Appreciations, With An Essay on Style | Page 8

monosyllables, close to us as touch and sight, he will intermix
readily with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in "second
intention." In this late day certainly, no critical process can be
conducted reasonably without eclecticism. Of [17] such eclecticism we
have a justifying example in one of the first poets of our time. How
illustrative of monosyllabic effect, of sonorous Latin, of the
phraseology of science, of metaphysic, of colloquialism even, are the
writings of Tennyson; yet with what a fine, fastidious scholarship
throughout!
A scholar writing for the scholarly, he will of course leave something
to the willing intelligence of his reader. "To go preach to the first
passer-by," says Montaigne, "to become tutor to the ignorance of the
first I meet, is a thing I abhor;" a thing, in fact, naturally distressing to
the scholar, who will therefore ever be shy of offering
uncomplimentary assistance to the reader's wit. To really strenuous
minds there is a pleasurable stimulus in the challenge for a continuous
effort on their part, to be rewarded by securer and more intimate grasp
of the author's sense. Self- restraint, a skilful economy of means,
ascêsis, that too has a beauty of its own; and for the reader supposed
there will be an aesthetic satisfaction in that frugal closeness of style
which makes the most of a word, in the exaction from every sentence
of a precise relief, in the just spacing out of word to thought, in the
logically filled space connected always with the delightful sense of
difficulty overcome.
Different classes of persons, at different times, make, of course, very
various demands upon literature. Still, scholars, I suppose, and not [18]
only scholars, but all disinterested lovers of books, will always look to
it, as to all other fine art, for a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from a
certain vulgarity in the actual world. A perfect poem like Lycidas, a

perfect fiction like Esmond, the perfect handling of a theory like
Newman's Idea of a University, has for them something of the uses of a
religious "retreat." Here, then, with a view to the central need of a
select few, those "men of a finer thread" who have formed and maintain
the literary ideal, everything, every component element, will have
undergone exact trial, and, above all, there will be no uncharacteristic
or tarnished or vulgar decoration, permissible ornament being for the
most part structural, or necessary. As the painter in his picture, so the
artist in his book, aims at the production by honourable artifice of a
peculiar atmosphere. "The artist," says Schiller, "may be known rather
by what he omits"; and in literature, too, the true artist may be best
recognised by his tact of omission. For to the grave reader words too
are grave; and the ornamental word, the figure, the accessory form or
colour or reference, is rarely content to die to thought precisely at the
right moment, but will inevitably linger awhile, stirring a long
"brain-wave" behind it of perhaps quite alien associations.
Just there, it may be, is the detrimental tendency of the sort of scholarly
attentiveness [19] of mind I am recommending. But the true artist
allows for it. He will remember that, as the very word ornament
indicates what is in itself non-essential, so the "one beauty" of all
literary style is of its very essence, and independent, in prose and verse
alike, of all removable decoration; that it may exist in its fullest lustre,
as in Flaubert's Madame Bovary, for instance, or in Stendhal's Le
Rouge et Le Noir, in a composition utterly unadorned, with hardly a
single suggestion of visibly beautiful things. Parallel, allusion, the
allusive way generally, the flowers in the garden:--he knows the
narcotic force of these upon the negligent intelligence to which any
diversion, literally, is welcome, any vagrant intruder, because one can
go wandering away with it from the immediate subject. Jealous, if he
have a really quickening motive within, of all that does not hold
directly to that, of the facile, the otiose, he will never depart from the
strictly pedestrian process, unless he gains a ponderable something
thereby. Even assured of its congruity, he will still question its
serviceableness. Is it worth while, can we afford, to attend to just that,
to just that figure or literary reference, just then?--Surplusage! he will
dread that, as the runner on his muscles. For in truth all art does but
consist in the removal of surplusage, from the last finish of the

gem-engraver blowing away the last particle of invisible dust, back to
the earliest divination of [20] the finished work to be, lying somewhere,
according to Michelangelo's fancy, in the rough-hewn block of stone.
And what applies to figure or flower must be understood of all other
accidental or