Style | Page 5

their chime in the ear, and the images that they put before the
mind's eye, words have, for their last and greatest possession, a
meaning. They carry messages and suggestions that, in the effect
wrought, elude all the senses equally. For the sake of this, their prime
office, the rest is many times forgotten or scorned, the tune is
disordered and havoc played with the lineaments of the picture, because
without these the word can still do its business. The refutation of those
critics who, in their analysis of the power of literature, make much of
music and picture, is contained in the most moving passages that have
found utterance from man. Consider the intensity of a saying like that
of St. Paul:- "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come,
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate
us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Do these verses draw their power from a skilful arrangement of vowel
and consonant? But they are quoted from a translation, and can be
translated otherwise, well or ill or indifferently, without losing more

than a little of their virtue. Do they impress the eye by opening before it
a prospect of vast extent, peopled by vague shapes? On the contrary,
the visual embodiment of the ideas suggested kills the sense of the
passage, by lowering the cope of the starry heavens to the measure of a
poplar-tree. Death and life, height and depth, are conceived by the
apostle, and creation thrown in like a trinket, only that they may lend
emphasis to the denial that is the soul of his purpose. Other arts can
affirm, or seem to affirm, with all due wealth of circumstance and
detail; they can heighten their affirmation by the modesty of reserve,
the surprises of a studied brevity, and the erasure of all impertinence;
literature alone can deny, and honour the denial with the last resources
of a power that has the universe for its treasury. It is this negative
capability of words, their privative force, whereby they can impress the
minds with a sense of "vacuity, darkness, solitude, and silence," that
Burke celebrates in the fine treatise of his younger days. In such a
phrase as "the angel of the Lord" language mocks the positive rivalry of
the pictorial art, which can offer only the poor pretence of an equivalent
in a young man painted with wings. But the difference between the two
arts is even better marked in the matter of negative suggestion; it is
instanced by Burke from the noble passage where Virgil describes the
descent of AEneas and the Sibyl to the shades of the nether world. Here
are amassed all "the images of a tremendous dignity" that the poet
could forge from the sublime of denial. The two most famous lines are
a procession of negatives:-
Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram, Perque domos Ditis vacuas et
inania regna.
Through hollow kingdoms, emptied of the day, And dim, deserted
courts where Dis bears sway, Night-foundered, and uncertain of the
path, Darkling they took their solitary way.
Here is the secret of some of the cardinal effects of literature; strong
epithets like "lonely," "supreme," "invisible," "eternal," "inexorable,"
with the substantives that belong to them, borrow their force from the
vastness of what they deny. And not these alone, but many other words,
less indebted to logic for the magnificence of reach that it can lend,

bring before the mind no picture, but a dim emotional framework. Such
words as "ominous," "fantastic," "attenuated," "bewildered,"
"justification," are atmospheric rather than pictorial; they infect the soul
with the passion-laden air that rises from humanity. It is precisely in his
dealings with words like these, "heated originally by the breath of
others," that a poet's fine sense and knowledge most avail him. The
company a word has kept, its history, faculties, and predilections,
endear or discommend it to his instinct. How hardly will poetry consent
to employ such words as "congratulation" or "philanthropist,"--words
of good origin, but tainted by long immersion in fraudulent rejoicings
and pallid, comfortable, theoretic loves. How eagerly will the poetic
imagination seize on a word like "control," which gives scope by its
very vagueness, and is fettered by no partiality of association. All
words, the weak and the strong, the definite and the vague, have their
offices to perform in language, but the loftiest purposes of poetry are
seldom served by those explicit hard words which, like tiresome
explanatory persons, say all that they mean. Only in the focus and
centre of man's knowledge is there place for the hammer-blows of
affirmation, the rest is a flickering world of hints