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and half- lights,
echoes and suggestions, to be come at in the dusk or not at all.
The combination of these powers in words, of song and image and
meaning, has given us the supreme passages of our romantic poetry. In
Shakespeare's work, especially, the union of vivid definite presentment
with immense reach of metaphysical suggestion seems to intertwine the
roots of the universe with the particular fact; tempting the mind to
explore that other side of the idea presented to it, the side turned away
from it, and held by something behind.
It will have blood; they say blood win have blood: Stones have been
known to move and trees to speak; Augurs and understood relations
have By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth The secret'st
man of blood.
This meeting of concrete and abstract, of sense and thought, keeps the
eye travelling along the utmost skyline of speculation, where the
heavens are interfused with the earth. In short, the third and greatest

virtue of words is no other than the virtue that belongs to the weapons
of thought,--a deep, wide, questioning thought that discovers analogies
and pierces behind things to a half-perceived unity of law and essence.
In the employ of keen insight, high feeling, and deep thinking,
language comes by its own; the prettinesses that may be imposed on a
passive material are as nothing to the splendour and grace that
transfigure even the meanest instrument when it is wielded by the
energy of thinking purpose. The contempt that is cast, by the vulgar
phrase, on "mere words" bears witness to the rarity of this serious
consummation. Yet by words the world was shaped out of chaos, by
words the Christian religion was established among mankind. Are these
terrific engines fit play-things for the idle humours of a sick child?
And now it begins to be apparent that no adequate description of the art
of language can be drawn from the technical terminology of the other
arts, which, like proud debtors, would gladly pledge their substance to
repay an obligation that they cannot disclaim. Let one more attempt to
supply literature with a parallel be quoted from the works of a writer on
style, whose high merit it is that he never loses sight, either in theory or
in practice, of the fundamental conditions proper to the craft of letters.
Robert Louis Stevenson, pondering words long and lovingly, was
impressed by their crabbed individuality, and sought to elucidate the
laws of their arrangement by a reference to the principles of
architecture. "The sister arts," he says, "enjoy the use of a plastic and
ductile material, like the modeller's clay; literature alone is condemned
to work in mosaic with finite and quite rigid words. You have seen
those blocks, dear to the nursery: this one a pillar, that a pediment, a
third a window or a vase. It is with blocks of just such arbitrary size
and figure that the literary architect is condemned to design the palace
of his art. Nor is this all; for since these blocks or words are the
acknowledged currency of our daily affairs, there are here possible
none of those suppressions by which other arts obtain relief, continuity,
and vigour: no hieroglyphic touch, no smoothed impasto, no
inscrutable shadow, as in painting; no blank wall, as in architecture; but
every word, phrase, sentence, and paragraph must move in a logical
progression, and convey a definite conventional import."

It is an acute comparison, happily indicative of the morose angularity
that words offer to whoso handles them, admirably insistent on the
chief of the incommodities imposed upon the writer, the necessity, at
all times and at all costs, to mean something. The boon of the recurring
monotonous expanse, that an apprentice may fill, the breathing-space of
restful mechanical repetition, are denied to the writer, who must needs
shoulder the hod himself, and lay on the mortar, in ever varying
patterns, with his own trowel. This is indeed the ordeal of the master,
the canker-worm of the penny-a-liner, who, poor fellow, means nothing,
and spends his life in the vain effort to get words to do the same. But if
in this respect architecture and literature are confessed to differ, there
remains the likeness that Mr. Stevenson detects in the building
materials of the two arts, those blocks of "arbitrary size and figure;
finite and quite rigid." There is truth enough in the comparison to make
it illuminative, but he would be a rash dialectician who should attempt
to draw from it, by way of inference, a philosophy of letters. Words are
piled on words, and bricks on bricks, but of the two you are invited to
think words the more intractable. Truly, it was a man of letters who
said it, avenging himself on his