CHAPTER VIII.

THE SECRET OF APT WORDS.

Le style c'est de l'homme.- BUFFON.

Altogether the style of a writer is a faithful representative of his mind; therefore if any man wish to write a clear style, let him first be clear in his thoughts; and if he would write in a noble style, let him first possess a noble soul.- GOETHE.

No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.RUSKIN.

IT

T was a saying of the wily diplomatist, Talleyrand, that language was given to man to conceal his thought. There is a class of writers at the present day who seem to be of the same opinion,- sham philosophers for the most part, who have an ambition to be original without the capacity, and seek to gain the credit of soaring to the clouds by shrouding familiar objects in mist. As all objects look larger in a fog, so their thoughts "loom up through the haze of their style with a sort of dusky magnificence that is mistaken for sublimity." This style of writing is sometimes called "transcendental "; and if by this is meant that it transcends all the established laws of rhetoric, and all ordinary powers of comprehension, the name is certainly a happy one. It is a remark often made touching these shallow-profound authors, "What a pity that So-and-so does not express thoughts so admirable in intelligible English!" whereas, in fact, but for the strangeness and obscurity of the style, which fills the ear while it famishes the mind, the matter would seem commonplace. The simple truth is, that the profoundest authors are always the

clearest, and the chiaro-oscuro which these transcendentalists affect, instead of shrouding thoughts which mankind. cannot well afford to lose, is but a cloak for their intellectual nakedness, the convenient shelter for meagreness of thought and poverty of expression. As the banks and shoals of the sea are the ordinary resting-place of fogs, so is it with thought and language; the cloud almost invariably indicates the shallow.

But, whether language be or be not fitted to cloak our ideas, as Talleyrand and Voltaire before him supposed, there are few persons to whom it has not seemed at times inadequate to express them. How many ideas occur to us in our daily reflections, which, though we toil after them for hours, baffle all our attempts to seize them and render them comprehensible? Who has not felt, a thousand times, the brushing wings of great thoughts, as, like startled birds, they have swept by him,- thoughts so swift and so manyhued that any attempt to arrest or describe them seemed like mockery? How common it is, after reflecting on some subject in one's study, or a lonely walk, till the whole mind has become heated and filled with the ideas it suggests, to feel a descent into the veriest tameness when attempting to embody those ideas in written or spoken words! A thousand bright images lie scattered in the fancy, but we cannot picture them; glimpses of glorious visions appear to us, but we cannot arrest them; questionable shapes float by us, but, when we question them, they will not answer. Even Byron, one of the greatest masters of eloquent expression, who was able to condense into one word, that fell like a thunderbolt, the power and anguish of emotion, experienced the same difficulty, and tells us in lines of splendid declamation:

"Could I embody and unbosom now

That which is most within me,- could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,

Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe,- into one word,
And that one word were lightning, I would speak;

But, as it is, I live and die unheard,

With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword."

So, too, that great verbal artist, Tennyson, complains:

"I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal,
And half conceal the soul within."

De Quincey truly remarks that all our thoughts have not words corresponding to them in our yet imperfectly developed nature, nor can ever express themselves in acts, but must lie appreciable by God only, like the silent melodies in a great musician's heart, never to roll forth from harp or organ.

"The sea of thought is a boundless sea,

Its brightest gems are not thrown on the beach;
The waves that would tell of the mystery
Die and fall on the shore of speech."

Thought," says the eloquent Du Ponceau, "is vast as the air; it embraces far more than languages can express; -or rather, languages express nothing, they only make thought flash in electric sparks from the speaker to the hearer. A single word creates a crowd of conceptions, which the intellect combines and marshals with lightninglike rapidity."

The Germans have coined a phrase to characterize a class of persons who have conception without expression,gifted, thoughtful men, lovers of goodness and truth, who have no lack of ideas, but who hesitate and stammer when they would put them into language. Such men they term

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men of "passive genius.' Their minds are like black glass, absorbing all the rays of light, but unable to give out any for the benefit of others. Jean Paul calls them "the dumb ones of earth," for, like Zacharias, they have visions of high import, but are speechless when they would tell them. The infirmity of these dumb ones, is, however, the infirmity, in a less degree, of all men, even the most fluent;. for there are thoughts which mock at all attempts to express them, however "well-languaged" the thinker may be.

It is not true, then, that language is, as Vinet characterizes it, "la pensée devenue matière"; for the very expression involves a contradiction. Words are nothing but symbols, imperfect, too, at best,- and to make the symbol in any way a measure of the thought is to bring down the infinite to the measure of the finite. It is true that our words mean more than it is in their power to express, shadow forth far more than they can define; yet, when their capacity has been exhausted, there is much which they fail, not only to express, but even to hint. There are abysses of thought which the plummet of language can never fathom. Like the line in mathematics, which continually approaches to a curve, but, though produced forever, does not cut it, language can never be more than an asymptote to thought. Expression, even in Shakespeare, has its limits. No power of language enables man to reveal the features of the mystic Isis, on whose statue was inscribed: "I am all which hath been, which is, and shall be, and no mortal hath ever lifted my veil."

"Full oft

Our thoughts drown speech, like to a foaming force
Which thunders down the echo it creates;
Words are like the sea-shells on the shore; they show
Where the mind ends, and not how far it has been."

Notwithstanding all this, however, there is truth in the lines of Boileau:

"Selon que notre idée est plus ou moins obscure,

L'expression la suit, ou moins nette, ou plus pure;

Ce que l'on concoit bien s'énonce clairement,

Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément."

In spite of the complaints of those who, like the great poets we have quoted, have expressed in language of wondrous force and felicity their feeling of the inadequacy of language, it is doubtless true, as a general thing, that impression and expression are relative ideas; that what we clearly conceive we can clearly convey; and that the failure to embody our thoughts is less the fault of our mother tongue than of our own deficient genius. What the flute or the violin is to the musician, his native language is to the writer. The finest instruments are dumb till those melodies are put into them of which they can be only the passive conductors. The most powerful and most polished language must be wielded by the master before its full force can be known. The Philippics of Demosthenes were pronounced in the mother tongue of every one of his audience; but "who among them could have answered him in a single sentence like his own? Who among them could have guessed what Greek could do, though they had spoken it all their lives, till they heard it from his lips?" So with our English tongue; it has abundant capabilities for those who know how to use it aright. What subject, indeed, is there in the whole boundless range of imagination, which some English author has not treated in his mother tongue with a nicety of definition, an accuracy of portraiture, a gorgeousness of coloring, a delicacy of discrimination, and a strength and force of expression,