spectator" that deal with Sir Roger de Coverley; you will find in it a delicately well-bred humor- a sympathetic sense of what life is in some of its smaller aspects that will pretty surely delight you. In the novels of Walter Scott, in many of the tales of Mr. Stevenson, there is a very distinct trait that without analyzing we call romantic, and that many of us are still able to enjoy. In modern novels there is often a profound sense of fact which seems for the moment to give these fictions a serious and lasting significance. In writers that many of us do not pretend to understand in Carlyle, in Browning, in Shelley

many of us feel an individuality perhaps more stimulating than if we were able to make out precisely its components. In the literature that every one admits to be great in the tragedies of Shakspere, in the nobler passages of Milton, to go no further we find a spirit that can be described by

no lesser word than sublime. One might go on interminably, recalling the enormously varied impressions that the literature we care about makes on us. If we are sensitive enough, every writer who is worth the name will make an impression peculiarly his own. If we are sensible enough, we shall enjoy, or at least try to enjoy, each of these impressions in its own way. But our business with them now is not to separate or to enjoy them; it is to realize how many and how various they are, and then to inquire what trait they have in common. For the quality of style before us -the emotional quality to which I give the name "force "includes them all.

In truth, I believe these various qualities, different as they seem, possess in common a trait more significantly characteristic than their differences. One and all, they hold the attention of a reader. Force, then, the emotional quality of style, I may define as the distinguishing quality of a style that holds the attention.

Of course, like clearness, force is in some degree a relative quality. What will interest one man will quite fail to interest another. Mr. Darwin, you remember, could find nothing in Shakspere; and it is not improbable that many people of a literary turn would fail to find anything in the works of Mr. Darwin. And we have all heard intelligent people eagerly disputing as to whether a given book is interesting or not. I remember such a dispute last summer about a novel called "Sir Charles Danvers," which impressed

me as tiresome; but to call it tiresome when the rest of the company had actually enjoyed it was simply to utter an absurdity. The fact that they enjoyed it showed that to many sane human beings it was not tiresome at all. Nothing, in fact, can be trusted to hold everybody's attention; nothing even with certainty to bore everybody. But though in this matter it is perhaps harder than in the matter of clearness to appeal to the average man, I believe that we may safely say that what will hold the attention of the average man of the ordinary human being-is in most respects a better piece of work than what will appeal only to a single class. To fastidious people there will always be a charm about what other people do not know enough to appreciate: herein, I believe, lies half the secret of academic pedantry. To people not of a fastidious turn there will always be a less holy, if not less inhumane, charm in horrors, and broad jokes, really shocking to others. But now and then you will find something that appeals to coarse people and fastidious alike. Perhaps as notable an example, in a small way, of what I mean as has appeared of late years are the earlier operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. There was something in them that filled our theatres for months with popular audiences; and something, too, which very honestly delighted a class of people who find what generally pleases popular audiences utterly abominable. There have been verses and music enough meantime highly edifying to the elect; and there have been things they called

comic operas by the dozen, highly profitable to thea tres of the lower sort. But in their own little way, "Pinafore" and the "Pirates of Penzance" and "Patience were a great deal more forcible, in the sense in which I use the term, than the works called better, and the works admitted to be worse, each of which appealed to the emotions of only one of the classes who joined in enjoying these. Always remembering, then, that the average man is not a vulgar fellow, but a man who combines the traits common to gentle and to vulgar alike, we may safely say that the most forcible writing is that which holds the attention of the average man.

If we were not given so constantly to forgetting things that we know perfectly well, it would seem almost needless to repeat what I repeat now. We are aware of the force of a given piece of style only as an impression, though an impression, to be sure, of which we are very keenly aware. At a given moment our wits may be so lazy that we cannot say certainly whether we understand what is said to us or not; but there are few moments in life when we do not know whether or not we are bored. Any piece of style submitted to us will interest us will hold our attention

-

-or not; and this matter of emotional impression, this question of whether we are interested or bored, is at once so much more palpable and so much more subtile a thing than the matter of intellectual impressionthe question of whether or not we understand a thing — that we are apt to forget how it comes to us. Yet, as