The Art of Writing | Page 3

fabric must not suffer, or the artist
has been proved unequal to his design. And, on the other hand, no form
of words must be selected, no knot must be tied among the phrases,
unless knot and word be precisely what is wanted to forward and
illuminate the argument; for to fail in this is to swindle in the game.
The genius of prose rejects the cheville no less emphatically than the
laws of verse; and the cheville, I should perhaps explain to some of my
readers, is any meaningless or very watered phrase employed to strike a
balance in the sound. Pattern and argument live in each other; and it is
by the brevity, clearness, charm, or emphasis of the second, that we
judge the strength and fitness of the first.
Style is synthetic; and the artist, seeking, so to speak, a peg to plait
about, takes up at once two or more elements or two or more views of
the subject in hand; combines, implicates, and contrasts them; and
while, in one sense, he was merely seeking an occasion for the
necessary knot, he will be found, in the other, to have greatly enriched
the meaning, or to have transacted the work of two sentences in the
space of one. In the change from the successive shallow statements of
the old chronicler to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic
narrative, there is implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit.
The philosophy we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far
more deep and stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the
generation and affinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost;
but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances,
these difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two
oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not,
afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is
the necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That
style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most
natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler;
but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain

to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their
(so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the
means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may
be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action
most perspicuously bound into one.
The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an
elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the
art of literature. Books indeed continue to be read, for the interest of the
fact or fable, in which this quality is poorly represented, but still it will
be there. And, on the other hand, how many do we continue to peruse
and reperuse with pleasure whose only merit is the elegance of texture?
I am tempted to mention Cicero; and since Mr. Anthony Trollope is
dead, I will. It is a poor diet for the mind, a very colourless and
toothless 'criticism of life'; but we enjoy the pleasure of a most intricate
and dexterous pattern, every stitch a model at once of elegance and of
good sense; and the two oranges, even if one of them be rotten, kept
dancing with inimitable grace.
Up to this moment I have had my eye mainly upon prose; for though in
verse also the implication of the logical texture is a crowning beauty,
yet in verse it may be dispensed with. You would think that here was a
death-blow to all I have been saying; and far from that, it is but a new
illustration of the principle involved. For if the versifier is not bound to
weave a pattern of his own, it is because another pattern has been
formally imposed upon him by the laws of verse. For that is the essence
of a prosody. Verse may be rhythmical; it may be merely alliterative; it
may, like the French, depend wholly on the (quasi) regular recurrence
of the rhyme; or, like the Hebrew, it may consist in the strangely
fanciful device of repeating the same idea. It does not matter on what
principle the law is based, so it be a law. It may be pure convention; it
may have no inherent beauty; all that we have a right to ask of any
prosody is, that it shall lay down a pattern for the writer, and that what
it lays down shall be neither too easy nor too hard. Hence